In article 816082862snz@railton.demon.co.uk, I wrote:
In article <4818e1$eu4@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> mps2@pitt.edu “Wayne” writes:
I for one do not have a problem with this concept. We will only truly be
able to contact any advanced life, be it God or what/who-ever, when we
have developed the prerequisite sensitivity to that Consciousness. The
analogy is with recently discovered lives in some of the depths of the
oceans, or of new discoveries by Hubble. These lives and discoveries
always existed. We simply did not have the sensitive instruments to
record or, in the case of deep sea creatures, to visit their environment.This is a different issue. If, as I was speculating, there is an analogy
between neurons in the brain and individuals on the Earth – and thus in
some sense the Earth itself is, or has the potential to become, a thinking
system, is it meaningful to talk of “contacting” this system?What you are saying seems to imply two ( or more ) separate entities, one
of which may be able to become aware of the other by special techniques. But
if we, as individuals, are a part of the larger system in the way I described,
I suspect that we could neither contact nor observe it.
Why not? I think that we do such all of the time. Are sociologists not
people that have learned to understand some of the language of the
world-mind? Just by saying that the Earth may think shouldn’t imply that
it thinks just like a human mind does.
How could a neuron
“contact” the brain?
Well, it couldn’t in the same way. However:
1) Neurons are much simpler than humans. They are not conscious by most
definitions of the word, and their form of communication is very simple.
There is some form of contact between neurons and our own mind, though, in
the sense that we are aware of their existence.
2) It is implied that this world-mind would be a superset of the minds of
its component minds. Although we may be conscious enough to be aware of
this over-mind, and to be able to understand it to a limited degree, an
individual mind could never completely understand the world-mind, nor
could the world-mind ever completely understand itself.
It’s not so strange a concept, if you think about it. It’s really just
another model for a society. If you want, you could even extend it to any
scale: e.g., a universe-mind.
—
Tim Moore
Tembel’s Hedonic Commune