Noosphere

Ok, well the answer to yesterday's question was 'the noosphere'.

Human consciousness is essentially different from that of other sentients. Only humans are able to reflect on their own thought processes. The reason we know this is from the behaviour of other animals, and yes, a certain amount of anthropomorphism is necessary to reach this conclusion, but we can also look at their brain activity and their little dead brains and compare them with ours.

One of the indicators of the ability to self-reflect is language. Certain animals do have both verbal and non-verbal languages, cats, bees, dolphins, chimps, for example, but when we study these we find a lack of the kind of complexity needed to think about their own thoughts and to develop a sophisticated sense of self identity.
As yet, no chimp has mastered human language more complex than that of an 18-month old child, because there are certain developmental jumps that a human child will make that a chimp's brain cannot. Understanding deception for example.

Language defines to an extent, how we think about the world. Consider for example, that there is no word in the French language that is the exact equivalent of the English noun 'mind'. If you look it up in a dictionary, you will see a number of possible candidates, for example, 'âme, esprit, intelligence' all of which have a separate English translation which most English speakers in my experience would argue have quite different meanings. So English speakers have a concept of mind that is arguably different from that of speakers of some other languages. We think there is such a thing as the mind. Or, more basically still, we have names for the things and actions around us.

I could drone on for days just on this subject alone, but no-one would read it, if anyone still is by this point, and I wouldn't get to where I want to go.

Human minds are amazing. From our consciousness comes our creativity and our planning. We think about the future and we plan for it. Ok, so do squirrels, but we also change that future and not in a way that can be explained away by our survival instinct alone.

I believe it is generally held that where we are right now in our history, we have everything we need to terraform another planet. We know what the problems are, we have solutions and scientific minds are constantly working on better ones. At some point we will have the will, as a species, to actually go out and do it and I believe we will. When we do, we will decide how it will look, what functions we need.

Those of us who are not scientists contribute in some way to making sure our scientists can work. Even I, not yet allowed to earn and thus contribute taxes to help this process, have opportunities to form the future. By helping with the schools programmes at the Park I may be playing some small part in the education of a future scientist or taxpayer.

That is a huge and future idea, but what about our cyber-life, the one we all lead? For the past couple of days, our internet access has been dodgy. I know everyone experiences this from time to time. But my life has been plunged back to Morse code, dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dash. I read my papers online, watch my news broadcasts, talk to people, e-mail, write this, find answers to every trivial question that wanders across my mind-screen. I consult the dictionaries online, check the weather, the TV programmes.

And yet, this has only been such a huge part of my life for less than ten years. Suddenly, friends like Dawn and Ree, with whom I had corresponded every few months, became daily and instant connections. People can move house but keep the same e-mail addresses, we can still find them, we stay connected in a way that we never could or did before.

The cybersphere has come into existence because of human thought. Of course all the elements were out there in the realm of physics, just waiting to be manipulated, but humans did it and it benefits us all.

What would be an even greater coup? In my opinion, the nightmare of science-fiction, Artificial Intelligence. Just to start thinking about this, consider how much more your current computer can do than the first one you owned.

In our house, we can play music that is stored on the main computer, anywhere in the house. We can record programmes shown on TV straight to the hard drive, in fact we can record three at a time. Even the remote control has a memory and can be programmed.
Our alarm in the morning is a random music track which plays at a set time. The other morning it seemed to me that the selection wasn't so random, the player was selecting just punk, then it moved on to grunge as though it had noticed a connection. I don't of course really believe this, coincidence no doubt, but it gave me food for thought for a while.

I don't think we can stop ourselves from creating intelligence in our own image. Whether we English speakers will ever think we have created other minds will be an interesting question, but I have answered my own one. For good or bad, the noosphere, the potential off-world future for our species and the possibility of AI, none of these would exist without us and more specifically, our minds.