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From: eecjr@zeus.bris.ac.uk (NR. Wright)
Subject: Re: Are we just Neurons in the World Brain?
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Date: Tue, 14 Nov 1995 12:37:10 GMT
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Patrick Juola (patrick@gryphon.psych.ox.ac.uk) wrote:

: A neuron with manipulative abilities could easily contact the brain.
: A telekinetic neuron, for instance, could easily operate the typewriter
: on my desk and leave me messages in the middle of the night like archie
: and mehitabel do.   So if we as human-neurons in the Earth-brain are
: capable of determining what the inputs and outputs of the system are,
: we could easily manipulate the environment to produce a different set
: of inputs and thus make our presence known.

There is a big "if" in there. I would be surprised if a human-neuron could
determine the inputs and outputs of the system - certainly in their entirity.
Only by acting with the cooperation of many more neurons could your
telekinetic neuron leave messages of any significance to you as an individual.


: This, by the way, is part of why I consider the idea of human-neurons in
: the Earth-brain to be ill-founded.  Not all things-that-are-distributed
: are information processing systems, and in fact I find it very difficult
: to ascribe anything as being the inputs, outputs, "senses" or "speech" of
: humanity or life-on-Earth taken on the grand scale


I agree with you. I certainly cannot find any analogies to sense organs, but
I don't think that this makes the idea ill-founded. It may be that in the
World Brain, these functions are still distributed. Also, I don't see any
objection, in pronciple to the development of "specialists" whose primary
purpose is to receive inputs from outside the system and other "specialists"
whose purpose is to process them. There may well be signs that this is
already starting to happen.

Chris.
 
