Online usernames

[Marios Kyriazis]

Using a consistent online username, or even better, using your own real-life name across all platforms may play a part in improving your health. That is why I have decided to change my previous username from Mrs Zeta to my real name, Marios Kyriazis. Below is a posting I wrote some months ago about this issue, and I can provide full peer-review references if anyone wants to discuss this:

 

 

Online anonymity, privacy and longevity

(Or: Relinquish your privacy if you want to live longer)

 

At first, it may appear strange to suggest that living longer has something to do with using pseudonyms online. However, it is true. I am suggesting that people who are well known online, those who are hyper-connected, and those who facilitate others to have access to relevant and meaningful information, are more likely to live longer.

 

It works like this: Humans are continually evolving and adapting to their environment. Our current environment is one of technology, digital communication, intense information-sharing and hyper-connection. Within this society we are exposed to vast amounts of both trivial and relevant information, which reaches our brain and may alter our basic biology causing a series of beneficial cellular and molecular changes which promote healthy lifespan.

 

Looking at this from a different perspective, it is known that agents which are useful to the collective are retained longer within the system. This can be true of any agent (i.e. any autonomous actor) such as a computer node, a human neuron, or an entire human. In this case, humans are digitally connected to other humans within a higher entity called the Global Brain. The more well-connected you are, and the more useful you are to the evolution of the Global Brain, the more likely it is that you will be retained by the system, i.e. you will live longer within this system. It follows, that in order for this to happen you need to be hyper-connected and share meaningful and insightful information.

 

First, in order to hyper-connect you need to:

· Develop a strong social media base, in diverse forums

· Stay continually visible online

· Be respected and valued in the virtual environment

· Increase the number of your connections both in virtual and in real terms.

· Increase the unity of your connections by using only one (user)name for all environments and across all platforms.

 

Second, in order to facilitate the flow of meaningful information you need to:

· Avoid spending too much time in trivial use of internet platforms

· Share your thoughts with your peers

· Create and share meaningful information that requires action

· Don’t worry too much about privacy

 

As we develop more technologies and become increasingly more involved with them, our society and culture will change, and this will have a direct impact upon our biology. It is inevitable that this will eventually lead to an increasing lifespan, in order to accommodate basic evolutionary principles.

 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140711125114-59182278-online-anonymity-privacy-and-longevity?trk=prof-post

 

[Acme]

For someone in a witness protection program or hiding from a violent spouse, significant other, or acquaintances, going public could very well result in their demise in short order. Anonymity is not a one-size fits all proposition. MYOB.

[Marios Kyriazis]

Obviously. And running as a physical exercise is good for fitness, but if you have two broken legs is not beneficial. And eating salad is good for your health but it will kill you if you are severely allergic to the ingredients. There is nothing in life that is a suitable 'one-size fits all' proposition. We can only talk in general terms and not pay too much attention to trivial exceptions.

[Acme]

Obviously. And running as a physical exercise is good for fitness, but if you have two broken legs is not beneficial. And eating salad is good for your health but it will kill you if you are severely allergic to the ingredients. There is nothing in life that is a suitable 'one-size fits all' proposition. We can only talk in general terms and not pay too much attention to trivial exceptions.

It wasn't obvious from your opening post where you give a rather blanket prescription. Getting killed is a very specific term[ination] & hardly trivial to the victim.

[Ophiolite]

Survival within the internet has no connectivity with survival in the real world, except for the fact that real world survival takes total precedence.

 

I see no validity in your concept at all.

[Marios Kyriazis]

Survival within the internet has no connectivity with survival in the real world, except for the fact that real world survival takes total precedence.

 

I see no validity in your concept at all.

 

Then you haven't understood the concept.

 

I am not talking about surviving within the internet (I am not even sure what that means). I am observing that, as humans integrate more with technology, digital communication and meaningful information-sharing, our evolutionary priorities change in order to help us adapt to this new environment. From here, I am speculating that this evolutionary changes *must* be beneficial to us, and if this is the case, then it would also be beneficial if we intentionally accelerate this process.

[Ophiolite]

No, your clarification confirms that I understood you fully. However, you have produced zero evidence to support your assertion. In what way would a thriving internet presence extend the longevity of your offspring? Why would such a presence favour mutations which led to longer life?

[Marios Kyriazis]

No, your clarification confirms that I understood you fully. However, you have produced zero evidence to support your assertion. In what way would a thriving internet presence extend the longevity of your offspring? Why would such a presence favour mutations which led to longer life?

 

Ah! Evidence. But this is speculation. Anyway, here are two peer-reviewed academic papers I published. The first explains how a thriving internet presence may extend your own longevity (not your offspring's, the whole point is that there won't be any offspring). The second paper is about how hyper-connectivity may lead to substantially longer life (not through mutations- it takes too long to rely on mutations).

 

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cplx.21626/abstract (some free text is available here:http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.6910)

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24852017 (full text available free here: https://www.academia.edu/3748542/Reversal_of_information_entropy_and_acquisition_of_germ-line_immortality_by_somatic_cells)

 

If you have only time to read just the abstracts, you will get the general point of the concepts.

[Bignose]

Your life may be substantially longer, but right now with security as lax as it is in far too many places on the internet, identity theft is a real concern and your longer life may be filled with a great deal more troubles.

 

Without a doubt, in the year 2014, there are incredibly significant reasons to protect your information on line.

[Ophiolite]

Great science fiction; sixth rate science. If I have an empty weekend I shall specifically address some of your assertions.¹

 

 

1. Certain adjectives removed because I've been told to stop making insulting remarks.

[Delta1212]

I'm getting the sense that you don't have an especially strong grounding in how evolution actually works. Am I wrong in that assumption?

[Sensei]

Everybody needs to have purpose of their life.

Everybody needs to have something to do tomorrow.

Everybody needs to feel useful for others. Regardless of age.

 

Old people, on retirement, often loses purpose of their life, loses reason to continue their life.. In such state of mind, even minor disease might be deadly..

 

[Marios Kyriazis]

I'm getting the sense that you don't have an especially strong grounding in how evolution actually works. Am I wrong in that assumption?

If you have a strong grounding in how evolution works, please highlight some specific points you think I am wrong.

 

If one has or has not a strong grounding in something is irrelevant. What is relevant is to assess the value of what one is actually claiming.

Great science fiction; sixth rate science. If I have an empty weekend I shall specifically address some of your assertions.¹

 

 

1. Certain adjectives removed because I've been told to stop making insulting remarks.

 

I look forward to it. I also appreciate your effort to avoid using insulting remarks as these are not really necessary.

[Delta1212]

Alright, a few specific points that you may want to address:

 

1. Evolution operates generationally on a population level. Individuals do not biologically adapt to their environment. They either are adapted to it or they are not, and they live and die by the adaptations they are born with. Humans have the exceedingly important advantage of being able to culturally adapt to new environments within a generation by learning new behaviors. These sorts of adaptations operate on an individual level, but we're born with the capacity to learn, and entering or excelling in a new environment induces no biological changes in an individual whatsoever, regardless of cultural or behavioral changes.

 

2. Piggybacking off of that, the environment does not induce adaptations that are beneficial to living in the environment. In fact, unless it happens in the germline, and therefore only affects your offspring rather than you, the only changes the environment is going to make to your biology that will have any noticeable impact are broken things, generally resulting in cancer. That's what we call the most common significant result of an environmentally induced alteration to an adult individual's DNA.

 

3. You haven't proposed a mechanism by which what you're describing could happen. Things don't happen just because. Evolution, for instance, works and a fairly straightforward and almost tautologically simple principle: The more something makes copies of itself, the more of that thing there will be, and the better a thing is at making copies of itself, the more copies of itself it will make. That's all that is required to be true for natural selection to function, because that's really all natural selection is: The better something is at copying itself, the more copies of it there will be.

 

This means any traits that result in more copies being made will wind up being more strongly represented in the next generation.

 

Let's say you have a population of people that are constantly being chased by wolves, and the only way to avoid being eaten is to run away. This is a constant thing that happens. Well, the slower someone is, the more likely they are to be eaten, and consequently the less likely they are to have children, because it's hard to get it on in a wolf's stomach. On the flip side, the faster someone is, the more likely they are to escape and, since it is again much easier to have children outside of a wolf's stomach, the more likely they are to have kids. This means, generation after generation, the faster people are having more kids than the slower people.

 

Eventually, the only people left are going to be the descendants of fast people, because all the slow people will have been eaten. So you'll have a population made up entirely of very fast people, but it won't be the case that being chased by wolves induced a biological change to increase speed. The traits to run quickly were already present, or we're equally prone to appear regardless of whether or not anyone was being chased by wolves, the wolves just killed everyone who didn't have the "speed gene."

 

4. Off the evolution point now, or at least tangential to it, you're proposing that people will live longer because they are more useful to a global brain network. The issues with this are A: can you demonstrate that there exists a global brain in any meaningful way and B: that there are any feedback mechanisms that would cause this network to improve the life expectancy of "useful nodes." Because contrary to your assertion, networks don't just spontaneously retain useful nodes. In networks that do, there is some mechanism that defines what is and isn't a useful node and a further mechanism for retaining those nodes. These things don't just happen.

[Ten oz]

Living longer and evolution aside I find that posters on forums who use their real names tend to be more polite. Anonymity allows people say anything without being accountable. Posters are far less likely to be vulgar, racist, classist, and etc if they know friends, family and co-workers might see it. There are forums online where I use my real name. Unfortunately this isn't one of them. I work in an environment where my more progressive political beliefs and Athiesm would create problems between me and my peers.

[Mrs Zeta]

Alright, a few specific points that you may want to address:

 

1. Evolution operates generationally on a population level. Individuals do not biologically adapt to their environment. They either are adapted to it or they are not, and they live and die by the adaptations they are born with. Humans have the exceedingly important advantage of being able to culturally adapt to new environments within a generation by learning new behaviors. These sorts of adaptations operate on an individual level, but we're born with the capacity to learn, and entering or excelling in a new environment induces no biological changes in an individual whatsoever, regardless of cultural or behavioral changes.

 

2. Piggybacking off of that, the environment does not induce adaptations that are beneficial to living in the environment. In fact, unless it happens in the germline, and therefore only affects your offspring rather than you, the only changes the environment is going to make to your biology that will have any noticeable impact are broken things, generally resulting in cancer. That's what we call the most common significant result of an environmentally induced alteration to an adult individual's DNA.

 

3. You haven't proposed a mechanism by which what you're describing could happen. Things don't happen just because. Evolution, for instance, works and a fairly straightforward and almost tautologically simple principle: The more something makes copies of itself, the more of that thing there will be, and the better a thing is at making copies of itself, the more copies of itself it will make. That's all that is required to be true for natural selection to function, because that's really all natural selection is: The better something is at copying itself, the more copies of it there will be.

 

This means any traits that result in more copies being made will wind up being more strongly represented in the next generation.

 

Let's say you have a population of people that are constantly being chased by wolves, and the only way to avoid being eaten is to run away. This is a constant thing that happens. Well, the slower someone is, the more likely they are to be eaten, and consequently the less likely they are to have children, because it's hard to get it on in a wolf's stomach. On the flip side, the faster someone is, the more likely they are to escape and, since it is again much easier to have children outside of a wolf's stomach, the more likely they are to have kids. This means, generation after generation, the faster people are having more kids than the slower people.

 

Eventually, the only people left are going to be the descendants of fast people, because all the slow people will have been eaten. So you'll have a population made up entirely of very fast people, but it won't be the case that being chased by wolves induced a biological change to increase speed. The traits to run quickly were already present, or we're equally prone to appear regardless of whether or not anyone was being chased by wolves, the wolves just killed everyone who didn't have the "speed gene."

 

4. Off the evolution point now, or at least tangential to it, you're proposing that people will live longer because they are more useful to a global brain network. The issues with this are A: can you demonstrate that there exists a global brain in any meaningful way and B: that there are any feedback mechanisms that would cause this network to improve the life expectancy of "useful nodes." Because contrary to your assertion, networks don't just spontaneously retain useful nodes. In networks that do, there is some mechanism that defines what is and isn't a useful node and a further mechanism for retaining those nodes. These things don't just happen.

 

Thank you for taking the trouble to go into some detail. I am using my original account to reply, since the guys at SF would not allow me to use the one with my real name (for administrative reasons).

1. Evolution operates generationally on a population level. Individuals do not biologically adapt to their environment. They either are adapted to it or they are not, and they live and die by the adaptations they are born with. Humans have the exceedingly important advantage of being able to culturally adapt to new environments within a generation by learning new behaviors.

We both agree here, I am talking about the ability of *humans* to adapt to new environments, particularly now with the help of technology. I am not talking about any other organism.

These sorts of adaptations operate on an individual level, but we're born with the capacity to learn, and entering or excelling in a new environment induces no biological changes in an individual whatsoever, regardless of cultural or behavioral changes.

I disagree. A new environment may induce biological changes and some of these may also be heritable. These changes are most likely to be epigenetic modifications.

Here is a passage (with references) from one of my working papers: (Information-sharing, adaptive epigenetics and human longevity http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6030)

“…, repeated stress early in life can protect against more sustained stress later in life [48] and social factors can play a role in epigenetic regulation the effects of which not only persist throughout life, but can also be transmitted to the offspring via epigenetic inheritance [49]. In addition, there are specific epigenetic profiles associated with longevity [50] which can be transmitted to the offspring. Gentilini et al. [51] have shown that centenarians have certain specific DNA methylation characteristics (such as those found in nucleodite biosynthesis, and control of signal transmission) which are also found in their offspring, suggesting that these characteristics are heritable.

48. Natt, D (2011) Heritable epigenetic changes to environmental challenges. Linkoping studies in science and technology, dissertation 1383, Linkoping University, Sweeden

49. Thayer ZM, Kuzawa CW. (2011) Biological memories of past environments: epigenetic pathways to health disparities. Epigenetics 6(7):798-803

50. Gentilini D, Castaldi D, Mari D et al. (2012) Age-dependent skewing of X chromosome inactivation appears delayed in centenarians' offspring. Is there a role for allelic imbalance in healthy aging and longevity? Aging Cell 11:277-83

51. Gentilini D, Mari D, Castaldi D et al. (2013). Role of epigenetics in human aging and longevity: genome-wide DNA methylation profile in centenarians and centenarians' offspring. Age (Dordr) 35:1961-73

2. Piggybacking off of that, the environment does not induce adaptations that are beneficial to living in the environment. In fact, unless it happens in the germline, and therefore only affects your offspring rather than you, the only changes the environment is going to make to your biology that will have any noticeable impact are broken things, generally resulting in cancer. That's what we call the most common significant result of an environmentally induced alteration to an adult individual's DNA.

See my answer above which addresses this point

3. You haven't proposed a mechanism by which what you're describing could happen. Things don't happen just because. Evolution, for instance, works and a fairly straightforward and almost tautologically simple principle: The more something makes copies of itself, the more of that thing there will be, and the better a thing is at making copies of itself, the more copies of itself it will make. That's all that is required to be true for natural selection to function, because that's really all natural selection is: The better something is at copying itself, the more copies of it there will be.

I take the term ‘Evolution’ to mean adapting to your environment, surviving and improving (yourself or your species). You may talk about evolution by natural selection, but there other types of evolution, for example, intentional or directed evolution. I talk about the latter

4. Off the evolution point now, or at least tangential to it, you're proposing that people will live longer because they are more useful to a global brain network. The issues with this are A: can you demonstrate that there exists a global brain in any meaningful way

The issue of the existence of a meaningful global brain is not my own proposition, it is a well-accepted and studied area (https://sites.google.com/site/gbialternative1/)

and B: that there are any feedback mechanisms that would cause this network to improve the life expectancy of "useful nodes." Because contrary to your assertion, networks don't just spontaneously retain useful nodes.

I am not claiming that networks spontaneously retain useful nodes. I am claiming that they retain them because there are specific reasons and defined principles at work.

In networks that do, there is some mechanism that defines what is and isn't a useful node and a further mechanism for retaining those nodes. These things don't just happen.

I know there is a mechanism for retaining useful nodes. However, I don’t know what it is in the case of humans within the global brain. There is some good research going on but from this point, I am just speculating and this area needs further study. It does not mean however that my hypothesis is necessarily wrong because it is based upon principles which have been proven correct in all other networks studied so far.

Once again thank you for raising some relevant points.

Marios Kyriazis

[Acme]

...

 

...

4. Off the evolution point now, or at least tangential to it, you're proposing that people will live longer because they are more useful to a global brain network. The issues with this are A: can you demonstrate that there exists a global brain in any meaningful way ...

The issue of the existence of a meaningful global brain is not my own proposition, it is a well-accepted and studied area (https://sites.google.com/site/gbialternative1/)

...

Once again thank you for raising some relevant points.

 

Marios Kyriazis

 

An operational note regarding internet communication: Your formatting of quoted material and use of fonts & type styles is an unnecessary and confusing mash. While you are not alone in trying to apply old-school techniques to this venue it would aid your communication to use the quote function and use the default style. I have edited your post to reflect this.

 

Back on topic, if what you & those at your link propose as a 'well accepted' global brain, wouldn't there exist an evolutionary analog for writing in general and printing in specific? Can you point to any research or evidence for such an evolutionary effect or artifact in humans?

Edited November 14, 2014 by Acme

[Phi for All]

 

I am using my original account to reply, since the guys at SF would not allow me to use the one with my real name (for administrative reasons).

 

!

Moderator Note

Or...

 

OR...

 

It's like you were told via PM, opening a second account is against the rules, so we banned the second one, and because Moderators can't change member's usernames, we requested one of the Administrators change your original username to Marios Kyriazis. It's not an instantaneous process.

[physica]

I've looked at your paper. It's a complete joke. This is why I quit clinical and went back to university to study physics. It reminds me of the A and E department where I worked where 3 consultants and a reg did an audit on unnecessary coag blood screens. They audited 98 patients revealing 51 unnecessary tests. The next audit consisted of 289 patients revealing 58.... they thought the problem was getting bigger and we were being more wasteful. Furthermore they presented it at a conference and nobody picked up on it. Hospitals are full of doctors and nurses who memorised biology to pass exams who think that they somehow understand science because of it. You are definitely no exception. After reading the paper you wrote and cited I wasn't shocked when it said this:

 

"In addition, photon-photon interactions induce molecular vibrations responsible for bio-amplification of weak signals described by:

m(c^2)=BvLq

where m is the mass of the molecule, c is the velocity of the electromagnetic field, B is the magnetic flux density, v is the velocity of the carrier in which the particle exists, L is its dimension, and q is a unit charge."

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.6030v1.pdf

You offer no testable predictions. The maths is so amateur it doesn't make sense. This isn't scientific it's just rambling....pub talk. Reading your posts and "paper" reminded me of the days when I worked in a hospital. Hopefully people reading this we start to appreciate how amateur and vocational clinical medicine is. In your conclusion you state that:

"The reductionist view that aging can be manipulated by simple biomedical repairs is unlikely to lead to any appreciable practical results that can be used in order to diminish the impact of age-related degeneration."

This is complete trash and over simplistic. Are you telling me that there is no "appreciable practical results" to giving an elderly patient with type 2 diabetes metformin?? Are you seriously going to tell me it won't affect the degeneration of eyesight??

Although my colleagues complained about it all I can say is: thank god medicine is becoming more protocol driven

[Mrs Zeta]

Back on topic, if what you & those at your link propose as a 'well accepted' global brain, wouldn't there exist an evolutionary analog for writing in general and printing in specific? Can you point to any research or evidence for such an evolutionary effect or artifact in humans?

 

I can't see the validity of this comparison. Writing and printing are static forms of communication and cannot at all be compared to the fluid, fast, global and immediate communication by digital means.

 

I've looked at your paper. It's a complete joke. This is why I quit clinical and went back to university to study physics. It reminds me of the A and E department where I worked where 3 consultants and a reg did an audit on unnecessary coag blood screens. They audited 98 patients revealing 51 unnecessary tests. The next audit consisted of 289 patients revealing 58.... they thought the problem was getting bigger and we were being more wasteful. Furthermore they presented it at a conference and nobody picked up on it. Hospitals are full of doctors and nurses who memorised biology to pass exams who think that they somehow understand science because of it. You are definitely no exception. After reading the paper you wrote and cited I wasn't shocked when it said this:

 

"In addition, photon-photon interactions induce molecular vibrations responsible for bio-amplification of weak signals described by:

m(c^2)=BvLq

where m is the mass of the molecule, c is the velocity of the electromagnetic field, B is the magnetic flux density, v is the velocity of the carrier in which the particle exists, L is its dimension, and q is a unit charge."

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.6030v1.pdf

You offer no testable predictions. The maths is so amateur it doesn't make sense. This isn't scientific it's just rambling....pub talk. Reading your posts and "paper" reminded me of the days when I worked in a hospital. Hopefully people reading this we start to appreciate how amateur and vocational clinical medicine is. In your conclusion you state that:

"The reductionist view that aging can be manipulated by simple biomedical repairs is unlikely to lead to any appreciable practical results that can be used in order to diminish the impact of age-related degeneration."

This is complete trash and over simplistic. Are you telling me that there is no "appreciable practical results" to giving an elderly patient with type 2 diabetes metformin?? Are you seriously going to tell me it won't affect the degeneration of eyesight??

Although my colleagues complained about it all I can say is: thank god medicine is becoming more protocol driven

 

The fomula you mention is not mine. It is cited from another peer-reviewed and published paper. And my 'amateurish' paper has been critically reviewed in detail by several academic experts who do this for a living, and it has been deemed suitable for publication.So I am confident that their opinion is more valid than the opinion of an unknown person who is hiding behind intentional anonymity. Nothing personal mind you. To be fair, you read the draft, working paper, and not the final post-review version (in press).

 

People can be clinical doctors and also have additional life-long training in other science disciplines such as biology. One does not preclude the other. One does not diminish the value of the other.

 

Regarding your last comment about manipulating ageing, you misunderstood the argument. Of course I am not talking about clinical age-releated degeneration. Clinical disease can be treated with reductionist approaches. Instead, I am talking about the basic, background and global process of time-driven damage. From the interventional point of view there is a distinction between age-related clinical disease (diabetes, arthritis), and the underlying process of senescence itself.

[Acme]

 

...Back on topic, if what you & those at your link propose as a 'well accepted' global brain, wouldn't there exist an evolutionary analog for writing in general and printing in specific? Can you point to any research or evidence for such an evolutionary effect or artifact in humans?

I can't see the validity of this comparison. Writing and printing are static forms of communication and cannot at all be compared to the fluid, fast, global and immediate communication by digital means.

...

 

Your lack of vision does not discredit my comparison. Labeling writing and printing as 'static forms' is a less than rigorous dodge that misrepresents the dynamics that letters and literature exhibit. Speed of flow does not change the character of fluidity, i.e. either a 'thing' flows or it does not. If such a thing as a 'global brain' exists, how would it not be affected/influenced by Luther's letters or his Bible? Would you seriously deny that Luther's Bible had any affect on people worldwide?

[Mrs Zeta]

I can’t see how you can decide that I have no vision. One (not I) may argue that the concepts I presented here are brimming with vision, but that is irrelevant.

 

What matters in the emergent phenomenon of the global brain is the degree and extent of information-sharing, the value of that information (it must be both trivial and non-trivial), its speed of transmission, how many people interact with it, and what happens to that information after it has been assimilated. Writing, speech and printing have played a part in defining our culture, but we can now move one step higher. If you compare the global brain with the human brain, then in your example, writing and printing are equivalent to the parasympathetic nervous system, or to other, slower and more primitive neurological functions. The global brain (digital communication) contains many other components which are more relevant to cognition, intelligence and creativity.

 

Your lack of vision does not discredit my comparison. Labeling writing and printing as 'static forms' is a less than rigorous dodge that misrepresents the dynamics that letters and literature exhibit. Speed of flow does not change the character of fluidity, i.e. either a 'thing' flows or it does not. If such a thing as a 'global brain' exists, how would it not be affected/influenced by Luther's letters or his Bible? Would you seriously deny that Luther's Bible had any affect on people worldwide?

[Acme]

 

Your lack of vision does not discredit my comparison. Labeling writing and printing as 'static forms' is a less than rigorous dodge that misrepresents the dynamics that letters and literature exhibit. Speed of flow does not change the character of fluidity, i.e. either a 'thing' flows or it does not. If such a thing as a 'global brain' exists, how would it not be affected/influenced by Luther's letters or his Bible? Would you seriously deny that Luther's Bible had any affect on people worldwide?

I cant see how you can decide that I have no vision. One (not I) may argue that the concepts I presented here are brimming with vision, but that is irrelevant.

 

Again, changing font and type-size adds nothing to your communication and in fact detracts from it.

 

You said "I can't see...", ergo you suffer a lack of vision. See?

 

What matters in the emergent phenomenon of the global brain is the degree and extent of information-sharing, the value of that information (it must be both trivial and non-trivial), its speed of transmission, how many people interact with it, and what happens to that information after it has been assimilated. Writing, speech and printing have played a part in defining our culture, but we can now move one step higher. If you compare the global brain with the human brain, then in your example, writing and printing are equivalent to the parasympathetic nervous system, or to other, slower and more primitive neurological functions. The global brain (digital communication) contains many other components which are more relevant to cognition, intelligence and creativity.

No, I'd say that in my examples of written communication the global brain is like that of a youth. Going further back to before writing a global brain would be akin to a toddler's brain. But in any case there is no evidence of a global brain; it is nothing more than a speculative metaphor and a poor one at that.

[Mrs Zeta]

But in any case there is no evidence of a global brain; it is nothing more than a speculative metaphor and a poor one at that.

 

 

You are now saying that you are better informed about the global brain than a group of 25 university researchers and professors, with dozens of publications between them, and several million euro budget. And the example I mentioned (the Global Brain Institute) is just one such organisation. Come on, where is your vision?

[Acme]

You are now saying that you are better informed about the global brain than a group of 25 university researchers and professors, with dozens of publications between them, and several million euro budget. And the example I mentioned (the Global Brain Institute) is just one such organisation. Come on, where is your vision?

Appeal to authority? Where is your integrity?

How many respected academics propounded phrenology?

Edinburgh Phrenological Society