ITA ENG

A New Habitat for a New Species

by Riccardo Notte

David Ho - The World of You

For a long time the cyberculture gave breath to the idea that electronic communication supplies the human race with an infrastructure able to express a sort of planetary “collective mind”. This idea isn’t new, but is represented in the history of ideas in a variety of ways which mirror the their respective ages. In particular, our current hypothesis of the collective mind takes the human mind as its model of reference. For example, in his “Escape Velocity”, Mark Dery cites (among others) Jody Radzik, the guru of rave culture, according to whom, “.. human beings are cerebral cells, the axioms of cellular nerves are the telephone lines”. Among others in the USA, also Douglas Rushkoff and John Perry Barlow, fascinated by the thesis of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, maintain that the human mind is an intrinsically “adjoining” entity, that is, made of connections, and if anything the major problem consists in rendering explicit these implicit connections (1). Among those who sustain the idea of the Global Mind, of the Planetary Mind, of the model of connected information, leading to the incipient birth of a sort of collective electric or electronic planetary conscience thanks to the multiple resources of the internet, Pierre Lévy and Kevin Kelly are particularly noteworthy. These and others’ suggestions have even influenced as rigorous a scholar as Derrick de Kerckhove, celebrated and recognized heir to McLuhan. The superficiality and even the theoretical poverty of these astounding discourses never ceases to amaze me, to such an extent that in my “The Stella race. Philosophy and anthropology of Ultramodernity” I began to decode the meaning of such statements. For what reasons have they appeared and spread like wildfire in a torrid summer? I suspect that these and other authors, who for the sake of brevity I won’t cite, have in one way or another erroneously interpreted the general tendency to multiply and consolidate interpersonal relations. This tendency has been in reality an action present in advanced society for many decades; it’s possible in fact to go back as far as the beginning of the last century. In short, the mistake lies in attributing to external factors direct power to redefine globally and totally the human psycomatic characteristics (the leading factor among these being the rapid development of new communications technology). All of this is not in itself wrong, but it is without doubt too reductive. On the contrary to how it may appear at first sight, these ideas are in reality timid, trembling and incomplete. And they miss the point. According to this vision, the environment is prevalent over the sum total, and retro-active effects of a system assume a disproportional value. On the contrary, in my opinion, every retro-action derives from an action. The actions which take place currently in cyberspace don’t justify the presumption of a passage to the internal state of the human psychosensoral organization. In other words, the hypothesis of a planetary brain, the fruit of a progressive fusion between computer and single brains- neurons isn’t sustainable. From my perspective a process of specialization in action is instead plausible. The hypothesis of a collective mind is rather old, and in my books I have discussed its origins and development in this century and not only. The jump in quality comes from the fact that communications on the net don’t lend themselves comfortably to supplying an ad-hoc metaphor of the holistic concept of “the Mind”. If - as is said ­ the population of the world is approaching 10 billion people, and if we connect among these 10 billion “cells”, sooner or later we will have something much closer in terms of complexity to the human brain and therefore a presumed collective conscience. And further, if the collective memory preserves and intersects in a way never seen before, in the end the role assumed by every person connected to the net will be redefined. After all, if technology develops interfaces of connecting the biological nervous system to the virtual “nervous system”, sooner or later the human being will be an integral part of a metasystem, of a global and sovereign holistic organism. And yet, for decades the philosopher John Searle argued that it was possible to organize well a complex exchange of symbolic material equipped with sense, using, we can say for an example, a billion Chinese, without being conscious of the process in action. In other words a machine of Turig, that is, any algorithmic machine, real or ideal, would effectively manipulate symbols on an infinite tape, without any intentional conscience of the act. One can well imagine that Chinese society, so instructed, beginning to manipulate abstract symbols passing them from hand to hand. Seen from outside, similar collective behaviour could even appear intelligent, in the sense of “conscious”. But because that operation is defined “intelligent” and “significant”, a conscious observer is always necessary for it to be so. Faced with these objections the theoreticians of a collective mind assume the existence of a not well identified “collective conscience”. Once again the analogy derives from what we know of the central nervous system. It seems in fact that the single neurons of the brain, taken individually are not knowledgeable of what they do. We take for granted this reply (that there aren’t foreseeable things to be taken for granted: subject of a lively contemporary debate involving genetic scientists and neuroscientists) and we admit that the human brain (and animal brain) are constituted by a series of agencies among their connections, but for the most part unconscious of what they do. It is in short the hyper-simplified nucleus of the “modular theory”, in which with various shades of relevance, the works of Marvin Minsky, Ray Jakendoff, Jerry A. Fodor and Gerald M. Edelman have surfaced, to cite only some of the more celebrated names.

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