Humanity Gaining a Nervous System : The Internet
The internet that connects us all is a large directed graph, which networks computers, servers, virtual and real machines all over the world. The interconnectedness that the internet signifies has an amazing similarity with the nervous system of human beings. In a sense, the internet is humanity gaining a nervous system.
Akin to the nervous system, information is instantly transmitted throughout the internet from one side of the world to the other. Within the human body information from one side of our body is instantly transmitted to another part of our body via the nervous system of which the brain is one central hub. Before the internet and electronic revolution, information had to travel via mail, ships etc…which was slow and costly. This pre-internet stage is akin to osmosis, another more permeative method of information transmission in the body that uses high to low fluid pressure difference to achieve flow, as oppose to electrical potential difference.
The nervous system appeared late throughout the evolutionary history of human beings. It is believed that the first brain/nervous system was in some primitive fish that had few dozen neurons connected and firing to control some minor movements. Before that life form was dominated by osmosis flow and movement such as that of bacterias. This again is similar to our technological evolution. Humanity went from slow information sharing to nascent form of few dozen interconnected computers. As evolution went on, the nervous system became more and more connected, gaining more and more control and power over the body and surroundings. This happened due to stimulation from the surrounding and competiton amongst humans imposing a need and a natural selection for a more power full nervous system i.e. increasingly complicatedly connected nervous system. Similarly, the internet has grown to a vast interconncted web, due to our needs and desire to access more information and competition amongst us humans to dominate one another with such access to information.
Moreover, developments such as Page rank, which make it possible to navigate and search the web, made the internet with despite its sheer size manageable and useful. Following the similarity once more, its is quite likely that there is a search methodology that might be represented by some chemical or encoded in the neural architecture of the system, which makes sure the right information gets to the right neuron. The internet compare to our nervous system, however, is nowhere close in its interconnectedness and power at processing information. A simple and obvious example is consciousness. It may be that the internet might grain a sense of self at some point in the future just as this sense of self appeared in the evolution of our nervous system. It is fair to wonder how all sorts or tricks and methods our brain/nervous system employs can somehow be mimicked in the internet. Sadly however, we now very little about how our brain works from its basic abilities like memory to its more abstract one such as imagination, visualization or consciousness. However, as more studies and developments occur on the brain, these finding are very likely to be transformed to the internet. That puts forward a very interesting and exciting step in the evolution of humanity as whole. Lets just hope that the evolution that the internet will go through gives rise to something friendly and compatible with us.