Philosophical reflections on the Internet forming a new consciousness, suggesting future implications.
In an issue of the widely distributed, family-oriented USA Weekend magazine, the physicist who invented HTML [hypertext markup language, used on the World Wide Web] and the Web was quoted as saying he believed the Internet (Net) was forming an artificial intelligence. He’s not the only one to have expressed that seemingly science fictional opinion. In an interview with the esteemed Paradigm Shift Web zine [online magazine] a couple of years back, Genesis P-Orridge, in an updated take on Teilhard de Chardin’s philosophy, speculated that a consciousness, a deity, was taking form in the Internet.
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Philip Farber (1999) studied this question.
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