The Global Brain

Opte Project visualization of routing paths through a portion of the Internet. The connections and pathways of the internet could be seen as the pathways of neurons and synapses in a global brain

I began using analytical tools in February 2014 to track my readership. I have now exceeded 50,000 page views! (About 40,000 visitors.) I would like to thank all the readers, especially my regular readers. I would also like to thank those who take the time to write responses, all of which I read and reflect upon.

And thanks to the engineers and computer scientists who designed and maintain the various parts of the world-wide web. It amazes me that I reach people all around the globe, as my site stats confirm. Science and technology, the true bringers of miracles, are creating a global brain.

The global brain is a conceptualization of the worldwide network formed by all the people on this planet together with the information and communication technologies that connect them into an intelligent, self-organizing system. As the internet becomes faster, more intelligent, and more encompassing, it increasingly ties its users together into a single information processing system, which functions like a nervous system for the planet Earth. The intelligence of this network is collective or distributed: it is not centralized or localized in any particular individual, organization or computer system. It rather emerges from the dynamic networks of interactions between its components, a property typical of complex adaptive systems.¹