it's alive!

A long yet mind-blowing (for me, anyway) quote, and then some thoughts:

Begin by jettisoning two habitual ways of thinking about what a brain is. First, forget about gray matter and synapses. When someone like Wright says “giant brain,” he means a device for processing and storing information, like the clustered neighborhoods of Florence. Second, accept the premise that brains can be a collective enterprise. Being individual organisms ourselves, we're inclined to think of brains as discrete things, possessed by individual organisms. But both categories turn out to be little more than useful fictions. As we've seen, ants do their “learning” at the colony level—growing less aggressive with age, or rerouting a food assembly line around a disturbance—while the individual ants remain blissfully ignorant of the larger project. The “colony brain” is the sum of thousands and thousands of simple decisions executed by individual ants. The individual ants don't have anything like a personality, but the colonies do. (Johnson 115)

This is all written in response to the question "is the Web becoming a giant brain?" a la The Matrix (the first one, not the sucky sequels). Johnson then goes on to argue, no, even in this definition, it is not, because a brain needs organization and structure, and the internet, which is anarchic, does not posses these qualities. It is entirely too random.

This is an area where Johnson is wrong. Part of this might come from him writing in 2001, and much has changed since then. But there is an emerging structure, around web portals, the bloggosphere, internet communities, links. Johnson is trapped into thinking that organization and structure has to be tied to physics. In the real world, however, connections can easily happen in non-physical ways.

I'm not convinced that the internet is a giant brain myself...that's something for my cyberspace scholar friends to answer. However, it has that potential.

What interests me, however, is the concept of thought. Learning, according to the above definition, is not linked to sentience. Any large system, from an anthill to a city, can display learning and growth (and this is one of Johnson's key points throughout). If it can learn, it can think. And I think this can be applied to culture at large, including popular culture.

Now, here's what blows my mind. If it can think, if it can learn, is it alive? Is sentience a requirement for life? Is culture alive?

If so, we've been using a wrong approach, the wrong metaphors. If so, we have to take our cues from science, from biology...at least a little.