Chapter 145 23.5 New Thinking Spaces

I do computer networking for a living.The web of networks -- the Internet -- connects millions of personal computers around the world.No one knows how many computers are connected to the network, or even how many relay nodes there are. In August 1993, the Internet Society made an educated guess, saying that the giant network consisted of 1.7 million hosts and 17 million users at that time.The network is controlled by no one and supervised by no one.The U.S. government, which has indirectly funded the Internet, suddenly realized one day that the Internet has been running on its own in the terminals of technical elites without much management and supervision.As its users proudly boast, the Internet is already the world's largest functioning anarchy.Countless pieces of information are passed between network users every day without regard to the interests of central authorities.I personally send and receive about 50 messages a day.In addition to the flow of so many personal letters, there is also a detached computer space for information interaction in the network, a shared space for open written communication.Authors all over the world add millions of sentences every day across countless overlapping topics.People are building a huge distributed document day after day, a document in a state of continuous construction, continuous change, and ephemeral eternity. "The fundamental element within the electronic writing space is not pure disorganization," Bolt writes, "but a state of constant reorganization."

The web bears far more fruit than printed books or table chats.A text is an intellectual conversation with countless participants.The way of thinking inspired by the multi-dimensional space of the Internet tends to cultivate non-dogmatic experimental ideas, witty globalization concepts, interdisciplinary synthesis, and unconstrained and emotional responses.Many participants preferred online writing to book writing because it was a peer-to-peer conversational style, and because it was free-spirited and free-spirited rather than meticulous and artificial. Distributed dynamic text, such as the Internet and many new books in hypertext format, is a completely new space for ideas, ideas and knowledge.Knowledge shaped by the age of printing produced the codes of this particular idea, which in turn implied a core set of fundamental principles—formed in ink and reproduced perfectly—so that human knowledge is only advancing.What each generation of readers has to do is to find the accepted truths in the books.

On the other hand, distributed text or hypertext provides a new role for readers - each reader jointly decides the meaning of the text.This relationship is the basic idea of ​​postmodern literary criticism.Postmodernists have no secular standards in mind.Hypertext, they say, allows "the reader to participate and, together with the author, to control the writing space." Reading a work, each time you read a different truth, each is not exhaustive, nor more than another. According to.There are many levels of meaning in the work, and different people have different understandings.To read a text it is necessary to see it as a network of ideas - trains of thought.Some threads belong to the author, some belong to the reader and his historical background, and some belong to the author's own time."Readers evoke their own texts from the web, and each such text belongs to a reader and a particular reading," Burt said.

This kind of splitting and cracking of works is called "deconstruction".Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstructionism, called a text (a text can be any complex) as "a differential network, a fabric of traces constantly pointing to other and different traces than itself." Or to use Burr's In Te's words, it is "a mark structure pointing to other marks." Of course, this symbolic image involving other signs is the archetypal image of the infinite regress and chaotic recursive logic of the distributed group, the symbol of the network, the link between everything and everything. symbol.

The generalization that we call knowledge or science is a web of ideas that point and teach each other.Hypertext and electronic writing facilitate this reciprocity.The web has readjusted the writing space of the printed book, and in the new space, many writing styles and ways of writing are bolder and more complex than ink printing.We can think of the overall movement of life as part of that "writing space".Data from weather sensors, censuses, traffic recorders, cash registers, and electronic information generators of all kinds expand the space for writing as they flood the web with their "talk" or statements.Their information becomes part of what we know, part of what we talk about, part of what we mean.

At the same time, this particular form of cyberspace shapes us.It is no coincidence that the rise of postmodernists followed the formation of cyberspace.Over the past half-century, unified mass markets (a consequence of rapid industrialization) have disintegrated in favor of small, niche networks (a consequence of the onset of informatization).This conglomeration of fragments is the only complete way we have.Fragments of commercial markets, social mores, spiritual beliefs, and racial divisions, and truth itself, fragmented into smaller and smaller fragments, characterize the age.Our society is a place where fragments fight.That's pretty much the definition of a distributed web.Bolt added: "Our culture itself is a vast writing space, a complex symbolic structure . We may perhaps be calling the final stage of a social order called 'network culture'."

There is no central manager of knowledge in the network, only guardians of unique perspectives.In today's highly connected and deeply divided society, people can no longer rely on the guidance of central standards.People are forced into the darkness of modern existentialism to create their own cultures, beliefs, markets, and identities out of a mess of interdependent fragments.The arrogant center or the industrial icon with an underlying "I am" becomes hollow.Distributed, leaderless, naturally occurring wholeness becomes the ideal of society. The ever insightful Bolt writes, “Critics accuse computers of monotonizing our society, producing uniformity through automation, but electronic reading and writing do just the opposite.” Computers promote heterogeneity, individuality culture and free will.

No one was more wrong about the consequences of computer use than George Orwell in his predictions.Almost all practical possibility spaces created by computers so far suggest that computers are the end of authority, not the beginning. The working mode of the bee colony opens up not only a new space for writing, but also a new space for thinking.If parallel supercomputers and online computer networks can do this, what kind of thinking space will future technologies—such as bioengineering—give us?One thing bioengineering can do for our new thinking spaces is change our timescales.Modern humans can conceive things within 10 years.Our history stretches five years into the past, our future five years forward, and no further.We don't yet have a structured way, a cultural tool, to think about issues whether it's decades or centuries.Tools for tracking genes and evolution may change that.Drugs that help harness our own minds will of course also reshape our thinking spaces.

The last question that stumps me and puts me on hold is: How much room is there for possible ways of thinking?Is there more or less of all the kinds of logic we have found hitherto in the treasury of thought and knowledge? The thinking space may be vast.Whether it's solving a problem, or exploring a concept, or proving a statement, or creating a new idea, there are perhaps as many ways to do it as the ideas themselves.On the contrary, the thinking space may be narrow and limited, just as the ancient Greek sages believed.I dare say that when artificial intelligence does emerge, it will be intelligent, but not very human-like.It will be one of many non-human ways of thinking, perhaps filling a treasure trove of thinking spaces.This space will also contain certain types of thinking that we humans simply cannot comprehend.But we can still use it.Non-human methods of cognition can provide us with wonderful results that transcend and are out of our control.

Maybe we will create surprises for ourselves.We might create Kaufman machine-like minds that can generate all types of thinking and all previously unseen complexities from a small finite set of instructions.Perhaps that cognitive space of possible existence is our space.We can then climb into any type of logic that we can create, evolve or discover.If we can move unimpeded in cognitive space, we can enter the realm of unrestricted thinking. I firmly believe that we create surprises for ourselves.