Fred’s Cozy Little Nook

If there is one qualifying thing about humans, it’s one thing: They love to communicate.

Witness the births and rapid development of communication technologies, from smoke signals (well, they did travel at the speed of light!) to the Gutenberg Press to telegraph to telephone to mass media systems like radio and TV to now the Internet.

Now, you can find others that share your interests, no matter how obscure, anywhere and everywhere on the planet.

You can hook up with old high-school and college chums you haven’t seen in 30 years. You can find those local with your common obscure interests and meet them in person. You can sell objects of limited interest — or find them. You can conduct business with others around the world that you have never met in person.

You can even work from home in a “virtual company”. Or you can make money selling ads on your web sites. Or find other creative ways to make money. Even find jobs and the like.

Information abounds from Wikipedia to every college and university that have cared to put up free courseware and research papers  on the web. Or you can get the goods on a person by hitting aggregate data services and track a person’s every address, job, and other activities going back decades.

Governments also have the goods on you, secretly monitoring your communications and bank transactions for whatever purposes they see fit…

My point here is that we now live in an age of hyper-connectivity. Not just instant communication, but for each and every individual being able to reach hundreds if not thousands with ANY information for ANY purpose at low to no cost.

With all this hyper-connectivity, some emergence is inevitable. The question is, of course, can or has that emergence organized itself to be a thinking, throbbing entity all its own? Is this possible? And if so, how would we mere “neurons” know it’s happened?

Keep in mind, as well, that this “mass mind” might operate — and most likely would — on time scales much different from  our human time senses would recognize. What if it took a day to complete a “complete thought”, whatever that would be? A week? A year? How would we know?

I do think this question is answerable — in time. And wouldn’t it be ironic that, in our searching and yearning for discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence, that is emergent intelligence was with us all along sitting right here under our noses?

Well, what would we call such a thing? What would a neuron call the brain? I’ll leave you with that thought.

I told myself I wouldn’t bother debating with theists anymore because the arguments are usually pointless and the theist still walks away a theist, despite the most cogent, logical, rational presentation I can muster.

But where I think these debates can sometime be useful is in helping others understand the deep issues involved with the proposed questions of whether or not some deity exists.

These issues go straight to epistemological concerns and approaches, and that represents the greatest dividing line between theists and myself. I am a scientist, an empiricist, a skeptic. I want to see the evidence; I want to see reason. Your typical theist, on the other hand — and especially Christian theists — insist on what they call “faith” and internal messages “from God” that no one else can hear but themselves.

This dichotomy in the epistemological approaches are, at best, irreconcilable. Indeed, they are diametrically opposed to the nth degree. One requires hard observations and hard reasoning; the other involves wishful and magical thinking, and self-delusion.

In asking the question of “does God exists?”, the first thing to be settled is “which God?” Why only one? Why not millions?

The next question to be asked is how one defines this “God”. Is there a workable definition that we can all agree on? Or will this definition vary from person to person, from culture to culture, from religion to religion?

Once we can get past that, there is the question of falsifiability.  This is where the theist falls down, because the theist will scream “you gotta have faith!”, and I want to know that there is something there beyond the delusion of humans.

The debate will probably never end, simply because there are people who seem to have a “need” for some sort of deity. Indeed, that “need” seems to have plagued Mankind throughout all of history. I have discussed some of these issues in other blogs, so I won’t repeat them here.

The debate is here at http://urlbit.us/gno (Is belief in God a sign of intellectual impairment?)