Imagining an integrative function within the world wide web

Are the UN and the International Community both Brain Dead (Part #5)

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From the perspective of cybernetics and connectivity basic to any model of information transfers within the world wide web, various ways of understanding "integration" can be envisaged with respect to the internet:

• Submarine communication cables between continents, as the first level of connectivity between continents
• Internet backbone, understood as the principal data routes between large, strategically interconnected computer networks and core routers on the Internet.
  
• Root name servers of the Internet, namely the set of name servers for the root zone of the Domain Name System of the Internet. These respond to requests for records in the root zone and answer other requests by returning a list of the authoritative name servers for the appropriate top-level domain (TLD). It might be asked whether the TLDs distinguished correspond to any degree, in functional terms, to the lobes of the brain -- possibly indicative of belief systems.
• Dominant search engines, especially those such as Google providing access to the world wide web.
• Emergence of a semantic web, currently understood as a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium. This promotes common data formats by encouraging inclusion of semantic content in web pages. The intention is to convert the current web, dominated by unstructured and semi-structured documents, into a "web of data".
• Server complexes registering all internet transactions, as with the NSA Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center Bluffdale, Utah)
• Simulations of an integrative function, as with:
  • the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), intended as a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information" with a node representing "every man, woman and child"
  • the FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator, a multidisciplinary international scientific endeavour with focus on techno-socio-economic-environmental systems.
• Initiatives such as the Global Futures Intelligence System (of the Millennium Project), the Global Brain Institute, the Global Consciousness Project, or the Global Sensemaking network

Clearly these variously perfom, or imply, a vital integrative function which provides a focus for particular kinds of studies of integration, most notably from the perspective of control systems and cybernetics. It is according to such understanding that forms of artificial intelligence, embedded within such systems, that planetary consciousness can be held to emerge

Readily held to correspond to only one of the hemispheres of the human brain according to current understandings of lateralization of brain function. the question is how this set of functions relates to integration as a whole -- more "integratively" understood. Whilst the subject of nuance and controversy, the functions distinguished are:

• Language functions such as grammar, vocabulary and literal meaning are typically lateralized to the left hemisphere
• Visual and auditory stimuli, spatial manipulation, facial perception, and artistic ability are represented bilaterally, but may show a right hemisphere superiority.

With respect to information on the world wide web, clearly both forms of information are currently transferred to various degrees. This can be understood as a "plumbing" function. There is far greater ease to the transfer of those associated with language. Clearly transfer of the second is also represented to a degree within some contexts but -- most notably -- not with respect to academic discourse regarding the world wide web itself. Academic journals are unable to handle information of the second kind, for example.

Of concern is the manner in which reflection governed by each hemisphere tends to appropriate the integrative insights of the other. Whilst deprecating the incapacties of the other, there is a degree of failure to recognize its particular capacities. In this process, the nature of any potentially emergent integration gets obscured, as variously discussed (From Information Highways to Songlines of the Noosphere: global configuration of hypertext pathways as a prerequisite for meaningful collective transformation, 1996).

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