Greetings from Darth Mencken

[Matterplay1]

Finally signed-on! I don't know what the problem was with my Mike Parisi persona. Twice I tried, with new passwords, yet it just didn't work. Finally decided, "Screw it!" And registered anew as "Darth Mencken," whom in truth I identify as online for all but the most serious R/L matters (employment and/or romance - Haven't found a way yet to effectively combine the two!). Farewell, Mike Parisi. You'll always be there when needed!
[snip]

Hi! Glad you made it! Please get in touch with me about this, either offlist or with the private message functionality of this forum. Yours is the only case so far of difficulties with signup, but I'd like to understand it better. Also, let me know if you want to delete the Mike Parisi handle from this forum.

One slightly more relevant thing on my mind lately is, to what extent can each device connected to the Internet - along with the owners/users of such - be likened to neurons in the brain (each individually incapable of comprehending the whole, yet comprising a part of and contributing to such)? And could the first true transhuman intellect arise (or has it already, or is it in the process of such?) with the Internet comprising its brain/mind, and each of us (ourselves, and the various devices we use to connect to the Net) serving effectively as its neurons, synapses, etc., with no more awareness or comprehension of such than our own individual neurons presumably have of the whole they are a part of?

The elements of the internet would be better likened to neurons living in a petri dish than to neurons in a brain. As long as they're alive neurons will reach out and connect with one another, but without the right context they won't tune those connections into anything coherent, for all their individual complexity and sophistication. The simplest neural nets of natural organisms, like those of a hydra or a jellyfish, have more real ability to actually inform an organism than the whole internet does. The only way for that vast number of linked computers to actually 'mean' something would be for someone to design it, or for it to evolve. For it to be designed, some person or group would have to have an unprecedented degree of control of the overall design and the individual elements would have to be 'programmed' to behave quite differently with each other than computers do now. For it to evolve, well, to start with there's only one internet, it's not in competition with some other internets, and it doesn't reproduce (and even if all those things were true there hasn't been enough time for anything to have evolved). So, an interesting speculative idea but not at all likely in the present day. This is not to say that in the OA setting there might not be any number of internet-like arrangements that result in an an 'organism' of some sort. Anything from plant-like to transapient level in overall 'intelligence', in fact. It would have to have been designed that way, though.