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From the Human Brain to the Global Brain

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Figure 1. Computer-generated image of internet connections world-wide (Global Brain). The conceptual similarities with the human brain are remarkable. Both networks exhibit a scale-free, fractal distribution, with some weakly-connected units, and some strongly-connected ones which are arranged in hubs of increasing functional complexity. This helps protect the constituents of the network against stresses. Both networks are “small worlds” which means that information can reach any given unit within the network by passing through only a small number of other units. This assists in the global propagation of information within the network, and gives each and every unit the functional potential to be directly connected to all others. Source: The Opte Project/Barrett Lyon. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.

From the Human Brain to the Global Brain

By: Marios Kyriazis

Introduction

Human intelligence (i.e., the ability to consistently solve problems successfully) has evolved through the need to adapt to changing environments. This is not only true of our past but also of our present. Our brain faculties are becoming more sophisticated by cooperating and interacting with technology, specifically digital communication technology (Asaro, 2008).

When we consider the matter of brain function augmentation, we take it for granted that the issue refers to the human brain as a distinct organ. However, as we live in a complex technological society, it is now becoming clear that the issue is much more complicated. Individual brains cannot simply be considered in isolation, and their function is no longer localized or contained within the cranium, as we now know that information may be transmitted directly from one brain to another (Deadwyler et al., 2013; Pais-Vieira et al., 2013). This issue has been discussed in detail and attempts have been made to study the matter within a wider and more global context (Nicolelis and Laporta, 2011). Recent research in the field of brain to brain interfaces has provided the basis for further research and formation of new hypotheses in this respect (Grau et al., 2014; Rao et al., 2014). This concept of rudimentary “brain nets” may be expanded in a more global fashion, and within this framework, it is possible to envisage a much bigger and abstract “meta-entity” of inclusive and distributed capabilities, called the Global Brain (Mayer-Kress and Barczys, 1995; Heylighen and Bollen, 1996;Johnson et al., 1998; Helbing, 2011; Vidal, in press).

This entity reciprocally feeds information back to its components—the individual human brains. As a result, novel and hitherto unknown consequences may materialize such as, for instance, the emergence of rudimentary global “emotion” (Garcia and Tanase, 2013; Garcia et al., 2013; Kramera et al., 2014), and the appearance of decision-making faculties (Rodriguez et al., 2007). These characteristics may have direct impact upon our biology (Kyriazis, 2014a). This has been long discussed in futuristic and sociology literature (Engelbart, 1988), but now it also becomes more relevant to systems neuroscience partly because of the very promising research in brain-to-brain interfaces. The concept is grounded on scientific principles (Last, 2014a) and mathematical modeling (Heylighen et al., 2012).

Augmenting Brain Function on a Global Scale

It can be argued that the continual enhancement of brain function in humans, i.e., the tendency to an increasing intellectual sophistication, broadly aligns well with the main direction of evolution (Steward, 2014). This tendency to an increasing intellectual sophistication also obeys Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (Ashby, 1958) which essentially states that, for any system to be stable, the number of states of its control mechanisms must be greater than the number of states in the system being controlled. This means that, within an ever-increasing technological environment, we must continue to increase our brain function (mostly through using, or merging with, technology such as in the example of brain to brain communication mentioned above), in order to improve integration and maintain stability of the wider system. Several other authors (Maynard Smith and Szathmáry, 1997;Woolley et al., 2010; Last, 2014a) have expanded on this point, which seems to underpin our continual search for brain enrichment.

The tendency to enrich our brain is an innate characteristic of humans. We have been trying to augment our mental abilities, either intentionally or unintentionally, for millennia through the use of botanicals and custom-made medicaments, herbs and remedies, and, more recently, synthetic nootropics and improved ways to assimilate information. Many of these methods are not only useful in healthy people but are invaluable in age-related neurodegenerative disorders such as dementia and Parkinson’s disease (Kumar and Khanum, 2012). Other neuroscience-based methods such as transcranial laser treatments and physical implants (such as neural dust nanoparticles) are useful in enhancing cognition and modulate other brain functions (Gonzalez-Lima and Barrett, 2014).

However, these approaches are limited to the biological human brain as a distinct agent. As shown by the increased research interest in brain to brain communication (Trimper et al., 2014), I argue that the issue of brain augmentation is now embracing a more global aspect. The reason is the continual developments in technology which are changing our society and culture (Long, 2010). Certain brain faculties that were originally evolved for solving practical physical problems have been co-opted and exapted for solving more abstract metaphors, making humans adopt a better position within a technological niche.

The line between human brain function and digital information technologies is progressively becoming indistinct and less well-defined. This blurring is possible through the development of new technologies which enable more efficient brain-computer interfaces (Pfurtscheller and Neuper, 2002), and recently, brain-to-brain interfaces (Grau et al., 2014).

We are now in a position expand on this emergent worldview and examine what trends of systems neuroscience are likely in the near-term future. Technology has been the main drive which brought us to the position we are in today (Henry, 2014). This position is the merging of the physical human brain abilities with virtual domains and automated web services (Kurzweil, 2009). Modern humans cannot purely be defined by their biological brain function. Instead, we are now becoming an amalgam of biological and virtual/digital characteristics, a discrete unit, or autonomous agent, forming part of a wider and more global entity (Figure 1).

Large Scale Networks and the Global Brain

The Global Brain (Heylighen, 2007; Iandoli et al., 2009; Bernstein et al., 2012) is a self-organizing system which encompasses all those humans who are connected with communication technologies, as well as the emergent properties of these connections. Its intelligence and information-processing characteristics are distributed, in contrast to that of individuals whose intelligence is localized. Its characteristics emerge from the dynamic networks and global interactions between its individual agents. These individual agents are not merely the biological humans but are something more complex. In order to describe this relationship further, I have introduced the notion of the noeme, an emergent agent, which helps formalize the relationships involved (Kyriazis, 2014a). The noeme is a combination of a distinct physical brain function and that of an “outsourced” virtual one. It is the intellectual “networked presence” of an individual within the GB, a meaningful synergy between each individual human, their social interactions and artificial agents, globally connected to other noemes through digital communications technology (and, perhaps soon, through direct brain to brain interfaces). A comparison can be made with neurons which, as individual discrete agents, form part of the human brain. In this comparison, the noemes act as the individual, information-sharing discrete agents which form the GB (Gershenson, 2011). The modeling of noemes helps us define ourselves in a way that strengthens our rational presence in the digital world. By trying to enhance our information-sharing capabilities we become better integrated within the GB and so become a valuable component of it, encouraging mechanisms active in all complex adaptive systems to operate in a way that prolongs our retention within this system (Gershenson and Fernández, 2012), i.e., prolongs our biological lifespan (Kyriazis, 2014b; Last, 2014b).

Discussion

This concept is a helpful way of interpreting the developing cognitive relationship between humans and artificial agents as we evolve and adapt to our changing technological environment. The concept of the noeme provides insights with regards to future problems and opportunities. For instance, the study of the function of the noeme may provide answers useful to biomedicine, by coopting laws applicable to any artificial intelligence medium and using these to enhance human health (Kyriazis, 2014a). Just as certain physical or pharmacological therapies for brain augmentation are useful in neurodegeneration in individuals, so global ways of brain enhancement are useful in a global sense, improving the function and adaptive capabilities of humanity as a whole. One way to augment global brain function is to increase the information content of our environment by constructing smart cities (Caragliu et al., 2009), expanding the notion of the Web of Things (Kamilaris et al., 2011), and by developing new concepts in educational domains (Veletsianos, 2010). This improves the information exchange between us and our surroundings and helps augment brain function, not just physically in individuals, but also virtually in society.

Practical ways for enhancing our noeme (i.e., our digital presence) include:

• Cultivate a robust social media base, in different forums.

• Aim for respect, esteem and value within your virtual environment.

• Increase the number of your connections both in virtual and in real terms.

• Stay consistently visible online.

• Share meaningful information that requires action.

• Avoid the use of meaningless, trivial or outdated platforms.

• Increase the unity of your connections by using only one (user) name for all online and physical platforms.

These methods can help increase information sharing and facilitate our integration within the GB (Kyriazis, 2014a). In a practical sense, these actions are easy to perform and can encompass a wide section of modern communities. Although the benefits of these actions are not well studied, nevertheless some initial findings appear promising (Griffiths, 2002; Granic et al., 2014).

Concluding Remarks

With regards to improving brain function, we are gradually moving away from the realms of science fiction and into the realms of reality (Kurzweil, 2005). It is now possible to suggest ways to enhance our brain function, based on novel concepts dependent not only on neuroscience but also on digital and other technology. The result of such augmentation does not only benefit the individual brain but can also improve all humanity in a more abstract sense. It improves human evolution and adaptation to new technological environments, and this, in turn, may have positive impact upon our health and thus longevity (Solman, 2012; Kyriazis, 2014c).

In a more philosophical sense, our progressive and distributed brain function amplification has begun to lead us toward attaining “god-like” characteristics (Heylighen, in press) particularly “omniscience” (through Google, Wikipedia, the semantic web, Massively Online Open Courses MOOCs—which dramatically enhance our knowledge base), and “omnipresence” (cloud and fog computing, Twitter, YouTube, Internet of Things, Internet of Everything). These are the result of the outsourcing of our brain capabilities to the cloud in a distributed and universal manner, which is an ideal global neural augmentation. The first steps have already been taken through brain to brain communication research. The concept of systems neuroscience is thus expanded to encompass not only the human nervous network but also a global network with societal and cultural elements.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgment

I thank the help and input of the reviewers, particularly the first one who has dedicated a lot of time into improving the paper.

Várias referências legais:

(2009). Smart Cities in Europe

(2012). Complexity and information: measuring emergence, self-organization, and homeostasis at multiple scales.

(2011). FuturICT-New Science and Technology to Manage Our Complex, Strongly Connected

(1996). “The World-Wide Web as a Super-Brain: from metaphor to model,” in Cybernetics and Systems

(2007). The Global Superorganism: an evolutionary-cybernetic model of the emerging network society.

(2012). Foundations for a Mathematical Model of the Global Brain: architecture, components, and specifications

(1998). “Symbiotic Intelligence: self-organizing knowledge on distributed networks driven by human interaction,”

(2011). The Smart Home meets the Web of Things.

(2014). Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks.

2005). The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

(2007). Smartocracy: Social Networks for Collective Decision Making

(2014). The direction of evolution: the rise of cooperative organization. Biosystems

“Distributing cognition: from local brains to the global brain,” in The End of the Beginning: Life, Society and Economy on the Brink of the Singularity

(2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups.

(2015) Systems neuroscience in focus: from the human brain to the global brain?

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U.N. Court’s Order on Rohingya Is Cheered, but Will Myanmar Comply?

BANGKOK — The surprisingly strong ruling against Myanmar by the United Nations’ top court this week is sure to increase international pressure on the country to protect its Muslim Rohingya minority, who critics say have been the victims of a government-sanctioned genocide.

But on Friday — a day after the International Court of Justice in The Hague ordered Myanmar to protect the Rohingya and report back regularly on the steps it has taken to do so — it was still unclear what the country’s response would be. The government has said almost nothing about the ruling, except to deny that the widely documented killing and persecution of the Rohingya by Myanmar’s military amounted to genocide.

Rights lawyers and an attorney for the African nation of Gambia, which brought the case, said the unanimous decision by the 15-judge panel had gone beyond even what Gambia had asked for. Myanmar and Gambia were each allowed to appoint a member of the panel, and even Myanmar’s choice — Claus Kress, a German law professor — sided with Gambia.

“This is an important ruling for a number of reasons,” said Carla Ferstman, a senior lecturer at the Human Rights Center at the University of Essex in England. She said the decision “means it won’t be enough for Myanmar to just avoid doing bad things. It must take active steps, and then prove it has done so, with a clear timetable for reporting.”

Myanmar has been condemned around for the world for its military’s assault on the Rohingya in the western state of Rakhine, which since 2017 has driven more than 700,000 people across the border into Bangladesh. Rights groups documented mass killings, rape and the burning of entire villages.

More than 100,000 Rohingya have been forced into camps within Myanmar, many of them in waves of violence that predated the 2017 campaign.

But for all of the denunciations by the United Nations, rights groups and various governments, the case brought by Gambia led to the first international court ruling against Myanmar since the atrocities began.

“The court confirmed that no matter where genocide occurs, it’s a matter for the entire international community, and that a state does not have to be connected or affected by the genocide in order for them to take action to prevent, end and punish it,” said Akila Radhakrishnan, president of the New York-based Global Justice Center.

Gambia, which brought the case on behalf of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, has asked the court to declare that Myanmar has violated the Genocide Convention. That decision could be years away.

But in its ruling on Thursday, the court ordered Myanmar to take steps to prevent acts of genocide against the 600,000 Rohingya estimated to remain in the country, and to prevent the destruction of any evidence of genocide.

Going further than Gambia had asked, the court also ordered Myanmar to file a report every six months until the case is resolved, spelling out what it has done to protect the Rohingya. (Gambia had asked only for a single report.) The first report is due in four months.

The court has no enforcement powers, but the United Nations Security Council can act on its findings. The world body’s secretary-general, António Guterres, welcomed the ruling and said he would transmit it to the Security Council.

Ms. Radhakrishnan said that if Myanmar disobeyed the order, it could mean an end to the “shocking level of leniency” she said the country had enjoyed on rights issues since its transition to partial democracy began in 2011.

“Now, the failure to comply with such a clear legally binding order would have the potential to change this dynamic and have Myanmar face real consequences,” she said.

The question now is whether Myanmar will comply.

The government’s chief spokesman, Zaw Htay, did not respond to phone calls or written questions about the court order. He has previously said that he would only answer reporters’ questions at news conferences in the secluded capital, Naypyidaw. His last news conference there was more than two months ago.

Brig. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, a spokesman for Myanmar’s military, which operates autonomously from the civilian side of the government, said in a brief interview that it would “cooperate with the government and we will work under the guidance of the government” in response to the ruling. He did not elaborate.

Myanmar’s Foreign Ministry issued a short statement after the ruling on Thursday that did not address the court’s order, but repeated the government’s denial that the Rohingya had been subjected to genocide.

The statement echoed what appears to be Myanmar’s new public relations approach: admitting that war crimes were committed in Rakhine, but denying that they amounted to genocide.

On Tuesday, a government-appointed commission released a summary of a report concluding that the security forces had engaged in mass killings of civilians in several locations in Rakhine, leaving as many as 900 dead. But it said it found no evidence of “genocidal intent.” The full report has not been released.

“The commission found that war crimes had occurred, and those are now being investigated and prosecuted by Myanmar’s national criminal justice system,” the Foreign Ministry said in its statement.

The genocide case has pit predominantly Muslim Gambia, which only recently tossed out its longtime dictator, against predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, which has yet to fully emerge from decades of military control.

“It is a very strong decision and it has given hope to Rohingya around the world,” said Arsalan Suleman, who was a diplomat in President Barack Obama’s State Department and is now an attorney on Gambia’s legal team. He praised Gambia’s “moral leadership” at a time when, he said, it often seems lacking on the global stage.

“You have a country in Africa, not an extremely well-developed country, but a country that really cares about human rights and dignity, and it has made it a national concern to fight for the Rohingya,” Mr. Suleman said.

In telephone interviews, Rohingya living in the Thae Chaung camp for internally displaced people, one of 14 such camps in Rakhine State, praised the court ruling and expressed hope that Myanmar would abide by the order.

“We are living in terrible conditions,” said Ko Kyaw Aung, 32, who moved to the camp in 2012, after an anti-Rohingya mob destroyed his home and small grocery shop. “There is still no hope of closing down the camp and returning to our land.”

He said the court’s order was “the only hope to bring justice and dignity” to Rohingya in the Rakhine camps, who he said numbered about 130,000.

Dr. Ferstman, of the University of Essex, said the ruling amounted to “a good day for smaller nations, for less powerful groups, who doubt they can also achieve justice.”

“Today, we have seen that the system can work for all and Gambia — a country with no direct link to Myanmar — should be applauded for bringing this case,” she said.

Saw Nang contributed reporting from Mandalay, Myanmar.

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