The Art, Design, and Technology Exhibition

The PolyTech University Design School Gallery

The CogSpace navigation console

People Navigating CogSpace

People Navigating CogSpace

CogSpace screen

Visualizing Collective Intelligence

Digital Synchronicity

More photos here by David Chalmers: http://consc.net/pics/hongkong.html

I’ve been developing this interactive, 3-dimensional model, and it was just recently accepted to be exhibited and presented at the Asian Consciousness Festival in Hong Kong this June.  You can see, interact, and read all about the model here:

www.cogspace.net

You can also download the entire abstract and descriptive paper here:

www.cogspace.net/docs/CogSpace.pdf

An excerpt from the abstract:

This model is an examination of consciousness through an interactive visual representation of the interdisciplinary knowledge domains of Cognitive Science and Consciousness Studies. As a visualization of the various scientific and academic approaches toward understanding mind and consciousness, a unified and comprehensive overview is achieved that orients our collective approach in the field of consciousness research as a whole.

The model is based on a 3-dimensional conceptual framework that assigns six (6) formally established primary knowledge domains of interdisciplinary Cognitive Science (namely: Psychology, Anthropology, Neuroscience, Computer Science, Philosophy, and Linguistics) to the geometric Cartesian coordinate system (x, y, z), and to a correlative color system (based on gradient scales of red, green, and blue), resulting in a semantic-color-space matrix for ontologically representational coordination of the topic contents. More specific knowledge areas are plotted within this axiomatic framework as sub-domains (such as Analytical Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Semantics, etc). The precise positions of subdomains are determined by metric averages derived by consensus survey of a diverse group of people, and is therefore also a representation of a collective perspective of consciousness research (not just the perspective of a single individual or isolated disciplinary field).

With this dynamic arrangement of organizational factors, the model renders a unique integral perspective and informative cartography of the “terrain”, and provides a “navigational instrument” for our explorative traversing across the frontier of consciousness research. By plotting each sub-domain in scope of the relative positions of all other domains, areas of knowledge and research concentration and lack of concentration (“unexplored regions”) become apparent. When referencing any particular disciplinary sub-domain within the manifold model, where it is at and what color it is can suggest something about it’s qualitative proximity to either more discrete and concrete or more continuous and abstract types of knowledge and research. For example, a sub-domain that is extremely neurobiological will be far less philosophical, and is placed on an extreme exterior boundary of the model (color saturation is more additive toward extreme hues). Inversely, a sub-domain that is a hybrid, somewhat balanced in interdisciplinary collaboration between linguistics and computer science, psychology and anthropology, and philosophy and neuroscience, is placed closer to the center of the model (color saturation is subtractive toward gray). The exterior of the model therefore represents the diverse areas of the more discrete and concrete–portrayed as the bright “rainbow” spectrum of colors. The interior of the model represents hybrid areas of the more continuous and abstract–portrayed figuratively and literally as the “gray area”. The closer a sub-domain is to the exact center, the closer it is to blending and fusing with an absolute, unified, and direct knowing and application of consciousness itself.

The overall result of the model is a “mind map” of the collective processes involving the differentiation and unification of interdisciplinary oppositions–the amalgamation of Interior and Exterior, Science and Art, Matter and Spirit, East and West–toward a realization of a coalescent whole.

A key element of this developing project is that the shape of the model is determined by a consensus formulation of the ontological constituents.  Among preparations and continuing development of this model, a survey will be made of a diverse group of people over the next few weeks.  In order to derive some “collective intelligence” in this formulation, some principles of “crowd wisdom” will be applied.  The more diverse the crowd, the better … so anyone can apply.  If you or someone you know is interested in participating in this survey, please contact me with the following information:

1. Name
2. Gender
3. Occupation
4. Education
5. Date of birth and age
6. Where you live
7. Any comments on why you want to be involved, or something special about yourself …

Within a week or so, the group will be selected, and the survey conducted.

Please forward this to anyone.

The CogSpace model will continue to evolve in various ways …

Thanks and happy cognitions!

I know … SO MANY SOCIAL NETWORKS … SO LITTLE TIME!  Isn’t FaceBook more than enough already!  Who has time to keep up with it all?  Plaxo keeps us all connected while also helping us save some time while doing so.

Here is a description of what Plaxo offers (from the website itself):

Plaxo keeps you in touch with people you care about.

When fellow Plaxo members you’re connected with move to a new home, change their cell phone number or change jobs, you’ll know… and your address book will be updated automatically.

So, if everyone gets on Plaxo, it can actually save time by keeping us all up-to-date on each other’s contact information.  We all know 100s even 1000s of people within our own networks, and most of those 100s and 1000s also know each other (this is the “plexus”).  How many times do we all get emails from somebody saying, “I just changed my phone number, please update your records”.  So then you might feel obligated to take a moment out of your busy day to open your address book, copy the new number over, etc.  Or how many times do you get an email from someone asking for your mailing address or fax number because they “lost it”, or even more–they ask if you just happen to have the information for someone you both may know.  This is not sustainable information management.  

As an alternative: what if everybody’s contact information updated itself everywhere automatically?  Plaxo aims to provide this for us with a service called “Pulse”.  Plaxo will also automatically make recommendations to you of people who you are already interacting with in email and/or other social networks … so, over time, it’s fairly straight forward to build up our shared social plexus.  I actually don’t use Plaxo much for general social interaction (I save that mostly for FaceBook).  Yet, it is good to be on Plaxo so that my social contact information is updated regularly.

It’s the 21st century.  We have the technology to move beyond the aggradation of trivial inconveniences that come with greater social connectivity–and get down to better uses of our time, energy, and attention!  Let’s focus less on establishing and maintaining connections, and more on the processes and qualities of being in connection!

Join the Plaxo plexus!

I also recommend that you download an extension toolbar that will keep your computer’s address book in sync with your Plaxo Pulse account.

See you on the Plaxo Pulse people plexus!

Palantir

Some crafty engineers over at FaceBook recently created the Palantir open-source computer application (named after one of the powerful “seeing stone” orbs in Lord of the Rings) that visualizes live activity on the FaceBook social network. See a video of the application here.

Lexicon

The FaceBook Lexicon is an application that presents key word usage on member’s post pages, with all types of options for comparative demographics. Below is a sample image from Lexicon that shows the number of keyword posts for “Obama” from June 6 – Nov 31, 2008.  Accordingly, the “Obama” posts peak around election day.  Although males show a slight majority of keyword “Obama” posts in this graph, I had also done a different comparative graph that shows females posting “Obama” nearly twice as much as males around election day.

People Power

Here is a report on FaceBook’s greatest energy source: people power.  Literally speaking, the amount of energy people use burning calories while interacting with the social network (more than 2 billion minutes per day) exceeds the amount of electricity used to power the computer server network.

All together and more, these advents of information technology are literally beginning to bring increasing definition and expression to the multitudinous aspects involving the living, breathing, thinking, seeing body, mind, and spirit of the global collective.

I also appreciate the insertion of ideas around a necessary and fundamental shift in consciousness.  For a shift in consciousness is preeminent to establishing a funamental change in economy, and correspondingly, in society. I can see how the selection of Krishnamurti’s words is a good choice in articulating this point (at the beggining and end of the film), as he generally proposes that it is the responsibility of each individual to catalyze a shift in consciousness within themselves.

Here is an opportunity to actually make the fundamental change of converting the economy to debt-free money.  You can vote for ideas such as these at Change.org, and the most popular ideas will be presented to Obama just as he enters office in January, 20th 2009:

Regarding the Zeitgeist movie, it was synchronistic and significant for me to have had someone remind me to watch this film last night–as yesterday, the planet Pluto had moved from Saggitarius into Capricorn (where it will transit for the next 16 years). A general interpretation of this transit is: that the mode of global transformation we have been in while Pluto was in Sagitarius was collective visioning, philosophies, and theories of global transformation. With Pluto in Capricorn, the mode of transformation is more down-to-earth, manifest, and structural.  For sixteen years, Pluto will engage in a process of breaking down and then rebuilding the structures on which we depend for a successful experience in the material world.  We can expect the transformation of all things ruled by that sign: such as our religious institutions, halls of government and political structures, construction techniques and buildings, and how we handle ownership of property. The point is: this day marks the point when we can say that we have the over-arching vision and theory we need, and it’s time to get down to actually manifesting the transitions.

This video is BBC’s special broadcast as part of the “Horizon” series.  It features an engaging narrative that introduces various ideas about the singularity and human enhancement.

Today, Homo sapiens is faced with a rapid modification of his environment, a transformation for which he is the involuntary collective agent. I am not implying that our species is threatened with extinction or that the “end of the world” is approaching. I am not preaching millenarianism. Rather, I would like to point out an alternative. Either we cross a new threshold, enter a new stage of hominization, by inventing some human attribute that is as essential as language but operates at a much higher level, or we continue to “communicate” through the media and think within the context of separate institutions, which contribute to the suffocation and division of intelligence. In the latter case we will no longer be confronted only by the problems of power and survival. But if we are committed to the process of collective intelligence, we will gradually create the technologies, sign systems, forms of social organization and regulation that enable us to think as a group, concentrate our intellectual and spiritual forces, and negotiate practical real-time solutions to the complex problems we must inevitably confront. We will gradually learn … to collectively invent ourselves as a species.

- From Pierre Levy’s principle work Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace

With the emergence of collective intelligence via the advents of the internet (web 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, etc), an augmentation of symbolic language can be realized within the unfolding of a collectively engineered medium and universally orchestrated message.

 
[ originally published here: http://spacecollective.org/MichaelGaio/4258/The-OverLanguage ]

OpenSoundControl (OSC) is a protocol for communication among computers, sound synthesizers, and other multimedia devices that are optimized for modern networking technology. Bringing the benefits of modern networking technology to the world of electronic musical instruments, OSC’s advantages include interoperability, accuracy, flexibility, and enhanced organization and documentation.

OSC integrates within the set of other standard internet protocols.

Internet Protocol Mandala

 
It appears that OSC is intended to supersede MIDI in multiple aspects. For one, OSC uses standard ethernet cable to transfer more information, with more flexibility and control of the types of information, with much less latency (operating at broadband speeds). Since it uses TCP/IP Ethernet, various types of data can be transfered and synchronized between an assortment of devices and applications, and more—such transfers can happen over any network, local or non-local—including the internet. This could make for some very interesting and novel capabilities in group multimedia collaboration, and in multimedia interaction with internet data and APIs (such as real-time multimedia data interpretations of collective processes).

OSC is implemented with a wide arrangement of audio and multimedia creation software (such as CSound, Max/MSP, Quartz Composer, and Pure Data). There are also some interesting devices emerging that use the OSC protocol—such as the incredible multi-touch screen control interface, the Lemur, and an iPhone application.

The Lemur multi-touch screen control interface.

What is the extent of possibilities with this new technical protocol? Pierre Levy, in his principle work, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, speaks of the necessity of some type of new collective language:

We are thus in the situation of a species whose members … have not yet achieved the state of collective intelligence of the culture for lack of an articulated language. How do you invent a language that no one has spoken, for which there are no records, no examples, and when we lack even an idea of what such a language might be?

My sense is that OSC is yet another key technical advent in the gradual crossing of the threshold into the realization of such a language, the awakening of collective consciousness, and the first coherent articulations of collective intelligence.    

Now we may begin to collectively utter the early instances of an “over-language“. Such a language will not be on the same level as English, Chinese, or French. This meta-language, as a universal language of consilience, will transcend and include all preceding cultural contexts, and synthesize the diversity of our human strands. It will extend from our established media and data bases, yet somehow also surpass rational associations to the semiotic. It will engage us directly with an authentic immediacy and novelty that mimics the impulse of evolution itself. It will orient us, reflect our comprehension of ourselves, our reality, and our purpose in a type of synaesthesic hyper-poetry that continuously describes the nexus where each individual traverses the multitudinous terrain of collective being. It will arch like a rainbow across the noosphere, sprouting spontaneously upon the fresh and tender tongue of the collective psyche in astonishing response to sensing ourselves as a symphonic orchestration in participation with cosmic evolution.

Global IP feedback visualization.

[ Originally published here: http://spacecollective.org/MichaelGaio/4263/MetaLanguage-Technique-OSC ]

Recall the disappointment in 2000 when Al Gore lost to G.W. Bush?   Can you imagine what it may have been like to have had Gore as President instead?  Despite Gore’s loss, look at the tremendous good Gore has done to bring a great deal of awareness to global warming over the past few years.  On the contrary, Bush started his eight year run as the worst President in American history at a time when the world needed that the least.

In 2004, we had the opportunity to exit Bush out of office, yet Bush won again against John Kerry.  The suspected voting suppression, manipulation, and fraud of 2000 (which many just could not quite believe could be true at that time) disuaded voters in the 2004 election, some complacency set in–and in any case, the election was stolen again.  With Bush’s regime, the world has been changed forever.

Now here we are in 2008 with an opportunity to exit Bush (and the policies and thematics that McCain would appear to carry forward), and more, to bring in Obama: perhaps the most progressive and liberal President any of us have seen in our life times so far.  Personally, I see that Barack Obama is the best realistic candidate for American President since JFK, perhaps even Abraham Lincoln.  We are blessed to have this opportunity.

Yesterday, while browsing through FaceBook.com, I was shocked to see someone in my own personal network posting a status note that made the assertion, “In this election do not vote.” Complacency is one thing, yet I’m highly perplexed why anyone would make an assertion against voting. I made a reply comment, saying that this is like saying, “IN THIS MOMENT DO NOT BREATHE.”

Aside from politics, candidates, and the issues–the right to vote, and the initiative to take personal action to vote–is the core and fundamental component of democracy. Each individual vote comprises a piece of the total collective body. Together we vote, together we forge our collective shape, and move forward in social evolution. While it is true that the political landscape has turned vile nearing the cusp of the 21st Century, and real crimes are being committed to deter and alter votes–we simply cannot afford to allow ourselves to become further deterred as individuals locked in complacency, depression, denial, or ungrounded idealism. If we lose our will to vote, we are losing the breath to keep our collective body alive.

The origin of the word “vote” comes from the Latin “vovere” which means “to vow”.  When we vote, we literally vow to participate in animating the collective spirit by our own action, and define the collective body by our individual perspective and choice.

It can be helpful and true to think about the mass population of America (and of the world) as having similar psychological and energetic constituents as an individual human being. Psychologist Carl Jung describes the fundamental psychological concept involved with the dynamics of the conscious and unconscious, which can be applied to either the individual or the collective psyche:

“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.” (AION: 126)

The notion of the collective unconscious was introduced by Jung as a “reservoir of the experiences of our species.” And Eckhart Tolle, in his book A New Earth, speaks about the “collective ego”:

“A collective ego manifests the same characteristics as the personal ego, such as the need for conflict and enemies, the need for more, the need to be right against others who are wrong, and so on. Sooner or later, the collective will come into conflict with other collectives, because it unconsciously seeks conflict and it needs opposition to define its boundary and thus its identity. Its members will then experience the suffering that inevitably comes in the wake of any ego-motivated action. At that point, they may wake up and realize that their collective has a strong element of insanity.”

Clearly, what we have been largely observing for the past eight years are various manifestations of the collective ego struggling against the evolutionary tide of the collective conscious as we move into higher human potentialities of a 21st Century global society. We have witnessed the collective ego emerging with it’s shadowy type of power in the events around 911, the wars in the Middle East, the surmounting economic crisis, partisan politics, voting fraud, and more. The old structures do not want to give into the new change. The extremism of McCain’s campaign very well characterizes this egoic manifestation by it’s harsh partisan division, aggressive attack ads, impulsive recklessness, contradiction, deceit, slander, and, even in the last few weeks, the internal dissension among key members of the Republican party itself. This CNN video report of Peruvian Shamans (in a majority favor of Obama) reflects a traditional awareness of the fundamental energy dynamics going on around the representatives of Obama and McCain.

The origin of the word “conspiracy” comes from Latin “con-” which means “together with”, and “spirare” which means “to breathe”. Although the common taken meaning of the word “conspiracy” is heavy with the extreme power dynamics of the collective ego in action, what it literally means is “to breath together”. I propose that this is the true meaning of conspiracy, and that we have an opportunity to reinterpret and deepen our understanding of the greatest conspiracy that is occurring upon the cusp of the 21st century. After thousands of years of our collective’s noble struggle to know ourselves within the massive backdrop of the cosmic unknown–we have come very far in our collective evolution, and are now becoming self-aware of ourselves, beginning to make a clearer distinction between our collective conscious and unconscious, our collective ego, and our collective superconscious. Yet the task is not to attempt to banish the collective ego by lashing out at it; that is simply more collective ego. As is recommended in the psychological process of individuation, the goal is to integrate and transform the ego with the authentic self. As a collective, we must recognize our collective shadow as ours, consciously and with wisdom utilize the resource of it’s energy and power, and consistently aim with our highest consensus intentions to create a world that can harmoniously orchestrate all of our diversity, and continue along our pathway toward the stars.

So at this moment in history, among the shadow of the collective ego struggle–occurring right now as voter suppression and fraud–be certain to follow thru with your vote (vow) to breath into our collective body, participate in the new pronoia conspiracy to evolve everybody. If you think you may choose to not vote, consider that perhaps you are playing into subtler levels of the voter suppression dynamics that have been set forth upon the collective body. When you do vote, you are taking responsibility in activating your own individual conscious evolution, and participating in the conscious evoltion of the collective.

Psychologist Carl Jung says, “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” And spiritual pioneer Andrew Cohen reminds us that “You Are It“:

No matter what happens with the results of this election, there is always the golden opportunity to choose to be present, to maintain equanimity, and to be rigorous with oneself as a conscious individual upon the collective path of evolution. This is the divine vote, your reverent vow to persist with the inherent quintessential nature as a conscious being. Above all, breathe …

[This blog article is also posted at the Barack Obama website here]

Diamonds are forever. Are you ready to live with the clarity, brilliance, and high value of such a perfect gem–and then literally pass it on to future generations … forever? According to an article at BBC News, you will.

The current trend of digital storage technology is about to go vertical. In just a few years, advents of digital storage and recording devices will be available to document our entire lives in perfect audio and video–continuously (24/7/365). We will then pass forward the high-defination and intelligently organized content of our collective lives into an indefinite future.

Currently, anyone with about $600 can go out and buy a Terabyte hard drive. Many current cellphones and PDAs also have ample storage capacity, as well as audio and video recording. We can extrapolate the current trends toward a near future where nearly everyone will be able to have enough storage capacity, and the devices in their hands to nearly effortlessly record their entire lives. As the author of this article suggests, we are on the brink of entering into real history:

“We’re only a few years away from the cost of data storage dropping so far that we can record ‘everything’ that happens to us: our location at any given time, what we are hearing, what we are seeing, and what we are saying or doing.”

“For the first time ever, the human species will have an accurate and unblinking, unvarnished view of its own past as far back as the dark ages of the first decade of the 21st Century, when recorded history ‘really’ began.”

Think about it: we lack nearly any accurate rendering of human history from 1000 – 2000 years ago (just a couple of old scrolls and stone tablets). I’ve seen perhaps a few dozen black-and-white photographs and have read only a few texts that were created only 100 years ago. When I look at my family photo albums, the images are tinted yellow, and appear just about as old as the scrolls of ancient Sumeria. From when I was between 3 – 5 years old, there is about a minute of recorded film (with no audio, of course). Fortunately, I was an avid journal keeper–and I now have a stack of about a dozen or so hand-written journals on my book shelf that loosely document my life from 18 onward. Today I take lots of photos and keep a blog (and yet, since entering my 30′s, I’ve become increasingly less concerned with recording the content of my life as opposed to investing time into generating new content of life). Interestingly, in just a few more years, I will be able to record just about everything in multimedia detail, while not needing to become overly concerned with the technical process of it. Even more, as overall information technologies continue to advance, all of my personal life content will be automatically indexd and organized for very efficient recall and cross-referencing.

“With your phone converting all the speech it hears to text (and storing that, too, and indexing it by time and location it becomes possible to search it all – like having Google for your memory.”

Once we pass into this technology paradigm, the process of collectively generating an impeccably detailed, broadly diverse, and long-lasting multimedia record of collective history will continue to evolve in its methods, means, and implications. As storage mediums get increasingly granular and smaller in size while simultaneously growing greater in capacity–we will approach another threshold: molecular and atomic archiving. Eventually, we will be able to record binary code at the molecular and even atomic scale.

“Consider a carbon crystal, created (and edited) one atom at a time by nanomachinery; there are two stable isotopes of carbon, and we can use a Carbon-12 atom to represent a binary 0 and a Carbon-13 atom to represent a binary 1.

One gram of this substance could store 10 to the power 21 bytes (887,808 petabytes) – the equivalent storage of more than 11 billion typical PCs.

By way of comparison, in 2003 we as a species recorded 2,200 petabytes (2.5 x 10 to the power 18 bytes) of data – enough to fill the hard drives of more than 28m typical PCs.

If we can figure out how to read and write data on the atomic scale, you could store the sum total of all the data we recorded in 2003 on a grain of sand.

Using nanoscale diamond as data storage, six hundred grams (about one and a quarter pounds, if you’re my generation) can store a lifelog, a video and audio channel, with running transcript and search index, for six billion human beings for one year.”

Sand, glass, crystal, and diamond could make very good storage substrates as they are each carbon/silicon based chemical structures with highly calibrated molecular symmetry matrices and optimal transparency (for optical read/write methods). Given that modern scientists have somewhat recently ushered us into the “New Diamond Age“, having invented methods for artificially growing synthetic diamonds in a lab, a next reasonable step will be to invent a way to “burn” a diamond (just as we now “burn” a CD with lazer) with the content of petabytes of knowledge and experience. Once a diamond is “burned” with data at the atomic scale, it will essentially last for millenniums and beyond.

I find the implications of this coming revolution in collective memory incredibly inspiring:

Imagine a day when dust sized nanobots drift through the air of your living room capturing audio and video (in super-high resolution) of every experience from multiple views of perspective, instantly logging with impeccable detail every nuance of experience and the environment into a super-intelligently organized hyper-array within a ubiquitous and transparent global communications network. Combine this with the inevitable advents of semantic systems and ontological engineering, and suddenly–life itself becomes far better than movies (YouTube gone toroidal)!

But what about security and privacy? Of course these are the most obvious concerns–and will be magnificent hurtles to overcome along our way to match social and spiritual evolution alongside the progressive strides of such technology [link here to future blog page on the archetectonic issue of human security and it's spiritual, psychological, philosophical, and technological correspondents].

Given that we do move though the coming bottle neck of social evolution and the environmental challenge–imagine a time centuries from now when it will be a common tradition for all people to review the moment of their birth–re-experiencing that potent and original moment with incredible and sensible detail. Future historians can render composites from vast resources of archived content into a life-like virtual reality (hello HoloDeck). They will interactively explore reconstructions of very specific moments in history, taking note to nuances that we may take for granted today. Everybody will be accountable and truly recognized for every small or great contribution (or lack of contribution) in their entire lifetimes. Each person may realize a uniquely compelling sense of presence and responsibility within the powerful scope of a collective witnessing to their every action–a witnessing shared not just by billions in an instantly networked global community in local time, but also for countless future generations. This aspect alone may contribute significantly toward a holistic integration of personal/collective psychology, result in a much greater sense of fulfillment while living life (feeling a deeper sense of security that your time well spent will be remembered), and be a key element in resolving the psychological problem around death. At the end of people’s lives, the very best moments, contributions, and messages are transferred onto a “hyper-diamond”, and then placed with the family gem collection, or passed along to kin as a diamond ring or pendent (where stories and experiences of the family lineage are continuously added).

Take into perspective that organic diamonds formed from oily carbon refuse of ancient plants and dinosaurs hard-pressed under tons of rock and eons of time into the most endurable and valued of gems today. Now again we cross a threshold of time into a new eon: where the dinosaurs of our gigabyte hard-drives full of photos, videos, and blogs will soon be placed within the vast archives of a complete composite of our unique stories. All that we say and do over the next few decades will, perhaps, even become mythologized onto the very atoms of a glimmering hyper-diamond–brilliantly cut with the multifaceted perspectives of a shared human legacy of immeasurable value.

Shine on you crazy diamond …

And keep an eye out for Lucy in the sky …

~ Michael Gaio

[300707]

[reference article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6287126.stm]