06-14-2013, 01:10 PM
(06-14-2013, 12:36 PM)Drashner1 Wrote: From various things I've read here and there, I don't think the Internet has either the processing power to form a find, nor the structure even if it had the power. The odds of a mind arising from sheer random chance in the mere decades the Net has been around seem rather long. Even if it ever did, how would we tell?
OA being host to massively more powerful computers and vastly denser and more 'brainlike' networks, this sort of thing might arise from time to time. Perhaps in cases where a local civ purposely designs its local networks to have a strongly brainlike structure and operations, presumably because such offers advantages of various kinds. Of course, AI is common in Terragen civ so presumably they have a good idea of what structures make a mind and so might be able to get very close without actually generating it. But occasionally mistakes may happen...
Todd
The, "How would we tell?" bit is what's significant! In any case, I don't believe it's actually happened. Still, the point is, How can we tell, especially if we (our persons, and the devices we use to interface with the Net) are at all analogous to neurons in the brain?
Not "random chance," really. How random has the growth of the Net been? *Maybe* something like a lower vertebrate to a lower mammal in one sense, and something like our individual dream states in another sense, is what I'm thinking. I freely admit I could be dead wrong here!
And I'm well aware that OA civ, for most of its history, has had *far* more "brain-analogous" networks. Well, it has to start somewhere. That "somewhere" is with us!