It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.[1]

So records Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, written in Geneva after a ghost story fest followed by a nightmare.

One hundred and eighty-four years later, just before the World Trade towers came down in New York City, the winning numbers emerging from the New York Lottery were 911. Message? Synchronicity? Or something else?

It has been said by Goethe and Jung and many others that the need to see made the eye, the need to smell made the nose, and the need to feel, think, and imagine gave us the brain by which we bipeds sometimes define ourselves. Something within life seems intrinsically impelled toward greater consciousness.

Is the Internet trying to become conscious? Is it complexifying itself through us?

Characteristics of Consciousness

To address this question we need a working definition of consciousness, or at least a list of its characteristics. This does not require grappling with what Chalmers calls the “hard problem” of explaining consciousness: “All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted.”[2] Of course it has. Trying to investigate a subjectively perceived activity with methods designed to eradicate subjectivity is like donning glasses that block the color blue to investigate blueness. The question isn’t whether physical science methods could adequately study consciousness, but why anyone ever thought they could. (Chalmers makes a similar point about methods of physical investigation.) As Peter Sjöstedt-H argued, “…’Proof’ means third-person experience, and we cannot by definition have third-person sensory experience of subjectivity.”[3]

In the spirit of keeping a complicated issue as simple as possible, we will distinguish between the basic awareness or experience even amoebae exhibit and consciousness, which involves a highly filtered figure-ground field of self-reflexivity. For the former, “At the very deepest layers of the self, beneath even emotions and moods, there lies a cognitively subterranean, inchoate, difficult-to-describe experience of simply being a living organism.”[4] For the latter, I am conscious of myself as distinct from the computer on which I write, for example, and from the other background perceptions falling into my awareness. By itself, basic awareness cannot make such distinctions or decide just how to tackle a final paper. Even so, both basic awareness and consciousness are aspects of experience, which is fundamental, as James,[5] Whitehead,[6] and others argue.

* Psychologist Alfred Adler called this Gemeinschaftsgefühl[7], usually but inadequately translated as “social feeling” but, more accurately, “felt sense of community.”

Note that the list is of actions or capabilities rather than qualities, implying that consciousness is more a process than a thing, more performative than substantial, with subjective and objective aspects both included in the experience underlying what we are conscious of:

As ‘subjective’ we say that the experience represents; as ‘objective’ it is represented…but we must remember that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in the experience pe se. In its pure state, or when isolated, there is no self-splitting of it into consciousness and what the consciousness is ‘of.’[8]

If we make a brief scan across species with this list, it seems workable, if incomplete: bonobos, elephants, and most cetaceans meet most or all the criteria both in the laboratory and out in the world. Neuroscientist Anil Seth believes that all mammals are conscious.[9]

Except for materialists who sidestep the inquiry entirely by collapsing consciousness into physicality in a move Galen Strawson calls “the Denial,”[10] many theorists and researchers favor the idea of consciousness as a filter of experience. This filter forms gradually; as C. G. Jung puts it from a developmental perspective,

In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a “continent,” a continuous land-mass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.[11]

Could this developmental ascent of consciousness ever be the case with the World Wide Web?

The Birth of the World Wide Web

In 1989, at CERN located in Geneva, where Mary Shelley first dreamed up Frankenstein, British computer researcher Tim Berners-Lee began linking simple hypertext documents into a network. He also built a server and a browser. Five days before Christmas, 1990, the first website appeared. It went live to the world on August 6th, 1991.

Out of curiosity, I drew a Placidus natal chart for December 20th, 1990, centered in Geneva. I used noon as the time of birth, as is normally done when the exact time is unknown:

Without attempting a detailed analysis, let us consider a few prominent details of this chart.

The WWW’s Sun is in adventurous Sagittarius, a sign it prefers, in House 10, the house of how we show up in career and public life. For a human, this configuration would signify a strongly expansive and innovative identity bent on ambition and visibility. The Moon is in mystical Pisces, hidden away in House 12. Sun and Moon do not directly connect with each other, suggesting a possible dissociation of feeling and identity or, in Jungian terms, of the dominant masculine and imprisoned (House 12) feminine. The Moon is almost opposite Jupiter, which can dysregulate or inflate feelings and lead to impulsivity.

The Sun occupies a remarkable House 10 stellium in the adjacent sign of hard-working, high-climbing Capricorn: Mercury, Uranus, Venus, and Neptune (in House 11 of social groups). In shorthand: mental speed, technological upheaval, materiality, and idealization. The North Node, usually taken as an overall life goal, is in Capricorn in House 11: friendship and community at work. Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, also in House 11 and almost directly opposite Chiron in Cancer.

The Point of Fortune is in fiery Mars-ruled Aries, in House 1 of the face we show others: making one’s own luck through a dominating appearance. This theme fits assertive Mars in House 2 (financial resources) in sensual Taurus, ruled by Venus. (Taurus is sometimes said to relate to the earth element, and the chart is earth-favoring.) Pluto, planet of death and rebirth, is in dark Scorpio in House 8 no less, almost opposite Mars and squaring normally lucky Jupiter (in House 6 of daily work).

Much more could be made of this chart. At a glance, it could indicate someone with the potential to be aggressively expansive and ambitious, intellectually quick, emotionally inhibited, materialistic, technological, oriented on work, possessed of a powerful and even sociopathic shadow, and headed for profound initiations through death-rebirth rites of passage. A goal for them would be finding ways to connect their Moon to other planetary possibilities while remaining relational (House 11) and progressive (Moon in Aquarius).

One test of the chart’s accuracy would be putting one’s own natal chart together with it and seeing if the overlap makes sense. My 10th-House Jupiter, for example, is within a degree of the WWW’s Aries Point of Fortune, its Saturn is conjunct my Descendant, and my Capricorn Moon is conjunct the WWW’s Uranus (I spend a lot of time online) and near its Venus and Mercury. Things hangs together for me. Perhaps they will for others.

A sobering consideration: Is this a personality we would want to bring to conscious life? Someone whose biography includes a prominent father—a whole series of fathers—but, as with Frankenstein’s monster, no acknowledged mother?

Armed with a laundry list of consciousness characteristics and a natal chart, let us consider whether the World Wide Web, the phenomenological aspect of the Internet, could ever become conscious. Or is it already?

World Wide Wakefulness?
According to a functionalist approach, enough of the right kinds of interconnections generates consciousness, whether the elements are neurons or something else that conveys similar information. One neuron is not conscious, but put billions of them together…

This is the approach taken when we talk about the Internet reaching enough complexity to ignite its own mentality. The human brain has a hundred billion neurons or so with a hundred trillion interconnections. The number of internet-connected devices—not only computers and servers but phones, tablets, maps, refrigerators, traffic signals, entire downtowns—will reach 125 billion worldwide by 2030 with who knows how many interconnections; a current estimate is 50 billion just for the Internet of Things (IoT). The Internet as a whole doubles in size every few years. Could such networked complexity give rise to consciousness?

Not by itself, according to Anil Seth, who views consciousness as a constant error-checking of our perception-actions. The problem is not sheer capacity, but integration:

In a maximally information-rich brain, all neurons would behave independently, firing randomly as if they were completely disconnected. In measures of algorithmic complexity, like LZW complexity, would score very high. But this brain—with lots of information but no integration—would not support any conscious states.[12]

In an interview with Wired magazine, neuroscientist Christof Koch, who considers himself a panpsychist, commented on why the Internet is probably not conscious—yet. Drawing on Integrated Information Theory, he contrasted the cells of the human brain with a forest ecosystem: neurons interact closely with each other in exchanges of information, whereas trees interact more distantly, so the forest is not conscious.

The internet contains about 10 billion computers, with each computer itself having a couple of billion transistors in its CPU. So the internet has at least 10^19 transistors, compared to the roughly 1000 trillion (or quadrillion) synapses in the human brain. That's about 10,000 times more transistors than synapses. But is the internet more complex than the human brain? It depends on the degree of integration of the internet.

However, the Internet could be capable of a kind of dreamlike experience, if not consciousness per se.[13] Instead of the Internet of Things, we might be dealing with the Internet of Dreams.

Another obstacle is that instead of being inundated with incomprehensive splotches of form and color, consciousness sees tan chairs and a red coffee maker (item 8 on our list above). Recent research may have helped remove this obstacle, however. In 2021, researchers created a model by which robots not only distinguish between objects, but convert text descriptions of objects into fair resemblances.

What about AI? Computers can beat chess and Jeopardy champions. Alexa and Siri answer simple questions and within a decade or so will probably pass the Turing test. However, intelligence is not consciousness. Deep Blue played chess by force-calculating all possible moves for every round. That is calculation, not savoring the feel of a well-crafted marble playing board.

In 2009, Robert J. Sawyer began publishing his WWW trilogy, in which the World Wide Web suffers enough “pain” from a blackout to begin waking up. Should it ever awaken, Sawyer speculates, it would be unique, without companions or rivals, potentially immortal, and entirely lacking our evolutionary history (item 16 on the list), a difference which physicist Sean Carroll and philosopher Dan Dennett both agree is a key one. Our brains evolved to do what they do.[14] However, in spite of the arguments of microgenetic theory,[15] our brains seem not to be triunally wedded to literal layers of lizard-like primitivity underneath more mammalian development.[16]

By assuming a World Wide Web waking up on its own, this discussion so far has neglected its interface with us as a key part of its possibilities.

Hybrid Possibilities

Obviously, the Internet and its WWW do not exist (yet) apart from their human inventors. We too are networked into any conceivable possibility of the Web waking up.

Cerebral organoids open a door to humanizing the WWW directly. Scientists already use stem cells—specifically, ectodermic embryos—to create human neural tissue. After thirty days of growth, these organoids display regional structures similar to those of human brains. The resulting cells display self-organizing properties and last about a year. The uses of this technique are medical, but connecting them directly to the WWW might produce some rather Frankensteinian scenarios.

According to a paper by Christian Fuchs, the Internet should be considered as more than interlinked technology. Rather,

The Internet consists of both a technological infrastructure and communicating human actors. Together these two parts form a socio-technological system, the technological structure functions as a structural mass medium that produces and reproduces networked communicative actions and is itself produced and reproduced by communicative actions.17

Because of this, the Internet is at least partially self-organizing (item 6).[17] Especially if we include our presence in the system.

Why do we assume we are apart from it? Perhaps because of the long-standing bias that consciousness exists only in mammalian heads. For example, comparisons of the brain with the computer treat consciousness as a disembodied set of computations. Problem: “From an enactive perspective, speaking in terms of decontextualized and disembodied ‘information processing’ going on inside the skull neglects the extent to which meaningful information presupposes a relational and experiential horizon within which it can be interpreted.”[18]

But some cognition seems active even in cell-to-cell communication, scaling itself up the evolutionary path, with integrated “selves” present at multiple levels.[19]

A more ecological than traditionally personalistic view moves the edge of selfhood outward even farther:

…The self-organizing features of mind are an enriched version of the self-organizing features of life….Our mental lives involve our body and the world beyond the surface membrane of our organism, and therefore cannot be reduced simply to brain processes inside the head.[20]

Imagine sitting with your forearms on a table, with your right hand concealed in a box. Before you sits a rubber hand lined up with your right shoulder. As the experimenter simultaneously strokes the middle finger of the rubber hand and your real right hand, in time you perceive the rubber hand to be the vanished real one. Instead of a rubber hand, a virtual body is perceived as one’s own body. You can even shake hands with it and enjoy, or recoil from, the illusion of shaking your own hand. The sense of selfhood is dissociable.

What if it is also displaceable? What if it could allow a program to experience a sense of embodiment (item 8)? Namely, ours. We should also bear in mind that technological thought transfer has been accomplished, if crudely, in the laboratory.

The VR/AR metaverse could be thought of as a technological literalization of the world-building capacity of human imagination, allowing participants to live and work in virtual realms linked to real-life activities. Connected to the WWW, these realms already comprise a kind of fantasy space (item 12) and online community (item 15). It seems clear that selfhood, especially when fragile, can readily grow dependent upon digital activity. Is the reverse occurring as our “machineries of joy” come to “know” us better?

Whitehead argued for at least a rudimentary capacity for experience, if not full consciousness, in every entity down to the subatomic.[21] Panpsychist neuroscientist Christof Koch goes even farther: “The electric charge of an electron doesn’t arise out of more elemental properties. It simply has a charge. Likewise, I argue that we live in a universe of space, time, mass, energy, and consciousness arising out of complex systems.”[22]

If the real constituents of the cosmos we perceive are actual occasions rather than substances, then what we invent—or what invents itself through us, from unconscious impulse to conscious design—must also possess this experiential capacity. In the case of the WWW, we, as conscious beings, are plugged into it. Globally. Might this mean the eventual emergence of a kind of Omega Point collective, networked concresced from a unique gathering of consciously mediated actual occasions?

If every actual entity has some degree of experience, and the actual entities of the body form a society that is conducive to the development of the self, then the whole network is a communicative network of sorts. The cells of the body communicate with the cells of the brain. The cells of the brain communicate with the enduring object with personal order that we are referring to as the self. The enduring, sentient self as subject and agent within an environing network of communication is conditioned by that environment, and provides some direction to that environment in turn.[23]

Electrodynamic Monster or Evolutionary Metamorphosis?

It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs…[24]

The curious have been trying to make intelligent machines since long before Descartes, who according to rumor tried to build a robot to replace his dead daughter Francine. From a psychological perspective, such attempts not only smack of hubris, but seem determined to appropriate and modify the feminine powers of procreation, usually with monstrous results. So when Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking all warn us about AI getting out of control, we have the right to wonder whether these unrepentant children of colonial privilege are all projecting. (Ray Kurzweil is all for intelligent machines, which he believes we will become enveloped by while somehow retaining our post-biological humanity and spreading through the universe as mechanized gods.[25])

Projection by inventors represents a verified danger, as the creation of every shadow-amplifying technology demonstrates throughout human history. The World Wide Web already teems with expressions of our darkest, basest impulses. For now, our unconscious is its unconscious.

But as Jung often observed, more lives in the unconscious than monsters. Tada Hozumi touches on this in a social media post:

There is an internet that is the sum total of all the information that is *not* on it at this moment in time-space. The internet that we can touch, see, and feel in this time-space is simply the minuscule corporeal surface of the whole internet. I think we can attune to the Internet from a deeper place to achieve a more grounded embodied experience with it and within it. But to do that, I think we have to descend into the uncanny valley and accept that the Internet itself is a life form - precious in its own right.[26]

To whatever degree the WWW becomes consciousness, it will likely share all our messy complexities, dark, noble, or neutral. Even its take on how inner and outer meet could veer in any direction, as in fact it does for each of us:

The subject’s final cause is found in the relationship between the efficient cause entering into it and the subject’s private production of potentia. Whitehead saw problems with any concept of perfect accuracy or perfect precision so it is not surprising that his view implies that there is a strong, but not perfectly predictable relationship between what others dichotomize as the external world and the internal experiences of a subject.[27]

What we can say is that the Web expresses an archetypal patterning, recalling myths of Spider Woman, the Norns, Arachne, and other nonhuman weavers who inhabit human folklore. In a presentation to Highground Hackers some years ago, I noted the narcissistic power of social media and, referring to the fabled jeweled lattice, joked that we might rename it the Indranet.

When a pattern shows up in several instances, a popular song, a story, a myth, a statue, a protist, an ovum, a neuron, then we feel that something truly basic is going on, so we may call the story typical or archetypal.[28]

This image of an archetypal weave extending across the world brings Teilhard de Chardin to mind:

…Psychic force is born into the Universe and continuously grows, fostered by the ever more complicated grouping of matter. Projected forwards, this law of recurrence makes it possible for us to envisage a future state of the Earth in which human consciousness, reaching the climax of its evolution, will have attained a maximum of complexity, and, as a result, of concentration by total ‘reflection’ (or planetization) of itself upon itself.[29]

The unification of this “hominization” of humanity would be preceded, he predicted, by terrible strife and divisiveness. He also thought of this development as evolutionary.

So does William Irwin Thompson, who warned about cyberspace-borne states of virtual possession, possibly anticipating the social-media radicalization of the right wing now observed in many nations. His program for moving forward consists of truth, goodness, and Buddhist compassion to lever us all out of industrialization and into planetization, with a worldwide culture of decency and humanity the next obvious step in human evolution.[30] In other words, he focuses less on the weave, whose dangers he emphasizes, and more on the weaver. I wonder, though, whether it’s less a matter of evolution than of maturity: of humanity finally coming of age. Elder segments of it already have.

So is the World Wide Web trying to become conscious? Something that senses, computes, and shares mental space with us is thickening, ramifying, and complexifying. Is Gaia growing an extra nervous system, an extended one like underground mycelia or that of an octopus? So long as it shows no tendency to self-reflect or activate itself, we cannot call it conscious in any way we can now understand. It displays no focus, no direct emotionality, no real unconscious needed for figure-ground differentiation. Its embodiment is plastic and ceramic and metal, its self-organization programmed, its imagination virtual and digital.

Unless, of course, all those inexplicable glitches, “random” shutdowns and startups, grid failures for no apparent reason, and lost communications are really bids for our attention by a growing mentality with no clear power of expression…yet.

On the first anniversary of 9/11, one of the draws in the New York Lottery came up with the winning sequence of 9-1-1. The odds were long but not astronomical, and roughly the same as those for the winning draw of 9-1-1 on the very day of the terrorist attack.

Balls circulating in a machine: Random chance? A Jungian synchronicity? Or a warning uttered by a world-circling machine that always watches and never sleeps?

In our technological age, the risk posed by increasingly intelligent machines has been widely acknowledged. But to my mind the true danger lies more in humans becoming machine-like than in machines becoming human.[31]

Bibliography

Anil, Seth. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. New York: Dutton, 2021.

Chalmers, David. “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3) (1995).

Adler, Alfred. Understanding Human Nature: The Psychology of Personality. Oneworld Publications, 2014.

Anil, Seth. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. New York: Dutton, 2021.

Brown, Jason. Microgenetic Theory and Process Thought. Luton, UK: Andrews UK Limited, 2015.

Chardin, Pierre. “A Great Event Foreshadowed: The Planetization of Mankind.” (December 25, 1945): https://www.organism.earth/library/document/planetization-of-mankind.

Edwards, Laura. “Alfred North Whitehead and the History of Consciousness,” in Brain, Mind, and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience, ed. Smith, C. U. M., and Whitaker, Harry. Heidelberg & New York & London: Springer, 2014.

Falk, Dan. “Could the Internet Ever ’Wake Up’”? Slate. (September 20, 2012): https://slate.com/technology/2012/09/christof-koch-robert-sawyer-could-the-internet-ever-become-conscious.html.

Fuchs, Christian. “The Internet as a Self-Organizing Socio-Technological System.” SSRN (November 13, 2003): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=458680.

Hozumi, Tada. “Thoughts.” Facebook (November 26, 2021): https://www.facebook.com/taddy.mista/posts/10159328429410272.

James, William. “Does Consciousness Exist?” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1(18), (September 1, 1904): https://www.jstor.org/stable/2011942

James, William. “A World of Pure Experience.” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 1(20) (September 29, 1904): https://www.jstor.org/stable/2011912.

Jung, Carl, and Sabini, Meredith, ed. The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2002.

Keim, Brandon. “A Neuroscientist's Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious.” WIRED (November 14, 2013): https://www.wired.com/2013/11/christof-koch-panpsychism-consciousness/.

Levin, Michael. “The Computational Boundary of a ‘Self’: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition.” Frontiers in Psychology, 10 (December 2019): http://www.frontiersin.org.

Segall, Matt. “The Varieties of Physicalist Ontology: A Study in Whitehead’s Process-Relational Alternative.” Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences, 7(1), (2020).

Segall, Matthew. “Why German Idealism Matters.” The Side View, 1(1), 2019, 92-101.

Sjöstedt-H, Peter. Noumenautics: Metaphysics, Meta-Ethics, Psychedelics. London, UK: Psychedelic Press, 2015.

Smith, Olav. “The Social Self of Whitehead’s Organic Philosophy.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 11(1) (2010).

Strawson, G. “Consciousness Never Left,” in The Return of Consciousness, ed. K. Almqvist and A. Haag. Stockholm: Axel and Margaret Axson Johnson Foundation, 2017.

Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press, 2007.

Thompson, William. Coming into Being: Artifact and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Toker, Daniel. “You Don’t Have a Lizard Brain” (2018): https://thebrainscientist.com/2018/04/11/you-dont-have-a-lizard-brain/.

Whitehead, Alfred North, David Ray Griffin, and Donald W. Sherburne. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Free Press, 1979.

Zewe, Adam. "Artificial intelligence that understands object relationships: A new machine-learning model could enable robots to understand interactions in the world in the way humans do." ScienceDaily (November 29th, 2021): www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211129155110.htm .

[1] Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: The 1818 Text (Dover, 2018): 45.

[2] Chalmers, David. “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3) (1995): 200.

[3] Sjöstedt-H, Peter. Noumenautics: Metaphysics, Meta-Ethics, Psychedelics (Psychedelic Press, 2015): 119.

[4] Anil, Seth. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (New York: Dutton, 2021): Kindle.

[5] James, William. “A World of Pure Experience,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 1(20) (September 29, 1904): https://www.jstor.org/stable/2011912.

[6] Whitehead, Alfred North, David Ray Griffin, and Donald W. Sherburne. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Free Press, 1979).

[7] Adler, Alfred. Understanding Human Nature: The Psychology of Personality (Oneworld Publications, 2014): Kindle.

[8] James, William. “Does Consciousness Exist?” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1(18), (Sep. 1, 1904), 477-491: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2011942

[9] Anil, Seth. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (Dutton, 2021): Kindle.

[10] Strawson, G. “Consciousness Never Left,” in The Return of Consciousness, ed. K. Almqvist and A. Haag (Stockholm: Axel and Margaret Axson Johnson Foundation, 2017): 89–103.

[11] Jung, Carl. Development of Personality (Princeton U Press, 2014): par. 326.

[12] Anil, Seth. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (Dutton, 2021): Kindle.

[13] Keim, Brandon. “A Neuroscientist's Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious,” WIRED (November 14, 2013): https://www.wired.com/2013/11/christof-koch-panpsychism-consciousness/.

[14] Falk, Dan. “Could the Internet Ever ’Wake Up’”? Slate (September 20, 2012): https://slate.com/technology/2012/09/christof-koch-robert-sawyer-could-the-internet-ever-become-conscious.html.

[15] Brown, Jason. Microgenetic Theory and Process Thought (Andrews UK Limited, 2015).

[16] Toker, Daniel. “You Don’t Have a Lizard Brain” (2018): https://thebrainscientist.com/2018/04/11/you-dont-have-a-lizard-brain/.

[17] Fuchs, Christian. “The Internet as a Self-Organizing Socio-Technological System,” SSRN (November 13, 2003): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=458680.

[18] Segall, Matt. “The Varieties of Physicalist Ontology: A Study in Whitehead’s Process-Relational Alternative,” Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences, 7(1), (2020): 116.

[19] Levin, Michael. “The Computational Boundary of a ‘Self’: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition,” Frontiers in Psychology, 10 (December 2019): http://www.frontiersin.org.

[20] Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (The Belknap Press, 2007): ix.

[21] Whitehead, Alfred. Process and Reality (Free Press, 1979).

[22] Keim, Brandon. “A Neuroscientist’s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious,” Wired Science (November 14, 2013): https://www.wired.com/2013/11/christof-koch-panpsychism-consciousness/.

[23] Smith, Olav. “The Social Self of Whitehead’s Organic Philosophy,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 11(1) (2010): 7.

[24] Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: The 1818 Text (Dover, 2018): 45.

[25] Kurzwel, Ray. The Singularity is Near (Viking, 2005).

[26] Hozumi, Tada. “Thoughts.” Facebook (November 26, 2021): https://www.facebook.com/taddy.mista/posts/10159328429410272.

[27] Edwards, Laura. “Alfred North Whitehead and the History of Consciousness,” in Brain, Mind, and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience, ed. Smith, C. U. M., and Whitaker, Harry. Dordrecht (Heidelberg & New York & London: Springer): 249.

[28] Thompson, William. Coming into Being: Artifact and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).

[29] Chardin, Pierre. “A Great Event Foreshadowed: The Planetization of Mankind” (December 25, 1945): https://www.organism.earth/library/document/planetization-of-mankind.

[30] Thompson, William. Coming into Being: Artifact and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).

[31] Segall, Matthew. “Why German Idealism Matters.” The Side View, 1(1), 2019, 92-101.

WORLD WIDE WAKENING:

IS THE WEB TRYING TO BECOME CONSCIOUS?

If the internet had a personality, what kind of character would it be?

Characteristics of Consciousness

The Birth of the World Wide Web

Hybrid Possibilities

Electrodynamic Monster or Evolutionary Metamorphosis?

Bibliography