ARE YOU SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE BACTERIUM?

Are You Smarter Than the Average Bacterium?

Searching for Nature’s Mind

We are creating an open, online Community of Inquiry to community(crowd)source the gobal sense of the present understanding of the nature of “mind”.

We humans are 90% bacteria!

Recent research studies from a variety of independent groups and organizations, especially accelerating in the last ten years or so, have surprisingly concluded that within the body of a healthy human adult, microbial cells are estimated to outnumber human genetically determined cells ten to one. It is more like a complex ecosystem or human/microbiome—a social network—containing trillions of bacteria and other microorganisms (including fungi and viruses) that inhabit our skin, genital areas, mouth and especially intestines (100 trillion bacteria in the gut alone).

Our majority microbial partners are smart!

More to the point of understanding mind, however, bacteria are now recognized as smart organisms conducting an intricate social life manifested by swarming and their ability to develop large, complex colonies. Collectively, they gather information from the environment, learn from past experience, and make decisions. Genetically, bacteria do not store all the information required to respond efficiently to all possible environmental conditions. Instead, to solve new encountered problems (challenges) posed by the environment, they first assess the problem via collective sensing, then recall stored information of past experience, and finally execute distributed information processing in networks ranging from a million to a billion bacteria in the colony, thus turning the colony into a super-mind.

WHO WE ARE

For our personal health and that of humanity generally, we need to reform our understanding of “Nature’s Mind” in order to develop an adapted theory consistent with this changing experiential/experimental data.

We can all be part of an online crowdsourced collective/collaborative inquiry (citizen philosophers, scientists and engineers) into the elucidation of Nature’s Mind, but "Don't expect to find "the gem" in each inquiry you make, for it's impossible not to find "a gem" in all inquiries, as long as you search with an Open Mind." We are All, AllWays, “Mind Creating Mind”.

Together we will community(crowd)source a new understanding of “Nature’s Mind”.

The two lead proponents of this campaign, Fred Reed (Technology) and Jon Ray Hamann (Theory and Strategic Organization) represent a continuing distributed collective effort to theoretically design and technologically implement an architecture  for building a virtual mind (called an AutoGnome) according to the same principles of life, mind, language and culture that form the pragmatic understanding of human and communal sign creation and usage (semiotics). 

WHAT WE'RE CREATING - AN INSPIRED COMMUNITY OF INQUIRY

Nature, in the broadest sense as used herein, is All (the Whole) of the natural world, both physical (non-living) and living, ranging from the infinitesimal to the cosmic. The longstanding query regarding the origin and nature of mind, leaves the concept of mind to be understood in a variety of different ways by a multitude of different cultures. Obviously many see mind as a property exclusive to humans whereas others ascribe properties of mind to some or all other living entities, and still others attribute mind to all physical (non-living) entities in Nature. The possibility of non-human minds is also a constant of exploration in the fields of extraterrestrial intelligence and machine-based artificial intelligence. 

We're are forming a grassroots people's online network (Community of Inquiry) of autonomous thinkers of all ages and backgrounds and commitments. Together they will be the source of the diverse experience, inspiration and innovation through which Humanity can creatively participate in the continued co-evolution of consciousness in the Universe, i.e.  Mind Creating Mind. This approach is to be distinguished from any approach founded solely upon the restricted experience and Worldview of an "authority-based" selection of small communities of experts.

The principal purpose and near-term goal of this Community of Inquiry is to serve as the online information/communications center from which we can organize a global internet-based research network directed at the cooperative synthesis and application of computer-based virtual intelligence(s)/virtual mind. It is intended to structure this effort as an open participation opportunity for anyone or everyone at anytime and everywhere to individually and/or collectively, dynamically and interactively, record their personally experienced sense and conceptualization of mind, i.e. a True People’s Collaborative Research Facility.

The expected mid-term use of this open participation network of sub-communities in the Community of Inquiry is to initiate incorporation of an agile, adaptive semiotic process for specifying the philosophical and formal foundations, theories and models, and technological syntheses and applications of an evolving virtual mind (the AutoGnome) needed to move from the current (2012) State of Consciousness of Humanity to the Singularity; that is, to the point of realization of the technological creation of an on-the-average smarter-than-human virtual intelligence. The methodology invoked envisions an Open Participation Virtual Institute/University/Campus (from Latin, campus means “field”) for Fundamental Virtual Mind Research and Development with periodic User Rollouts of Limited Virtual Intelligence Applications as they appear either responsive to an applied need or offer an advance in the extant technology

A projected long-term goal of this Institute is to evolve a new interdisciplinary focus of attention -- MicroBioSemiotics – on the relation between human and non-human life forms through increasing understanding of the common features of life and intelligence as influenced within their ecosystems. This approach will modify the use of semiotic theory and technology for inquiry into biological processes in a non-anthropomorphic way. Such understanding will be used to develop new technology for mediating the relationship between human and microbiological life in areas such as health, wealth generation, agriculture, and waste reuse as a constructive environmental initiative.