Kevin Kelly presented at TED on The One. It’s about the new Internet, the semantic web. Watching it, I couldn’t but help think Kevin Kelly was very aligned to the Gaia Hypothesis without realising it. Maybe he is, and just doesn’t mention it in his speech.
Since reading Peter Russells “The Awakening Earth” back in the late 80’s I have been aligned to the Gaia hypothesis that Earth is a living organism that operates beyond what we can comprehend with our limited language and observation capability.
I relate to earth as an entity. Too complex for us to understand, like cells in a body ignorant to the totality of their greater being. Another example is fleas on the elephant who don’t know the elephant exists because it’s too big for them to see (they don’t have the means to see or measure it - the science). More importantly to complex for them to comprehend (they don’t have the language or maths to describe it).
Another example used to explain Gaia visually is to cram the billions of years of earths life into a 100 year movie. When watched it would look like a writhing, changing, living organism. Clearly alive when time frames are equalised between the earths and ours.
So when the web came along in the 90’s I wondered if it was another step in earths evolution. Are we humans the foot soldiers building it. Cells in the body, the genetic intelligence amongst all the other species. A brain built by earths genetic agents, intelligent humans.
The net is dependent on people. Much like a nervous system can’t function without the body and vice-versa. If Gaia is an organism then the net can be seen to be an extension or evolution of a nervous system. I don’t think it’s the only one, I think the earth is developing and evolving multiple sensory and messaging mechanisms which we are helping to create. Memes for example operate through the language construct rather than silicon chips and broadband cables. Despite this Memes are also stored on them. Not to dissimilar to having data in cache plus on the hard-drive memory.
