The whole of humanity, the system formed by all people together with their channels of exchange, can be viewed as a single organism.
The integration of individuals in human society is much less advanced than the integration of cells in a multicellular organism. Analysis of the evolutionary mechanisms underlying selfishness, competition, and cooperation among individuals and groups moreover points to fundamental obstacles hindering further integration.
The present global computer network is on the verge of undergoing similar transitions to the subsequent levels of learning, characterized by the automatic adaptation of connections, thinking, and possibly even metarationality.
If such learning algorithms could be generalized to the Web as a whole, the knowledge existing in the Web could become structured into a giant associative network which continuously learns from its users. Each time a new document is introduced, the links to and from it would immediately start to adapt to the pattern of its usage, and new links would appear which the author of the document never could have foreseen. Since this mechanism in a way assimilates the collective wisdom of all people consulting the Web, we can expect the result to be much more useful, extended, and reliable than any indexing system generated by single individuals or groups.
In the following years virtually the whole of human knowledge will be made available on the Web.
The agents searching the Web, exploring different regions, creating new associations by the paths they follow and the selections they make, and combining the found information into a synthesis or overview, which either solves the problem or provides a starting point for a further round of reflection, seem wholly analogous to thoughts spreading and recombining over the network of associations in the brain. This would bring the Web into the metasystem level of thinking, which is characterized by the capability to combine concepts without the need for an a priori association between these concepts to exist in the network.
With a good enough interface, there should not really be a border between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ thought processes: the one would flow naturally and immediately into the other.
The brains of the users themselves would become nodes in the Web, which can be consulted by other users of the Web itself. Eventually, the individual brains may become so strongly integrated with the Web that the Web would literally become a ‘brain of brains’: a super-brain.
There does not seem to be a part–whole competition between individual and super-brain. This is due to the peculiar nature of information: unlike limited, material resources, information or knowledge does not diminish in value if it is distributed or shared among different people. Thus, there is no a priori benefit in keeping a piece of information to oneself (unless this information controls access to a scarce resource!).
The super-brain may facilitate the emergence of a universal ethical and political system by promoting the development of shared ideologies that transcend national and cultural boundaries.