Fortean Internet

[Kondoru]

I cant, its hidden under that pile of books...

 

[wombat103]

6*5*4*3/1*2*3*4 = 15

15 = 1+5 = 6

 

[Peripart]

I must read The Number of the Beast again, as I agree with you Uair01, you only get 15 universes if you perm any 4 dimensions from 6, and I can't rememberhow Heinlein made the leap to that altogether bigger number. But I do remeber that the book considered that virtually any universe that you could conceive of existing did exist (eg Oz). As I say, I'll have to read it again.
If you want to catch up with some classic SF, then the same author's Job has a theme of alternative universes as well, but treated quite differently. My praise of Heinlein is not unqualified, though. I read "Stranger in a Strange Land", and it was garbage. IMHO, of course.

 

[Kondoru]

I liked some but not all his works.

He was a good storyteller if nothing else, with a keen eye for detail.

(Remember `Have space suit; will travel` was written before there was any RL things)

One of my liberal friends read `Time enough for love` and was most disturbed when she found she agreed with his so say faschistic views.

(smirks)

 

[sunsplash1]

Re: Multi-dimensional space & the Net

A thought struck me today whilst driving to work:

...The number of additional dimensions varies with theory and I was wondering whether the Internet or 'Cyberspace' (being the archaic name for the hypothetical 'space' where all on line interactions occur) could be classed as one of these additional dimensions.

Great speculation, Mr E! But, I wouldn't think so. The Internet, cyberspace etc is pretty much an extension of the industrial revolution. Its electrons wizzing around, lots of data and a little information. Nothing really hpothetical about it...
:?

Going one step further, could the Net be the materialisation of Carl Yung's Collective Unconscious?

No, as yet the 'Net isn't in my head.

We can, at the touch of a button 'tap into' this 'space' and gain knowledge, wisdom & experience from our contemporaries and those who have gone before.

I can do the same reading a book, talking to a neighbour, or watching a movie/documetary. The 'Net is more convenient , sometimes.

Not sure about the wisdom bit. The more I use the Internet, the dumber I get!

Though not spiritual in nature, could we be fashioning a fast-track way for humans to gain enlightenment through communication of knowledge?

Goog god I hpe not! Instant expertise? Broadband enlightenment? No thanks...

 

[OldTimeRadio]

FATE

FATE Magazine back circa 1996-1998 published an article claiming that not only had there been an explosion of ghostly and paranormal reports since the introduction of the Internet to the general population, but that there had likewise been an explosion of EXPERIENCES.

This was a year or two before I was even on-line and in fact one of the reasons I did link to the Net.

 

[Kondoru]

So did you get Enlightened, did you?

(Says she who spent a lot of her teens worrying about how to get Enlightenment, and no longer cares. nor is she sure of what that means, either...)

 

[wombat103]

Re: Multi-dimensional space & the Net

Instant expertise? Broadband enlightenment?.......@ 12000 Kbps....
.... a frightening concept.....

there is no difference between an enlightened person and an ignorant person.
what makes the differece is that one realises it,
while the other is kept in ignorance of it.

Hui-neng / Daikan (637-713)

 

[Kondoru]

Thank you. I wish I had known that 15 years ago.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

"So did you get Enlightened, did you?"

I have to confess that with all this free flow of uncensored information I just sort of assumed that we'd get the major Fortean and paranormal mysteries solved within a few months. Mea culpa and all of that.

On the other hand, I think we've gotten closer to the above goal in the past five or six years than in the previous century.

And the one thing I am absoluteluy certain of is that there has been a real and profound sea change in Science since the year 2000, with many of those things which were previously treated only with insults and ridicule now deemed worthy of serious investigation. For just two examples of what I mean, ice falls and "Atlantis"-type submarine discoveries.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

Jungian Subconscious and the Internet

I'd been much inclined to accept this theory of the Internet being the semi-materiialization or quasi-solidification of Jung's Collective Unconscious if it weren't for all the things we "KNOW" will "HAVE" to be on the Net but which repeated searches absolutely fail to find.

While no individual can explore all the information stored on the Net, most in-depth researchers have more than occasionally come up against the hard edges of the box.

 

[ramonmercado]

maybe a bit OT but its off planet as well.

Pushing the Internet Into Space


By Joanna Glasner | Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Mar, 14, 2006 EST

Currently, it can take about 40 minutes to relay information from a Mars rover to a NASA scientist -- a rather amazing feat, considering the data has between 100 million and 400 million kilometers to travel.

But to Adrian Hooke, that's still too long to wait.

Hooke, manager of data-standards programs at NASA, says it is technically possible to build a system allowing for interactive communication between humans and machines about as far away as the moon. Meanwhile, across greater distances in space, researchers are finding ways to maintain dialogs despite frequent disruptions.

"There isn't a lot of interaction in interplanetary communications…. Everything tends to be done in a store-and-forward mode," said Hooke. "We're extending internet-like communications into highly disrupted, highly stressed communications environments."

Forget the world wide web. Through a project called the interplanetary internet, Hooke and networking guru Vint Cerf, co-creator the internet's TCP/IP protocol, have been working for the past six years to develop a standard for communicating in disconnected environments, where an uninterrupted two-way dialog isn't possible. The approach is called delay-tolerant networking and relies on communications technologies designed for use in remote places like deep beneath the sea or out in space.

In December, a group of researchers including Cerf submitted a draft proposal for a delay-tolerant networking architecture to the research group studying the technology. The architecture revolves around what researchers call a bundling protocol, used for keeping large quantities of data in a single unit. The approach contrasts to the packet-switching technology used to transmit data on the internet, in which information is chopped into smaller bits, transmitted to its end destination, and then re-assembled.

Hooke used a dropped cell-phone call to illustrate the bundling concept. If the phone network had used a bundling protocol, the person on the receiving end of the conversation would later get to hear the part of the conversation that was missed when the call was cut off.

While the technology is still a work in progress, recent space transmissions, including one involving the Mars rover Spirit, offer a sort of prototype version of what the interplanetary internet will look like, Hooke said. The rover sent a transmission to the European Space Agency's Mars Express, an orbiting craft, which then transmitted the data to Earth.

Another early iteration of the interplanetary internet concept is a standard called Coherent File Distribution Protocol (CFDP), used in spacecraft including the Deep Impact mission, the Messenger probe to Mercury. CFDP allows an instrument to record an observation in a file and transmit the file to Earth without having to consider whether physical transmission is possible at that time, according to the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, an international body that develops space communications standards.

"It has a lot of the attributes of the interplanetary internet built into it," Hooke said. "You could make an argument that as more missions pick up CFDP, we'll have the beginnings of the interplanetary internet."


http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70377-0.html

 

[gridban]

I love this thread ! I have so many thoughts on this topic I hardly know where to start, but here goes:

The good thing is that it positively encourages critical thinking as there is so much obious BS when other mediums are more insidiuous.

Just what I thought. When people say "you can't believe everything you read on the internet", I always want to say "do you believe everything you read in print"? With so much information, without the capacity to judge what to accept and what to reject, it would become overwhelming. I also like the fact that all the information just gets out there without having some voice of authority like a newspaper or TV station to hand it down to us.

Quote:
Going one step further, could the Net be the materialisation of Carl Yung's Collective Unconscious?


No, as yet the 'Net isn't in my head.

In William Gibson's Neuromancer, where the term cyberspace comes from, people connect directly to the internet by means of electrodes - maybe that would be closer to Jung's collective unconscious?

I can do the same reading a book, talking to a neighbour, or watching a movie/documetary. The 'Net is more convenient , sometimes.

Yes, but compared to books or movies, the net resembles having immediate access to every library in the whole world

Not sure about the wisdom bit. The more I use the Internet, the dumber I get!

Really? Why?

Goog god I hpe not! Instant expertise? Broadband enlightenment? No thanks...

Why not? If we could achieve speedy enlightenment via the internet, why would that seem like a bad thing to you?

uair01 wrote:

Could it be that we're collectively building a superhuman entity - call it Uebermensch or Leviathan or The 666-Beast - that will one day gain real intelligence and self-knowledge and then take over the world?
Isn't the Internet compareable to a huge nervous system already? Shocked



In which case all you'd have to do is pull the plug out Rolling Eyes

I have a book at home by David Ambrose called Mother of God, in which an AI program becomes conscious, and turns out to have malevolent designs on humanity - and pulling out the plug doesn't work. Can't remember why not, unfortunately, but I liked the book a lot and would definitely recommend it.

I won't even start on the multiple universe stuff right now...

 

[Twin_Star]

the internet is a clockwork man. No more, no less. The fact that computers, routers, switches etc process things very, very fast just give humans the illusion of "connected-ness", "together-ness", or - going way out on a limb - sentience.

Forget any sort of chip multithreading, parallel processing etc, that is just an extension of velocity. 8 lane highways instead of single track roads. The next step is true quantum computing, estimated by my good self to be first successfully trialled April 30th, 2025.

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

Several threads merged.

P_M