I realized some months ago that by allowing some people online (or many, trusted as one source) to accrue more and more influence over the thoughts and activity of the other nodes of the network, the Internet is transgressing more and more into an emergent organization consistent with Dan Dennett’s model of how the functions of human consciousness comes about.

To be clear, I’m talking about Daniel Dennett’s fame in the brain model, which concerns itself with the organization of the content of consciousness:

Just as becoming famous is not a precisely datable event like being transduced into a medium (like being televised), so achieving fame (or ‘clout’) in the brain is not a precisely datable transition in the brain. It is a competitive phenomenon — not all can be famous — and it is only retrospectively determinable since it is constituted by its sequelae.

Is the trend really going in that direction, though? Are certain people or information sources gaining influence, or is influence being distributed more evenly? I intuit the former, but don’t know what the data says.

On a related note, today I read this great article by (famous) economist Robin Hanson, where he suggests we need to accept and make use of the existing systems of fame & influence to make the world smarter on a meta-level, instead of getting lost in improving our own puny, individual rationality:

When what matters is how the world acts, not how you act, rationality on your part consists mainly in improving the rationality of the world’s beliefs, as determined by its main systems for deciding who to believe about what.

The noblest calling I can imagine.

Can we be happy, knowingly being “just” a cog in this great machinery, and should we? Does the global rationality rank higher than the local, because of its obvious utilitarian priority — the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?

If we are indeed taking part in the birth of something analogous to human consciousness on a global level, then maybe its increasing rationality will soon push the few to see to the needs of the many, in a much greater way than has been done so far. Push is probably the wrong word, since it implies coercion — one would hope that by allowing us to see the world clearer, it would make humanity more empathetic toward all sentient creatures, and free us from the ego, this perspective trick of consciousness that makes us prisoners in our own bodies, to do on a global scale what is actually really necessary, good and right.

Here’s a more dystopic view. :)