The internet is simply a way in which minds can communicate with other minds. We see no self-awareness in the internet. Now some people say,”Well, what about some kind of collective consciousness that arises by an emergent phenomenon?” Well, that’s a lot of gobbledygook. That’s a lot of nice words. Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s pure speculation at the present time. Even in the laboratory with our finest instruments and the latest developments in artificial intelligence, we cannot make a computer become self-aware. You realize that one of our most advances computers was the IBM computer Watson, which defeated two humans on the program Jeopardy. At that point, many pundits said, “Oh my God, the end is near.
Minds can communicate with other minds
You can’t go up to Watson, slap its transistors and say, “Good boy! You just beat two humans on Jeopardy. You made history. Let’s drink to it!” You see, Watson is an adding machine, a very sophisticated adding machine. It adds billions of times faster than the human brain, but that’s all it is. It’s what is called an expert system. It deals with formalized inputs, formalized outputs. You talk to an expert system every time you’re on the telephone, and the telephone says, “Please hit button one.
