By Global Brain we mean a self-organized information processing system where the collective activity of the many individuals and models working on the system yields higher levels of information processing than we ourselves as individuals can attain, just as biological brains manifest globally-distributed, high-level cognitive abilities from the complex, highly interconnected web of lower-level information-processing cellular units.
Our concept of the Global Brain is a network of interconnected humans and computers from which higher levels of information processing can emerge.
We predict that the worldwide information and communications network needs to surpass a certain threshold for a Global Brain to emerge, and that the passing of this threshold will produce a sudden state change, or transition, from the non-global-brain state to the global-brain state.
The network is rapidly expanding throughout the entire world to form a diffuse net covering the surface, with a few ganglia that coordinate some kinds of activity but do not (yet?) exercise coordinated information processing and decision-making for the entire world “organism” as a brain does.
A serious problem with all of these informal information exchanges is the danger of misinformation, by intention or by mistake. Procedures need to be developed to protect users against planted fake news and data, and users need to develop a critical approach to information from the net. This problem, though, is a general problem of public information.
Would some form of global self-awareness or consciousness emerge, just as self-awareness and consciousness emerges in biological systems whose brains have reached a certain level of complexity?
Since individual neurons are considered not to have an awareness of the perceptions and thoughts which they help create, would we, as the individual information-processing units in this Global Brain, be capable of sensing the higher forms of information processing that might emerge?
Synchronous activity in the Internet would be a sign of emergence of a Global Brain.