A little while back I posted the seemingly outrageous idea that the Internet may be conscious and that we may have given it consciousness by accident.
The question was, "How do we go about figuring out if it actually is?"
This is a difficult question for humans to answer about each other, nevermind bits of information being shared across an international computer network, the majority of which are pictures of cats and silly videos.
Sometimes I can't even tell if the slow moving ape hunched over its shopping cart blocking the cereal aisle in the supermarket is a conscious being or not, but what I can tell is that this particular ape is miserable.
Aha! That's something. Emotions are a clear indication that something conscious-like is going on behind those slow-moving glassy eyes. A something that not only gives it the ability to poorly navigate a shopping cart in front of people that know what they want, but a something that tells it exactly how it feels about it.
Someone on the Internet had to already have noticed this and chances are that someone took the average of everyone's mood and concluded that to be the mood of the Internet.
That someone, or couple of someone's, website is here:
http://www.wefeelfine.orgAllegedly we, as a society of the mind of the Internet have become
happier since around February 2005.
Now I've done some research to try to figure out what the exact date was that started this turn around from 'miserable ape in the supermarket' to 'slightly less miserable ape that finally realised it would like some cereal too' and I think it was February 15th, 2005, the day the Internet was introduced to YouTube.
Now the question is, how does YouTube assist consciousness and emotion?
