When Enough of Us Are Connected

Coalescing into a Greater Self (Barlow)

"We coalesce into a greater self, as every synapse on planet Earth strives toward becoming continuously and continually connected to every other synapse in a vast ecosystem of mind...."
 (John Perry Barlow in a Special Wired Edition: Scenarios )

A New Ecology of Intelligence (Chislenko)

"The ability of future machines to directly share experiences and knowledge with each other will lead to evolution of intelligence from relatively isolated individual minds to highly interconnected structural entities."

"The new system will incorporate many of today's structures and will develop new traits transcending the limits of human understanding. Its evolution will evade human control, but relations of descendants of humans and today's machines will be largely symbiotic and will lead to the emergence of a new ecology of intelligence."
  ( Networking in the Mind Age by Alexander Chislenko)

The 'Grey Matter' of Mankind (de Chardin)

"...all around us and right under our eyes, a process of great importance is going on. It is favoured by the sudden multiplication of ultra-rapid means of travel and transmission of thought, and consists in the formation of more and more psychic zones or groups. In these the human nuclei are converging their powers of reflection upon one common problem with one common enthusiasm, and so organising themselves into stable functional complexes. In these, surely, it is perfectly legitimate, as a matter of sound biology, to recognize the 'grey matter' of mankind."
 (from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Man's Place in Nature)

Patterns of Coherence (Russell)

"As the communication links within humanity increase, we will eventually reach a time when the billions of information exchanges shuttling through the networks at any one time would create patterns of coherence in the global brain similar to those found in the human brain."
 (from Peter Russell's The Global Brain Awakens)

The Passage (Lipnack & Stamps)

"The world brain is already so complicated that you can't describe it accurately. New interconnections are being created so rapidly that any description would be out of date. This is a new biological phenomenon, one of the most momentous ones in the earth's history. The human species is becoming something new. It is similar to the passage from the protozoa to the metazoa. . . "
 (From The Networking Book, by Jessica Lipnack & Jeffrey Stamps)

When Enough of Us Are Connected (Dilbert)

"Logically, all things are created by a combination of simpler, less capable components. Therefore, a supreme being must be our future, not our origin. What if God is the consciousness that will be created when enough of us are connected by the Internet?"
  (Dilbert)