And also to you amen.

Architecture penguin catalogue misanthrope boilerplate unnecessary bus recent multiple random generation reply your neighborhood here meaningless modern decay ware idiosyncratic polymath and also to you amen typo giveaway subjunctive sesquipedalian dance.

-Anonymous, spam

Today at work I was chatting with Paul the in-house courier, an affable and entertaining young fellow, and we were discussing some random word spam that had made its way past the new Printing House spam filters. The spam in question had absolutely no sales pitch of any sort, it was just word salad, and we were speculating as to why anyone would send it. We agreed that it was probably just some sort of low-pass reconnaissance by the spammer community, just testing to see what would get through, but I presented the alternative theory that they were net dreams - the nascent consciousness of the Internet manifesting itself as the same sort of garbled metaphor that any of us might experience during a run of rapid eye movement.

Obviously, it's the first explanation, but imagine, imagine if it was the second one. The nature of consciousness is elusive at the best of times, and investigations of the phenomenon are hampered by that elusiveness. Recommended reading here would be Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he suggests that consciousness bears the same relationship to reality that roadmaps do to the landscape - a duplicate in another medium that allows us to find our way.* The Internet, with its odd connections, its millions of nodes, and its constant flow of information, would seem to be an acceptable start in the process of creating a digital analog of the human mind, a "duplicate in another medium".

But will that lead to consciousness? Science fiction author Vernor Vinge has suggested that there is a point in our future where the combination of humans and computers will cause the creation of some kind of superhuman intelligence, leading to a leap in our evolution that will defy description. He refers to this shift as the Singularity, and is understandably (or perhaps sadly) vague about how it will take place and what it will mean to us. In his defense, how could he be specific? What sort of leap of imagination could predict the nature of post-humanism? In his novel Marooned in Realtime, Vinge sets his scene by having a small portion of humanity that has been in stasis for a variety of reasons emerging in a post-Singularity world where the rest of humanity has vanished, leaving behind only vague clues as to the nature of the transcendent experience that has led to their disappearance.

I have to admit to being sceptical about the concept: jokes about internet dreams aside, I don't think that we are one step closer to the creation of technological sentience than we were a thousand years ago. Well, to be fair, we're one step closer - I suspect that in 1008 no one was thinking about it at all.

- Sid

* Yes, I DO own a copy of Mr. Jaynes' book, for the doubters among you. And, just to completely establish my geek credibility, I stumbled across it in a used book store and purchased it because I'd seen the Beast reading it in an issue of X-Men.