What particularly caught my interest was the idea of calling civilization, and even the social networks between people, facilitated by communication technology (anywhere from verbal and gestural communication, to the internet), can be observed as a single organism, using the metaphor of the cells in our body making up the moving, talking, thinking construct that we call ourselves. Dan Dennet, in his

TED talk on consciousness (I have yet to read his book on his interpretation of consciousness), made a similar point: all of the neurons interacting with each other as interconnected, yet individual organisms, and unaware of their collective product, generate the perception of consciousness, though we consider the neurons themselves unconscious. Within the cell as well, the systems can be broken down into smaller and smaller parts.

Taking the example of the brain, the individual nodes making up the whole are not fully 'aware' of their collective society, and that that society seems to imagine itself as conscious, we can apply it to human society in the same way, and we humans, mere cells in the system, cannot fully understand what the 'consciousness' of the complete system may be. As is well covered in these posts, the information transfer rate is accelerating, and increasingly more effective means of information and goods transfer are evolving, as a trend of culture and technology. It seems almost inevitable that in a not so distant future, every one of us will be linked intimately with every single other, through modes of technology not yet foreseen, but that would allow for instantaneous, effective, and adapting information flow in the collective network of the human species. Forms of life, made up of all the humans in existence today, perceive and exist in planes that we literally cannot imagine. As is often useful to do when discussing evolutionary systems such as this, the phenomenon can be described as having intention and desire: "What does technology want?" Obviously, evolution has no intentions or desires, but merely trends, that within certain fractal scales of time and space, are relatively constant.

Links:

http://www.celldeath.de/encyclo/index.html

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/03/civilizations_a.php