Roumen's Weblog

Expressing Oneself and Other Random Thoughts

Today I went for a coffee with my old Dutch friend. It turn out to be a very pleasant evening. Sometimes our discussions go a bit wild and we start to discuss metaphysical things, like "Who am I?", "What the hell am I doing here?", "Is there any 'I' anyway?", "Is it all just an illusion?" and stuff. Mostly we don't find any answers to such questions, but at least we have a good feeling about having very spiritual conversations.

Among other things we've opened the idea of expressing ourselves. We all humans have this need to do something to show who we are (well, most do) - painters paint, developers write code, poets write poems, etc. For some reason we need to share this with other people. Which brings me to my popular topic - blogging. Why am I blogging? Why so many other people are doing it? Is it because we do not have enough friends? Or is it because something terrible happened in our youth and we are still not able to recover?

Well, thinking more about blogging, it's just another way of expressing yourself. But what's driving it? It seems to be a strong need for conversation. I have many friends and don't suffer from being asocial, but still I want to write to other people all these ideas. Thanks to the internet I get the opportunity to share my ideas and experiences with thousands of people. So it seems to me that the whole thing about blogging comes from our need to talk and the internet just gives us a very unique possibility to reach people independently on distance.

It is always exciting to read comments to my blog and answer them. Another interesting thing is to see the reactions in other blogs, it's also a way how the discussion goes. One guy writes a message and another guy responds. By that you can create even chain reactions. Actually this way the Internet is creating an image of reality and individuals write their updates on the reality. The system reacts on lies. If you write something terribly wrong, it is very soon corrected by the others. That's why companies have to be honest on the internet, if they claim about themselves they have the best product people will definitely react very soon by saying their product sucks.

So, by blogging and other discussions on the Internet we are creating a huge knowledge base. Anybody can search it using powerful search engines like google. It's not very well organized, actually it's completely disorganized and may be out of date. But still, if you are interested in almost any topic, you'll probably find the answer. As I sometimes say, if it's not on Google, it doesn't exists.

My concern is: what will this thing called the internet develop into? In Holland, 70% of teenagers have their personal page and are using the internet as a huge part of their social life. Instead of going to a disco or pub, they chat on the Internet. Although the interface is still very unmature (you can't touch it, smell it and taste it), it replaces many of their normal human interactions. So many people on the net, so many discussions going on - so incredible huge amounts of information shared.

If you take a scientific look at our brains, they're just billions of neurons interconnected in a huge network. Now how does that differ from the Internet? My sci-fi question is: what does it take for the system to become alive? Will humans be needed to operate it or once we develop tools which will enable automatic organisation of information inside the system create a real artificial intelligence? Or is there something else necessary, some kind of energy which is unique to live beings and thus no technology can't create anything living? What is behind this world? Why are we here? Is there any meaning of life?

That's it for my Friday midnight's stream of conciousness. I'll try to come back to earth with next posts :-)