• The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind.

• We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.

• The changing information which we experience as world is an unfolding narrative. It tells about the death of a woman. This woman, who died long ago, was one of the primordial twins. She was half of the divine syzygy. The purpose of the narrative is the recollection of her and of her death. The Mind does not wish to forget her. Thus the ratiocination of the Brain consists of a permanent record of her existence, and, if read, will be understood this way. All the information processed by the Brain—experienced by us as the arranging and rearranging of physical objects—is an attempt at this preservation of her; stones and rocks and sticks and amoebae are traces of her. The record of her existence and passing is ordered onto the meanest level of reality by the suffering Mind which is now alone.

• This loneliness, this anguish of the bereaved Mind, is felt by every constituent of the universe. All its constitutes are alive. Thus the ancient Greek thinkers were hylozoists.

Exegesis from the novel VALIS by Philip K. Dick 1981

We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us. But something has gone wrong. All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can’t read outside and can’t hear inside. So I say, we have become idiots. Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangement of parts of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore we are language. Why, then, do we not know this? We do not even know what we are, let alone what the outer reality is of which we are parts. The origin of the word “idiot” is the word “private.” Each of us has become private, and no longer shares the common thought of the Brain, except at a subliminal level. Thus our real life and purpose are conducted below our threshold of consciousness.

- from the novel VALIS by Philip K. Dick 1981

Clearly, the notion that computer networks are booting up the mind of the planet is not a  techno-scientific scenario at all, however much the language of complex systems or artificial intelligence may help may help us get a handle on the Internet’s explosive, out-of-control growth or it’s possible mind-like properties. The leap from the global brain to the Gaian mind remains  essentially a metaphysical move– which doesn’t mean the leap is worth hazarding. For whether or not we take Mark Pesce literally, his vision of the online noosphere gives voice to a growing if inchoate intuition that computer networks and virtual technologies have opened up what amounts to a new category of knowing and being, a unique and unparalleled global space of intelligence, experience, terror, and communion. On the other hand, even if we accept the outlandish supposition that Gaia is indeed waking up and rubbing her satellite eyes, we cannot assume that this electronic consciousness will be unified to itself, let alone achieve a state of mystical perfection.

This is the lesson of Gibson’s Neuromancer myth: The cyberspace AI that achieves technological godhead at the end of his first novel cannot maintain its omniscient infinity, and it fragments into the crafty polytheistic subroutines of Haitian Voodoo.
- Erik Davis – Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism In The Age Of Information

Every computer consists of two aspects, known as hardware and software. (Software here includes information).

The software consists of programs that can exist in many forms, including the totally abstract. A program can be “in” the computer in the sense that it is recorded in the CPU or on a disk which is hitched up to the computer. A program can also exist on a piece of paper, if I invented it myself, or in a manual, if it is a standard program; in these cases, it is not “in” the computer but can be put “in” at any time. But a program can be even more tenuous than that; it can exist only in my head, if I have never written it down, or if I have used it once and erased it.

The hardware is more “real” than the software in that you can always locate it in space-time—if it’s not in the bedroom, somebody must have moved it to the study, etc. On the other hand, the software is more “real” in the sense that you can smash the hardware back to dust (“kill” the computer) and the software still exists, and can “materialize” or “manifest” again in a different computer.

(Any speculations about reincarnation at this point are the responsibility of the reader, not of the author.)

In speaking of the human brain as an electro-colloidal biocomputer, we all know where the hardware is: it is inside the human skull. The software, however, seems to be anywhere and everywhere. For instance, the software “in” my brain also exists outside my brain in such forms as, say, a book I read twenty years ago, which was an English translation of various signals transmitted by Plato 2400 years ago. Other parts of my software are made up of the software of Lao Tzu, Herman Hesse, my second-grade teacher, the Simpsons, the Beatles, my mother and father, George W. Bush, my various dogs and cats, Dr. Richard Dawkins, and anybody and (to some extent) any-thing that has ever impacted upon my brain. This may sound strange, but that’s the way software (or information) functions.

Of course, if consciousness consisted of nothing but this undifferentiated tapioca of timeless, traceless software, we would have no individuality, no center, no Self.

We want to know, then, how out of this universal software ocean a specific person emerges.

What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.

Because the human brain, like other animal brains, acts as an electro-colloidal computer, not a solid-state computer, it follows the same laws as other animal brains. That is, the programs get into the brain, as electro-chemical bonds, in discrete quantum stages.

- Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising.