The Semantic Sphere 1: Computation, Cognition and Information Economy [Hardcover]

The new digital media offers us an unprecedented memory capacity, an ubiquitous communication channel and a growing computing power. How can we exploit this medium to augment our personal and social cognitive processes at the service of human development? Combining a deep knowledge of humanities and social sciences as well as a real familiarity with computer science issues,?this book explains?the collaborative construction of a global hypercortex coordinated by a computable metalanguage. By recognizing fully the symbolic and social nature of human cognition, we could transform our current opaque global brain into a reflexive collective intelligence.

Acknowledgements xv

Chapter 1. General Introduction 1

1.1. The vision: to enhance cognitive processes 2

1.2. A transdisciplinary intellectual adventure 5

1.3. The result: toward hypercortical cognition 27

1.4. General plan of this book 35

PART 1. THE PHILOSOPHY OF INFORMATION 37

Chapter 2. The Nature of Information 41

2.1. Orientation 41

2.2. The information paradigm 45

2.3. Layers of encoding 56

2.4. Evolution in information nature 66

2.5. The unity of nature 69

Chapter 3. Symbolic Cognition 75

3.1. Delimitation of the field of symbolic cognition76

3.2. The secondary reflexivity of symbolic cognition 78

3.3. Symbolic power and its manifestations 80

3.4. The reciprocal enveloping of the phenomenal world and semantic world 82

3.5. The open intelligence of culture 84

3.6. Differences between animal and human collective intelligence 85

Chapter 4. Creative Convlƒ