The emergence of humanity’s self-awareness

Abstract

A fundamental difference between humans and other animals is that humans are highly self-aware while other complex animals are less so; and simple creatures like mosquitos are not self-aware at all. Some researchers believe that self-awareness is an emergent property of a complex neural network. If this is so, then high self-awareness should appear when a neural network approaches the complexity of the human brain (∼90 billion neurons and 1014 synapses). If one takes a much broader view and considers all of humanity as a neural network, then today there are ∼7 billion individual human elements, of whom ∼3 billion are interconnected via computers, smart phones, tablets, and the Internet. By morphological analogy, as human interconnectivity continues to grow and strengthen, eventually humanity will approach ∼70 billion interconnected humans, at which point we will become highly self-aware as a single human super-organism. This organismal self-awareness may manifest itself as the elimination of wars, hunger, and strife, and as the collaboration of all individual elements working together for the greater good of humanity. It is projected that this organismal self-awareness will occur between the years 2400 and 2600.