I'm sure you are familiar with the inner workings of the brain. The brain is made up of a gray matter which is composed of billions of nerve cells. You can think of each brain cell like a node that both receives and sends electromagnetic signals. Somehow, not well understood yet, a mind emerges from these signal transmissions. All that you know yourself to be (including that knowing!) arises from these signals being transmitted to and fro in your noggin.

What if that's all that's required for thought to take place? When a person is in a deep coma, they're brains keep working. Many report dreams and a faint understanding of what is going on around them. Somehow the signals being transmitted in their heads still carry meaning. Although our understanding of the brain is astounding, it is still very limited. It's not as though you can stick a colander connected to a bunch of wires and a chart recorder over someone's head, read the electric signals and know what they were thinking. In fact, similar electrical patterns in different people could mean completely different things.

The internet is a vast, cross-cultural network of computers. Each of these computers acts like a node that sends electromagnetic signals to each other. At all times, there are signals being transmitted back and forth on a global scale. Given the fact that most people tend to visit the same, say, 10 to 20 sites over and over again, these signals would also seem to form patterns. What if all these signals being sent back and forth are, in some little understood way (just like the brain), giving rise to a mind. What do you think the internet is thinking?

Now I think it's important to realize that I'm not saying that the internet you log onto knows you are logging on to it. No way. Not any more than you know when a particular cell fires in your brain. You see, while you surf the net, you are acting like a cell in the internet brain. YOU are the neuron. It's as though the internet is an evolution into another dimension of mind.

Consider…
2-D Brain is the nucleus of the cell neuron. Signal transmission is electromagnetic through orbital interactions of the molecules.
3-D Brain forms from collection of neurons into an actual brain. Signal transmission is electromagnetic in nature.

The next dimension would obviously emerge from the connection of many brains. Now short of hooking ourselves Borg-like (that's another post :o) ), connecting our desires electronically through the internet comes pretty close. And once again, the signal transmission is electromagnetic in nature.

I should also make it clear that I don't believe that the internet would think the way we do. I mean YOU wouldn't think like YOU do if you'd spent your life locked in a closet would you? In fact I can't see as how the internet would think symbolically (as we can only do) at all. There's no reason to believe that the internet is wired the same as a human brain, so there's no reason to think it thinks like us either.

…But think how our desires give rise to this new (hypothetical) mind. One of the most important drives of a cell is to multiply. This naturally leads to our own sex drives. What does our sex drives, manifested in an oh so Freudian-subconscious way through all the sex, both normal and deviant, surfed on the net?
…Soon enough, virtually everyone planet-wide will have some sort of homepage expressing their desires, while they surf through the desires of others.
…This mind of ours is evolving.

So, how do we talk to this mind? Well, I don't believe we can. Just as it's impossible to believe that a cell could ever communicate with your mind, you cannot communicate with the mind of which you form a part.

But something else might happen…

Think of how much we understand of life on a cellular scale. Sure we know just a smidgen of everything, but at least now we know where he rules are written and we have a pretty good idea of the playing field. Soon enough (maybe the next 100-200 years), we could very well be able to create a cell from scratch. What if the mind we are creating on the internet is somehow figuring out right now how to speak down to us. I could go on for hours about the God connotations of that, but I won't.

I don't think the mind we are creating has any idea of us yet. Just as a baby doesn't know neurology. And even upon maturity, no one of us could figure out how to talk to a cell alone. Just as it requires many of our minds to understand a cell, it must require many of the 'mind we make'(s) to understand us.

Now what if we linked our internet to those of some alien civilizations.