Cyberspace and Consciousness

The expressions 'cyberspace' and 'information highway' are so casually used interchangeably that 'cyber' might easily be taken to mean 'information' in some ancient language. But, in fact, it comes from the Greek for 'steer', as does 'govern'. The etymological confusion seems traceable to the development of 'Cybernetics' decades ago, which aimed to study self-correcting information processing systems. Plainly, the focus of that rubric was originally on the self-correcting, rather than the information processing, dimension of the such systems, so its more recent association with the latter dimension is a slight terminological displacement. In the context of current computer technology, such lack of linguistic precision is hardly significant, but a more instructive application of this analysis might be to the topic of the human Mind. Theories of Mind have generally tried to explain thought processes, and one long tradition attributes that activity to an incorporeal being that is incarnate in the human body. 'Soul', 'Spirit', 'Mind', and 'Consciousness' are some of the names that have been given to that being, which is to be distinguished from the brain. But with the wane in influence over the centuries of Theologies in which incorporeal beings are central, in combination with the rise in sophistication attributed to brain operations, the concept of e. g. Consciousness has been struggling in recent years against charges of being superfluous, i. e. the physical brain is lately being shown to sufficiently account for all the intellectual activities previously attributed to Consciousness or its incorporeal ilk. However, these debates seem to have rarely, and at best implicitly, considered that Consciousness is primarily concerned not with the information-processing, but with the homeostatic, i. e. the self-correcting, functioning of the organism, which leads to fresh reformulations of the relations between Consciousness and the data which become, with respect to it, meaningful information. So, one more way that computer technology can illuminate the human brain that it models, is with respect to its cyber, in the literal sense, character.