From the appearance of “The Computer and the Brain” to the revolution of the infosphere

This Neumann’s last publication marks the beginning of a comparison between artificial and natural information processing machines that has continued ever since, that is, the comparison of “The Computer and the Brain”. With a brief description of the book, we prepare the formulation of the new tasks of the comparison. In doing so, the revolutionary change that took place in the infosphere of humanity with the co-evolution of computing, networking and representing information, and which is still in intensive development, must be taken into account. The book contrasts the stored program architecture based on Neumann’s principle with the neural network architecture of the brain. The numerical comparison is based on differences in the performance, number, and density of the active elements. The comparison cannot be continued in this way, because we are not dealing with individual computers, but with a system of cooperating machines organized in the Internet. The worlds of the two kinds of machines jointly use the latest collection of artificially created information carriers, the Data Sphere, and together they form the active information processing component of the Humanity’s infosphere. The carriers of information provide the common, materially existing object of computation and thinking, which I call formation in the paper. The information event, introduced in the paper, associate formation with information. Formation means information when the observation or creation of the formation in an information event is connected to the meaning for its owner. While the information processing of computers is only the transformation of formations, the assignment of meaning is carried on in an information event both before and after the transformation. In the most important information event, the owner is the human mind. The separating barrier between the two worlds is the information event. Within the computer systems, there are no more information events, only formations are transformed, in which the activation of program formations enables the automatic execution of the computation.