Howard Bloom on "The Global Brain"
Sunday 10 November 2002
repeated the following Wednesday at 2.30pm
with Natasha Mitchell/David Rutledge
This week: the evolution of mass consciousness, from the Big Bang to the 21st century. Author and scientist Howard Bloom thinks we're all part of a mighty "global brain", and the internet lies at the heart of his grand thesis. But this isn't just a human brain. The countless millions of animals and microbes that we share the planet with, could have their own ideas about who should be running the show.
Natasha Mitchell: Hello, Natasha Mitchell here, and thanks for joining me today for All in the Mind. And under me are the orchestral strains of Haydn, because this week's program is about the curious idea of the collective mind - and an orchestra is perhaps one of the nicest examples we have in our culture of group thinking.
But it's not all harmony, of course. Like any mob, an orchestra has a mind of its own. And any conductor will tell you that the individual in charge has only limited control over the collective. Things can sometimes go badly off the rails.
Today we're translating this unpredictable picture into global terms, with the idea that we could all be part of a global brain. Howard Bloom is a US based scientist, but not your everyday empirical boffin, in a long and varied career, he's been a computer designer, an immunologist, a social anthropologist, a PR guru in the music and film industries - and most recently, the founder of the International Paleopsychology Project. This is a multidisciplinary group of scientists dedicated to mapping out the evolution of mass consciousness.
And let me hand the mike today over to David Rutledge, who managed to grab Howard Bloom for a chinwag on the phone from his home in New York.
David Rutledge: In September last year, Howard Bloom published a book entitled Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. It's a very optimistic study of the potential for humans and non-humans to pool their collective knowledge and sort out the horrible planetary mess we've made of things so far.
But of course, since the book was published, we've all become a lot more worried about globalisation. Terrorism has evolved into a worldwide threat, helped along by global communication networks. And then, on the non-human front, we've got various species of microbes that look increasingly capable of getting the better of us, via hospital infection or bioweapons. Suddenly nobody feels completely safe anywhere, and there's cause for concern about just what the global brain might be thinking and planning.
But first of all, what is this "global brain"? Well, the principle's relatively simple: if we understand the brain as a system of individual neurons, and intelligence as the collective activity of those neurons, then we've got a nice working model for human societies. Each human is like a neuron, interacting with other humans through sophisticated channels of communication. As our communication technologies become bigger and more complex - like the internet, for example - then the great brain increases in size, until finally it covers the entire surface of the earth, with everybody interconnected everywhere.
But what's interesting about this putative global brain, is that it isn't just a human brain. We humans, of course, share the planet with countless millions of animals and microbes, and they've got their own ideas about who should be running the show. So let's hear from the man behind the Global Brain thesis: Howard Bloom.
Howard Bloom: First of all, you have to realise that plants are often very clever at seducing animals into doing their work for them. They will create an apple, and they'll seduce a passing animal into thinking that apple is delicious, the animal will eat the apple, the animal will then carry the seeds around in its gut, and two miles later it will excrete those seeds - and whammo, the creature becomes a messenger working on behalf of the apple tree.
About 8000 years ago, a whole bunch of grasses came up - if you want to call it this - with the "idea" of harnessing these very peculiar interesting looking animals called human beings, and they sort of made a deal with us. If we planted them, and if we gave them just the right amount of moisture, and if we gave them just the right kind of soil, and if we kept all of their natural combatants, their predators, away from them, they would in turn stop dropping their seeds randomly on the ground, they'd clutch their seeds tightly to the tufts at the top, and they'd keep those seeds and make them very, very fat and nourishing for you and me. Those seeds became barley, wheat, rye, and we've been working as employees for those seeds for a very long time. We've also been working as employees for sheep, goats and cows.
Meanwhile, we also work as employees for these vast colonies of micro-organisms of bacteria in our gut. You and I, David, are each a collection of one hundred trillion cells. Now, fifty trillion of those cells are the ones that co-operate in making the body of you and me, and fifty trillion cells are cells that don't even call themselves you and me. They are cells of bacterial colonies living in our gut, and they've worked out a basic deal with us too. In exchange for our walking around, finding interesting food and chucking it down our throats to feed to them, they will take that food and turn it into something that we can digest with the villi in our intestines. And they also will produce a few things that we're not going to get from any place else: Vitamin P, Vitamin K and a variety of Vitamin Bs. So without them we can't live and without us they can't live.
When I talk about a "global brain", I'm talking about the fact that we have this vast number of creatures on this planet - we're not just talking about six billion human beings; every bacterial colony the size of your palm has more creatures in it, all communicating with each other and all making smart decisions, than all the human beings that have ever been. When you take all these plants, all these animals, all these human beings, all these non-human beings and all these bacteria, and put them together and you've got a global brain. You've got a kind of a superorganism, each of whose components, each different species, is somehow contributing its little bit of knowledge to the grander pool, and thus taking biomass, and consistently making more and more biomass on this planet.
David Rutledge: I see what you mean about how this varied biomass forms this collective entity, which "thinks" in a certain way. But if we talk about - I mean, you're talking in terms of "decisions", you're talking in terms of these entities getting "ideas"; this implies a degree of focus which we usually associated with a term like "intelligence" or "mind". And you know, of course those are very slippery terms. Can you see a kind of global mind or global intelligence developing at some point?
Howard Bloom: We have to realise that an intelligence is not necessarily a system in which there is one great decision maker, making one great decision. An intelligence, including yours and mine, is a highly more complex process than that. For us to even come to a conclusion, you know - right now, let's look at something in the room. You take a look at your microphone and I will take a look at the clock on the other wall. Well, our visual system takes the images that we're seeing, the photons that are hitting our irises, divides them up in literally thousands of different ways, condenses them down to codes, sends those codes from one part of the brain to the other, divides the codes up in 20 or 30 different sections - the codes that represent horizontal lines, the codes that represent vertical lines, the codes that represent movement, the codes the represent each individual colour - and then, having taken this entire picture that you and I are seeing apart, bit by bit by bit, reassembles it again, and presents it as if it's a painting, or on a movie screen, to you and me. And it does it all in a flash, so quick that we think it's instantaneous and we're actually seeing the clock.
What's actually going on is this vast process of co-operation and competition - and competition is as important to the operation of a collective intelligence, or any kind of intelligence, as collaboration is. There's a competition between various sections of the brain, and even between various receptors in our eyes, saying "I've got this one", "no, I've got this one", "it's this, I see it as a line", "no, no, no" - it's a squabble up there in the brain, it's like a soccer game gone amok. And so when you're feeling that it's a soccer game going amok, it's getting a much more accurate sense of who you are, than you are during the moments of absolute conviction when you know exactly what you've decided. Because brain science shows us that we don't even get that message about what we've decided, till half a second after the decision has been made.
David Rutledge: Let's talk about technology. I mean, humans are self-consciously developing technologies that are taking us in the direction of mass consciousness - and I'm thinking about the internet, for example. Do you see the internet as a major developmental step in the evolution of the global brain?
Howard Bloom: I think it's huge, I think it's making massive differences. First let's not deceive ourselves: three and a half billion years ago, the bacterial colonies I've talked about - each of which had more members just in one colony than all the human beings who've ever been - used elaborate communication systems. They sent attraction signals, they sent repulsion signals, and they sent very complex signals based on little bits of DNA. So communicating large amounts of material on a constant basis has been going on for three and a half billion years. But we're entering such an incredibly new phase of it, that it's absolutely ridiculous. And when something new comes along, at first it comes along for one purpose, and then evolution takes it and shapes it and finds six or seven other purposes for it. And as it does, it produces surprises. So, for example: last year in the Philippines, there was the first mobile communications political revolution. The Philippine population was getting fed up with Joseph Estrada. In previous years, the only way the Philippine citizens were able to communicate about this, was through a telephone - and a telephone that was riveted to the wall by a piece of wire. Now, everybody in the Philippines - or most people in the Philippines - have cell phones. So they used their text-paging devices, and the ability to forward a message to 125 friends, to create a mass movement of an entirely new kind, a text-paging mass movement. And that text-paging mass movement overthrew Joseph Estrada.
Meanwhile, there's a fellow named Osama bin Laden who is running - he's the first wireless warrior. And he, with his lap tops and his cell phones, is running a sort of - I call it a "complex distributed conspiracy", in which he can have cells in cities all over the world and have a new form of global guerilla urban warfare that again - because of the worldwide web, and because of cellular communication - can accomplish things that make those of us who think in terms of standard military procedures just drop our jaws with awe, and wonder "how in the world we are going to confront this?"
David Rutledge: So it's not all a rosy future, is it?
Howard Bloom: It's not all a rosy future, by any means. And the task for you and me is to exert something called will, to make sure that the cultures that are willing to listen to a great many points of view, without slitting the throats of those who express unconventional points of view, these pluralistic and democratic cultures have got to win over the Osama-type cultures that do work by slitting the throats of those that don't agree.
PULSE
David Rutledge: On ABC Radio National and internationally on Radio Australia, you're listening to All in the Mind. I'm David Rutledge, and our guest this week is Howard Bloom, author of Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century.
When we talk about the technologies of mass mind - the media, the internet, the mobile phone - it's irresistible to speculate on whether or not those technologies might, at some point, acquire a consciousness of their own. One nightmare prediction is that sooner or later the internet is going to wake up, realise it's a lot smarter than we are, and start ordering us around. So does Howard Bloom think that that's just sci-fi alarmism, or is it a realistic proposition?
Howard Bloom: It could be, but it seems to me that we're ordered around by various compulsions that we don't have control over now, and we have to learn how to grab hold of them. Look: most of us cry out for turning swords into pruning hooks, to turn war into peace, and we've never been able to do it. And every time we're swept into a war, we're swept into it almost by surprise. The surprise, really, about the current Iraqi situation, and the noise that George Bush is making about a war, is that he is making so much noise. Usually, countries have sort of fallen into war by accident. They started things like the First World War, where they thought "oh, we're just taking care of some minor little problem here in the Balkans", and whammo, things have spun violently out of control. So there is something bigger than us, some force of the superorganism that can take off on its own direction, using us, and we're carried along as if we were clipped to the side of a horse, but have fallen off the saddle and are being dragged bumpily along the ground. So that already, you know, the emergent properties, having dragged us individuals along in strange directions, is already a difficult thing we have to confront, and we may have to confront it in new ways. But I really doubt that the it's the machinery that's going to take over, I doubt that we're going to be led around by the nose by a microchip. It's our own human love of bloodshed, and love of hatred and love of squabbling, that's going to get us into trouble.
David Rutledge: There's also the question of dependency getting us into trouble, isn't there? If we become part of a global brain, then we become effectively enslaved by it, insofar as we're completely dependent on it. You know, the decisions that global brain technologies make, will be so complicated that we'll be unable to make them ourselves without those technologies.
Howard Bloom: I think that's an erroneous fear. We've always been dependent. When it comes to technology, there was a very interesting study done about 20 years ago, that showed that, you know, we assumed that the printing press was the great liberator of humanity. But it depended on how the printing press was used. In the West, the printing press was the great liberator of human ideas. But in the East, particularly in Russia, the printing press was a monopoly of the state, and the Tzar used the printing press for just one purpose and one purpose alone, and that was to put out edicts, demands on the public, and tell the public exactly what it could do and what it couldn't do. So the very same printing press that liberated the West enslaved the East. We'll always have dependencies. Whether we are enslaved by those dependencies, or whether we are liberated by the dependencies, has a lot to do with the decisions we make.
continued...
Sunday 10 November 2002
repeated the following Wednesday at 2.30pm
with Natasha Mitchell/David Rutledge
This week: the evolution of mass consciousness, from the Big Bang to the 21st century. Author and scientist Howard Bloom thinks we're all part of a mighty "global brain", and the internet lies at the heart of his grand thesis. But this isn't just a human brain. The countless millions of animals and microbes that we share the planet with, could have their own ideas about who should be running the show.
Natasha Mitchell: Hello, Natasha Mitchell here, and thanks for joining me today for All in the Mind. And under me are the orchestral strains of Haydn, because this week's program is about the curious idea of the collective mind - and an orchestra is perhaps one of the nicest examples we have in our culture of group thinking.
But it's not all harmony, of course. Like any mob, an orchestra has a mind of its own. And any conductor will tell you that the individual in charge has only limited control over the collective. Things can sometimes go badly off the rails.
Today we're translating this unpredictable picture into global terms, with the idea that we could all be part of a global brain. Howard Bloom is a US based scientist, but not your everyday empirical boffin, in a long and varied career, he's been a computer designer, an immunologist, a social anthropologist, a PR guru in the music and film industries - and most recently, the founder of the International Paleopsychology Project. This is a multidisciplinary group of scientists dedicated to mapping out the evolution of mass consciousness.
And let me hand the mike today over to David Rutledge, who managed to grab Howard Bloom for a chinwag on the phone from his home in New York.
David Rutledge: In September last year, Howard Bloom published a book entitled Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. It's a very optimistic study of the potential for humans and non-humans to pool their collective knowledge and sort out the horrible planetary mess we've made of things so far.
But of course, since the book was published, we've all become a lot more worried about globalisation. Terrorism has evolved into a worldwide threat, helped along by global communication networks. And then, on the non-human front, we've got various species of microbes that look increasingly capable of getting the better of us, via hospital infection or bioweapons. Suddenly nobody feels completely safe anywhere, and there's cause for concern about just what the global brain might be thinking and planning.
But first of all, what is this "global brain"? Well, the principle's relatively simple: if we understand the brain as a system of individual neurons, and intelligence as the collective activity of those neurons, then we've got a nice working model for human societies. Each human is like a neuron, interacting with other humans through sophisticated channels of communication. As our communication technologies become bigger and more complex - like the internet, for example - then the great brain increases in size, until finally it covers the entire surface of the earth, with everybody interconnected everywhere.
But what's interesting about this putative global brain, is that it isn't just a human brain. We humans, of course, share the planet with countless millions of animals and microbes, and they've got their own ideas about who should be running the show. So let's hear from the man behind the Global Brain thesis: Howard Bloom.
Howard Bloom: First of all, you have to realise that plants are often very clever at seducing animals into doing their work for them. They will create an apple, and they'll seduce a passing animal into thinking that apple is delicious, the animal will eat the apple, the animal will then carry the seeds around in its gut, and two miles later it will excrete those seeds - and whammo, the creature becomes a messenger working on behalf of the apple tree.
About 8000 years ago, a whole bunch of grasses came up - if you want to call it this - with the "idea" of harnessing these very peculiar interesting looking animals called human beings, and they sort of made a deal with us. If we planted them, and if we gave them just the right amount of moisture, and if we gave them just the right kind of soil, and if we kept all of their natural combatants, their predators, away from them, they would in turn stop dropping their seeds randomly on the ground, they'd clutch their seeds tightly to the tufts at the top, and they'd keep those seeds and make them very, very fat and nourishing for you and me. Those seeds became barley, wheat, rye, and we've been working as employees for those seeds for a very long time. We've also been working as employees for sheep, goats and cows.
Meanwhile, we also work as employees for these vast colonies of micro-organisms of bacteria in our gut. You and I, David, are each a collection of one hundred trillion cells. Now, fifty trillion of those cells are the ones that co-operate in making the body of you and me, and fifty trillion cells are cells that don't even call themselves you and me. They are cells of bacterial colonies living in our gut, and they've worked out a basic deal with us too. In exchange for our walking around, finding interesting food and chucking it down our throats to feed to them, they will take that food and turn it into something that we can digest with the villi in our intestines. And they also will produce a few things that we're not going to get from any place else: Vitamin P, Vitamin K and a variety of Vitamin Bs. So without them we can't live and without us they can't live.
When I talk about a "global brain", I'm talking about the fact that we have this vast number of creatures on this planet - we're not just talking about six billion human beings; every bacterial colony the size of your palm has more creatures in it, all communicating with each other and all making smart decisions, than all the human beings that have ever been. When you take all these plants, all these animals, all these human beings, all these non-human beings and all these bacteria, and put them together and you've got a global brain. You've got a kind of a superorganism, each of whose components, each different species, is somehow contributing its little bit of knowledge to the grander pool, and thus taking biomass, and consistently making more and more biomass on this planet.
David Rutledge: I see what you mean about how this varied biomass forms this collective entity, which "thinks" in a certain way. But if we talk about - I mean, you're talking in terms of "decisions", you're talking in terms of these entities getting "ideas"; this implies a degree of focus which we usually associated with a term like "intelligence" or "mind". And you know, of course those are very slippery terms. Can you see a kind of global mind or global intelligence developing at some point?
Howard Bloom: We have to realise that an intelligence is not necessarily a system in which there is one great decision maker, making one great decision. An intelligence, including yours and mine, is a highly more complex process than that. For us to even come to a conclusion, you know - right now, let's look at something in the room. You take a look at your microphone and I will take a look at the clock on the other wall. Well, our visual system takes the images that we're seeing, the photons that are hitting our irises, divides them up in literally thousands of different ways, condenses them down to codes, sends those codes from one part of the brain to the other, divides the codes up in 20 or 30 different sections - the codes that represent horizontal lines, the codes that represent vertical lines, the codes that represent movement, the codes the represent each individual colour - and then, having taken this entire picture that you and I are seeing apart, bit by bit by bit, reassembles it again, and presents it as if it's a painting, or on a movie screen, to you and me. And it does it all in a flash, so quick that we think it's instantaneous and we're actually seeing the clock.
What's actually going on is this vast process of co-operation and competition - and competition is as important to the operation of a collective intelligence, or any kind of intelligence, as collaboration is. There's a competition between various sections of the brain, and even between various receptors in our eyes, saying "I've got this one", "no, I've got this one", "it's this, I see it as a line", "no, no, no" - it's a squabble up there in the brain, it's like a soccer game gone amok. And so when you're feeling that it's a soccer game going amok, it's getting a much more accurate sense of who you are, than you are during the moments of absolute conviction when you know exactly what you've decided. Because brain science shows us that we don't even get that message about what we've decided, till half a second after the decision has been made.
David Rutledge: Let's talk about technology. I mean, humans are self-consciously developing technologies that are taking us in the direction of mass consciousness - and I'm thinking about the internet, for example. Do you see the internet as a major developmental step in the evolution of the global brain?
Howard Bloom: I think it's huge, I think it's making massive differences. First let's not deceive ourselves: three and a half billion years ago, the bacterial colonies I've talked about - each of which had more members just in one colony than all the human beings who've ever been - used elaborate communication systems. They sent attraction signals, they sent repulsion signals, and they sent very complex signals based on little bits of DNA. So communicating large amounts of material on a constant basis has been going on for three and a half billion years. But we're entering such an incredibly new phase of it, that it's absolutely ridiculous. And when something new comes along, at first it comes along for one purpose, and then evolution takes it and shapes it and finds six or seven other purposes for it. And as it does, it produces surprises. So, for example: last year in the Philippines, there was the first mobile communications political revolution. The Philippine population was getting fed up with Joseph Estrada. In previous years, the only way the Philippine citizens were able to communicate about this, was through a telephone - and a telephone that was riveted to the wall by a piece of wire. Now, everybody in the Philippines - or most people in the Philippines - have cell phones. So they used their text-paging devices, and the ability to forward a message to 125 friends, to create a mass movement of an entirely new kind, a text-paging mass movement. And that text-paging mass movement overthrew Joseph Estrada.
Meanwhile, there's a fellow named Osama bin Laden who is running - he's the first wireless warrior. And he, with his lap tops and his cell phones, is running a sort of - I call it a "complex distributed conspiracy", in which he can have cells in cities all over the world and have a new form of global guerilla urban warfare that again - because of the worldwide web, and because of cellular communication - can accomplish things that make those of us who think in terms of standard military procedures just drop our jaws with awe, and wonder "how in the world we are going to confront this?"
David Rutledge: So it's not all a rosy future, is it?
Howard Bloom: It's not all a rosy future, by any means. And the task for you and me is to exert something called will, to make sure that the cultures that are willing to listen to a great many points of view, without slitting the throats of those who express unconventional points of view, these pluralistic and democratic cultures have got to win over the Osama-type cultures that do work by slitting the throats of those that don't agree.
PULSE
David Rutledge: On ABC Radio National and internationally on Radio Australia, you're listening to All in the Mind. I'm David Rutledge, and our guest this week is Howard Bloom, author of Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century.
When we talk about the technologies of mass mind - the media, the internet, the mobile phone - it's irresistible to speculate on whether or not those technologies might, at some point, acquire a consciousness of their own. One nightmare prediction is that sooner or later the internet is going to wake up, realise it's a lot smarter than we are, and start ordering us around. So does Howard Bloom think that that's just sci-fi alarmism, or is it a realistic proposition?
Howard Bloom: It could be, but it seems to me that we're ordered around by various compulsions that we don't have control over now, and we have to learn how to grab hold of them. Look: most of us cry out for turning swords into pruning hooks, to turn war into peace, and we've never been able to do it. And every time we're swept into a war, we're swept into it almost by surprise. The surprise, really, about the current Iraqi situation, and the noise that George Bush is making about a war, is that he is making so much noise. Usually, countries have sort of fallen into war by accident. They started things like the First World War, where they thought "oh, we're just taking care of some minor little problem here in the Balkans", and whammo, things have spun violently out of control. So there is something bigger than us, some force of the superorganism that can take off on its own direction, using us, and we're carried along as if we were clipped to the side of a horse, but have fallen off the saddle and are being dragged bumpily along the ground. So that already, you know, the emergent properties, having dragged us individuals along in strange directions, is already a difficult thing we have to confront, and we may have to confront it in new ways. But I really doubt that the it's the machinery that's going to take over, I doubt that we're going to be led around by the nose by a microchip. It's our own human love of bloodshed, and love of hatred and love of squabbling, that's going to get us into trouble.
David Rutledge: There's also the question of dependency getting us into trouble, isn't there? If we become part of a global brain, then we become effectively enslaved by it, insofar as we're completely dependent on it. You know, the decisions that global brain technologies make, will be so complicated that we'll be unable to make them ourselves without those technologies.
Howard Bloom: I think that's an erroneous fear. We've always been dependent. When it comes to technology, there was a very interesting study done about 20 years ago, that showed that, you know, we assumed that the printing press was the great liberator of humanity. But it depended on how the printing press was used. In the West, the printing press was the great liberator of human ideas. But in the East, particularly in Russia, the printing press was a monopoly of the state, and the Tzar used the printing press for just one purpose and one purpose alone, and that was to put out edicts, demands on the public, and tell the public exactly what it could do and what it couldn't do. So the very same printing press that liberated the West enslaved the East. We'll always have dependencies. Whether we are enslaved by those dependencies, or whether we are liberated by the dependencies, has a lot to do with the decisions we make.
continued...
