Global Brain: The Evolution of the Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

by Howard Bloom

Book Overview

As someone who has spent forty years in psychology with a long-standing interest in evolution, I'll just assimilate Howard Bloom's accomplishment and my amazement.-DAVID SMILLIE, Visiting Professor of Zoology, Duke University In this extraordinary follow-up to the critically acclaimed The Lucifer Principle, Howard Bloom-one of today's preeminent thinkers-offers us a bold rewrite of the evolutionary saga. He shows how plants and animals (including...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471419192
• ISBN13: 9780471419198
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: Wiley (TP)
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.6" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

All in all you're just another neuron in the global brain...

but definitely not just another brick in the wall, unless you are totally unfit or unwilling to play your part. Continuing with the exciting and provocative work started out in "The Lucifer Principle", Howard Bloom comes now into the realm of the global brain. This is not just the sum of human minds, but of all living things in the planet. In fact, Bloom suspects that in the interspecies war between bacteria and humans, we don't currently have the upper hand. For many years we have thought that intelligence is a human privilege. Not quite. We have achieved wonders, but let's see if we can survive and thrive for 3.5 billion years, just like bacteria have done. So, from a macro-historical and biological perspective, human beings are nothing more than cells of the social superorganism. In fact, we are the neurons of the global brain. Bloom describes, then exemplifies, the five elements of this global brain: 1. "Conformity enforcers", the elements that impose discipline, traditions, habits and ideas, forging identity and homogenizing societies. Think of your local ayatollah. 2. "Diversity generators", which stray out of conformity and come up with new ideas, styles and ways of doing things, often at an expensive price. Your weird, nerdy neighbor might just be one of those. 3. "Inner-judges", kind of what you feel when you skip work or when nobody laughs at your jokes. These mechanisms may punish us -guilt, shame, remorse, a feeling of failure- or reward us -joy, pride, a sense of achievement-. They tell us what's right and what's wrong, however they are encoded. 4. "Resource shifters", the adjudication of money, power and status to the old or new winners, and the taking away of said resources from the weak or failed. Being only handsome, then, is not enough to grab the blond from the short, bald and fat tycoon. 5. "Intergroup tournament", exercises in the demonstration of power between competitors for whatever. Interesting ones currently going on between the Islam and the West, humans and bacteria, and global sports like soccer. These five elements combine to create the global brain of which we are part. This is easily one of the most interesting and important books that have come up in the last decades. Even if it's not totally right, it asks the right questions and gives the reader a lot to think about, not to mention hundreds of books to read in the rest of your -hopefully- productive and status-achiever life. Read it.

A journey through everything with one big mind...

Books about science: for the majority of them, the layman reader will either be overwhelmed, bored, or both. Regardless of the topic, may that be evolution, the string theory, astronomy, you name it. This one here is decidingly different. It is so, because of the uncanny talent of the author to present one big and complex theory written almost laid back , with very creative style, one that grabs you and doesnt let go, first page to last. H.Bloom had a formidable task ahead of him as he started his book. His theory alone was such that he needed to time-travel with the reader, while deviating in such diverse sectors as history, biology, psychology, sociology. All in a book's work. Bloom claims that evolution's crucial leaps are based on the collective mind of a species and how it adapts, predicts and organises its society members in various situations. That's a controversial view to begin with as many evolutionists dont abide to this thought. But Bloom does a tremendous job in not only the way he lays forth his expansive arguments but very convincingly showing that his arguments thoroughly work. Bloom's thesis was in desperate need of strong paradigms from the get-go and he provides them in abundance. He shifts through the microbe and bacteria world to show that the incredible adaptiveness and survivability of these micro-organisms is due to their ability to "work" as a mass mind. The chapter on this is one of the most fascinating of the book. Bloom knew all too well, that bacteria alone wouldn't do the trick. Nor would his examples of certain monkey species which owe their survival to pure imitation be ebough, examples which also include elephants and other species as well. The big question for the naysayers was could he prove his point concerning the human species as well? In reality, even if Bloom hadn't included the human species at all in his thesis his case is close as it comes to shut-tight. Concerning humans then, Bloom goes way back to the mountains of Sparta and its hardcore principles of weeding out the "weak" compared to those of Athens which kept a place for mostly everyone through a much more liberal system. From there on he progresses effortlessly towards modern times and doesn't lose a note in his effort. The final frontier is of course the internet, which Bloom claims is our biggest high-tech bid of mass mind processing. It becomes almost sci-fi by then (it certainly is pure reality of course) and it's a bombastic closing for a book that starts out in fascinating fashion and ends just in the same manner if not more so. In the end, and as you reach the final chapter, you have the intense impression that you've had a hyper-exciting chat with a very insightful human being. Reading this book isn't simply a pleasure because of the comfortable and inviting style in which it is written but mainly because you emerge a more expanded mind by the time you're done. The charisma of Bloom to make you "think big" i

On the evolution of the planetary mind

Howard Bloom's Global Brain is one of those books, like Edward O. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), and Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999), that presents the distillation of a lifetime of learning by an original and gifted intellect on the subject of who we are, where we came from, and where we might be going, and presents that knowledge to the reader in an exciting and readable fashion. By the way, the very learned and articulate Howard Bloom (our author) is not to be confused with the also very learned and articulate literary critic Harold Bloom. Bloom's theme is the unrecognized power of group selection, interspecies intelligence, and the dialectic dance down through the ages of what he calls "conformity enforcers" and "diversity generators." These diametrically opposed forces, he argues, actually function as the yin and yang of the body politic, active in all group phenomena from bacteria to street gangs. He is building on the idea that a "complex adaptive system," such as an ant colony or an animal's immune system is itself a collective intelligence. He extends that idea by arguing that a population, whether of humans or bacteria, is a collective intelligence as well. Put another way, intelligence manifests itself as an emergent property of a group. Furthermore, intelligence manifests itself as an emergent property of a collection of interacting groups. This idea is certainly not original with Bloom--indeed it is part of the Zeitgeist of our age--but his delineation of it is the most compelling and thorough that I have read. It runs counter to the prevailing orthodoxy in evolutionary theory. In particular it is in opposition to Richard Dawkins's selfish gene theories and Ernst Mayr's insistence that natural selection operates on individuals not on populations. It is a synthesis of ideas that will, I believe, in the next decade or two, greatly alter the perspective of many of our scientific disciplines. Bloom also posits "inner-judges" which function like biological super-egos; and "resource shifters" which function like neural nets, rewarding those strands of the group that are successful, punishing those that are not. To this he adds the playfully named "intergroup tournaments"; that is, war and other competitions between groups as close as human bands and as diverse as animals and their microbial parasites. Bloom defines these ideas on pages 42-44 and elaborates on them throughout the book with a summary in the final chapter. The key idea that needs emphasis here is that Bloom believes (as I do) that evolution, cultural and biological, operates on groups as well as on individuals--groups of people, groups of animals, groups of microbes--cities, tribes, gangs, herds, species, bacterial colonies and viral masses. He sees all forms of life as interconnected in ways that are

Live and Let Die Group Dynamics, Bacteria Are Winning

Very very few books actually need to be read word for word, beginning with the bibliography and ending with the footnotes. This is one of those books. While there are some giant leaps of faith and unexplained challenges to the author's central premises (e.g. after an entire chapter on why Athenian diversity was superior to Spartan selection, the catastophic loss of Athens to Sparta in 404 BC receives one sentence), this is a deep book whose detail requires careful absorbtion. I like this book and recommend it to everyone concerned with day to day thinking and information operations. I like it because it off-sets the current fascination with the world-wide web and electronic connectivity, and provides a historical and biologically based foundation for thinking about what Kevin Kelly and Stuart Brand set forth in the 1970's through the 1990's: the rise of neo-biological civilization and the concepts of co-evolution. There are a number of vital observations that are relevant to how we organize ourselves and how we treat diversity. Among these: 1)The five major elements of global inter-species and inter-group network intelligence are the conformity enforcers; the diversity generators; the inner-judges; resource shifters; and inter-group tournaments. You have to read the book to appreciate the breadth and value of how these work within all species from bacteria to homo sapiens. 2) Bacteria have extraordinary strategies for rapid-fire external information collection and exchange, quick-paced inventiveness, and global data sharing. Species higher up on the evolutionary scale do not always retain these capabilities--they internalize capabilities while losing organic connectivity to others. 3) Imitative learning, while beneficial in general, can be extremely hazardous to inventiveness and adaptation. This ties in with his wonderful discussion of reality as a shared hallucination--fully one half of a person's brain cells are killed off by culturally-driven framing. 4) Non-conformists--diversity generators--are absolutely vital to the survival of any species because they are "option generators"--but too often those in power (e.g. a corporate presidency that thinks it knows all it needs to know) will shut out and even ruin the very non-conformists it most needs to adapt to external challenges it does not understand. 5) Labor theories of productivity that exclude calculation of the time and enegy spent on information exchange are out-moded and counter-productive. In this the author is greatly reinforced by Paul Strassmann's many books on Knowledge Capital (TM) and information productivity--we have the wrong metrics for evaluating individual information productivity, something Alan Greenspan saw early, but we also have the wrong metrics for evaluting *group* information productivity, something most have not figured out yet: it is called the "virtual intelligence community" or the "world brain", and that is the next information revoluton. 6) W

Global Brain: Another Pythoragean

Many of us, obscure or famous, have grand dreams but few of us will have the same one. "Global Brain" is Howard's and will appeal to one third of a scientifically literate readership, confuse a second third, and agitate the remainder.Order, entropy, and emergence or the tennis matches between variation and coherence are FUNDAMENTAL but generate anecdotes and fringe data. They will therefore seduce a few of us at 5 a.m. but irritate the journeymen weavers of normal science. Bloom is not their only recent suitor. Edelman and Tononi ("A Universe of Consciousness") and Kauffman ("Origins of Order") share his infatuation, so does Bob Wright. So did Darwin and Galton."Global" describes the inevitable emergence of cooperative strategies whether in bacteria or in nations. These gambits pay off in computer simulations as well as political and economic ones. Selfishness and non cooperation may enhance reproductive outcomes in new settings and in transient relationships but mutualism, whether bee hives or Manhattan, always emerges in a stable niche. Further, cooperation helps to stabilize that niche further and often reverses the flow of selectionism that we usually notice. Instead of environments choosing creatures, creatures choose and change environments. Howard describes that transition through human history but does more.Bloom reinforces his stories about ancient and modern human civilizations with data about bacteria and neural networks that parallel and surpass human achievement. The parallels imply a statistical order that gives him and the rest of us some greater freedom to jump levels of metaphor and to enlist computer algorithms in order to glimpse what some of the numbers might be and how they might work. (I can look backwards and see Pythagoras --- a prominent figure in the opening sections of "Global" and perhaps a saint for Howard --- read Howard's book and immediately generate the theorems that underlie it. Flip the calendar: Diogenes clears a fresh patch of sand and once more puts Alexander on hold!)Once upon a time, Pearson, Fisher and Haldane in the U.K. gave us numbers but an American, Sewall Wright, gave us images and helped to make an important sale for Darwinism back in the tumultuous '30s and '40s. (My gawd, that was only yesterday!) Howard gives us a verbal drawing of human nature, arguing from the parallel phenomena seen in molecules, solar systems, and all stops in between."Global" coincidentally mirrors Bob Wright's "Nonzero"; I find the books complementary, each enriches the coherence given by the other. Both authors use cross cultural and historical descriptions to focus on the emergence of global cooperation but Howard extends his net into the galaxy. Both writers hint of statistical underpinnings but without describing them directly.Also like "Nonzero," "Global" will annoy some people. Bloom imagines a universal mind, Wright hints of a universal theism. Either position will elicit snarky comments. Furthermore, Global was publ