Customer Reviews

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

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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) World War III is here now, and it is an inter-species group tournament in which we are losing because we are not collecting and exchanging vital information fast enough. The rampant continent-wide diseases (not just AIDS but the square of AIDS, malaria-anemia, tuberculosis, and hepatitis, best described by Robert D. Kaplan's works as well as Laurie Garrett) and the antibiotic-resistant (and freezer resistant) strains of toxic disease and disease carriers will kill most of us much sooner than a gun in the hands of a fellow man....unless we figure out that early warning, global coverage, and rapid response non-military surge intervention is vital to our survival.

7) Language as well as culture are killers of thought. The author is compelling and fascinating as he discusses this in detail, comparing different language-cultural "toolkits" for concepts like the environment, alternative food sources, discipline options, and so on.

8) The author, who clearly has suffered some himself from being excluded or not taken seriously, is careful to discuss both the positive and the negative aspects of the "conformity police"--the conclusion I draw from his overall discussion is that we are seriously at risk, as humans in general but as Anglo-Saxons in particular, because the conformity police control all the resources (including National Science Foundation grants) and the iconoclasts are being shunned and starved.

9)The chapters on the kidnapping of the mass mind and how reality is a shared group hallucination draw ably on earlier works such as "The Social Construction of Reality". The author excels at discussing how a very small number of people--25,000 in the case of Hitler's takeover of Germany--can combine cultural conformity traits with a little terror and corruption to dominate much larger groups of otherwise intelligent beings.

10) Internal processing matters more than external collection. I found this fascinating. Kevin Kelly and Stuart Brand and others have led the way in earlier decades, but the author does a great job of pointing out how an effective learning machine has far more internal connections than external windows, and that in a "hive mind" what you do with what you know individually--in terms of sharing with others--is vastly more important than how much you as a single individual might know.

I am not as upbeat as other reviewers about how this book suggests endless possibilities for a return to the perfect earth and inter-galactic migration. If anything, I am fairly concerned that the bacteria will win this war and that it will be another human species, billions of years from today, that may finally get it right. While we know everything we need to know to radically alter the manner in which we collect, process, and share information, our political conformity police and our economic robber barons are intent on keeping us stupid as a people in this generation. Nothing stands between us and Howard Bloom's vision for bio-diverse salvation but our own inherent timidity, rigidity, and inertness--we are chained by old ideas and loath to explore new ones. We prefer death by habit to life by choice. This is very scary stuff--this is a *great* book.

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 not obvious, but discernable if we find the right perspective. Bloom's perspective begins with the physics of the big bang, continues through pre-Cambrian microbial jungle, to the dialectic dance of Sparta and Athens, even to pre-September 11th Afghanistan (perspicaciously, by the way), until he concludes that all life on earth is, and has been, plunging toward an emergent property which might be called Gaia with a planetary brain.

Some observations:

"Reality is a mass hallucination" (p. 193) or "Reality is a Shared Hallucination" (title of Chapter 8; see also page 2 and page 170). This declaration, expressed somewhat differently, is a tenet of Buddhism, but here Bloom makes the case from a scientific point of view, and he makes it very well.

"Humans have been outfoxed...by a collective mind far older and nimbler than any we've developed to this point--the 3.5-billion-year-old global microbial brain." (p. 115) What Bloom is asserting here and throughout the book is that bacteria constitute a superorganism with an intelligence superior to ours that expresses itself through its complex chemistry and tactile behavior.

"...[T]he brain we think belongs solely to our kind achieves its goals by tapping the data banks of eagles, wheat, sheep, rodents, grasses, viruses, and lowly E. coli." (p. 220) This dovetails with "We are modules of a planetary mind..." (p. 219) and "the global brain...is a multispecies thing" (p. 216), and the final line in the text, "We are neurons of this planet's interspecies mind." (p. 223)

In short, this is one heck of a book. And I'm just talking about the text, which is written in a spirited--sometimes even giddy--style that is infectious and thoroughly engaging. There are 66 pages of footnotes and a 62-page bibliography listing perhaps 500 titles. Some of footnotes contain multiple references, and of course there are errors. It is clear, for example, that human class did not exist 25 million years ago (as is asserted on page 148). When one looks at Bloom's footnote for the assertion, one realizes that he probably meant 25 thousand years ago. The point here is that we shouldn't be put off by all of his references. Those references allow us to check on his facts and gauge his interpretations. And, were any of us to actually read all of the approximately 500 titles he lists, I think we could at the very least apply for our own special ivory tower and some kind of honorary degree.

Bottom line: read this book.

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" is beyond any question. He elevates you to great heights and makes you see life from way up there while thrusting you through many dimensions of reality, micro or macro.

I can go on and on, about why this is is one of the most important books on the market right now, but i hope the point has been laid out clearly enough. The hype preceeding this book and which started with the previous one (The Lucifer principle) is obviously 100% justified.

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.

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 published near Bill Hamilton's death. Thus, Howard fires his customary barbs about neoDarwinists (he really hates them!) at the very time one of their modern leaders dies of malaria contracted in Africa. The overlap in events is unfortunate for all of us, especially for those of us who like to combine Hamilton's contributions with the ideas from Bloom, Edelman, Goodwin, Kauffman, and anyone else infected by the complexity zealots, whether from Santa Cruz and Santa Fe.

Jame Brody, Ph.D. Editor, Evolutionary Psychology Forum, Behavior OnLine

In the follow up to "The Lucifer Principle", Howard Bloom peels away more layers of the onion to show readers the details of how the world really works. Bloom looks into the basic operations of nature, economies, cultures and consciousness and explains the unifying and underlying principles that define the world around and inside us. He continues to discuss the singular nature of our world, and the increasing existence of what he terms the "Global Brain"--a single, intelligent entity composed of the interactions of all life.

Bloom's analysis and detail are impressive. "Global Brain" provides some of the finest examples anywhere illustrating the interconnectedness of man, nature, markets and cultures. He provides a sound proof for his thesis that the natural tendency of life is to always increase in scope and interconnectivity, and he throws in an enlightening look into specific processes of diversification, expansion, communication, judgment and conformity enforcement that hold as true for the natural world as for human economies, societies and psychology.

Unfortunately, Bloom concedes defeat to the whims of his self-titled "super-organism". After providing such an outstanding explanation of how we work within the world around us, he wraps up his book with a rather terse surrender: even though we can understand the world around us we cannot hope to control its processes or its impact on our lives, so we should just accept our fate and carry on. While I found the majority of Bloom's book exceptional, I strongly reject his conclusion. Understanding of the processes and principles on which our world operates is the key to increasing our ability to control and influence the events of our existence. I highly recommend "Global Brain" for its analysis and explanation of these concepts, but I encourage readers to draw their own conclusions. We cannot alter the basic principles of the market, of evolution, or of our own consciousness, but by understanding them and how they control us we can identify how and when we are working against our own best interests--we can remove ourselves from that chain of control.

Howard Bloom's Global brain is a book that explores one pivotal theme, which I felt other reviewers did not hint at. This theme is that of Group Selection versus individual selection, and while he explored the idea of individual selection in the Lucifer Principle, he deals more with the fact that this does not negate a higher fucntioning, that of group selection, and the intriguing thing about group selection is that, as hinted at by Bloom, This group selection is a principle of evolution, and involves ever greater series of organizing principles, thereby leading to the idea of a global brain or consciousness, which immediately leads one into thinking about Quantum physics, and the holographic or illusory properties of perception usually attributed to the brain.And yes, while this book is not a theory of everything, it is a continuation of the Lucifer Principle, it deals with ideas such as the Spatan verus Athens Paradigm, which seems very useful when examining modern societies, as well as how memes function, particular as the species conflicts using ideas, ideas which are utilized by the Global brain to transform the beings on it and to itself evolve into other more complex, as yet unimagined forms. Bloom is excellent at this, and the book itself, as is the purpose I think of a good book, is to stimulate the reader into thinking about such matters, and to have their own ideas about them. I recommend this book to the curious, the wellread, and to the open minded.It is a good, quick, fun read, and it has a great many insights, not all of which are obvious. Check it out.

This book was simply breathtaking. Howard Bloom gives an excellent summary of the history of life and evolution in order to explain a mass consciousness, or a "Global Brain". He does so by elaborating on Group selection, arguably more convincing than individual selection. If we did indeed evolve from lesser creatures, then we evolved from creatures that had to group together in order to conquer their surroundings. What did a single bacterium ever accomplish? Howard weaves in and out of time and space so that the Spartans are just as relevant as any other extinct group that strictly enforced conformity and failed to support diversity, and the Athenians are not unlike a group of bacteria that took advantage of mutations in order to survive or thrive when conditions changed. While Bloom is extraordinarily edifying and quite vast in scope, I failed to find a central theme. The conclusion of the book seemed to be a warning of the virility of viruses and that we are coming ever closer to a war that pits mankind against bacteria. I recommend this book on the merit of its incredible historical scope and the knowledge emparted. I feel that I have taken a few steps closer toward enlightment, a state I hope to reach when I feel comfortable in my knowledge of the world.

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"Colonel" Bloom, the recently self-appointed commander of the Starship "Global Brain" has caught millennial fever. In his latest flight manual he sets out to convince us that everything on planet earth is an inter-connected, consciously aware, intelligent machine.

Like so much writing done on the fringes of the social sciences his ramblings get dangerously close to the murky world of pseudo-science.

In order to give his "opus" an allure of credibility and robustness the book is well endowed with footnotes and a bibliography. In fact they take up 150 pages of this 370-page book. It's a shame that he does not check the veracity of his citations. On page 59 we have the "in the wild" aggression of chimpanzees throwing stones at tigers. It's a shame that tigers are only found in Asia and chimps are restricted to Africa. That chimp had a strong arm! It's this sort of sloppiness that gives the behavioural sciences a bad name. The recent imbroglio over the anthropological studies of the Yanomamo Indians in the Amazon jungle is a product of such ill-disciplined research.

Bloom's book claims to cover the "Evolution of the Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century". We are given endless details on the sex-life of Archaeozoic primitive life forms and gory descriptions of pornographic Neolithic cave paintings (p103 -104). The flowering of western civilization in the past 500 years with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the last 150 years of technology development is dismissed in a few flimsy chapters. Surely if there is a Global Brain emerging the best evidence would be seen in the work of Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Our Italian seer is dismissed by Bloom in a few lines as an improver of telescopes, whereas Isaac and Albert don't rate a mention in his book at all.

Bloom seems to endorse the mentality of the mob. He gives himself away when describing the maverick ants (p38) who go hunting for new food sources away from the colony. Bloom says they merely "stumble" on food, they don't explore systematically or work rationally towards their discoveries. This behaviour which can result in saving the colony from starvation is done by individual trailblazers, not by the "mass mind" of the collective machine.

Bloom weaves his way on a convolute voyage along the paths already well worn by followers of Darwin, Marx and Freud. Despite his many tenuous arguments and his histrionic style Bloom may just be right after all. The real test will be when the Global Brain takes up chess.

I am not sure I get this book very well. Perhaps that is because the very notion of a 'collective mind'or 'global brain' is something I find difficult to understand. I have always believed that individuals have minds(if that is the proper way to say it) and they alone think and plan and coordinate action. It is difficult for me to understand the notion of a 'collective mind' without understanding where its center is- center for self- consciousness and reflection.
With that reservation I begin by citing 'Cyberplay's description of this book.

"Global Brain presents evidence that the shared intelligence of humankind is part of a larger planetary mind, one that combines the learning of microbes, waterfowl, predatory cats, idealists, militants, religionists, and scientists. The book predicts that the great world war of the 21st century will take place between the collective intelligence of humanity and that of a world wide web 96 trillion generations old and billions of years wise-the global internet between microbial societies. Finally, Global Brain anticipates some of the creative paths this planet's team of battlers and borrowers may take during the next one-hundred and fifty years."

Again I am not sure I understand this. Bloom has categories for different kinds of operatives within the global -brain. He places special value on those capable of thinking and acting in ways outside the consensus. But so far as I can understand it he differentiates between the collective brain of the human, and other forms of collective brain, such as that of those he considers our great rivals, bacteria. Does this mean that one part of the overall global brain( Let us say the 'human part') is striving to coopt the whole of reality?

I also wonder if Bloom is talking about some vast cosmic evolutionary process from the Big Bang on, what the ultimate goal of this is? Is it one vast system under one vast self -reflexive consciousness?

I wonder too what connection these vast networks have to do with our own individual lives, and whether in terms of valuation they can ever be equal to them. We love and care for individuals more than we can ever love and care (At least most of us) for the whole system of Brain or Mind or Collective Consciousness.

I too wonder what all this has to do with traditional Western religious conceptions of a Creator God, Who is also Providence leading and ruling all to its ideal end.

This book has the great value of stimulating us to ask ultimate questions, perhaps even provides new formulations in which ultimate questions are asked in ways not asked before.