'Free Mojtaba and Arash Day'

22nd February 2005

For an informed and interesting article on collective intelligence & wisdom, there is this wonderful article (quite long) called 'Coming Together' - recommended

I've quoted from the futurist and thinker Barbera Marx Hubbard before: so I will again!

"Nature always creates new bodies for new frontiers; witness the sequence of bodies from fish to amphibians to mammals to humans, and now to universal humans. We are at the threshold of genuine newness. The only difference between us and other creatures who experienced a radical change is that we are entering the process consciously."

Barbara Marx Hubbard, Conscious Evolution

For a short interview with her - check out this page of 'What is Enlightenment?'

The concept of collective intelligence is coming to the fore as perhaps the evolutionary potential, or directional drive, behind the Internet, as well as our burgeoning electronically networked social-sphere. Although I recognise that electronic access is still closed to many sectors of our global sphere, and beyond the capacity of many developing countries - this is changing. Negroponte's move towards a $100 computer is a step here.

One working definition of collective intelligence is:
'the enhancement, optimal use, and fusion of skill, imagination, and intellectual energy, regardless of their qualitative diversity. This idea of collective intelligence obviously involves the sharing of memory, imagination, and experience through the widespread exchange of knowledge, new forms of flexible organisation and co-ordination in real time.' (Pierre Levy)

As I've discussed before, there are now many sites and movements devoted to this cause. See 'The Transitioner' for an extensive site that summaries the arguments and understandings on this topic.

If humanity is increasingly able to share its collective memory externally and as both an open-source and a pooled-resource, then we have an important opportunity opening before us as for the first time in our recorded history we have a species-collective.

In this way, both cultural and social evolution is a distributed and collective affair. Since biological evolution has now been overtaken by conscious cultural evolution (see earlier blog referring to Freeman Dyson), our ever-accelerating intelligence-mutation can be in the hands of the many rather than the few.

This is not new either - it is merely the actualisation of the Over-Mind... the Noosphere. What is new is its actuality in our foreseeable future.

We can be both as the particle and the wave: as the individual and the whole. We are the physical manifestation of our quantum potentiality.

For an exquisite journey through the spheres, try this link into our cosmic nebula

The well-respected Freeman Dyson - of Princeton's 'Institute for Advanced Study' - has commented upon what has been postulated as the post-Darwinian era. Here, cultural evolution has overtaken biological evolution:

"cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence" - quoted from 'The Darwinian Interlude'

Our progress, it is now being recognised, is being spearheaded by our spread of ideas, rather than genetic inheritance. And mobile communications are helping to foster this dramatic change. In turn, these technologies will allow for a greater dispertion of ideas, and thoughts, which can become as memes to influence our collective thought processes - a move towards a synergetic collective, global mind? What Teilhard de Chardin envisioned as the 'noosphere'?

Let us remember: 'Every Thought has a parallel action' (Mevlana)