Collective Intelligence: The Need for Synthesis

To upgrade our thinking patterns is a beginning step to an upgrade in human consciousness, and is necessary if we are to succeed in adapting to our rapidly and inevitably changing world. In other words, if we don’t enact a change, or learn to adapt to the incoming energies of change and transformation, our presence is likely to be no longer required, or needed. It is a sobering thought.

The human species has entered a period of profound, fundamental, and unprecedented change. It needs to acquire new skills in order to co-exist with an environment that is itself undergoing profound change within the larger fabric of living systems - planetary, solar, and galactic. We need to upgrade our capacities in order to have the internal resistance to an upgrade in energies. Not to do so may result, quite literally, in us blowing a species-fuse! Whichever way we look at it, we are in need of preparation. If we are not prepared, that which manifests as truth may very well seem like science-fiction. And it needs to be stressed that our future depends to a large degree upon the ability to renew our perceptions about the world. It is a question of how our inner vision can be brought in balance with (and in support to) the impacts of a changing environment. If there is enough ‘critical mass’ of mind-change then there is a better possibility that shifting energies will be experienced less chaotically. Evolutionary biologist Elizabeth Sahtouris expresses the same sentiment when she writes


While people have always created reality out of their beliefs, until now a handful of powerful people dictated the beliefs of each human culture. The glory of our own time is that the news is finally out that each and every one of us has the authority, even the mandate, to choose the beliefs by which we live and create our individual and communal lives. To create the human future well we need good Vistas - consciously created belief systems comprised of worldviews and the values for negotiating them courageously and lovingly.




Our priority is to first change our perceptions and way of thinking. It is a challenge we face to adapt our thinking so that we ‘think-in-sync’ with our changing world.

Collective Intelligence: The Need for Synthesis

All living species are inherently connected in varying degrees of subtlety - the collective mind of humanity is no exception. Often we discover our ideas are simultaneously shared with our friends or associates as minds in close contact/proximity entangle together and share thought-forms. The collective mind of humanity is moving ever closer to being more awakened, yet we require triggers, stimuli, in order to activate latent capacities. Global communications have helped to increase our awareness of distant events and to trigger shared empathy and collective emotionality. This is part of what can be termed ‘collective intelligence’; others have named this the ‘global brain’, or the ‘noosphere’. The thought forms that we emanate go towards the state of our collective mind, and are functional in that an intentional act carries with it more force, power, and effectiveness than a non-intentional action.

A species collective intelligence can exist without being self-aware because it already exists. A collective consciousness does not require that all ‘components’ be conscious since a conscious entity produces an exponential effect, so only a relatively few conscious ‘nodes’ or ‘awake people’ can represent the many. This is why human history has progressed from the actions of the few; it is not surprising that many of the agents of human history have been conscious of the collective mind of humanity, or have been the agents of conscious entities. As proclaimed inventor Doug Engelbart says – ‘The key thing about all the world’s big problems is that they have to be dealt with collectively...If we don’t get collectively smarter, we’re doomed’. Likewise, the well-known thinker Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase ‘the global village’, sees humanity as a total global community. He wrote that where previously human evolution was about the ‘outering’ of physical tools and technology for progress, human acceleration is now concerned with the intensification of the central nervous system worldwide: ‘Evolution became not an involuntary response of organisms to new conditions but a part of the consensus of human consciousness. Such a revolution is enormously greater and more confusing to past attitudes than anything that can confront a mere culture or civilisation’.

The analogy is that of humanity operating as a planetary ‘nervous system’; a global brain, with each individual representing a firing neuron and our communications as conscious informational networks. Systems philosopher Ervin Laszlo defines the global brain as:



The global brain is the quasi-neural energy - and information - processing network created by six and a half billion humans on the planet, interacting in many ways, private as well as public, and on many levels, local as well as global. A quantum shift in the global brain is a sudden and fundamental transformation in the relations of a significant segment of the six and a half billion humans to each other and to nature - a macroshift in society - and a likewise sudden and fundamental transformation in cutting-edge perceptions regarding the nature of reality - a paradigm shift in science. The two shifts together make for a veritable “reality revolution” in society as well as in science.



What Laszlo refers to as the ‘reality revolution’ is simultaneously a ‘quantum’ shift in the species collective mind alongside a global transformation in perception regarding the nature of reality. For such a revolution to occur during our period of transition on this planet would be of tremendous value in terms of parallel evolutionary shifts. As famed Jesuit preist and ‘noosphere philospher’ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote: ‘…according to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together. There is no mind without synthesis’. It is no coincidence that at the same time our planet, within its solar family, is experiencing a sudden evolutionary ‘jump point’ (or phase transition), our species is coming also to a peak in its collective mind. We must remember that throughout human history the real and fundamental changes have always come about from sufficient numbers of people changing their minds; rather than from governments or social decrees. By a deliberate change in the way people perceive reality, and thus the world, great shifts can be brought about. It is a dangerous flaw to take our own limits of perception to be the limits of our world, as Schopenhauer so ably noted.