Howard Bloom: The Global Brain (Interview)

This an 8-part video/interview with Howard Bloom about his classic book Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century - all 8 parts have been collected into this single playlist (just hit play and all the videos will play in succession). This book blew my mind - one of the coolest, most awe-inspiring science books I have read.

The book's description, via Amazon:

"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 humans) have evolved together as components of a worldwide learning machine. He describes the network of life on Earth as one that is, in fact, a "complex adaptive system," a global brain in which each of us plays a sometimes conscious, sometimes unknowing role. and he reveals that the World Wide Web is just the latest step in the development of this brain. These are theories as important as they are radical. Informed by twenty years of interdisciplinary research, Bloom takes us on a spellbinding journey back to the big bang to let us see how its fires forged primordial sociality. As he brings us back via surprising routes, we see how our earliest bacterial ancestors built multitrillion-member research and development teams a full 3.5 billion years ago. We watch him unravel the previously unrecognized strands of interconnectedness woven by crowds of trilobites, hunting packs of dinosaurs, feathered flying lizards gathered in flocks, troops of baboons making communal decisions, and adventurous tribes of protohumans spreading across continents but still linked by primitive forms of information networking. We soon find ourselves reconsidering our place in the world. Along the way, Bloom offers us exhilarating insights into the strange tricks of body and mind that have organized a variety of life forms: spiny lobsters, which, during the Paleozoic age, participated in communal marching rituals; and bees, which, during the age of dinosaurs, conducted collective brainwork. This fascinating tour continues on to the sometimes brutal subculture wars that have spurred the growth of human civilization since the Stone Age. Bloom shows us how culture shapes our infant brains, immersing us in a matrix of truth and mass delusion that we think of as reality.

Global Brain is more than just a brilliantly original contribution to the ongoing debate on the inner workings of evolution. It is a "grand vision," says the eminent evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, a work that transforms our very view of who we are and why.

 Enjoy the interview.

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

Jon Udell interviewing Howard Bloom.

Author of: 

• The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates ("Bloom's argument will rock your world." Barbara Ehrenreich)
• The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History ("mesmerizing" The Washington Post)
• Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century  ("reassuring and sobering" The New Yorker)
• The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism ("Impressive, stimulating, and tremendously enjoyable." James Fallows, National Correspondent, The Atlantic)

Resume, in part:

• Former Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute
• Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University
  Founder: International Paleopsychology Project
• Founder, Space Development Steering Committee
• Member Of Board Of Governors, National Space Society
• Founding Board Member: Epic of Evolution Society
• Founding Board Member, The Darwin Project
• Founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab
• Member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology. Scientific Advisory Board Member, Lifeboat Foundation
• Advisory Board Member, The Buffalo Film Festival
• Board Member, Humanity Plus
• Board of Editors, The Journal of Space Philosophy

FORA.tv - Tim O'Reilly: Birth of the Global Mind

Interesting talk - O'Reilly believes that the evolution of technology has disrupted our social structures - resulting in the birth of the "global mind." A few years back, Howard Bloom wrote a book on this idea (Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century), from a deep evolutionary perspective.  A compare and contrast would be interesting.

    Tim O'Reilly: Birth of the Global Mind from The Long Now Foundation on FORA.tv

Tim O'Reilly: Birth of the Global Mind

Tim O'Reilly discusses how evolving technology has disrupted society, and has given birth to the global mind. "The history of civilization is a story of evolution in our ability to build complex 'multicellular minds,'" says Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media (books, conferences, foo camps, Maker Faires, Make magazine.)

Speech allowed us to communicate and coordinate. Writing allowed that coordination to span time and space. Twentieth century mass communications allowed shared information and culture to blanket the world. In the 21st century, memes spread mind to mind in nearly real time.

But that's not all. In one breakthrough computer application after another, we see a new kind of man-machine symbiosis. The Google autonomous vehicle turns out not to be just a triumph of artificial intelligence algorithms. The car is guided by the cloud memory of roads driven before by human Google Streetview drivers augmented by powerful and precise new sensors. In the same way, crowd-sourced data from sensor-enabled humans is leading to smarter cities, breakthroughs in healthcare, and new economies.

The future belongs not to artificial intelligence, but to collective intelligence.

~ Tim O’Reilly is founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly also hosts conferences, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, Strata Online Conference, and Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. O’Reilly’s MAKE magazine and Maker Faire have been compared to the West Coast Computer Faire, which launched the personal computer revolution. O’Reilly is also a partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm, and is on the board of Safari Books Online. He watches the alpha geeks to determine emerging technology trends and uses his platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community.