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Global Brain The Evolution Of Mass Mind From The Big Bang To The 21st Century



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




A Brief History of Everything is an altogether friendly and accessible account of men and women's place in a universe of sex, soul, and spirit, by Ken Wilber. Wilber examines the course of evolution as the unfolding manifestation of Spirit, from matter to life to mind, including the higher stages of spiritual development where Spirit becomes conscious of itself. In each of these domains, there are recurring patterns, and by looking at them, we can learn much about the predicament of our world - and the direction we must take if "global transformation" is to become a reality.


Until the End of Time is Brian Greene's breathtaking new exploration of the cosmos and our quest to find meaning in the face of this vast expanse. Greene takes us on a journey from the big bang to the end of time, exploring how lasting structures formed, how life and mind emerged, and how we grapple with our existence through narrative, myth, religion, creative expression, science, the quest for truth, and a deep longing for the eternal.


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, flocks of flying lizards, 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 Era, 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.


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Author Howard Bloom is Tom Needham's special guest this Thursday at 6 pm EST on WUSB's 'The Sounds of Film.'Britain'sChannel4 TV once called Howard Bloom "the next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Freud." He is the author of many books including 'The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History,' 'Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century,' 'The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Revision of Capitalism,' The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates,' and 'How I Accidentally Started the Sixties.'He is considered an expert in mass behavior, from the mass behavior of quarks to the mass behavior of human beings. He has lectured at Yale, Stanford, and Columbia University's Department of Neuroscience. His writing has appeared in 'The Washington Post,' 'The Wall Street Journal,' 'Wired,' and 'The Village Voice.'In the 1970s and 1980s, he founded the Howard Bloom Organization, one of music industry's most successful publicity firms. Some of his clients included John Mellencamp, Billy Joel, Prince, Michael Jackson, Simon & Garfunkel, Talking Heads, Cyndi Lauper and Earth Wind & Fire.


This linguistic minutia came to mind as I read Howard Bloom's Global Bra in The Evolution of Moss Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century How can one capture the evolution of everything in the cosmos from the start to now in a single book? One way is through metaphor, and Bloom's choice for his carrier is the computer--more specifically, the Internet and World Wide Web--that he hopes will transfer the idea of nerve cells communicating across a brain to individuals talking across a world.


Bloom correctly credits the metaphor to others (global brain metaphors have been common since the early 1980s), but he sees something deeper, in both time and space. "This planetary mind is neither uniquely human nor a product of technology." Indeed, it goes all the way back to the beginning. Al Gore didn't invent the Internet; bacteria did. "Three and a half billion years ago, our earliest cellular ancestors, bacteria, evolved in colonies. Each bacterium couldn't live without the comfort of rubbing against its neighbors. If it was separated from its companions, a healthy bacterium would rapidly divide to create a new society filled with fresh compatriots. Each colony of these single-celled foremothers faced warfare, disaster, the hunt for food, and windfalls of plenty as a megateam."


Bloom's "new scientific theory," as he calls it, explains "the inner workings of something to which conventional evolutionary thinkers have been blind: a planet pulsing with a more-than-massive data-sharing mind." Why haven't these scientists shared Bloom's vision? The tyranny of individual selection has blinded them to the possibilities of group selection. This is a contentious issue tantamount to, if you will excuse my own metaphor making, Baptists and Anabaptists debating the merits of infant baptism, with emotions running just as high and factions fighting just as divisively.


My first thought in considering this set of ideas was the writing of Howard Bloom (Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century) but Chorost is really talking about something different. The second thing I thought about was the idea of adding, as the very first project, a tactile connectivity that allowed for a slap upside the head. When I look at the behavior of a lot of people on line, such as the global warming denialists who send me death threats or the misogynist creeps who stalk Rebecca Watson or Surly Amy, it is clear to me that those people would probably not act as they do if a) everybody knew who they were (though certain people seem to not care about that) and/or b) if their behavior was being carried out face to face with other people. And, more importantly, within reach. 2ff7e9595c


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