Global Brain by Howard Bloom

The correspondence below about my comments of Howard Bloom's Global Brain is the genesis of my having started a blog.

Paul:

Anyone who can write such glorious opinions should definitely have a blog! How can you not share them with the world? Depriving all but the select few of us who correspond with you of some of the best entertainment in town! I am laughing so hard tears are streaming down my face!How did you know that I love four box charts – I have them for nearly everything – in fact one was intimately involved in one of my early meetings with Jean – but then that is another story – perhaps for another cup of coffee….
Jane

The Review

Jane:

Here is a framework for you, a matrix with 4 members" Conscious and Competent (and their opposite). You can have four combinations: Conscious-Competent, Conscious-Incompetent, Unconscious-Competent, and Unconscious-Incompetent. Howard Bloom is Conscious-Incompetent, in other words an well-read-opinionated-supercrank, the worst of its kind. Frankly, talking about his book is a waste of ink. After twohundredwhoknowshowmany pages (which I raced through to stop the agony) I have no idea where his famed Global Brain or Global Network comes from or what it is. His breathless error-filled, simplified, poorly-written chapters, like Athens vs. Sparta, etc., support not a wit his thesis. Is it that we are linked with bacteria and honey badgers into a planetary web (check out the first inane paragraph on page 207). So what? Tell me what you have learnt from him that you can use. What happened to memes?, Do you now understand how other people or mitochondria think and receive your message. Can you now talk to the blue algae, like Dr. Doolittle? Can you send messages to your friend using your pet cow's, Abullard's mooings? Conjure up Pythagoras for an intergalactic travel, along with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the usual suspects?As you gather, reading The Global Brain, was extremely exasperating. I used up my allotted expletive, "Idiot", on the margin; I was forced to use "Idiot squared and cubed", borrowing infinities not dreamt of even by Cantor. By the way, I am certain Bloom will end up in an asylum, where he will consider himself diversity generator, talking to the viruses, quarks and leptons, hoping for another Big Bang so he could socialize with the protons. Nuff said. He heaps an awful lot of facts from the Big Bang to our time and beyond to arrive at his thesis (whatever it is), and I am not exactly persuaded by the facts that protons are social and bacteria communicate that there is a global network now. He believes his own metaphors. He plays fast and loose with facts, picks what he needs, ignores counter opinions, and if he brings them up, they appear as caricatures. Can't separate facts, hypotheses, verified, unverified, unverifiable, whatever. He clearly misunderstands genetics, let alone his bete noir, the selfish gene. Nowhere does he give a shred information on the mechanism for global linking. As for group selection, I am firmly against it because I can find no mechanism for it; Bloom's smarter colleague, D.S. Wilson uses Bloom's derided method of game theory and genetics to derive altruism from group selection, and he maybe right. So what, that is an intramural skirmish among scientists.
A framework that may be helpful to you guys is his five essential elements for the “collective learning machine”, even though even here I have to say that the best part is the fancy nomenclature. Maybe he should be a consultant. Any job openings with your company? How about it? If you are still around.

1. “Conformity enforcers stamp enough cookie-cutter similarities into the members of a group to give it an identity…”
2. “Diversity generators spawn variety. Each individual represents a hypothesis in the communal mind…”
3. “Inner-judges are biological built-ins which continually take our measure, rewarding us when our contribution seems to be of value and punishing us when our guesswork proves unwelcome or way off the mark…”
4. “Resource shifters shunt riches, admiration, and influence to learning-machine members who cruise through challenges and give folks what they want. Meanwhile, resource shifters cast individuals who can’t get a handle on what’s going on into some equivalent of pennilessness and unpopularity…”
5. “Intergroup tournaments…force each collective intelligence, each group brain, to churn out innovations for the fun of winning or for sheer survival’s sake.” Whatever...

But even here I can't resist pointing out that whenever in any system there is similarity, it is of course due to his Conformity enforcers; if there is a change, the Diversity generators are responsible, when there is a competition for anything he drags in Intergroup tournaments. It's like tarot cards. Or worse. I can come up with a framework:1. Strong beats weak 2. Slow outlasts fast, 3. Needy gets supplied first (or last), 4. Grasshopper syndrome (save now spend later). 5. If you don't use it (right away) you lose it. I can go through the history of the Universe selecting events that can be demonstrated using the above. Or using the "rule of three" which is no rule whatsoever: Driving Force, Resisting Force, and Resolution. Come to think about it, a murky philosopher, Hegel (now there is a man who would love Bloom and maybe vice versa) has already come up with something equally unverifiable, with which he held Europe in awe for a century: Thesis, Anti-thesis, Synthesis. Or here is another or (you see what happens when I get started!): 1. Attraction wins, 2. Repulsion wins, 3. Revolving things. I bet I could make it works. If things move, Attr, beats Rep., if they decline, Rep. wins over Attr, and so on.I have read many so called systems theorizers: In history the most famous historiographers are Spangler (absolutely superb), and Toynbee (almost as good), and of course Carl Marx (I can tell you guys a few things about communism!). Of course, recently Fukuyama (The End of History) and Huntington (The Clash of Civilization). By far the best system builder is a (transpersonal) philosopher named Ken Wilber. In fact, in my opinion he is the best philosopher of the last 30 years. He is also a Buddhist or Eastern monk, but no one is perfect. I have read everything he has written, which is a lot, and some of it is not easy. He is crystal clear in his writings, but he has a lot to say. His Magnum Opus is Sex, Ecology, Spirituality but that takes commitment (worth it). An interesting starter is Theory of Everything.If I don't stop I will be longer-winded than Howard Bloom.

Paul