Global brain

The Global Brain is a metaphor for the intelligent network formed by humans together with the knowledge and communication technologies that connect them.

The term was first coined in 1982 by Peter Russell in his book The Global Brain. The first peer-reviewed article on the subject was written by Mayer-Kress and Barczys in 1995.

More recently, Prof. Satish Nambisan (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) and Prof. Mohan Sawhney (Northwestern University) have applied the term to the management field - in their book The Global Brain - to describe the vast creative potential that lies outside company boundaries.

Francis Heylighen, who contributed much to the development of the concept, distinguished (in (Heylighen 2005)) three main aspects of the global brain metaphor. These are the organicism, encyclopedism and emergentism aspects.

Organicism aspect

Main article: superorganism

This approach sees our planet or our society as a living system. This view can be dated back to 1159 with John of Salisbury. In his treatise of political science the Policraticus he compares society to a creature. Each social class plays a role attributed by God: the king is the head, the Church is the soul, the judges and governors are the eyes and the ears, soldiers the hands and farmers the feets. Thomas Hobbes also compared society to the marine monster, the Leviathan in his famous piece of work bearing the same name. However, it is Herbert Spencer who studied in most details this analogy in his monumental Principles of Sociology. Gregory Stock proposed in 1993 a modern vision of superorganism formed by humans and machines, which he calls "Metaman". The Gaia hypothesis envisioned by James Lovelock in 1986 also sees the Earth as a living organism. In this organic metaphor, the analogue of the nervous system is thus the global brain. The exchanges of information on Earth are processing at a high rate and speed, similarly as the functioning of a nervous system.

Encyclopedism aspect

In the encylopedism aspect, the emphasis is in developing a network of universal knowledge. The first encyclopedic endeavour was attempted by the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert. However, at the end of the 19th century, the amount of knowledge was too important to be published in one single synthetic piece of work. To tackle this problem, Paul Otlet founded the documentation science, now called information science. H. G. Wells also proposed the idea of a world encyclopedia, or World Brain. Nowadays this dream of an universal encyclopedia seems to become a reality with Wikipedia. It is also noteworthy that Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, was inspired by the free associative possibilities of the brain for his invention. The brain can link different kinds of information without any apparent link otherwise; Lee thought that computers could become much more powerful if they could imitate this functioning, i.e. make links between any arbitrary piece of information. (Berners-Lee 1999, p4 and p41).

Emergentism aspect

This approach focuses on more spiritual and speculative aspects of the global brain. The global brain is here seen as a higher level of evolution Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his Phenomenon of Man made a remarkable synthesis of science and religion and had a vision of evolution towards more complexity and consciousness. He anticipated a new level of consciousness, a network of thoughts which he called the noosphere. This can be interpreted as a very impressive anticipation of internet and the web. Peter Russell also emphasised the spiritual dimension that everyone should strive for, in order to achieve a greater synergy in the superorganism.

The emergence of a higher order system in evolution may be called a "metasystem transition" (a concept introduced by Valentin Turchin) or a "major evolutionary transition" (see Szathmary and John Maynard Smith, Nature, 16 March 1995) .

Application in Management

The term Global Brain has also been applied recently in the management field to reflect the global innovation network that companies can tap into to enhance their innovation agenda. In this perspective, the term relates to the global network of scientists, independent inventors, academic researchers, customers, suppliers, as well as different types of innovation intermediaries who facilitate the innovation process (for example, idea scouts, innovation capitalist, etc.). See: "The Global Brain: Your Roadmap for Innovating Faster and Smarter in a Networked World" by Satish Nambisan and Mohan Sawhney, published by the Wharton School Publishing, 2007.

See also

• Gaia hypothesis
• Metaman (Gregory Stock)
• Noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin)
• Social organism
• Superorganism
• World Brain (H. G. Wells)
• Management cybernetics

External links

• The Global Brain FAQ.[1]
• The Global Brain
• Peter Russell's website
• Global Brain mailing list (subscription moderated). [2]
• The World Syntegrity Project

Bibliography

Wide audience

• P. Russell 1982': "The Global Brain Awakens" (emphasis on philosophy and consciousness)
• G. Stock: "Metaman" (social and economic evolution)
• J. de Rosnay: "The Symbiotic Man" (new sciences and technologies).

Advanced litterature

• See references about the Global Brain [3]

• Berners-Lee, Tim (1999) – Weaving the Web. Texere, London.
• Bloom, Howard (2000) Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century.
• Goertzel, B. (2001) - Creating Internet Intelligence: Wild Computing, Distributed Digital Consciousness, and the Emerging Global Brain. Ed. Plenum.
• Heylighen F. (2007): Accelerating Socio-Technological Evolution: from ephemeralization and stigmergy to the global brain, in: "Globalization as an Evolutionary Process: Modeling Global Change", edited by George Modelski, Tessaleno Devezas, and William Thompson, London: Routledge, p.286-335.[4]
• Heylighen F. (2007): "The Global Superorganism: an evolutionary-cybernetic model of the emerging network society", Social Evolution & History. 6 No. 1,p. 58-119--a detailed exposition of the superorganism/global brain view of society, and an examination of the underlying evolutionary mechanisms, with applications to the on-going and future developments in a globalizing world [5]
• Heylighen F. (2005): "Conceptions of a Global Brain: an historical review", , Technological Forecasting and Social Change [in press] [6]
• Heylighen F. (2004): "Das Globale Gehirn als neue Utopia" (The Global Brain as a new Utopia), in: R. Maresch & F. Rötzer (eds.) Renaissance der Utopie (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt) [7]
• Mayer-Kress, G. and Barczys, C. 1995 - The global brain as an emergent structure from the worldwide computing network. The information society 11(1): 1-28. [8]