The Invisible Brain: The Emergence of Collective Intelligence

Dear Believer in Global Solutions,

Human cultural evolution, and I include here economy, technology, science, social relations and arts, is based on countless and immensely complex interactions between billions of intelligent individuals, each continually making judgments based on individual goals and values, taking into consideration the specifics of time and place, of local social compatibility, weighing and balancing short term and long term preferences, needs and consequences, risks and chances, benefits and costs. Together, all these small independent decisions and voluntary consequent actions over time add up to an immensely intelligent and adaptive system of self-organization, the intelligence of which can never be represented in a single “collectivized” mind or several single minds in a group. A single mind can principally only represent a single mind, and a committee can only agree on what the single minds that form it can compromise on – which is usually not more, but rather less than each of its single minds would propose.

So what we could call “collective intelligence” is purely an emergent phenomenon, it is not the result of collective representation. It arises from spontaneous self-organization, from a process of purposeful interaction and intentional cooperation. The less restricted, controlled and disturbed by human interference or coercion this process can unfold, the more intelligence it will produce, because every participant can employ and contribute his full knowledge, experience and skills. In other words, optimal social intelligence requires a free market of ideas and actions. So when we approach problems, the best chance is indeed to rely on free markets as the best and biggest source of collective intelligence. The more complex, global and difficult the problems are, the more intelligence is required and consequently more freedom to let this intelligence emerge. Collective intelligence is the “invisible brain” that guides a society and allows it to survive, evolve and prosper.

Why is such a simple principle so hard to understand? We are all convinced that the best knowledge is always local: nobody knows more about our own affairs than we, each of us, ourselves. It should not be too difficult to see that this principle applies at any scale. There is no line where you could say: from here on knowledge must come from 'above'.

Yet politicians, scientists, journalists, preachers and artists do not seem to get tired demanding the replacement of our most efficient mechanism for finding intelligent solutions with coercive measures backed up by the threat of laws and regulations. When the diversity of individual fine tuning skills of billions of brains are required most to achieve the maximum of collective intelligence, they demand collective uniformity instead:

Bring in the tanks! Call in the Air Force! Let’s go for the big solution! We need big government now! We need Manhattan projects, global Marshal plans and any other plan as long as it is a central, global plan!

Anyone dissenting? Shut up and get in line! Enough talk, we need action! Mankind in crisis must act as one single mind! This is a war! You either follow or you are foe! Anyone having doubts? This is not the hour of doubts, this is the hour of individual obedience and collective action!

Oil too expensive and possibly running out? We have a solution:Tax the consumers! The markets cannot handle scarcities like that, a stronger force is needed! If alternative energies are too expensive we will force them on you! Biofuel laws are hiking the price of bread for the poor? Let them eat cake! The climate will change anyway because that’s what climate does? This might well be. But then at least we have taught them a lesson in government: if everyone puts aside his little private ego and individual claim to intelligence and freedom, we can do great things together! They might turn out wrong in the end, they might kill millions, they might waste the resources of several generations and even throw us back into poverty – never mind! Historians of a later age will admire the ruins of our giant solar power plants and vast windmill forests like they admired the pyramids: as grandiose monuments of human discipline and absolute political power!