Chapter 6

CHAOS, COMPLEXITY, AND THE EMERGENCE OF HIVE MIND

There was a high-frequency energy being passed between people, and I could sort of see into people's minds. And there was a period of time where the whole group had a very discontinuous awakened experience, where we could basically perceive the same reality together but express it in each of our own unique ways. It was almost as if we were suddenly surrounded by this ambient energy that allowed each person to leap, inside of themselves, into a much vaster way of being in expressing themselves and interacting with one another. ⁵

Attempting to understand a phenomenon as mysterious as collective wisdom, it turns out, is a bit like trying to understand God. Although everyone kind of knows that their concepts will only take them so far, it doesn't stop anyone from putting forth their best guess—with confidence. If you ask a handful of collective wisdom researchers what exactly is happening in these experiences, you'll end up with a list of explanations that run the gamut from the scientific to the sublime.

At one end of the spectrum, there is what we might call the “additive model,” which suggests that collective intelligence is simply the compounding of our individual intelligences. Get a few individual minds together, the reasoning goes, and you've got a group mind. Two heads are better than one. And three are better than two. Robert Kenny explains: “Sometimes people who have these experiences simply say that a collection of individual minds kind of aggregate in some form or combine and become a group mind, a kind of new entity with its own particular characteristics.”

At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who suggest that by coming together in a receptive state, we are simply making ourselves available to a deeper collective consciousness that is already there. Tom Callanan states, “I believe that collective consciousness already exists, and our individual consciousnesses are nodules that are poking up out of that like little islands. We imagine that we're separate, so we go about trying to build bridges across the gaps between our islands. But through conversation you actually sink to the level of collective consciousness where you're already connected. There's no need for the bridges.”

Between these two poles are countless other theories and subtheories attempting to make sense out of this mysterious phenomenon, including at least a handful of models rooted in the “new science.” But none seem to have conferred legitimacy to this otherwise esoteric field like the new sciences of chaos and complexity have. “I would say that collective intelligence is a systemic phenomenon. It's a nonlinear dynamic,” Juanita Brown explains. “If you think of it in terms of living systems or chaos theory, it's like the collective intelligence emerges as the system connects to itself in a variety of diverse and creative ways. If you are collectively focusing attention around a real-life question, and you intentionally increase the cross-pollination between individuals—the synapses, let's call them, in the social brain—the likelihood of collective insight emerging increases. So it's a product of the systemic interactions, not simply the product of one plus one.”

In the emerging science of complexity theory, the notion that wholes are greater than the sum of their parts is no longer a matter of poetic fancy. Studying the complex behavior of beehives and ant colonies, cities and economies, researchers are discovering that when individuals combine forces, higher-order collective properties emerge that cannot be explained by studying the individuals in isolation. A close look at an ant colony or beehive reveals a remarkably orderly and surprisingly complex society—surprising, that is, given the fact that ants and bees have brains that are less than one-millionth the size of a human brain. Does that mean that they are all just working automatons taking orders from the more intelligent “queen”? Not likely. It turns out that the queen herself is equally unintelligent and has no executive power whatsoever. “Mother” would perhaps be a better name for her, as her anointed role owes entirely to her maternal capacities.

How, then, does a hive decide to swarm and go in search of a new home? And moreover, how does it choose its new home once it gets there? How does an ant colony know how to organize itself into an elaborate city with the garbage dump in one place, the cemetery in another, and the dwelling units wisely as far away from both as possible? The answer is what has become known in complexity theory as “hive mind.” But the implications may not be as esoteric as they sound. Wired editor Kevin Kelly, writing in his 1997 book Out of Control, states that the general scientific view is that this emergent “mind” has a “technical, rational explanation” and is not a product of “mysticism or alchemy.” To most scientists in this field, the simple explanation for emergent complexity is that when you get a large enough group of individuals following the same few simple instructions, complex patterns can emerge that begin to look like higher intelligence—or at least intelligent behavior. But is there actually anything like a thinking mind driving the hive's behavior? And moreover, does the hive mind have anything resembling self-awareness? Does it know that it's knowing? In the eyes of most scientists, the answer to all of the above is “no.” For them, the hive mind is simply a metaphor. There is no ghost in the collective machine.

So, despite the obvious analogies that beg to be drawn between hive mind and human collective intelligence, it does seem worth questioning whether in fact the group mind that emerges between conscious, self-reflective humans can ultimately be accounted for by the prevailing theories of emergent complexity alone. It is of course plausible that the awakening of collective intelligence experienced between human beings is in fact something like the hive mind made conscious. But there are at least a few scientists who see something else at work in these experiences.

Chapter 7

THE FIELD AND THE FLOCK

In last night's discussion, we all went into new territory. It was as if a profound unified structure in consciousness descended down into us and between us, and at the same time mysteriously seemed to be functioning within its own dimension. No one could be said to be creating this, but everyone who gave themselves to its expression became animated through its explosive power. As we established ourselves firmly in this liberated field, extraordinary things began to happen. One woman who was in a struggling emotional state transformed into a joyful radiance. Another woman who was sincerely concerned by world issues shed tears as she collided with the profound meaning in what was happening.⁶

SCIENTIFIC MODELS OF EMERGENT COMPLEXITY ultimately feel a bit too reductionistic to explain collective intelligence among humans, according to biologist Rupert Sheldrake, they don't really account for the group behavior of most other animals either. “When you look at a flock of birds flying, you can get an entire flock of hundreds of birds suddenly changing direction, suddenly banking, turning almost at the same time. They all know where to go without bumping into each other. This is more complicated than you might think, because it happens too quickly to explain it just in terms of the birds looking at their nearest neighbors.” Sheldrake explains that early attempts to create complexity-based computer models that simulated flock behavior, though initially impressive, ultimately failed because they tried to reduce the flock phenomenon to a few simple instructions followed by each individual. “By basing their models on nearest-neighbor interactions, they produced animations that looked a bit like flocks, but were biologically naïve. The best state-of-the-art models of flock behavior are 'field models' where you treat the whole flock as if it's in a field, the field of the whole group. This is what I think of as a morphic field, a field that organizes systems where the whole is more than the sum of the parts.”

For most who have witnessed the emergence of collective intelligence, Sheldrake's notion of group fields seems to have some resonance. Indeed, one of the most common ways people describe the experience of collective consciousness is as an increasing awareness of being in a field together, a field of knowing and seeing that unifies the group. But what makes this notion of collective fields particularly intriguing, in light of collective wisdom experiences, is the way it seems to account for one of the most remarkable phenomena of group experience: the sense that, once it emerges, the collective mind seems to take on a life of its own.

Central to Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance is the notion that collective fields, once created, should begin to impact other groups engaged in similar activity around the world. His well-publicized research seems to demonstrate convincingly that once one individual or group breaks through to new knowledge or capacities, it becomes easier for others to access that same knowledge or capacity. And, in speaking with practitioners of collective wisdom, again and again one hears stories that seem to confirm Sheldrake's theory.

Jerry Sinnamon, a Connecticut hospital administrator faced with the challenge of transforming his failing institution, described how, through a series of dialogue-type workshops with hospital staff, a new collective vision for the hospital progressively developed—despite the fact that each workshop comprised an entirely different group of people. “It was almost as if the same group was meeting month after month, when in fact there was no overlap of attendees between workshops whatsoever,” Sinnamon describes. Regardless of the individuals involved (and there were a thousand in total who participated over the course of two years), each successive group seemed to pick up where the previous one had left off, moving the inquiry forward. Sinnamon recalls, “It was as if the collective consciousness of the organization was building this new vision for what the hospital could become. And as a result of this process, we not only rebuilt our reputation in the local community, but we ended up actually gaining an international reputation as a healing place.”

Among the researchers and practitioners of collective intelligence I spoke with for this article, such phenomena seemed to be almost a given. Dialogue pioneer Sue Miller Hurst described a series of workshops she led in which each new three-day gathering seemed to begin where the previous one had ended, in spite of the fact that each workshop was attended by a completely new group of participants. “It's as if there was a hideout who'd been at the last one, who came there and said, 'Okay, you guys. This is what we're going to do.'” Chris Bache described a similar phenomenon in his university courses, the development of what he called “course mind.” According to Bache, a kind of learning field develops around each course that, over the years, makes it easier and easier for students to grasp the material. “I find that every few years I have to redesign my entire course, because the students are starting out at a higher level of understanding and receptivity. They get it faster. Now, this could be caused by improved pedagogical delivery or by cultural shifts that are taking place in the background. But I'm convinced that one of the things that's happening is that the learning which previous students have undertaken actually makes it easier for subsequent students to pick up these same concepts. So you can move through things more quickly.”

As mind-bending as these stories are from a conventional scientific standpoint, for Sheldrake they are not in the least bit surprising. In fact, when I described this phenomenon to him, rather than offer an in-depth explanation, he simply responded, “Yes, that's the sort of phenomenon you'd expect with morphic resonance. Theoretically, this kind of thing is what my hypothesis actually predicts.” And while the existence of such phenomena is not ultimately a proof of Sheldrake's field theory itself, it does seem to suggest that whatever this collective mind is, it appears to exist independent of the ongoing participation of the individuals who gave birth to it. And that in itself is a mystery worth pondering, a mystery with far-reaching implications.