Our society is rapidly growing more complex and more interconnected and is forming a so-called “Global Brain” or “Hive Mind”. A Global brain not only in the sense used by computer engineers in terms of a planetary ICT network that interconnects all humans and their technological artifacts (the Internet-of-Things), but also as a higher order planetary entity functioning above the level of its constituting parts (humans, infrastructure, machines, resources).
In nature global brains are ubiquitous: microbial societies, beehives, anthills, bird flocks, fish schools and animal herds behave in a concerted ways as if they are driven by an invisible common intelligence. It is from this behaviour that that ICT has borrowed the terminology “Swarm Intelligence”.
In the human society hive mind information spreads as viruses. These packages of information that provide for groups to establish a collective identity are called “Memes”. Culture, group language and religion are extremely important and successful memes. The combined set of all these memes together constitutes the human “Memome”. As no individual is aware of all memes, in a certain way this collective distributed knowledge constitutes our “collective unconscious”.
In certain circles it is believed that the entire set of human experiences, memes and emotions is stored in the ether in what is called the “Akashic records”. Whereas this need not be true, something functionally similar could be the case. After all thoughts and emotions are the result of electric currents in the brain and the electromagnetic field they create are essentially non-local. The collective unconscious could be an interference pattern of electromagnetic energy surrounding us. If our brains can send brainwaves, they can probably also receive them. The physicist Nikola Tesla was convinced that the human brain operates more like a radio, which receives information from the collective unconscious than merely as a computer that generates and stores its information itself. Perhaps both views are partially correct: The brain is both a radio AND a computer.
The advantage of accepting that the brain can also function as a radio, allows for the explanation of the concerted behaviour of natural global brains as mentioned earlier. The members of a bird flock or fish school simultaneously change direction, as if they all seem to receive the same order. No delays or spreading of information has been observed among the members of the flocks/schools. Hence the hypothesis that they all are tuned in to the same frequency of a collective “mind”, which may exist as an electromagnetic or etheric interference pattern or force field. This could be an explanation for the phenomenon of “telepathy” which some humans possess.
So collective interference patterns may hover around in the ether an influence all of us (to a different extent).
Human (and animal) social groups develop several kinds of mechanisms to maintain a social coherence. There are rules and regulations which the members obey regarding survival, territory, pecking order, and mating. In human society this results in a framework of ethics shared by the group, where disobedience can result in exclusion form the group. Timothy Leary and R.A.Wilson call this larval behaviour. These are the typical behaviours of humans belonging to the human hive. An individual being part of a certain meme-group behaves as if hypnotised by this meme. The collective unconscious limitations drive each and every action of the hivoid (member of the hive). As long as this is the case, the amount of free will such a hivoid can exert is extremely limited and subject to the collective law. In fact the hivoid cannot be a true individual, but is a kind of zombie or borg (like the borg in the Star trek series). The hivoid is incapable of calling his meme beliefs into question. The hivoid is unable of self-reflection.
Memes spread as viruses; they penetrate great masses of the society which are not immune to their call. A successful meme (such as a religion) is extremely infectious. The meme is spawned through the society, self-enforcing as an unconscious feedforward mechanism. As the hivoids are not capable of introspection and calling their beliefs into question, the meme lacks a feedback mechanism which could result in a conscious adaptation of the more edgier aspects of the belief system. Rather certain memes tend to polarise and become more extreme over time. A meme that adapts to conscious intelligence is not likely to survive, but will slowly go extinct. Hence the secularisation in Europe, where rationality and scientism have infected Christianity, which is going to its demise. In the USA, where Christianity has spawned into several submemes, which have more radical points of views, demonise scientism and strongly appeal to larval instincts, this secularisation is less of an issue.
In the Information Integration Theory (IIT) of Giulio Tononi, consciousness of a certain information is only established when information is integrated, which necessarily involves a kind of feedback. On the other hand Tononi describes that there are feedforward complexes of information, which functionally behave as if they are the result of conscious information integration, but which are not.
It is these feedforward mechanisms, which when existing on a neurological level, which could be the cause of various psychiatric disorders: hearing voices, being possessed by demons, unstoppable compulsive thought patterns etc.
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More of this chapter in my next book, which I have submitted for publication.
