Blog of Collective Intelligence

Tor Nørretranders, author of C i v i l i s a t i o n 2.0 has just opened Reboot 9 with an inspiring talk on what mae us human: Dare, Care and Share. To get his message across he emphasized the role emotions and relationships in Civ 2.0, a bit at the expense of intelligence, as the essence of to be human. After his talk, Thomas the main organizer asked the 500 people in the main hall, what questions would be interesting to ask from ourselves for the next two days. I offered this one:

What would it look like if we didn't pit intelligence against emotions but go for their synergy, for Civilization 2.0? If the forms of CI 1.0 (and social organization) led to the global crises we are in, CI 2.0 will need to be governed by what has heart and meaning for us.

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-- Are you in for a phone call tonight? - asked Ria.

I answered, tomorrow would be better because--while waiting for replies from Bud, Otto, Thierry, Federico, and Albert--I’m busy with observing the direction, in which my creative inspirations want to flow tonight.

After replying, I entered into a contemplation about the last part of the sentence that I've just written. As soon as I did, the Truth of Impersonality appeared in my awareness and shortly after, my inner ears heard a message as follows:

Leaning into the unknown,
you will see the direction emerging from the space within,
in which an intensely present creative impulse meets
one of the calls from the Field that are asking for your attention.

Tonight, the impulse was to write. The call came from the Blog of Collective Intelligence. I got out of the way, and this entry was born.

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I wrote about intersubjectivity as a direct experience of CI, in a couple of entries of this blog but until recently I didn't put myself in a situation of responsibility for facilitating it. That opportunity was given to me when following our conversation about How local meetings with global experts can boost CI, Chris Macrae invited me to talk to a small group in London, last week. We were all guests of the Duke of Cambridge who was very generous to us. No, not the member of the royal family but a trendy organic pub sporting his name, with good food and a lovely, little patio where we enjoyed the sun and an intriguing conversation. The invitation was to speak about my life's work. Given that it's CI, I thought it would be more interesting to not speak about but trigger an experience of it.

Continue reading "Intersubjectivity in an organic pub" »

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Regarding the questions of emergence, Ken Wilber has a very interesting and powerful distinction between 'individual holons' and 'social holons'. Each of them clearly illustrate 2 different types of emergence.

Here is what he says in an interview:

Briefly: individual holons are holons with a subjective interior (prehension, awareness, consciousness); they have a defining pattern (code, agency, regime) that emerges spontaneously from within (autopoietic); and they have four drives (agency, communion, eros, agape). Examples of individual holons (or compound individuals) include quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms....

Social holons emerge when individual holons commune; they also have a defining pattern (agency or regime), but they do not have a subjective consciousness; instead, they have distributed or intersubjective consciousness. Examples include galaxies, planets, crystals, ecosystems, families, tribes, communities.... Both individual and social are holons, and they both follow the twenty tenets. Actually, individual and social holons are not different entities, but different aspects of all holons, since all holons have an interior and an exterior in singular and plural forms (the four quadrants), but they are indeed different aspects that cannot be merely equated.

Now, artifacts are any products made by an individual or social holon. A bird's nest, an anthill, a automobile, a house, a piece of clothing, an airplane, the internet--these are all artifacts. An artifact's defining pattern does not come from itself, but rather is imposed or imprinted on it by the agency or intelligence of an individual or social holon.

[...]

Continue reading "Different types of emergence?" »

Posted by at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Commenting on The emergence of CI, an online experiment, Charles Savage asked a powerful question that, I believe, deserves a lot of attention from all who don’t only want to theorize about CI but experience it live, vibrant, and tangible. He wrote:

>I have one questions, is there something between:
>Individual Intelligence
>?????
>Collective Intelligence

> Is it not possible to have a "collective intelligence" context where the "individual intelligence" comes alive?

Charles, thank you for inquiring into the very heart of what I find the most exciting about Collective Intelligence as theory AND practice. In my experience, individual intelligences come alive and shine best, indeed, in the context of a collective intelligence. Autonomy and community are not only not opposite but one doesn’t really exist without the other.

> In other words, how it is possible to have a dynamic interaction so that as individuals value the intelligence (and emotions) of the other, the collective intelligence emerges?

Continue reading "What's between individual and collective intelligence?" »

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Here are some more comments from Jay Cross about Shift Happens!

> When I look back at your definition of Collective Intelligence: "the capacity of communities to evolve towards higher order integration and performance through collaboration and innovation," I have a tough time figuring out when the tipping point has tipped, e.g. when the ice turns to water or when the performance is of such a higher order that an observer would say, "Boy, that's really different."

Are you asking, what is the evolutionary threshold for a system-in-focus to reach metasystem transition? Discussing the Big Shift, or the threshold for entering the next phase of global society, a friend of mine, Larry Victor responded in an email, 10 years ago:

Continue reading "How would we know, we reached tipping point?" »

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Jay Cross wrote some truly thought-provoking comments on Shift Happens!

> Okay, George, so you're looking for a phase change, the creation of something new & different.

Yes, indeed! To be more precise, I’m one in the thousands of voices exploring the possibility of blogging for Emergence as a self-fulfilling prophecy :-) The “thousands” is not a joke. I just googled [“tipping point” blog] and got 18,700. Even [“phase transition” blog] unearthed 388 pages!

> Emergent learning implies adaptation to the environment, timeliness, flexibility and space for co-creation. It is the future. We haven’t figured it out yet. Or, from the perspective of complexity science, it hasn’t figured itself out yet. (emphasis added - GP)

Right! I like your second statement because leaning in it, we may become more attentive to the processes by which it is figuring itself out. Like right here, if this dialogue manages sustain our shared-interest.

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I’ve just discovered in an interview that Seth Kahan made with John Seely Brown a very intriguing and fertile perspective on the role blogs may play in the emergence of a conscious social mind. See below. I added the emphasis for highlighting the potential that I sense for social innovation experiments using blogs for Emergence.

”Notice, also, that blogs can suddenly reach a critical mass that then forces something out into the open, into public consciousness. You might think of it as an analogy to the subconscious vs. the conscious. The formal or conscious part is what today’s journalism is about, New York Times and so on. But the informal layer, comprising things like blogs, is like our unconscious mind. It’s not publicly visible. But all kinds of things are happening there.”

Continue reading "Phase transition from the unconscious social mind" »

Posted by at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (2)

Commenting on my entry about The emergence of CI, an online experiment, Jay Cross wrote in his blog:

> I'm interested more in group mind than individual consciousness, but I figure they're both complex systems, why not see how one viewpoint cross-fertilizes the other.

I think of consciousness as a continually emergent quality of the self, individual or collective, by which it recognizes itself and its relationship to other selves.

An explorer of collective intelligence--defined as the capacity of communities to evolve towards higher order integration and performance through collaboration and innovation--I became curious of the tipping point, the transition from a collection of intelligences to collective intelligences. Jay's entry gave more fuel to that exploration. He wrote:

> George Por lit my fuse this morning. Using his blog entry as a starting point, I let whatever come to mind guide my thinking.

I guess, that's how our blog connections work most of the time; one person's entries become triggers of free associations in another person's mind and blog, creating a rich soil of loosely linked thoughts in the noosphere, at the tune of probably millions of new entries every day. That kind of connections occurs in loose networks or communities of learners that I differentiate from communities that learn.

In the slide of John Seely Brown that Jay posted in his blog (see below) JSB is talking about a shift from tools supporting individuals to tools supporting relationships.

The shift that I try to understand and promote is a more radical one that what JSB is referring to. I'm focusing on tha nature, enablers and obstacles of a qualitative jump from a collection of intelligences to a collective intelligence that transcends and includes the individual minds, from a community of learners to a community that learns, which transcends and includes the intelligence of its members.

Continue reading "Shift Happens!" »

Posted by at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (2)

As I said, in a recent entry in the blog on communities of practice , I've been away for a while but not idle. In the last couple of months I made friends with an amazing array of very remarkable people. One of them is Peter Merry who has just finished writing his forthcoming book on Evolutionary Leadership. This entry is originated as one of my contributions to it.

The meaning and accelerating the emergence of CI

Having learned ways to quiet their mind and strengthen their health and vitality, aspiring evolutionary leaders are ready to dance with the energies of the “We,” their teams, communities, the network of all of their relationships. They are ready to ask and see into powerful questions.

It is springtime in Europe and the air is gently sprayed with a scent of nature and human spirit coming alive again, after a long winter. It is a good time to look at generative questions, the seeds of transformation. Here's one that I believe worth of our attention:

How can a group of individual intelligences become truly collective intelligence? How can they escape into a more complex and capable collective intelligence, without sacrificing their autonomy?

The act of “seeing into” a powerful question is like holding a baby in your arm, in a mix of awe, wonder, and curiosity. Can you hold the following question, in that way?

"How to accelerate the emergence of a higher collective intelligence in communities?"

I offer the this meaning of CI, as a starting point: “Collective intelligence is a distributed capacity of communities to evolve towards higher order integration and performance through collaboration and innovation."

This is an updated version of the definition introduced in the chapter on "Liberating the Innovation Value of Communities of Practice" of the forthcoming textbook on Knowledge Economics: Emerging Principles, Practices and Policies.