Collective Intelligence (C1)

In mainstream science, individual intelligence and collective intelligence have generally been regarded as distinct phenomena. Individual intelligence is believed to include things like humans, fish, plants, etc., and collective intelligence includes swarms of bees, societies, and so on. 

However, developmental biologist Michael Levin argues that in fact all intelligence is collective. He points out that we, as human organisms, consist of a collection of trillions of cells, each of which behaves as an individual lifeform. Our total intelligence as humans is the aggregate product of the intelligence of all of these cells. 

There is lots of research now which suggests that the cells in the body communicate with each other and organise themselves on a grand scale in much more sophisticated ways than is commonly believed. Experiments have shown cells to have a kind of individual memory which informs their behaviour, and consists of way more information than just a genetic code.  

All of this connects to the theory of the conservation of information – the idea that all of the information about the whole history of the universe is effectively “saved” in each part of the universe, no matter how small. Paradoxically then, all of the knowledge of reality is in every atom within us, and yet with our thinking mind it seems we can barely scratch the surface of this knowledge. 

At any rate, this theory should compel us to think of memory – which is information about the past – as something much more fluid, and as something that can be accessed and instrumentalised by cells (and everything else in the universe) in ways that go way beyond simplistic mechanisms analogous with the writing down of data.   

These ideas have profound implications for what we are capable of, and where we may be heading as a species. It might be entirely possible for human society to behave increasingly as one single organism. What’s really mind-boggling about this is the idea that, just as we don’t ever experience life from the point of view of one of the cells in our body, this unity-consciousness would probably also not experience life from the point of view of one of its constituent human beings!   

See a video from Michael Levin here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a3xg4M9Oa8