The Waves of
Collective Intelligence

For Searle, the capacity of most animals to engage in collective behavior requires a pre-intentional, one could say categorical, sense of one or several other self-consciousnesses likewise disposed toward cooperative activity. Collective behavior is tacit, categorically structured perception and behavior by a community. That subliminal sense of community must be biological and internal, caused by and realized in one or several organs of the body, analogous to the way in which the sense for intentional contents and states of a personal nature are caused by and realized in the brain. That sense must also be capable of forming intentions or quasi-intentions that utilize the self-conscious intentionality of the individual brain by way of which the possible designs of the community can be realized. Regardless of whether collective intentionality can, in the final analysis, be made out in itself to be causally self-referential, as all true intentionality must be, the crucial question for empirically-minded thinkers will be how that pre-intentional sense of community and its super-personal intentionality work mechanically.

 

I think it will turn out that the biological and even physical basis for social cooperation in general is nothing more and nothing less than the moral law described by Kant in his third Critique. On Kant’s analysis, the key feature of a good and socially acceptable intentionality is that it universalizes its maxim of action. It sees in its own action only what others in its position would also see. It retains for itself a sense of the self-conscious intentions not just of others, but of all possible others. As such it is maximally rational, and working through biological individuals of varying degrees of moral and intellectual clarity, it amounts to a law of nature. In all probability universal intentionality is a field phenomenon, a radiation of unknown composition and unanalyzed characteristic produced by cosmic evolution, psychically pervading all consciousness with social commitments. It is the force of nature largely responsible for social intelligence, social behavior and in part the historical and even geological transformation of the planetary environment. This law of nature and its wave mechanics, I think we will probably decide, suffuses the entire animal kingdom, and is seen (and felt), for example, in the care of mother for offspring, in the cooperative enjoyment of the hunt or the football game and in the affirmation of peace and brotherhood at the basis of all settled and prosperous human society.

 

I believe the most likely organic candidate in human beings and higher animals for this universalizing self-sense and cooperative impulse is the rhythmical system of the heart and lungs. The heart and lungs function at a level intermediate between the self-consciousness of events in the brain and the unconsciousness of events in the metabolic organs such as the liver. In a metaphorical if not a strictly descriptive sense, one could say that while the brain and central nervous system conduce to functions that are awake and self-conscious, the liver and pancreas and their functions are sound asleep and unconscious, but the universal and regular stirrings of the heart and lungs are dream material, unrecorded patterns in an unknown ether, neither self-conscious nor unconscious. Extending that view, one might find it plausible to think of the heart and lungs (and of the overall circulation of the blood, which is an electrolytic fluid marvelously conferring nutrition, health and even the sense of self-consciousness, to the extent it is present) as generators of macroscopic wave functions that all individuals transmit and register in a very broad and non-specific way but which, because they are materially shared at a semi-conscious level, form the categorical ground and basis for all collective intelligence and social cooperation.

 

A program that might empirically demonstrate the physical action of wave functions in highly cooperative social activities such as free conversation could only be of profound interest to biology and philosophy alike. If the wave functions that pre-intentionally underlie and largely constitute the collective intentionality of conversation and social intuition in general can be analyzed as categories and classes of physical nature, a considerable reworking of social and linguistic science can be anticipated. I believe I have identified both a subject sample and a methodological framework suitable to run initial tests for these wave phenomena under free social conditions. What is required to begin the tests is a modicum of institutional legitimacy, sponsorship and funding, and a spirit of exploration into a largely unknown social territory, the territory of collective intelligence.

 

References:

 

Flygt, Carl H. “How to Do Conversation Research.” Monograph at http://consciousconversation.com/Essays/Conversation_Research.html.

 

Searle, John R. "Collective Intentions and Actions” in Intentions in Communication, Cohen, Morgan and Pollack (eds). 1990.

Sheldrake, Rupert. Dogs that Know When their Owners are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999.

Sheldrake, Rupert. The Sense of Being Stared At. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003.