Such patterns exist where there is an interconnected group of human beings working to some common view or purpose. Such interconnectivity has always existed locally: in a family, in a village, in a culture, in a society and in enterprise, in either bureaucracy or commerce. All these work precisely because they form patterns that are based on shared interests and understandings of how the thoughts and actions of others mesh with one’s own.
That is how they function. This is why, through speech and writing, humanity has a mechanism able to construct communal visions of the world, in a way unavailable to most other animals. Of course, we share with other animals a huge capacity for non-verbal communication. The significance of that for engagement in some forms of coordinated activity should not be forgotten. When an impala or a wildebeest senses danger and runs, all follow its action.
It is also true that, even with the old physical limitations on inter-human communication, global thoughts did arise. They formed very slowly and imperfectly over many years, decades or centuries. Their formation was restricted to the speed at which people could walk, and by the extent to which they could learn and understand another language. However, planet-wide thinking did occur. Most importantly, it occurred along the great data bus of medieval times: the Silk Road that connected China to the West.
Along this route, merchants transported goods: silk, tea, spices, gold, silver, etc. All these were used in exchange that was motivated by the surplus that could be earned, which was sufficient to justify the efforts and resources merchants put into creating this connection. As a bi-product of this trade information, knowledge and know-how permeated from East to West, albeit slowly and imperfectly. The knowledge of how to make gunpowder followed this route.
Most of the activity our brains engage in modulates processes that enable us to exist and survive, i.e., acquiring, transforming and excreting the substances we use to generate the energy that sustains us as living beings. We need to acquire oxygen, and distribute it around our bodies. The cardiovascular system does this by breathing in air and separating out oxygen, which is then passed into the blood and pumped round our bodies by the heart. The brain keeps this process functioning throughout our lives. This process ends in our breathing out carbon dioxide and the unused nitrogen remnant. The carbon dioxide is then inspired by plants and converted into the oxygen we breathe. From Gaia’s perspective, this completes the cycle.
Similarly, our brain acts out a process that enables us to acquire food. We then ingest this food, and the brain helps the body to automatically convert it into materials that we can use, together with oxygen, to create the energy needed for our muscles to function. The unused ingested material is excreted into the environment, where it is recycled as water and nitrogenous material, and used as food by plants.
Without the cardiovascular and digestive systems, we could not survive at all. Much of our spinal cord and lower brain is engaged in supporting the processes required to keep these in operation and coordinate them. However, humans have additional capacities. We have the ability to move in coordination with others to acquire the food we need to survive. Without the speech, memory and planning we use to be very effective at this, we would not be human.
Different parts of our brain have distinct roles in each of these activities. They represent successive needs in the evolution of living beings and, to an extent, they exist in all animals. In reptiles speech memory and planning are only slightly developed, while in mammals the sensing and coordination function is developed, although not necessarily its planning and thinking parts. The latter are only really well developed in man, although apes and some whales have similar large areas of brain.
Our brain, like that of other living things, has evolved over eons. As evolution adapts to what exists, the old is not destroyed or replaced. It is accommodated. In consequence, the human nervous system shares some features with the nervous systems of all other animals. One might then expect the planet’s brain to evolve similarly, with ancient parts driving basic functions: eating, procreating, moving. Later parts then evolved to improve sensing and coordination, and modern parts evolved to think and plan.
If we bear these considerations in mind, it becomes relatively easy to identify the distinct parts of Gaia’s emergent brain. The most ancient continuing systems of organised coherent thoughts are those of the Han Chinese. These are deeply rooted.
These thoughts are reflected in both major philosophies of the region: Taoism and Confucianism. They are strongly conservative and communal. They accept that the “Way” (Tao) of the universe simply is. It understands that stability comes from the acceptance of this, the suppression of self-interest and the acting out of one’s duty to siblings, parents, family, community and state.
In the West, a more chaotic form has evolved. Its origins are equally ancient but not so coherent in form, although equally so in process. They come from the free-thinking analytical rationality that epitomised ancient Greece. These thoughts are fragmented and incoherent, in the sense that they are not based on a persistent vision of proper form, but on a continuing dialogue between thesis and antithesis, from which emerges a view dominant for a time but never achieving a final truth.
In the Western system, such diverse thoughts are maintained by groups that are often international and inter-cultural. The most ancient holder of these still extant is the Roman Catholic Church. Of course, in modern times alongside its world view we also find those of the protestant reformation.
Some great commercial enterprises also span the planet, or parts of it, and sustain a system of thought and culture that is pertinent to their purpose: e.g., Unilever, Shell. More recently, there have arisen some viable organisations with moralistic purposes, such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace and the World Wild Life Fund.
These project a view of proper human behaviour: the acceptability of imprisonment and the treatment of prisoners, and the care of the environment and the protection of species, respectively. Such organisations may be seen as the developing embryonic conscience of the planet.
In the interests of their citizens, or of their own power, nation states project a particular world view, and win others over to it by propaganda, diplomatic missions, etc. Free Trade is one such idea. It has been extensively promoted and advocated by such means. This has resulted in states acting together to promote, set up and implement the World Trade Organisation.
All the above can be seen as thought patterns in the evolving mind of the planet. To qualify, they need only interconnect human beings together for a common purpose, and generate the resources to support them in pursuing it. However, disparate fragments of thought do not constitute a brain.
For example, we have described a role for the West and North East Asia in the planet’s brain. So far, however, there is no place in it for the 1.5 billion people in Islam, or the 1 billion who live in and about the Indian subcontinent; nor for those in Africa, South America or the Pacific. Our work must encompass these, if what is developing is to be seen as truly global.
In ancient times, Islam provided the data bus needed to connect the principal parts of the medieval planetary mind. It translated each major part of the evolving planetary mind to the other, and in the process, until the 15th century, it added hugely to human understanding of art, science and commerce.
The Indian subcontinent is home to the greatest number of Muslims on the planet, and is also the place of origin of three of the world’s great religious perspectives: Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. India thus has the potential to make a huge contribution to the soul of the planet. However, even more clearly, having been ruled by the British for three centuries, it is now imbued with English culture to the extent that, in its higher education system, it makes more effective use of English as a language than anywhere else on the planet. As English is now the language of international commerce and business, India thus has a significant advantage as a place for doing any business requiring communication and analysis in English.
For a global brain to be meaningful for our current purpose, we need a truly dynamic process. As the need arises, new thoughts must be created on a planet-wide basis, to be pursued as they prove useful, and otherwise abandoned. The Internet and modern Information and Communication Technology (ICT) make this possible on a global scale.
The educated skills of India and their development via English, the universal language of business, give India huge advantages in the modern world. Arguably, at one time Islam had a similar advantage, given its shared understanding of Arabic.
If those within the Umah could revert to the attitudes with which Islam was imbued until the closing of the Gates of Ishtehad, Islam would be of considerable utility to the modern world. It developed important insights into how best to interrelate the stable communal cultures of Asia with the more chaotic free enterprise of the West. In so doing, it made a huge constructive contribution to the global development of the arts, scholarship and science.
At present, it is difficult to see what global contribution the Spanish and Portuguese speakers will make. In the past, they yielded huge wealth for Spain and Portugal. There is no doubt whatsoever that, with current rates of Spanish-speaking immigration into North America, they are bound to have a huge impact on the future of what is now the richest country on the planet, the USA. Perhaps this migration will prove the means by which the Spanish-speaking world becomes truly integral to Gaia’s brain.
Africa and the Pacific remain untapped territory. Poverty and violence have created a huge African diaspora. This is replicating humanity’s past, by dispersal out of Africa across the planet. This diaspora will ensure that Africa is well wired into the developing global mind, and will influence it in subtle and not always obvious ways. We will discuss these as this work unfolds.
We thus argue that, by using ICT technology, humanity is creating planet-wide connectivity that has the appearance of a brain. But how does it work? Does it work effectively? What features will it have? This process is the “Way” of the universe. It is thus inevitable. To talk of what it should be or could be or ought to be, or what is right and wrong in it, is to misunderstand the “Way”. It merely is.
behaviour, we can choose to act to assist its maturation. It is to our advantage for it to be well-adjusted, content
and happy, and without psychosis. If it proves dysfunctional, that may be fatal to its survival, and to ours.
