Blog of Collective Intelligence (since 2003)

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.

[…]

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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.

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.”

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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.

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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.
CI sits in the lower left of Wilber’s quadrants, the space of “we,” culture, and inter-subjectivity. Wilber has been giving many good maps of it, even an excellent, 1-sentence summary: “These shared values, perceptions, meanings, semantic habits, cultural practices, ethics, and so on, I simply refer to as culture, or the intersubjective patterns in consciousness.” A student of Wilber, Steve McIntosh, further specified the content of those inter-subjective cultural structures that we share with others in groups:
“While the content of subjective consciousness consists of feelings, thoughts, and decisions, the content of inter-subjective cultural structures consists of the substance of what is shared by subjective consciousness—the substance of information, meaning, and value.”
Source: Intersubjective holons: dynamic systems of communication. An examination of the nature and behavior of the structures of consciousness and culture, by Steve McIntosh (.pdf)
In communities and organizations, besides those shared qualities, we also share a capacity to evolve and co-evolve with one another and with the surrounding social, technical, and market ecosystems.
CI is continually emerging from the connected conversations among members across ecosystems.
It’s occurring all the time, in many invisible ways. Let’s make one visible, by a simple, small-scale experiment, an open source, collaborative learning process that could give its participants a taste of that emergence. I imagine four steps:
• Discovering the seed conditions for the emergence of CI
• Sensing what hinders the evolution of CI
• Comparing notes
• Seeking patterns that connect actionable meaning

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