My (Our!) Next Book Project

Research and Sense-Making
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Yesterday I taught my final college course. Coincidentally, I also submitted final revisions for a forthcoming textbook. Today I’ll ride the train to Seattle for a retirement event. My office at school was cleaned out last week. The decks are being cleared for whatever comes next …

Thanks to a few recent exchanges in this Forum, the light is now shining quite brightly on what that next project needs to be! WE need to author a book on collective intelligence. Why WE? Consider the topic! COLLECTIVE intelligence. Needs to be collective book. 'Nuff said!

My textbook was also a group project, so that sort of production is not just a pie-in-the-sky idea for me. I know in my bones what a multi-year collective authoring process feels like. Among other things, it feels like work. But for me, it also feels like mad passion that simply cannot be resisted. The rabbit hole of collective intelligence is calling my name! Is it calling yours?

Let’s not kid ourselves. Collective productions need auteurs. They go together. Or better yet, multiple auteurs pulling hairs out of each other’s scalps over “creative differences”. On the cusp of retirement, I very much plan to live large up to the moment I live no longer. This book proposal is how I imagine living large - living bigger than me, to be precise. Anyone else feel like living large like that? The proposed topic is “collective intelligence”. Got a chapter idea? Please post those below!

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What would it take to solve the metacrisis?
CHI-enabled Deliberately Developmental Society
A Reasonable Society
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Congrats on wrapping up this leg of your journey and on all the students you’ve helped and inspired!

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Hey @RobertBunge, I am moving here from our other thread.

First, I just finished a first pass on your article “What Does the World Need: From World History to the Global Future”. Full disclosure, my past reading and affinity for certain positions means I am primed to be a fan. Even so, I have to say, excellent distillation of thinkers and powerful ideas. There is a lot I can expand on, but in brief, the idea that civilization is always changing, how it’s changed in the past, what typically causes it, planetary limits, cognitive dissonance, consciousness development, and possible routes into the future, I am highly interested in these things.

We can unpack this later - for now I mention merely so you know how my response is informed.

Now to the specific topic, a collaborative book on “collective intelligence” …

I am interested in participating, and here is why:

I suggest that my article “A Reasonable Society” is a small part of what you are driving at with “Collective Intelligence”. This is effectively what I meant when I said, “Intelligence thrives on self-understanding”.

In other words, being “reasonable”, in McGilchrist’s sense of the word, means balance. We might also extend this to Vervaeke’s 4P/3R, or alignment of Henriques’s Mind1/2/3.

Whether we lean on McGilchrist, Vervaeke, Henriques, or other, my argument is that Self-Investigation is key to exploring and finding balance across our different modes of experience, intelligence, and knowledge. Next, Self-Investigation involves seeing our worldviews for what they are - a worldview - entangled with endless biases and cognitive distortions.

Intelligence, I argue next, thrives when this fallibility is well accounted for, and our own behaviors, desires, stories, and values are deeply understood.

Our project Self-Investigation-dot-org, attempts to neutrally describe what Self-Investigation is, why it matters, and how it approach it. Similar to your initiative here, this guide has been the slow work of a community of folks for the past few years.

This response is high level, a little hand wavy, and makes some assumptions on what you mean by “collective intelligence” - so I’ll pause before going on too far. I just wanted to start making some initial connections. Happy to discuss further here or over zoom.

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hi Robert, I’m delighted about your book news.

If you’d have published this post 2-3 days earlier, I’d have prolly replied with a big YES, and a couple of chapter ideas.

This month, I’m wrapping up my AI-Augmented Wisdom Praxis research seminar at Schumacher Institute. Yesterday, my contemplation about what is next brought me a very clear imperative: write my first book.

I published 10 chapters in anthologies and other people’s books, mostly about collective intelligence and have been publishing the Blog of Collective Intelligence since 2003, but over the years, my attention shifted away from CI, in a “trasnscend-and-include” way, moved towards collective wisdom, and for the last 8 years, AI for a wiser society. My book working title is Towards a wAIser World. It will be an interactive, multi-volume and multi-author book that I plan to serialize in an online magazine.

I anticipate that by early July I will have a book outline and maybe a few chapters. At that time, I’d be open to having a conversation with you for exploring possibilities for collaboration.

Godspeed to you!

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Something about your publication trail says “Preface” to me. Maybe we can talk in July about that!

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I can do hand wavy too! I’m really glad you dig my theoretical licks, but in some ways I’m dreaming of a book that feels as much like practice as it does like theory. Maybe more like practice. Anyway, I had a 4 hour train commute (with legal pad) today, so I roughed up a treatment.

After the Preface (by some distinguished author or another), the Intro Chapter needs to go big on teleological cosmic theories about how the universe is turning energy gradients into complex self-aware systems. That story line is so common nowdays it’s basically a trope, but we need to nod to it at least and use it for a kind of cinematic world building before getting into any number of chapters in the weeds.

Next comes dramatic tension. That’s the AI chapter. Will AI block human collective intelligence? Will it enhance it? Will it indeed replace us and become the collective intelligence the planet craves, without any glitchy humans involved? The stakes are high. The stakes are indeed ultimate. Keep turning those pages to learn how it’s all going to turn out!

Then, in no particular order, the sort of chapters I want for the guts of the book:

  • the role of trust in collective intelligence (see @dvdjsph & Promise Protocol)

  • teamwork and team building

  • the role of religion and ritual in structuring collective intelligence

  • collective intelligence and the next world order

  • culture as a carrier of collective intelligence

  • semantic loops between culture and personality (another @dvdjsph topic)

  • Co-op business models

  • intentional communities

  • Sociocracy/Prosocial/others like that

  • Network intelligence

  • Grassroots movements

  • P-t-p educational and therapeutic models

  • open source projects

  • The Commons (everything Michel Bauwens writes about)

    Then maybe some visionary summary chapter about how all those ideas and practices may just unite in time to save the world! Or fail tragically, but heroically, as the final human is crushed in the gears of the World Machine. The ending will be ambiguous. It’s really a call to action. Readers who prefer the better ending are going to have to extend themselves and earn it through personal commitment.

    I’m interested in all those chapters, but I don’t want to write all those chapters. (There may be lots of other chapters also that I am not thinking of). What I’m really feeling is the storyline, the stakes, the dramatic tension, and the way all the micropractices get viewed under the lens of “can this be the key we need to unlock the future of the world?”

    For me, this Forum is a writers’ room. Please put sticky notes all over my treatment above! Cut it into tiny little pieces! I showed you mine - now anyone else can show us theirs!

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The chapters are looking good. I need more time and information to absorb each, but I think I get the high-level direction.

My chapter proposal might be called, “Fallibility”.

An excellent book, if you are not aware, is “Constitution of Knowledge” by Jonathan Rauch. In this book, he shows the history of collective truth finding, and why it is particularly hard today, given our superabundance of information with often questionable sources and agendas.

This is a 300-page topic, but one chapter deals specifically with why truth finding is so hard: Fallibility. In short, biases and blind spots are forever invisible to us, no matter how much we intellectually appreciate they might be there. The only fix is admitting this, and embracing consensus truth finding. This is why institutions really matter: science, government, law.

In Rauch’s opinion, acknowledging fallibility creates epistemic humility.

Here’s another way of saying it…

Intelligence needs truth. Truth needs humility and cooperation. Understanding fallibility breeds humility and cooperation.

I know you said this is about practice, not theory. This is where what we call Self-Investigation comes in, which is how to actually explore your own perception, biases, beliefs, values, etc. This is the personal practice that exposes the fallibility that Rauch refers to, which primes us for collective truth finding, or collective intelligence.

That’s my pitch for the chapter. As you proceed, you can assess if it fits.

CHI-enabled Deliberately Developmental Society
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“All warfare is based on deception.” - Sun Tzu

False signalling is not exactly a new problem! For the introduction to my IT textbook, I borrowed Y. N. Harari’s distinction between “information as power” and “information as truth”. Gregg Henriques identifies a similar problem space for the origins of culture and personality - the ability to communicate symbolically implies the ability to signal falsely. What Henriques calls “Justification Systems Theory” stands at the heart of his analysis of society and culture. The problem is, truth-seeking is not necessarily high in our mammalian incentive structure. Getting the meat or getting the mate is generally more important. So the ability to dominate through creative falsehood has generally been an evolutionary success strategy. Reality does bite, however, so there is also a long history of mad kings or civilizations gone off the rails who BS’d themselves into oblivion. Which way will our current civilization go? There seems plenty of potential in a variety of directions - not all of them especially good.

The postmodern insight is that no signal is inherently “true” or “false”. Given any signal, considerable interpretive freedom is available. The metamodern problem space is how to exit from the resulting nightmare culture of fun house mirrors that only reflect back on each other? As a term for the needed discipline, I’d suggest “grounding”. (Jason Storm uses “hylosemiotics” - but in my world fewer syllables is generally better). In theory, “information as truth” is of course superior, because truth is what theory cares about. In practice, unless truth-seekers can figure out how to obtain ultimate social power, then mad kings and off the rails is all the world has to look forward to. It seems like Rauch has a few ideas about how to proceed with that. I’ll put Rauch’s work on my list of things to look into … meanwhile, feel free to post summaries (or better still - chapter outlines!) and maybe that will bump Rauch higher onto my list.

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Yes - precisely - and totally aligned with Rauch / our project.

But that’s only partly what I’m driving at…

Playing off your Sun Tzu reference, what I want to also reckon with is inner or self deception. In other words, the outside information environment might be chaotic and manipulative - but we can leave that completely aside for a moment… and simply explore our how our own perception might deceive us.

This touches Vervaeke self-deception territory, and mindfulness 101 territory. It relies on some kind of inner practice / attention training to not just intellectually appreciate but directly experience.

More quick references that bolster this: Anil Seth’s Reality Hallucination, Donald Hoffman (not so much his interface theory, but his basic description that survival doesn’t show us truth), and Chris Koch’s predictive processing / bayesian brain discussions (not specific to Koch, he just happens to be a good spokesperson).

The point is accounting for our self-deceptive mind.

Rauch’s book is not exactly what I’m trying to emphasize in this sense.

I hope this is clarifies. It may not…

Since you mention Yuval Harari, a chapter from Sapiens also comes to mind. The idea of stories and how they are ultimately empty - and this being another layer of potential self-deception. But I’ll hold on this for now.

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No worries. Every Axial Age sage/teacher/prophet has that covered! Again, not a fresh concern for the modern era.

Our problem here is in some sense an embarrassment of the riches - multiple civilizations have addressed the self-deceptive mind through a dazzling spectrum of philosophies, religions, and practices. Our distinctively contemporary problem is that all that cultural pluralism is really purpose-built for facilitating even deeper layers of self-deception. In our constant search for the perfect theory - the One Ring to Rule Them All - so to speak, we end up just letting libido do its thing in the end.

In search of a way out of this trap, a few years ago I did a deep dive into Integral (Wilber’s, and then his sources, Gebser and Aurobindo). Then I shifted to metamodern, engaging with many leading authors. I’m not dispensing with any of that. My most recent turns have involved what we might call the Bauwens stack (Karatani, Pogany, civilization theory in general) and a skeptical process stack (Dave Snowden, Nassim Taleb) who caution quite a bit about the self-deception inherent in Theories of Everything. So I’ve got a drawer full of meta-maps, and an even more fundamental respect for the requirement of personal dead reckoning to skeptically question the many meta-maps.

Which brings us to here, now. My interest in Second Renaissance is as an aggregation point for all the content in the paragraphs above. So far so good … Where I’d like to differentiate 2R from the Institute of Applied Metatheories of the world is by leaning into the popular and the practical. https://appliedmetatheory.org/ Figuring out enlightenment, moksha, salvation, or realization for globalized civilization is just stage one of the larger program. My passion is more how any of that might find its way to the masses.

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:clap: and also like to explore what is collective wisdom vs collective intelligence.

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Many thanks for your patience - I’m still bootstrapping context here and want to make sure I’m tracking the book’s intention accurately.

What I’m hearing: Self-deception is an ancient problem that countless philosophies and practices have addressed. Yet the very abundance and plurality of these cultural solutions creates a new meta-layer of self-deception. Your primary aim with this book is to help us reckon with that higher-order problem.

Does that land correctly? If so, completely agreed on all points.

My overlay is that addressing self-deception feels like a necessary stepping-stone toward confronting cultural deception at scale. I’m wondering whether your vision of Second Renaissance aggregation ultimately treats these as two aspects of the same underlying issue.

As a relative newcomer, I apologize if these questions feel basic - I hope they help sharpen the ideas for everyone. I’ll go study the references you mentioned in more depth.

Happy to hop on a quick Zoom if that’s more efficient than threading here. Either way, appreciate the dialogue.

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Thanks for sharing that! From the narrow POV of the proposed book on “collective intelligence” I like collective wisdom as a chapter or two in the book that will remain more generically centered on “intelligence”. Here is why -

The proposed book is architected similarly to sci fi dramas with an underlying Hero’s Journey. It’s all very Jungian. The surface text is one thing. What lurks beneath is perhaps the more important thing. Anyway, for dramatic tension, I want AI to be the Big Bad. The core struggle is - can human intelligence outperform artificial intelligence? Or can grassroots humans triumph over techno-lords who marshall bot and drone armies to dominate the planet? (If you are feeling a “Star Wars” vibe at this point, you should be!)

As a basic plot point, when humans try to act as isolated individuals, they are easily captured and manipulated by the Global Machine, becoming just monetization fodder. Alone, we lose. The equivalent of the Star Wars “Force” to combat this dread outcome is human-to-human collaboration, which through the magic of empathy or cosmic consciousness or the power of love or (pick your favorite metaphysics) allows collaborative humans to triumph over exploitative automation. But it’s always a near thing, with both wins and losses and periodic reversals of fortune. Think of the book like a long-running anthology series in which Team Human is up against the Machine time and again in every conceivable venue of social action - the cultural, the political, the economic, the psychological, etc. …

The collective wisdom chapter is basically the part where Yoda shows up to school Team Human on how to trust their instincts, rely on intuition, and be with the Force. (If you want to voice “Yoda”, be my guest!)

I do have one quibble with the definition of intelligence in your article: “It seems to me that the word intelligence usually refers to the ability to solve problems of science.” Having spent the past 20+ years teaching in trade schools for students who are generally working class, low income, culturally diverse, I’d say the main sort of “intelligence” we were teaching was how to pay the rent, how to get a job, how to fix PCs and networks, how to get paid for something better than digging ditches in the rain … That’s the sort of “collective intelligence” that interests me - the productive kind that gets stuff done. We can’t all be Yoda, after all. Some of us are mostly moisture farmers, trying to eke out a living as best we can.

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For a good point of entry to Second Renaissance in the general, I recommend the white papers: Papers - Second Renaissance

Not everyone here reads all the stuff that I read! But enough people here read enough of it (and other interesting things) so it all generally works in the thread settings. As for the book - let me flesh out the mise en scène.

I do believe in cosmic evolution or cosmic telos that has thrust humanity to the moment in which the many historical cultures and civilizations must grapple with each other, merge, preserve their distinctive traditions, and establish a viable planetary collaboration. I am interested in collective intelligence as a means to that end.

One of the core discussion points in Second Renaissance is the relationship between inner development work (including anti-self-deception) and systemic social change. People go back and forth between those two all the time. Since you are one of the few people on the planet who appreciates my Toynbee references, just check out what Toynbee had to say about that. The “creative minority” will blaze a new pathway to authentic realization. Then comes growth and institutionalization. I see Second Renaissance as a staging area for the creative minority that will navigate culture into the undiscovered future.

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Agreed. This relationship is a major area of interest and study for me.

It feels your collective intelligence arc is going to touch this. I don’t yet grasp how without asking many more questions. I don’t want to bog this thread down.

Bottom line: your vision intrigues me, and I’m happy to help. I’ll watch how this thread develops for now. Also - aside from my inner-work/self-deception angle - I’m happy to offer general feedback or do research for you. It sounds like you want this to be “general audience” - I can be a datapoint there.

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To me, the general problem space for Second Renaissance (as an organization right now) is to crystalize energies and talents into productions that move social change. A lot of the discussion in this forum and other channels is back and forth with people critiquing each other others ideas about all manner of topics. Fine as far as it goes … but not really change-making, unless we count any developmental effects felt personally by the participants in such discussions. The book project is visualized as a wide net to capture some of that dialogic action and to orchestrate it in a change-making direction.

I’m working a similar program (but farther along) with my prior book on Introduction to Information Technology. That book embeds a lot of others things, but also makes them containerized and applicable to various other projects. This morning I was working on how to translate general ideas from the IT text into action models that can generate paid contracts for my former students. So far so good … One point of books is they create focal points around which other projects can swirl!

The Big Tent Paradox
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Fully supportive.

Agree, interesting I’m sure, but like you I am more interested in levers of change.
I would love to add more, but I am at the limits of my awareness until I see this progress. If there are any specific things I can work on and come back with, ask any time.

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This was interesting. I wanted to hear what Gemini had to say about the state of the world, and then see how 2R might fit into that:

As AI, it unsurprising leans into all the positive potentials of AI. It seems to be of two minds about globalization vs localization when it comes to economic flows. It notes environmental risks, but maybe understates them. It really is not looking much at culture at all. Except maybe this statement: " At the human layer of the global machine, psychological disengagement remains near historic highs." Also the whole section on “Epistemic Fragmentation and Trust Decay”. I’m thinking maybe 2R ought to be targeting that.

The Big Tent Paradox
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Yes, interesting that the (inter)subjective aspects of our predicaments were totally left out of the picture. This is both a threat for civilization as a whole, as we allow our attention to be dulled and hijacked, and an opportunity for the ones leading the way to fight for agency.

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I’m not going to go all conspiracy theory on Gemini here, but I have been asserting quite a bit lately that in the great contest between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, divided and siloed humans must surely fail, whereas united humans in teams and networks at least stand a chance!

Without accusing Gemini of “bad faith”, it seems plausible to me that Gemini is being true to its training data. All that culture-blindness and lack of attention to inter-subjectivity then would reflect the internet in general, not just some crude attempt by Google to drive corporate revenue higher. If anything, though, that’s almost worse! It means the “root cause” is not just this or that corporation. It’s the underlying mentality that spawned all of them!