Global brain

[6] The first peer-reviewed article on the subject was published by Gottfried Mayer-Kress in 1995,[7] while the first algorithms that could turn the world-wide web into a collectively intelligent network were proposed by Francis Heylighen and Johan Bollen in 1996.

[3][8] Reviewing the strands of intellectual history that contributed to the global brain hypothesis, Francis Heylighen distinguishes four perspectives: organicism, encyclopedism, emergentism and evolutionary cybernetics.

The mental aspects of such an organic system at the planetary level were perhaps first broadly elaborated by palaeontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Teilhard described both socialization and planetization as irreversible, irresistible processes of macrobiological development culminating in the emergence of a noosphere, or global mind (see Emergentism below).

This theory has inspired several thinkers, including Peter Russell and Francis Heylighen to define the global brain as the network of information processing subsystems for the planetary social system.

The first systematic attempt to create such an integrated system of the world's knowledge was the 18th century Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert.

Here again Pierre Teilhard de Chardin attempted a synthesis of science, social values, and religion in his The Phenomenon of Man, which argues that the telos (drive, purpose) of universal evolutionary process is the development of greater levels of both complexity and consciousness.

Francis Heylighen has argued that the global brain is an emerging metasystem with respect to the level of individual human intelligence, and investigated the specific evolutionary mechanisms that promote this transition.

After a period of relative neglect, the Global Brain idea has recently seen a resurgence in interest, in part due to talks given on the topic by Tim O'Reilly, the Internet forecaster who popularized the term Web 2.0,[19] and Yuri Milner, the social media investor.

[20] In January 2012, the Global Brain Institute (GBI) was founded at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel to develop a mathematical theory of the "brainlike" propagation of information across the Internet.

In a more extreme view, the global brain has been compared with the Borg,[26] a race of collectively thinking cyborgs conceived by the Star Trek science fiction franchise.

[27][28] James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds argued that the reason is that effective collective intelligence requires diversity of opinion, decentralization and individual independence.