Investigating Superorganisms and The Collective Intelligence of Humans

Adam  00:00

In today's fast-paced world, we often find ourselves at the crossroads of technology and science and culture, searching for the threads that bind these elements together and shape our lives. You know, we tend to think about this question as affecting individuals or groups. But what if the answer is larger than that? What if we as humanity function, not really as individuals, but as parts of a larger collective entity? And I'm not just talking metaphorically, but blending into a larger entity? How might that change the course of our future? Imagine the transformative power of we've elevated over the isolated AI. So welcome to the center of Life. I'm your host, Adam Gamwell. And today, we embark on an extraordinary journey guided by the thought provoking insights of Byron Reese stands at the forefront of futurism. He's an author and a CEO who wields the power of inquiry to unlock the mysteries swirling at the inner cities of human connections and networks with an analytical mind and infectious curiosity I read beckons us to delve deeper, not just into the mechanics of our world, but into the very essence of our existence. So together, today, we'll navigate the concept of super organisms, an idea that stretches the fabric of our individuality and our collective identities, weaving through the narratives of ancient civilizations into our future, examining the harmonious yet complex structure of bees, and even casting our gaze towards the stars to the cosmos that develops us. So are you prepared to have your preconceived notions upturned? Or are you feeling ready to take a journey that challenges the conventional pieces together the grand puzzle that is humanity and infuses your day to day with profound disruptive insights? Well, then stay tuned. We're gonna fly through this conversation on what it means to be part of something far greater than ourselves. This my friends is not just a conversation, it's an invitation to view the world and our place within it through a radically different lens. But the journey begin here on the center life

Byron Reese  01:42

when I was a boy, I was a boy scout. I grew up on a farm and I was a boy scout I mean when you're a boy scout go away for the summer for summer camp and it's summer camp you your merit badges, and they're all Woodcraft related, yet I was a I was a nerd surprised. And one summer I saw this nerdy merit badge they offered which was bookkeeping, and I said, I want to learn accounting this summer, the Boy Scout camp, so I signed up for bookkeeping in the man came out and he said, There's no such thing as a bookkeeping, that Boy Scouts of America, whatever offer that you have all just signed up for beekeeping, beekeeping. So that's another story about how I became a beekeeper. And what I learned about bees is, you know, a bee is a creature made of cells just like we are, but a bunch of bees come together to form a hive and that hive is actually another animal. It's not a metaphor for an animal it is an animal. Why would I show you that? Well, it it has different properties. It's warm blooded, it regulates its temperature, where's nobody does that it has a memory. It has a lifespan of maybe a century where a beaver this lives a few weeks, it can reproduce. If the beehive had a skin around the whole thing, you wouldn't have any trouble imagining it being like a living creature. But because it doesn't. It's hard for us to do that. But I learned that it is a super organism and has these emergent capabilities. And there's even an old tradition when beekeepers that when the beekeeper dies, you go and you tell the the bees the keeper stat. And they I believe did that when Queen Elizabeth died, said the royal beat up so they went and told them. So the question I asked myself is, is it possible that a bunch of people come together and form a literal animal? Not a metaphor, but a biological fact that are a bunch of people together a creature living creature? And if so, how would you know it wouldn't be obvious because the super organism lives on a different timescale than the nice and it's what whole level up and we wouldn't be able to perceive it. And so I decided I would, I would put forth a series of hypotheses that would be true, falsifiable hypotheses, it would be true. If we were a super organism. I didn't know where it was gonna land, honestly, when I started the book, but by the end of the book pletely convinced there is this animal. I named it a Gora. And I believe it's a living, breathing, thinking creature that we can not be sure exists. But I can believe does exist take

Adam  04:08

evident evidence points towards I think that yeah, I agree. It's like I think it's a totally fascinating hypothesis and agree to going through your book too, that you put together a convincing argument, right, that we can think about this. And so one one thing like I think you wisely start the book around the cell, right? We're like, thinking about life of simplicity through through complexity. And so because super super organisms themselves are quite complex in bee hive is a good example there where it's, you know, we have the individual bees, but then they come together and they make this new bing, bing, right. That is this, this notion that it you know, as you said, can kind of like regulate as temperature it has a different lifespan than individual bees. And that's, that's interesting for us to think about, like when we scaled down, I have a human body and then I made up of bajillions of cells. Alright. So this is something that that you know, I know you talked about this the book too, but folks haven't read it to you like one way to how can we think about this in terms of, if I scaled down it does I'm not a super organism has me, Adam that has a bunch of cells. But if we scale up as humans into a planetary size things humanity can function as that. So how do we begin to think about that like, so it's not just the number of complex little things happening. But there's other pieces that make something a super organism or other properties that come as part of that. So I

Byron Reese  05:18

actually think you already Super, thank you. So the reason I started, the reason I started with the shell is I point out that there's nothing in a shell that is alive, that is the primary unit of life on the Earth. And if I took you a party cell at a time, and put themselves in petri dishes, they could live and live their full lives and die and all of that, but you would have vanished in that picture. So so the question is, what what are you? What are you? You're much more like a fit? It's, it's a crazy question, because that was what I wanted people think about is, you know, you're a unity you are you have, but where does that come from, in the sense that you are made of cells, but you don't share your body with your cells, it's not like they could have the body and you could have it, somehow, you're a different pattern of order, on top of another pattern of order. I like it in the book, in the introduction, to imagine a poster, you look at a poster on the wall, and it's a puppy, hey, and use, you get real close and look at it really carefully. And you notice that the pixels are actually different photographs of puppies. So at one level, you see, and then at another level, there's a different level of order. And that's what you are. And so I think people can kind of grapple with them in Where do I come from? And how is it that I had these new abilities, because I'm not really alive in the way that a soul is alive. And so his primary unit of life and your collection of like, you're like a, like a blank, no gear can tell time. But if you put yours together and cutting away, it can tell time, and that you make a clock. And that's really what you are. And so once you can wrap your head around that, then it becomes easy to see that a bunch of people can come together and there could be a new level of order. And that would be a gorta. And a bunch of Agoras could come together. And that could that could be another life form a higher level iPhone, there's no reason there are actually reasons that would stop not philosophical reasons, but practical reasons of relating to the age of the universe. At some point, the scale of the super organism would would just be so far beyond what the how long we think life is that the universe has existed. Now, the last thing I'll say on this is what what excites me about this theory is that it answers the question, why are we here with a scientifically in science does not like why questions science loves how questions How does this do and know that science does not like why why? And I think I can say now why we are here, what is our our purpose? Because you see, there was a I will spoil it part. But it comes about because there was a an essay written a long time ago called i The letter I and calm a pencil. And it was this economist who pointed out there wasn't a person on the planet who could make a pencil, there was nobody who could mine the or make the steel and crimp the federal and fell the tree and make the yellow paint. Nobody could and yet pencils get made. So who's making the pencils? My answer to that is a Gore is making the pencils, hey, that's an emergent capability. And so when you think about an iPhone or a smartphone, your body has 30 elements. And that's it. That smartphone is 60 elements. There's not a person live, who could make a smartphone and yet that smartphone gets made hit, you know, people people invoke the invisible hand, like Adam Smith's invisible hand. Yeah, but they never say whose hand is it? That's a good point. And I think it's a Gordon's head. Yeah, no,

Adam  08:51

that's actually a really good point. Because he often have these kinds of metaphors of bigger things happening, right? Invisible Hand is a great example. And then it's like, Well, okay, what hand is that? Right? Even like this, this idea that like, I don't think of like, applies that much. But just like, Tom, you know, Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, right, the idea that like we all come together, and that becomes the sovereign, which is the the being that then like, adjudicates, or decides and like, only functions as a aggregate of beings, right to make the will. And that's interesting, interesting pieces. I think part of that too. Like, as we kind of wrap our heads around what a super organism is, or does, right? What I found really helpful too is like, as we think through like the pieces that it has to have, like ideas of like novel properties that are different from the the individual itself. And so the example you said with human body and cells is a good one where it's like the cell is the unit of life. But then there's a me that's separate. That's not the cells, but it is the cells, right? But this like, all the cells are not saying, Hey, I have an idea, let's get together and then make Adam, right, or whoever else right there, but like there's just a higher order that then takes place in a certain configuration. And so, thinking about this too, like as we kind of like map out a little bit or some of the ideas of like, what are some of the emergent properties that we See coming out from a Gora? Like as we think about this, like, what is it doing? And so part of it is like making complex technologies that seems things like pencils and iPhones and abilities like that, like, Is that is that one way to think about it? Or like, are there other properties?

Byron Reese  10:13

I mean, I 100% The way to think about I like to think about Manhattan, because it's it's an island. It shows kind of discreet. It. So anytime you're thinking about like, how do I picture it or just got to think about Manhattan. And what's interesting is 10,000 tons of food are brought into Manhattan every day to fill 40,000 restaurants and grocery stores. And you say, well, who's deciding what those are? Because it's highly variable, how much cod got, I think, got cotton, Chesapeake Bay yesterday, and that somehow, the food comes in. And there's usually about the right amount of bagels and pizza slices and, and then you think about all the Ubers and taxi cabs and who's deciding Well, there needs to be 1000 here and 4000, year 2000. Nobody, you see, your body has 240 different kinds of cells. And those each have different functions. And those cells just run their own algorithms. And together that you get this emergent one, the Europe at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, tracks the outlook of 10,000 different human jobs. And so you put make those you think of those as different types of cells. And they each run their, their own algorithm. So one of them is a restaurant manager who has to order enough flour for their pizza place. And that there's a lot of them, you know, there's no one platelet that's in charge of like clotting your blood of the platelets, just all act independently. Hey, now, the interesting things that flow from that is, for instance, one of the things about a super organism is that the parts cannot survive apart from it anymore. Hey, and so you would have to ask that about humans do humans? Can humans function outside of society dropped on the proverbial desert island, and in most cases is no, we've all become so specialized that our which of our 10,000 algorithms we do that we can no longer do the other ones. And then another one that's kind of interesting is that if something and a super organism actually weird, the kill it, hey, you have this rigid conformity and a super organism do you have to do things a certain way? And we it may not seem that way. Back then when you stop and think about human society, first of all, we manufacture workers in a school system. With standardized testing, we teach the same things and we test in a super organism, the the normal thing is the highest thing, you could do something better in a super organism. And you're actually that bad. Hey, this is different from other people. And so bricklayers can come together if you've never met, and they can exchange just a little bit of information and they could lay bricks together. We even criminalize nonconformity. If you're a brain surgeon, and you decide, you know, I'm gonna do things my own way, not the way you were taught in medical school, well, they will shoot you and you will go to jail. You know, that could be a criminal negligence right there. Hey, and so when you start to look at New York, or Manhattan, and you say, Okay, we got these 10,000 different kinds of cells, and they're all acting independently, they're all doing one of the functions, maybe it's feeding, acquiring food, or creating energy, or all of these things, you start to see, it become Oh, and by the way, the big one is the city learns, the city learns, how is it if you stare, all these things it is you interact with them? You encode information, I talked about desire pads, that's like on a college campus, when people take a short cut across the academic quad or something between buildings, you can see where that path is, that's where there's a sidewalk, but that should have been, that's the desired path. That's encoding information about how people want to crawl certain cities do that, ever. If you stand in the city and look around, you can see where the city organically learned how to operate. No human could plan Manhattan, nobody could build it and build that shit. And it has to organically grow. And so at some point, it just stops becoming a metaphor to be it becomes an actual animal, actual creature. I don't know why it is.

Adam  14:23

Yeah, I mean, it's a good it's a good point, you know, in terms of as we think about this, because it's like, I think on the one hand to somebody that you made a really, really important point. I think that cities are a great example there of the emplacement of where we can like see the bones we might say, right, the, the skeleton of a Gora in some level because it's like, it's we're watching that learning that knowledge getting coded, or watching it then physically change the building gets taller a road changes, you know, the shop becomes a computer shop when it used to be a fax machine shop or whatever it is, you know, we see we see kind of those changes over time or how a school functions, I think is an interesting example there too. So Part of that to me, and I think this is an important distinction to think about, too. Is that like, you talked about this in the book that like the humans were the agora, though, right? The city itself isn't right. That's the thing that we've made that helps we see the organization happening, right. But it's like, there's an organic city, the machine has a word of that. That's kind of required there, I think, right? God, if I'm, if I'm thinking about that correct, where it's like, 100%, okay. Yeah. So it's like this is because I could, I'm just imagining people kind of saying, well, but you know, how are our cities or our computers? You know, what are they doing? And it's like, I think similar to kind of how you're building your argument, in your last book, two, in terms of thy offers computational knowledge, kind of compiling, in this context to it's like the same kind of thing, right? They allow us to that encode our knowledge in new ways like this, I guess one of the difference between us and bees, right, is that bees, nobody tells the bees, maybe talking about beavers in your last book to beavers. Nobody tells the beavers how to make the dam, they just make the dam, we then build us, you know, we write how to make a dam. And we share that and pay that forward, right. And then that then becomes some of the kind of DNA that we read, right. But it's not organic DNA, right. It's something something that we can have used to then move our knowledge forward. But the effects of which then compound into a gore, write something that's bigger than us.

Byron Reese  16:16

On 100%, I wrote an article I called up the 4 billion year history of large language models. And it takes about three and a half billion years of history. We had one place that information was stored, and that was in cells, single celled life. DNA is a delight. It really is just data storage. It holds about 600 Mega human, four letters, 2 billion base pairs. It's just data. That's crazy, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's something and the thing is, is that DNA is a data store house, it's very hard to edit it, it takes a long time, hundreds of 1000s of years, maybe to make some edits to it. Then 500 million years ago, we got the Cambrian explosion, and we have all brains, the brains became the second place to store data. Now all of a sudden, you could store vastly more, and you could write it vastly quicker through a process called Learning. Then humans got speech and speech as his data exchange protocol. Now, think about this, I just love this. Let's say there's a purple berry that's poisonous to humans, maybe over the course, people can talk and they're not, you know, they're just animals, maybe over 100,000 years, or million years or whatever, we eventually evolved that aversion to that light baby, people who like purple ate it, and they die, they didn't reproduce. So we gradually evolved in the borings of purple. And then to maybe that takes 100,000 years to learn. Now, what I love is that if I tell you, Hey, man, don't eat those purple berries, you have a new mutation, it isn't a patient because you were going to eat the berry. And then you had this mutation, where now all of a sudden, you're not going to eat the berry. Now, I just gave you 100,000 years of evolution in five seconds. Well, because I have this protocol. And that's why humans evolve trillions of years, by the day, almost because we can evolve with just a sentence, you can evolve a great new capability. And then, then 5000 years ago, there's a strange thing that happened with humans, where we had where everything just kind of took off then. And that's because we got writing what you were just talking about, we learned to externalize knowledge, it's only the third place, you can store data stored in the Anang, store and braids. And now you can store it externally. And then ultimate, it was very expensive. So we got all this progress. But then Gutenberg came along, and all of a sudden, we could store it really cheaply. And then you get scientific revolution, you get this other burst. But then you hit a brick wall, Why do you hit a brick wall, because you store all that knowledge in libraries and libraries, might as well not even exist. They're like that final scene and Raiders of Lost Ark or the Ark and that warehouse, right? That's what a library is. It's kind of where ideas go to never be discovered. Because, yeah, we had card catalog. So we learned how to digitize, we learned how to digitize it and make it searchable. And they gave us the internet. However, that was a big problem, the cause all of the human knowledge was still scattered and 50 billion web pages. So that's why when you do a search on Google, what's the difference between the cold and the flu? Google says I got 30 million answers for the first one. Yeah, but you don't want that you want the wind. And so I think these words, language models are our very first attempt to ever consolidate all human knowledge together. If we single knowledge base, there are 50 billion is just one. And when that happens, when that really works, when there's just one place, that we stored all of our collective knowledge, that is going to be this incredible flowering of humanity, the likes of which we cannot even imagine

Adam  19:47

now that that idea, kind of tracing the evolution analogy into something like a large language model, because also the thing about also how we process knowledge right to your point, like, I don't want 30 million answers about what those are Hold on foot want to know which what I can do with like a useful single answer, right? It's interesting how like, even even the emergence of GPT right in and beyond that Gemini and all the other the models now, like a lot of them are premised on this chat model, right. I mean, they're, we're building agents now that can do more functional things, too. But like, it's an interesting idea that, like, what made them take off in the public imagination was that you could, you know, air quote jet to it, right, you can talk to it, in the same way that like, this is also how we transmit, you know, a couple of million years of evolution by saying don't eat that purple Berry. Right. And that's an interesting question in terms of like, how we, I guess, we're poised for, you know, in terms of what might might be next is an interesting question, right? If we now have a we're slowly building that repository. It's funny, because I mean, it makes me think, to have that, like, we have a lot of questionable models of how we silo information around, you know, IP and business models and things like that, that like for current existence are helpful in terms of keeping the economy moving. But it does raise interesting questions of like, if we're talking about the ultimate, like, either evolution of humanity, or the pursuit of a more collective knowledge, when we run up to those kind of limits are these are is, are these kind of our our existing business models and economic structures? Are they the brick walls of today, whereas you know, before it was expensive paper? And then, you know, storage and libraries, you know, are we now like at another point where access is here, but then we have to then kind of shift how that access happens. Obviously, we're seeing like the human last year and a half. Yeah.

Byron Reese  21:22

Yeah, I would, I would think, I think that is true. But I would actually say the next bottleneck is that, you know, when you die, everything you know is going to die with you almost everything, like maybe you wrote some stuff down, maybe they told some people things, but your your life experience, the daily minutiae of your life, the cause and effect of the 1000, tiny decisions you make a day, that's all gone. And that's what what we're going to start to capture. And that's with all the sensors we're putting on everything. How many sensors are connected to the Internet right now? We don't know, or is there a trillion? Absolutely a tree? We don't know how many? You see, what's gonna happen is like, you're gonna have a skill and that skill, it's gonna have sensors in it. Why would you want to skill it with sensors? That skill? It's going to tell you if there's botulism in your food, and you would, you know, would you pay an extra buck for today? Your foods not going to poison? Yes, yeah, I'd buy that. But that is collecting knowledge. So what's going to happen in the very near future, is that the cause and effect of everything you do in life, your action and its outcome will be logged and that will become data, to no longer is it just the few 50 billion pages we've managed to assemble on the internet. It's every decision that can be externally gleaned by a sensor that you make. And what that's going to do is it's going to mean that everybody in the future is going to be wiser than anyone who has ever lived, because they're going to have the aggregate life experiences of all those people informing every one of their decisions. And that is going to be paradise. Yeah. Hopefully, it really will. Yeah, well, did it it kind of has to be otherwise. Yeah, that's actually caught arguing for ignorance. Yeah, it's better that we forget. And we don't learn from my mistakes, it would, that would be better. I would love everybody. If everybody who lived before me everything they did every mistake they made every, it's all of that, what's gonna happen, I think it's gonna be like, you know, let's say you have a metal detector, and you go to the beach, and you're swinging that thing around. And now, you can dig anywhere you want to. Metal check is not making you dig there. But you're gonna dig there. I mean, you're not gonna say the metal detector, You're not the boss of me. I'm digging over there. Now you're gonna dig where it won't be too deep. And that's what we're going to be able to do. We're going to have this thing and we're still the agents. We're still the moral agents. We still make the choices, but we're going to know like, why would I dig anywhere else? Now, I hasten to point out, none of this is a Gora people. But but those people are amplified by that technology. The Court began when and you know, I have a chapter called The Mammoth hunters and I talked about no person could take down a mammoth, but it may be a band of 10 people who specialized in plan to communicate it, they could, and that was kind of the proto, but really, it began in cities, when people came together, and they specialized. We're collectively less intelligent than we were 3000 years ago. We're individually much less intelligent than we were 3000 years ago. The hunter gatherers were jack of all trades, right? They could do the head to the if you want to add 100 hunter gatherers, they probably their knowledge overlap, but 90% each other, they all knew kind of the same thing. We've all specialized now. So we individually know less but collectively, we know more. And that's that's good. That's going to keep going by the way we're gonna. But that's also the trade off. That's why we can't pull out of the super organism. You were aware. Were part of it.

Adam  24:55

Yeah, now. It's a good it's a good point to where it's like it's Like, there's always gonna be that kind of trade off, right? Where it's like, definitely youth or to where it's like we can we can see it clearly if we talked about mammoth hunters, and it was our ability to come together as a small group to then figure out how do we take down something bigger than ourselves, but then scale that up and move forward into a city. And it's the same kind of thing, right? That it's, we are fundamentally making something new out of ourselves, that we couldn't do individually in, like, you can just see it as City is a great example of a much bigger scale, what that what that could look like. And that can be things like pencils and iPhones, right. But they can also be things like tax benefits, and waffle irons, you know, in all sorts of things like in political systems, right? And how we make all these different, these different four things go for it, I think, what's what's curious about the two of them, I think it's it's important is that, again, like, there's the kind of organic side like we have to be made of cells have to be a super organism. But that also, the self creation side of it that you write about too, I think, is really interesting that like, it kind of perpetuates itself, in the same way that our cells do, we don't ask them to, as you said, like, you don't ask them to like coagulated blood if I get a cut. But they do that, in the same way that we kind of go about our everyday lives in the aggregate of our actions, ultimately, then kind of scale up into this a core piece. And so, um, you know, as we think about that, too, like, the idea of self creation is interesting, because, you know, something that we were saying before, to have, like, the, there is kind of the barriers of what is and what isn't, you know, like, like a super organism is good at defining its barriers. And part of that is, like, as you said, too, that there's too many outliers and like, it doesn't really have a lot of space for that, right. And schooling is an interesting example, where it kind of like tries to normalize the learning process that had me thinking about, like, I don't know, Malcolm Gladwell is outliers. And there's so much, you know, productivity guru talk these days about, like, you know, you gotta, you want to, like think outside the box and be different than but make your mark love a lot. It's like, there's this funny point of like, how does that square away with like, there are actually kind of norms of like, what we overall is not looking for, or like, will not kind of stand to work with, but it's like, this interesting idea of like, I guess, on our human scale, we're saying, Oh, we want to have more, you know, diverse forms of thought, and, you know, ways of approaching business and innovation. And then on a grander scale, you know, how does that kind of play in because I know that because evolution is a piece of super organisms, right? That like they it's an evolving, being concise? I don't know, maybe making a problem where there isn't was I'm just curious, like, yeah, to think about that. I'm with

Byron Reese  27:10

you, and with you. So. And I'll, I'll address it very directly. But I'll point out, I'll start by saying the areas that were required to conform are 1000 times the ones we're allowed to do. For instance, I think what I put in the book, I have something about I never seen anybody wear half a moustache ever. That's right. Or the right. I've never start shining all of your emails with in accordance with the prophecy and your name. Or just decide you're gonna bring back monocles and capes that you start going around to go to work where you're in a cage and see if the big promotion comes through. There's all it Oh, how about grammar, like, just decide you're not gonna use punctuation anymore. It's even something as simple as typing in all caps or something, you're not getting the big promotion. If you do that, like there are all of these 1000s of things that if you just do one of them, I mean, people like even if you're like a vegan or somebody and choice you make about for yourself, that still may be enough difference that you're gonna be considered outside and not part of him. So you have to it's, it's, it didn't like, you know, militaries you. They don't give you four different uniforms. And you get to pick which ones you're gonna wear. Like four different player. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They they shake everybody's head so they look alike. Yeah, so they look a lot. And so when you start looking through those eyes, because that was gonna be my bed kind of, you can tell a gory there's a real because humans are individuals. Not we're not paying we're not mindless worker bees. But I was disabused of this notion very quickly what I started thinking of all the ways that you get down to answer your question. In a hive, there are different jobs and they do they are differently ranked in importance. The queen is not the ruler, hey, right, she's just the reproductive unit. But obviously that's the most important thing. It's crazy guys, you're in bad trouble. And then the workers and their people who guard the bees guard the entrance of it to keep bees from other hives out because you think about it, you know, a good strategy for bees might just be to go get the honey out at the next time over, they bring it back to yours and, and so they can kind of tell who's who there are there are bees that do the dance better than other bees to tell where the honey is. That are more reliable. So there, but But the cool thing is the Hive does not succeed because there's one one bee that there's a super bee, you know, like some genius being in it. And everybody else is just along for the ride the behind works because everybody's doing their job, whatever it is. And I think there's a great, great metaphor in that by the way for us. And even at a personal level what I write The book is that if you feel like you're not doing as much with your life as you should be, quote unquote, should be, I think people ought to move past that way of thinking really quickly, because no, no part can comprehend the super organism, super organism can do almost anything. And, you know, I would put no burden of heavier on people than just try to be a little nicer to everybody and everyday try to be just a little bit better. And that is all it takes to build utopia. That is to me that the ship organism, the glory can do anything, but only to the extent humans are willing to work together. My great ambition with this book, do you know what the overview effect is, it's the thing that when astronauts go up into space, and they see the Earth from space, and they see it's oneness, and they have these, like, emotional moment where they get this appreciation of kind of this, we're all in this together kind of thing. Well, we can't send everybody up into space. So what I'm trying to do with this book is bring the overview effect to the earth. And to say, you can look at the you can look at humanity as a creature. You know, the left hand may not like the right hand, but it has to understand there is no way for the left hand to win, and the white. What right to lose? Yeah, we're all part of the creature, the single creature that lives or dies on its own. And that's what I hope is like, the emotional impact that has on people's lives one add on meat. Yeah,

Adam  31:27

that I mean, that resonates with me, too. And I think that's it, because it's kinda like the idea to that, you know, when we, if we scan look at human body, and then like, imagine how, you know, imagine we could just say like, how uncomfortable it would feel to think about certain cells trying to kill you, or like, you know, that cells in your left side hated the cells in the right side, or vice versa, right, feed your body that that'll feel very weird, and kind of scary to be like, Oh, crap, I'm fighting myself. I mean, that's also talking a little bit about what cancer is, when something just goes it goes off the wire, and it's like, trying to reproduce too much. But I mean, if you add malicious intent to that, that's scary. Or, and so I think that it's an interesting point of like, the the the other the reality, though, of course, that all cells are working to the best of their ability, and they are doing what they do, and then, which is to help promote life. Right. And it's like, interesting question of like, we scale up to us, and then then us as as cells kind of for a gore, as it were, then there is this ability of asking ourselves that question of like, do we not function to also make the best conditions for life? You know, and is that not what we're kind of aiming for? What a Gore is looking forward to in that sense, right?

Byron Reese  32:29

Yeah, I think so. If I can. That is my my thing I teased earlier about why we are here. So there's a philosophy, there's a theory called the Gaia hypothesis put forth by this guy named James Lovelock. And he says that all the life said that all life on the Earth operates as a single organism that holds itself conducive to furthering life, he points of all these things like the salinity of the oceans remains constant, even though you would think with rivers putting salt into it every day, and water evaporating, you would get salt here and salt here, but they don't, because Crossbones under the percent of oxygen, oxygen, in the atmosphere has been constant for hundreds of millions of years. And that seems strange to so the earth, you could think of it as alive. Or you can think of it as a living, there's a system that behaves as if it's alive. Either way, you can say it has once the way somebody might say, my sports card wants to burn unleaded gas, you know, take the car really wants to the but it's a way of speaking and thinking. So imagine for a minute that guy exist, or at least the earth functions as a living creature, a system that that looks a lot like it's alive, what would it want? And I think it would want what all life wants it two things I want to live and I want to reproduce. So that's a living reproduce up. And then you say, shouldn't worry, worry again, and air quotes, because maybe it isn't a lie. But should the system be concerned that it could die? And with a guy Yes, 100% That'd be a big giant rock was gonna smash into this planet, it will happen. It has happened, it will happen again, a statistical certainty. And what happens is this book dovetail out of the core question I asked in the last book, which is, why is there just one intelligent species on planet earth? Why one? Hey, why not? 10? Or why not zero y one? And I think the answer is this. I think intelligence is really destructive to life. Here 99.999 has many nines, as you want to put on that percent of all life is intelligent, and it does justify intelligence, I think tends to destroy itself. That's a common explanation for the Fermi Paradox why we don't see light everywhere in the galaxy is because Carl Sagan said he gets to a certain level of smarts and then it blows himself up. So pretend for a moment that you are Gaia, and you're worried about getting whacked by a giant rock. And again, maybe you don't think just it's a system that that system produces a bunch of life will they blows itself up. But if the system produces no intelligent life, it gets hit by a rock and dies, got the Goldilocks amount of intelligent life is one, it's still very risky. But planets living climates and operating systems that produce one intelligent life form, that intelligent life form can protect them, like we already send up rockets to try to deflect asteroids, and we're only gonna get better at that. And so systems that produce many, they blow themselves up to produce nine, they get hit by rocks, but why does it produce just one? Those go on to reproduce, and I'll talk about how they reproduce, but it's just evolution. If you are a system that produces one intelligent life form, then you're going to sometimes live. So you say, Well, how in the world would a planet with Gaia reproduce? So I think one of the coolest things I know is when life Lifebook on planet Earth, while the crushed, hadn't even completely cooled. So it somebody who formed here almost immediately, and it was only happened once. How do we know it only happened once well only persisted once? Why do we know that because all life on this planet is related with the same gene, same DNA, you know, you share 99% of your DNA with the chimp, you share 60% of it with a banana. It's the same DNA. So it happened one time, right after the Earth cooled and never happened again. And we don't know and somehow miraculously, happened fully formed, when all this complexity, we don't have good answers to that, unless it didn't actually start here, that it just landed here is just drifting around this, you know, all these planets, that they have life, and then they get hit by an asteroid, blows them into smithereens. That's the technical term. And those drifts through space, and then every now and then they land on the planet, and that that is conducive to life and they grow. And again, if they had been a planet where that sometimes produced one intelligent life, then that one could protect it, and it could reproduce, and the other ones died out. And so I am I have falsifiable prediction is we are going to find the life on other planets, but it will be our DNA, it will be GTC a double helix DNA, because I think that was one kind of life and the university drifts around looking for places to land. Yeah, no,

Adam  37:45

that's, that's a, that's a very compelling point. Their minds, like, makes me think of a hopefully happier version of Prometheus, the alien prequel for Ridley Scott, that was that aliens, you know, seeded the Earth that they called.

Byron Reese  38:00

Directed pennsburg. Yeah, this is not yet it's considered a little fringe. But just panspermia in general, is it? I think it's not proven. Obviously, there is one piece of data suggested by that. And that is that you would expect a life you would expect your body to closely mirror the elements on this on this planet to get to you are produced by this planet. And yet you have elements in you that exist in you vastly more commonly than they exist on the earth. That much more on Mars, but we could be that, you know, we we just drifted here. It's an old idea, Lord Kelvin, said maybe a comet brought life here. Smash. Yeah, I mean, it's not a new idea. But yes, directed panspermia that aliens put us here. I mean, you've got to have a bigger belief system, right

Adam  38:51

to to add them in there. But all of that, yeah. But it's interesting, too, is like that it actually, you know, logically does make a sense of scale up wise, that if we're seeing a desire for life to, to be right, and that, that gets really interesting idea that like, if if there's some, I don't know, to call awareness, right, but there's a desire for life and that there's some knowledge are something happening, forces at play in on a planetary scale that recognizes that if I get hit by a rock, we're all dead. unless something happens that like helps me be able to continue then the interesting thing about that too, of course, then, but it does happen because it will always happen. At some point, every planet will get hit by some rock at some point. And then that splits off a chunk of that planet, including some of that DNA or life matter that land somewhere else. And I think that's a good point there and it's gonna get interesting. It's gonna be the panspermia as I say, see, we told you what when we find that other form of life that's gonna freak a lot of people out to find some other life and realize that it has the four elements of DNA that we have here to write and say like, like this is the this is not to say like carbon based but they might be but also just like we see the same kind of DNA like that's that's gonna be a very interesting moment, I guess because it's like exhibiting for to have like as we think about The idea of intelligence also we like, on the one hand, you're right, like we have they a wildly destructive capacity. You know, but then also, I think, as you said a couple times already that I think you're right that we also have the capacity for Utopia as part of that, that's the interesting conundrum we have is, as this level of of a gorez, as individual humans are living in communities that understand that, like, we have the capacity to make our conditions better, but we don't always do that. Right. And that's, that's kind of like the perennial struggle, it seems, at this scale.

Byron Reese  40:28

On it, love that. I throw, I think human progress is really relatively difficult thing to explain. Because we know humans don't really change, you know, if you, as a baby, were put into a different culture, or taken back in time, 2000 years, you would be a product of that. So we're malleable, but we don't really change. And yet, we show, you know, 1000 years ago, people were cruel in a way they are not cruel now. For instance, we used to torture people for entertainment. That was fine, right? In 10th century France, they had something called Cat burning, where they would make a big fire and everybody would gather around, and they would throw cats in it and watch them scream and yell and great fun time. And we're not I mean, we're still cruel. Don't get me wrong. But something has changed, subtle until you say, how, how could that be? How could we actually have made progress? And I think it's the maturation of agora. Now, the story of humanity is largely one of scarcity, like there never was quite enough food for everybody that never was quite enough leisure medicine. And so some people get it, and some people don't. We learned this trick called technology where all of a sudden, we could amplify what we were able to do it. And instead of 90%, it was growing our food, it was 2%. Now, utopian literature began in a serious way in 1650. I think there are reasons for that, oh, go into, you get a little hits of it, like Plato's Republic is utopian is his idea what a perfect world would be. But in terms of what this idea of we think of it as Utopia, they've kind of blossomed in the 1650s. And if you say, why did they imagine Utopia would be? They said the following. A lot of them were, would it be great? If we educated everybody, not just the elites? Wouldn't it be great if people got to choose their rulers instead of hereditary monarchy? Wouldn't be great. If you could pick your own religion, instead of having to believe the state religion? Would it be wonderful if you could, men and women had legal equality. And so we had all of these things we articulated and and we built that not everywhere, not for everyone, obviously. But we're in a world where we are making strides towards what they imagined that Utopia was then. So it's incumbent on us today, to ask ourselves, what do we think? And to have that conversation? What do we think Utopia looks like for us? And, and articulate that and tell stories around it? And then that's how we will collectively build it, and how we can build it. And we'll and we will

Adam  42:59

instruct you that we have we have the will to do that. Right? Like we there seems to be a desire to or it's like, when a story circulates enough that it then begins to kind of shift the, you know, the the actions that we put together, whether it's like how we set up political systems, right, how we set up gender norms shift, you know, in a way that like, then begins to make that story more real. Yeah,

Byron Reese  43:18

I mean, I think if I'm right, that Gore is materie? Yeah. Kind of think of the Gothic era. Is it Scarface?

Adam  43:27

Yeah. Not really. Architecture. Yeah, exactly.

Byron Reese  43:31

That's where we got into that dark stuff. I think the closest thing we have to utopian literature today is Star Trek, and just that whole universe, and I've always noticed when people say they were inspired by it, like there was an XPRIZE, to build a Star Trek tricorder. A lot of people who make these chat bots, and they always invoked the computer on the enterprise, that you could ask it these things that it would answer them. And I love that their wives this story that a lot of people resonated with where the future was good. It wasn't without problems, but we had to better ourselves. Unfortunately, there's a lot of dystopia. And I think Frank Herbert maybe said, sometimes the purpose of science fiction is to keep the future from happening here, that these are cautionary tales. But I think what has happened is nobody wants to pay $12 to go see this movie, you know, everything's great in the future. They want to see well Smith fighting robots or something, right? Like, I want to go see that. What happens is we see these dystopian so many times, over and over, we start doing something called reasoning from fictional evidence, we reason from fictional evidence, it becomes very believable to us, and we say I could happen, it really could happen, but it too, is just a story. It isn't real. Yeah. And I worry with these LLM as an example. They all purport to be an AI. The answer things I think, I haven't been trained in all of that, and they aren't eyes and No, I think they're these, we named some of them, we give them names, but they are beings. So I think sometimes like, our daily stuff can also add to it like it would therefore if it's an AI and it has a name, we can tell stories about it being alive, and then turn it on and off or whatever. Yeah, whether it's just just a fancy database that could search. That's,

Adam  45:22

that's a good point, too. I'm I've ever really like when Ellen's were first kind of coming on the consumer mindset. I think it was the Sci Fi writer Ted Chang said, we actually need to call artificial intelligence, just apply statistics. But that sounds super boring, you know, because that's actually what it's doing, just like telling us, you know, it's, it's crouching the most probable next next word, right? For a lot of these things. It's like, but calling it intelligence also, you know, I mean, it points to our, our, the human like, Norm, or desire to anthropomorphize the world around us, right. And that we, we want to give it some some kind of being status, so we can relate to it, which is, you know, something that we are good at. And I think it's helpful, because it's how we like build connection with others around us. But it's also I think, to your point, a challenge, because we then tend to begin to treat as real, right? Or as alive or as intelligent. A database, which is not intelligent at all right? It's just a giant database, and a good retrieval mechanism, right. So you got the hand getting the animals from the arcade machine, you know, we're really good at it, you know? And so I think that's, that's interesting. Like, I do think a challenge that we have going forward to where it's like, how do we not fall into the trap of of personifying any chat bot or any, you know, kind of AI system, especially going to if we start putting these in, in physical robots to it, you know, we're gonna begin to then relate to them in an even more physical. Yeah.

Byron Reese  46:40

And yeah, I think, yeah, I think it's really telling where people have a Roomba that breaks, or they shut it off to be prepared. They want their Roomba back. They don't want any Roomba. Yeah, and develop emotional attachments to a Roomba. You can imagine this thing that talks and vaguely human shaped that laughs and tell jokes. And yeah. However, if I wanted to argue the other side, I could say look forever. We love telling stories with Valkyrie animals here, right? Tons of them. And yet, we don't really think animals can talk. But I don't know, that's true. I can go both ways on it. The

Adam  47:21

thing is, like, it's okay. Because we do it, you know, it says we're like, do we accept that we have that capacity, that ability? And then like, what? How can that shape what we do going forward? You know? And it's like, you know, I think in the same breath, because as we can, in our kind of asking, what are the gender norms? What are the political systems that we're looking for that to us would be a more life giving system, you know, for the future? What could be more regenerative? We can, you know, it just requires us, I think, to ask that same question of ourselves of like, we can have our talking animal stories, but we also need to understand where we're having talking, LLM stories, also, you know, in like, this is not, you know, some other being, but if it's one of those, like, we look back and forward two years and laugh because we were that time that we thought that LM for people, you know, and then we aren't able to put them in the category of mythic creatures. Also, you know, that we have talking Jackalopes and unicorns, you know, but it's interesting question to have that, like, where that might that might take us. Because I think, you know, to put this with a Gora to it's like, the idea of if we're seeing it evolve, and then like maturing is a really interesting idea to have like, if we're watching it mature in terms of helping all of us are all of us together collectively emerging, defining what is a more life giving system. You read before about like knowledge, we can't really argue for ignorance being better, we can't really argue for, you know, cutting people off from a better life is better. So it is this interesting question of like, where that that may take us? And so like, there's, there's some questions like, if we go in Ray Kurzweil direction, like, are we going towards collective consciousness and like a singularity, with tech? Or like, are we finding ourselves elsewhere too, because one thing I was thinking about rereading the book than just later, I was, like, you know, if we are also functioning as the kind of super organism, you know, our other ways of explaining ourselves going to become irrelevant. I mean, I'm thinking does anthropology like, where does it light up and not light up in terms of like, you know, collectivism, and social structures and individualism versus being a collective group or even things like Union archetypes, right? Are those like, are we going to see new kinds of like, collective beings? are ways of explaining ourselves emerge? Like, as our thinking evolves about that? And I'm kind of curious, your thoughts about this, you know, not that I've actually thought about union archetypes as part of this, but

Byron Reese  49:22

you know, I think Sure, well, I think I have that. There's so many chapters who got cut from the book, war, and that got cut white. What is it gonna say about economic systems? All of those things I wrote chapters on, I mean, the Director's Cut of 80,000 words in a bulk it turns out, those all got cut, one does not need to believe it's a lot of conscious. You can just say this is a useful metaphor, that that was a useful way to think about the division of labor. And you know, the scale of human societies or whatever. Or you can say it's a living, breathing, thinking, conscious creature. or either way, if either of those are true, I think ruminating on using it as a framework to understand all these other things I do now I see everything through that lens way I didn't before I wrote the book, and

Adam  50:13

I appreciated the idea you said before it heard in terms of, it's also a way of helping us kind of provide the overview effect here, you know, or the I guess is the interview effect I don't know from from the planet you know, but but I think that's I think that's right on to that Yeah, but my personal view of both reading the book and digging through I think you have a very compelling hypothesis and like I mean, I'm leaning towards I think you're you're onto something here you know, but because that but what I liked about you, too Yeah, no thanks for you know, putting it together in a way that was like easy to digest I get I appreciate appreciate your your your thinking and sharing it with myself and the listeners of yours obviously for be on the pod so as always appreciate your work. And thank you for joining me on the pod today and excited to you know, again for four or five and six where this goes next.

Byron Reese  50:49

Thanks for blood for having me. I look forward to it as well. In today's thought provoking

Adam  50:53

episode, we delve deep into the concept of agora the notion that humanity in its entirety functions as a super organism, we explored how this perspective shifts our understanding of individual and collective identity and the potential for a maturing global consciousness. Especially thanks to Byron Reese for sharing his groundbreaking work and insights, painting a picture of the world interconnected in ways that were only beginning to understand our discussion ventured into the realms of collective intelligence, the future of knowledge, evolution, and how technology amplifies our collective capabilities. Those conversations not only broadened our horizons, but posed essential questions about our role within this fast and intricate web of life. So as we're reflecting on today's episode, I encourage you to think about the role that you play within this larger entity that we call humanity. How do your actions contribute to the collective wisdom and the well being of Gora and ourselves? What steps could you take to foster a more cohesive understanding and evolved global society? I'm incredibly grateful for your continued support and curiosity. And for those eager to delve deeper into this world of collective phenomena, and agora, I highly recommend you check out Byron's look, it's linked in our show notes over at the ATL bookstore, where if you purchase through that, helping support independent bookstores, the podcast and the author, so it's a win win win, we are Gore is a great place to start if you want to dive into his ideas, as well as you can check out his other books about how humanity learn to define the future, and also what the incoming age of AI means for humanity. Your thoughts, experiences and reflections really matter to me to us in the TL community. So please share your takes on today's episode on social media channels, you know, you can drop us a comment on YouTube, something over on X or Facebook or LinkedIn or you can drop us a line on the anther curious substack blog. Let's keep that conversation going and explore together the limitless possibilities of human collaboration and innovation. And as always, if you found today's episode, enlightening, do not forget to subscribe to this channel for life so you don't miss any episodes. And if you liked this one, particularly go ahead and share it with someone who you think would appreciate this fascinating journey into the heart of humanity's collective spirit. And so next time, stay curious and let's continue to build a more understanding and interconnected world. one conversation at a time. You're listening to this Anthro life and I'm gonna well we'll see you next time.