Join Us in Building the Global Brain

Hi my name is Andrew, my connection to Howard Bloom began (I think, since, I think, there were some background happenings beneath the surface that facilitated the connection, but maybe I’m overthinking) back when I was a child when I first thought “Hey, maybe electrons orbiting around a nucleus are like the planets orbiting around our Sun”, or maybe it was, when I first became fascinated by electricity by ripping apart an old TEAC owned by Todd Rundgren, or volunteered at Singularity Summit 2009 in NYC and met some of the very interesting visionaries there, which led to (here’s where the beneath the surface things comes in) me seeing a book called Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom in one of my (not to be named) social media feeds. 

It had everything my soul was searching for: superorganisms, good and evil a by-product (emergent property) of nature’s strategies, biological fabrics, competition battles. I was hooked. Before I even finished Lucifer Principle, I saw Bloom also had a book called Global Brain. Now at this time I was on a mailing list called “Global Brain” and was in fact struggling to build an artificial intelligence (“life?”) startup called Thought LLC, based on individual software agents that worked together and competed to “do cool stuff,” and I thought, “Well it can’t get any better than this!” 

I devoured Global Brain, and it did get better, it had “diversity generators”, “conformity enforcers”, “resource shifters”! and if you can imagine someone nodding his head more vigorously in agreement with every turning page, well that was me.

Then came the Conclusion at end of the book and Howard basically suggested “wouldn’t it be neat” if there was a digital world where nano-cyborgian’s, nano-computerized bacteria climb and dive through nebulae, continually upgrading their software via genetic and inventive algorithms. Well, to say my mind exploded out of the back of my head would be an understatement. 

I don’t think I’ve read any author in my life who has drawn me into his world the way Howard does, his words dance off the page, he speaks directly to you like an old friend, and his perception and ability to understand, deconstruct, theorize, create, and connect you to Humanity, the Universe and your place in it, is his magic (and I grew up reading Tolkien incessantly).

And even though I’ve met some famous people and talked to a few celebrities in my life, I never in a million years would have considered doing this, but I sent Howard a message on unnamed social media platform and said (paraphrasing) “Hi, I’m Andrew, I read Global Brain, I’m building a platform that runs complex adaptive systems and was wondering if you’d take a look”

Well Howard did take a look, and then the dream of having lunch with the person you most admire in the whole world came true, (it was a Zoom meeting), and that experience surpassed the previous most profoundly wonderful day of my life which was standing in front of Einstein’s house on Mercer St in Princeton after meeting James Guthrie the producer of Pink Floyd’s The Wall in the room at Princeton where Einstein first presented Relativity in the United States where the clock in the room was “stuck” since the 1950s, after listening to the remastered release of Pink Floyd’s “Time” in Direct Stream Digital, the high resolution audio technology built by my friend Gus at Sony who gave me Todd Rundgren’s TEAC.

What I want to do in no certain order:

1. Help Howard get his message out.

2. Continue building a Global Brain with Howard.

3. Travel with Howard and Friends at the Howard Bloom Institute On His Magical Journey Through The Universe.

4. Meet you the reader and talk about Life, the Universe and Everything.

“The Cosmos has made a compact with the human soul.  The universe’s history, the gods of our imaginings, heaven, hell, and the dream of utopia, all are within us–we contain infinity. We also contain within us all the vastness of a destiny.  Anything we can conceive and believe we can achieve. There is nothing permanent about this new testament, this new deal man has been handed by science, intuition,wonder, will, and curiosity.  We have been given an open contract by our evolutionary mother.  We’ve reached a turning point in history.  Which way the cosmos goes depends on you and me.“ — Howard Bloom