Communication is easy with the internet, so climbers learn from each other, they get better faster as they push each other forward in mutual competition.  Mr. Cochrane says the key is “Group size and the cost of transmitting information…the larger the group studying any problem, the faster the knowledge advances. If 1,000 people are figuring out how to climb, and all of their good ideas disseminate through the group, each member of the group gets to use new ideas more quickly than if there are 100 people doing it…. rock climbing is much more advanced than before because of technology—the technology of communication.”

 

Communal consciousness is powerful when it gets going, and communication is the key.  Before 1500, human civilizations were at their most diverse because they developed in isolation, slowly.  Then the West opened communication across the globe, and human progress jumped forward. 

 

There’s an equation in all this:

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human development = diversity in ideas + communication of ideas + competition.

 

Diversity brings new ideas into the communal consciousness, communication spreads the ideas around, and competition shows which ideas are better.  Sound familiar?  It’s Darwin’s natural selection:

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evolution = variation in traits + inheritability of traits + competition.

 

Freeman Dyson adds a wonderful twist to the equation.  He imagines the original phase of biological evolution on Earth as open sharing of genetic material across different organisms, through horizontal gene transfer.  Viruses might have travelled from organism to organism sharing genetic information on an open-source basis.  Organisms with the best chemical devices survived and shared, so evolution went rapidly in parallel.  Later we get speciation and genetic data gets siloed within species, which starts the Darwinian era.  Today we’re moving beyond the Darwinian era and back to original evolution with its open-source sharing, except now we share ideas not genes.  Cultural evolution replaces biological evolution because ideas move faster than genes.

 

We share good ideas like good jokes.  A good idea is one that corresponds with reality, that is, it works in the real world.  True, we also share bad ideas, but over the long haul, an idea must work in the real world and that tends to weed out the bad and keep the good.  Which is why old ideas are better than new ideas, and why we should respect old religions, social structures and traditions.  Said Carl Jung, “Religious dogma is always the result and fruit of many minds and many centuries, purified of all the oddities, shortcomings, and flaws of individual experience” (from Psychology and Religion).  When something has been around for thousands of years, having been molded by billions of people, then I, one person, should think twice before trying to replace it. 

 

Think of communal consciousness like a global economy: each person makes choices about how to spend his money, and our choices collectively create and maintain an economy with useful products at realistic prices.  Imagine a shared consciousness consisting of billions of people, where each person thinks for himself and communicates with others (through the medium of prices and otherwise).  The entire system grounds itself in the reality of individual choice, which means that the data in the system is real and true because it comes from each individual making life-choices for himself.

 

So there it is: diversity in ideas + communication of ideas + competition = human development.  To maximize human development, we need lots of people with lots of ideological diversity, and we need all of us online communicating (without censorship).  Then we let the best ideas win.  I believe that we solve global problems by innovation, and to get those wonderful new innovations, we need all innovators online participating in the game.