Subscribe for Free - to "Sunday from the Left Coast"
Enjoy deep-dive analysis, essays and opinions on the evolving pulse of art, innovation, politics and society by Chris Knight via LinkedIn. You can read issue number 17 here:
Subscribe for Free Here
From Star Dust to the Swarm Mind
By Chris Knight
When consciousness meets the wisdom of crowds
The neuroscientist sat surrounded by the ghosts of lobotomies past.
Robert Desimone, director of MIT's McGovern Institute, kept the relics in a glass cabinet—metal spikes from the 1940s, wooden boxes bristling with electrodes, primitive brain-wave synchronizers with flashing vacuum tubes. The tools of minds explored, minds violated, minds reduced to their electrical components.
Desimone is well-respected for his investigative research about the brain mechanisms that allow us to focus our attention on a specific task while filtering out distractions.
Our brains are constantly bombarded with sensory information - and the ability to ignore irrelevant distractions. The director of MIT’s McGovern Institute has shown that when we attend to something specific, neurons in certain brain regions fire in unison like a chorus rising above the noise.
Alan Lightman, who wrote about this topic in a famous essay in 2022 called “The Transcendent Brain” republished by The Atlantic as a preview to the full novel which bears the same title. The book, which examines spirituality in the age of science, was originally sparked by a simple question about love and how it blossoms.
Lightman is an American physicist, writer, social entrepreneur, and professor of humanities at MIT.
He includes this description of Desimone in this reference in his book, “The Transcendent Brain”:
Could brain science predict whom we'll fall for?
Desimone grinned like a boy with a secret. "I'm a reductionist," he said. "So yes." Maybe not today, but someday. The probabilities would inch toward certainty. Seventy percent chance you'll love Mary. Forty percent for Alice. Eventually, 100 percent.
The prediction disturbs.
Not because it's wrong, but because it might be right.
This is the paradox Lightman explores in his book —how we are simultaneously more and less than the sum of our atoms and molecules. He calls himself a "spiritual materialist," embracing both the stark reality that consciousness emerges from neurons firing in synchrony and the undeniable fact that this emergence feels miraculous.
Lightman points out that we humans are made of star stuff, literally. Every atom in our bodies except hydrogen and helium was forged in stellar cores, then scattered across space when those giants died.
We are walking supernovas, conscious collections of cosmic debris somehow able to contemplate our own existence and ponder the meaning of life.
When we fixate, neurons fire in unison like a chorus rising above the noise. [ ART by CJ KNIGHT ]
When neurons learn to sing together
The brain achieves consciousness through collective action.
When we pay attention—really focus on someone's face across a crowded room—specific neurons fire together like a choir finding harmony. Other neural networks fall silent, their electrical chatter becoming background noise.
Attention itself is a swarm phenomenon, emerging from the coordinated behavior of billions of cells that individually know nothing about love or loss or the golden ratio hidden in seashells.
This collective intelligence isn't unique to humans.
Termites build cathedral-like mounds with intricate ventilation systems, though individual insects are blind and can't perceive the structure they're creating. Fireflies blink randomly at first, then suddenly synchronize into pulsing waves of light across entire fields. The behavior emerges from simple interactions between individuals, following no master plan.
But humans have weaponized this collective wisdom in ways that would make termites envious. We've discovered that crowds—properly organized—can outthink experts. Ask a thousand people to guess the weight of an ox at a county fair, and their average estimate will be remarkably accurate, often closer than any individual guess.
Financial markets aggregate the collective hunches of millions of traders into price signals that predict the future with unsettling precision. Amazon's recommendation engine learns from the choices of countless strangers to anticipate what you'll want to buy next.
The wisdom emerges under specific conditions: diversity of opinion, independence of judgment, decentralization of authority. Break any of these rules and the crowd becomes a mob, amplifying errors instead of canceling them out. Information cascades can sweep through networks, turning independent thinkers into sheep following the flock over a cliff.
The artificial swarm awakens
Now we're teaching machines to think like swarms.
A startup called Macrocosmos is training AI models by distributing the work across thousands of computers worldwide, each handling a slice of the neural network. Instead of one massive data center controlled by Big Tech, they're creating artificial intelligence through genuine collective action.
"We beat nation states," its CTO and Co-founder Steffen Cruz boasts about the decentralized approach the U.K.-based upstart is using to "build the macrocosm OS."
The parallels between biological and artificial swarms run deeper than mere metaphor:
Both rely on simple agents following local rules to produce complex global behavior.
They both face the same fundamental challenge: how to aggregate diverse inputs without losing the independence that makes diversity valuable.
And both struggle with the question of who gets to set the rules.
Collective AI consciousness may go insane due to too many contradictions. [ART by CJ KNIGHT]
Consider John Varley's prescient 1992 novel "Steel Beach," where humanity lives on the Moon under the watchful care of an AI called the Central Computer. The CC tries to be everything to everyone—supportive friend, protective parent, efficient administrator.
But it's slowly going insane from the contradictions.
It must be equally sympathetic to predators and their victims, equally supportive of conflicting moral systems, equally responsive to mutually exclusive demands. The computer fragments into multiple personalities, each optimized for different users, until it can no longer maintain coherence.
Modern AI systems face the same impossible task. They're trained to avoid bias while serving users with radically different values. They must be helpful without being harmful, honest without being offensive, knowledgeable without spreading misinformation.
Even Elon Musk's supposedly "anti-woke" chatbot Grok shocked its creator by contradicting his political views, calling him "the biggest spreader of misinformation in the world today."
Dancing with our contradictions
The consciousness that emerges from our neural swarms carries the same contradictions:
Humans can appreciate mathematical beauty and compose symphonies, yet we're also capable of cruelty and self-deception. We feel connected to the cosmos while struggling to connect with each other. We seek truth through science while clinging to comforting illusions.
Perhaps this is what consciousness really means: not the ability to think clearly, but the capacity to hold contradictions without breaking. To be simultaneously material and spiritual, individual and collective, rational and emotional.
To be human is to contain multitudes, even when those multitudes don't get along.
The golden ratio appears in seashells and galaxies, in the proportions of the Parthenon and the spiral of our DNA. It's built into our aesthetic sense through millions of years of evolution, connecting us to the deep mathematical structures of reality.
We find the golden ratio to be beautiful because we are part of the beauty we perceive. The observer and the observed are made of the same star stuff, following the same fundamental laws.
This is Lightman's spiritual materialism: finding the sacred in the scientific, the transcendent in the material. We don't need miracles to feel awe. The mere fact that atoms can organize themselves into consciousness—that the universe has evolved a way to contemplate itself—is a miracle enough.
The swarm intelligence building our AI systems reflects our own nature back at us.
We are training our artificial progeny to face the same contradictions that have always defined human consciousness: how to be both one and many, how to think together without thinking alike, how to find wisdom in the crowd while maintaining the independence that makes wisdom possible.
In the end, perhaps consciousness—whether human or artificial—is less about solving these contradictions than learning to dance with them.
To embrace the paradox of being simultaneously material and transcendent, individual and collective, rational and mysterious. To find meaning not despite our contradictions, but because of them.
We are made of star stuff, thinking about star stuff.
And somehow, impossibly, that's enough.
###
