The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth's evolving consciousness may explore the headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come. The work of H.O.P.E. is to make visible the larger relationships we live within - relationships that inspire visions of wonder and works of hope.

Chrysalis, the charter school we created to focus on natural science, is up and running. Chrysalis is fully enrolled with about 40 students between 2nd and 8th grade taught by two teachers with myself taking classes out into the field each week. The first three months of operation have been very exhausting and stressful. Everything is being done for the first time; there is no established culture to help students, families, and teachers navigate each day.

Also, though a charter school is theoretically free of most state regulations, a charter school does not exist independently of the world. A charter school must interface with other institutions (such as insurance companies that are not governed by state education regulations but which have evolved their policies with schools that are bound by state regulations). At every turn, one encounters constraints that funnel one towards doing some aspect of a school in the culturally expected standard way. One never knows where these constraints will next pop up but they require continual energy and vigilance to decide whether this is an area important to resist the constraint or not.

But classes are coalescing into a community. Intellectual fervor is beginning to be part of the student culture. Kids are starting to look at the world with the expectation that it has interesting stories to be read. However, we still feel that Chrysalis is only 5% of the way toward our vision. That is partly because we are cloudy in our own minds as to what an ideal school would look like. The balance between teacher-driven structure and student-driven structure is an issue we struggle with a lot. And, of course, what is the essential content a student should master.

What follows is extremely speculative. I hope it doesn't turn you off. The thoughts that follow are something I've thought about for some time. However, when I try to explain it, listeners hear something different from what I mean. What made me decide to tackle this topic was a letter from a friend who had bought Complexity from me. He sent me a book review of a recent book on complexity. The reviewer refers to the idea "that recurs in every complexity book--indeed, complexology's Holy Grail is the [computer] simulation ... of the complexity of human consciousness. The review continues with quotes about how the "hyperreal" "in time will entirely replace 'the desert of the real itself'". To which my friend wrote "If there is something that I can identify as evil, it is the increasingly articulated idea (a logical culmination of scientific control of nature 400 years old) that we don't need natural processes; we can replicate what we need of them."

I agree with my friend's comment about the "increasingly articulated idea...that we don't need natural processes". There is a hype about the Information Age that borders on hypocrisy. That phrase conveys a sense that we have moved beyond the polluting, heavy machinery impact of an industrial culture into the pure atmosphere of Information. But much of the polluting heavy machinery has been moved overseas where labor is cheaper and where ecological degradation is less regulated. Much of the "Information" is the business of consumption and the financial transactions that border on a Ponzi scheme involving the retirement savings of us Baby Boomers. And so I share my friend's anxiety about the direction of our society. And a phrase such as "the desert of the real itself" leaves me wondering whether that author ever went for a walk outdoors.

However, the possibility of creating consciousness within a computer fascinates me for reasons that lead in quite the opposite direction of my friend's fears. The cornerstone to this possibility is the hypothesis that consciousness is not dependent on properties and materials restricted to life, but instead emerges from the complex interconnections between neurons (and between the brain and the rest of the body and the environment). Artificial intelligencers hammer away at this point: consciousness lies in the complex nature of the connections, not in any special properties of the connectors themselves. Therefore, consciousness does not have to be limited to organisms with neurons. If the complex pattern of connectedness can be recreated in computer circuitry, then consciousness will be created there.

What fascinates me about this hypothesis is not the possibility of human-created consciousness. Instead, if this hypothesis is true, it points to the probability that the Earth is conscious in a very materialistic, profound way. The work of the artificial intelligencers is disconnecting the link our culture makes between consciousness and life. We think of consciousness as a phenomenon of life, arising from and dependent upon it. When deep ecologists try expressing our intuition about the world, this cultural link gets in our way and leads us to say things like "the Earth is alive". But others hear this as either some mystical mumbo-jumbo or else a poetic expression of the scientific awareness that the collective effects of life have strongly shaped the Earth we experience.

But if life and consciousness are separate phenomena, then we can more accurately describe our intuition as "the Earth is conscious". Ever since an autumn hike in the glaciers-containing headwaters of an Alaskan valley, I have had the sense that the Earth is somehow "alive" and yet I could never fit this intuition with my rational experience of the world. A major reason I liked Complexity so much was that it points to the fit. To quote from page 293 of the book:

"Langton is basically saying that the mysterious 'something' that makes life and mind possible is a certain kind of balance between the forces of order and the forces of disorder. More precisely, he's saying that you should look at systems in terms of how they behave instead of how they're made. And when you do, then what you find are the two extremes of order and chaos...But right in between the two extremes, at a kind of abstract phase transition called 'the edge of chaos', you also find complexity: a class of behaviors in which the components of the system never quite lock into place, yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either. These are the systems that are both stable enough to store information, and yet evanescent enough to transmit it. These are the systems that can be organized to perform complex computations, to react to the world, to be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive."

This "phase transition" fills the world. Alluvial fans, glaciers, braided streams, snow and vegetation distributions are all examples of natural structures that are stable enough to store information and yet able to adaptively react to the world. The world is full of structures that are "stable enough to store information". Scientists are constantly discovering ways in which current structures contain stored information (memory) about the past--whether it is strata or glacial moraines or the ratio of certain isotopes or our DNA. And yet the evanescence is also there, especially when one learns to see from a geological point of view.

If consciousness arises from the organization of complex interactions, then consciousness can be as much a part of the physical world as the interdependence of that world or its tendency to resist sudden changes. The patterns that scientists are finding in the workings of the brain are similar to the patterns we find in nature. If consciousness arises from the organization of matter, and not the special nature of biological cells, then the entire planet could function in a way that gives rise to consciousness.
 
 

Our experience with brains and computers often constrains and blocks my thoughts about such "earth consciousness". This is part of the reason it is easy to misinterpret what I am trying to say. Therefore, the rest of this article will describe some of these constraints. For example, our theories of structures underlying computation build on a binary model of neurons or switches that have only two states: on or off. We call the amount of information that can be communicated by this two state model one "bit" and use it as a measure of information. But there is no theoretical reason why a computational network can not be created with connections that have many more than two states possible between them. The world is full of gradients. I begin thinking of them as connections like a dimmer switch rather than an on-off switch. A leaf is not limited to green or brown. There can be a multitude of possibilities within it, each communicating and influencing the foraging pattern of insects upon the leaf. If each connection can effectively communicate eight states, for example, then each connection would be as powerful as three binary connections.

Another limiting image is that brain consciousness arises from connections between the same stuff (neurons). Therefore we might tend to homogenize the "stuff" of consciousness. But when we explore the edge of our consciousness, we realize that input comes from our muscles, our eyes, our ears. The connections are not purely neuronal. We are constantly connected to light, sound, massiveness. In the same way we can begin to see the blackening of a stick as it burns in a fire as a communication between fire and wood and the air, a communication between solar energy stored from the past and heat and light released into the present atmosphere.

Another limitation from familiar computer models is the notion that all calculations somehow have to pass through a central processing unit. Such a notion tends to make us limit "consciousness" to how many calculations can pass through some specific area in a specific time. Such an image limits our conceptions of Earth consciousness. We are developing, however, computers that do parallel processing. These potentially very powerful computers do not restrict all the calculations to one route through a central processing unit. There are multiple parallel pathways so large numbers of calculations happen simultaneously. Without a doubt, if the Earth is conscious, its physical structure is massively parallel so that an incalculable number of calculations are happening simultaneously. Therefore the consciousness of the earth would not be limited by how much information is flowing through a certain point.
 
 

Another difference between "brain consciousness" and "Earth consciousness" is density. Life has evolved a tremendous density of synaptic connections within several cubic inches. To say the Earth is conscious is not to pretend that anything on the non-living Earth has anywhere near the density of organized connections we find within brains. But at the same time, we must realize that each living brain is part of the entire pattern of connections upon the Earth and so that the consciousness of the Earth contains the output of all of those living brains. This proves that the consciousness of the Earth (however measured) is greater than ours because all of our brain power (no matter how great) is contained within the connected material from which emerges Earth's consciousness. True, lots of internal chatter and mini-decisions are constantly going on internally with little or no influence on the world around it. But as a result of consciousness, we do interact with the world and the changes we make (whether it is a conversation that changes someone else's mind or whether it is soil pushed backward by each walking step) become part of the "calculation" of the global consciousness.

If you have ever been in a social setting in which a "group mind" emerges--whether it is panic or a mob or an audience entranced by artistry or a group gathered in prayer, you have experienced how your consciousness becomes part of a "greater" consciousness. I don't mean "greater" in a mystical sense or a moral sense. Simply that we have experienced times in which our consciousness somehow connects with others to create a consciousness different from our own and which exists because of these connections rather than residing in a specific organism.
 
 

I think of Earth consciousness as nested. Just as a small discrete drainage nests within and is part of a larger drainage, so a discrete human consciousness nests within and is part of a larger consciousness. It also means that a fern-filled grotto has a certain consciousness which nests within its sidecanyon which has a certain "larger" consciousness (which contains that of the grotto) which nests within the Grand Canyon with its larger consciousness which nests within the Colorado Plateau with its very special consciousness which nests within....

The Grand Canyon puts me in a different consciousness than the Olympic seashore. A gift of life is being mobile consciousness. It is fun to move over the Earth and be aware of how different places shape how we think and feel. We function differently depending on where we are "plugged in". There are certain places I return to because when I am there, I understand better what I am supposed to be doing with my life. True priorities rise to conscious awareness easier there. Perhaps the Greeks and Druids and such were responding to this variation within the earth's consciousness when they put temples in certain places or held certain groves as sacred or created mythology to explain why certain local places came to have the "feel" that they had.
 
 

If the Earth is conscious, then what is the point? What is it doing with that consciousness? Can we communicate with it? Is Earth consciousness what we mean by God? (To which I say No because Earth consciousness would be just one very tiny nested part of the Universe's consciousness in the same way that my consciousness is just one tiny nested part of Earth consciousness.)

But what is this consciousness doing? My hypothesis is that it is evolving/developing structures that minimize the rate at which entropy increases so that the flow of solar energy pools on our planet, creating miraculous possibilities. The world tends to develop structures like meadows and beaver dams which store energy and create new possibilities. Over billions of years, this has led to a warm atmosphere and vast deposits of petroleum and prairies and forests and an incredible diversity of DNA. An individual rock might not be sentient, in the same way that an individual neuron might not be conscious. But just as a billion interconnected neurons can give rise to thought, so a rock could be an interactive vital piece within a geological structure (such as a meandering stream) evolving towards minimized entropy. As structures like these develop and spread, as ecosystems within the world accumulate energy, the consciousness of the Earth "thinks new thoughts and imagines new possibilities".
 
 

Another constraint our experience places on thinking about this is that when we think of "consciousness", we tend to think of "self-conscious". Is the Earth self-conscious? Things can be conscious without being self-conscious. Barnacles and copepods are conscious though I doubt they are self-conscious. Self-consciousness is probably a recent evolutionary development.

Also, our own "biocentrism" limits our scope of what earth consciousness might be. Our sense of "self" has been strongly shaped by the feedback loops of biology in which premature death leads to elimination from the gene pool that shapes future generations. This natural selection has shaped a sense of self attuned for survival and focused on the body that can potentially die at any unexpected time. The Earth, however, exists within a different set of forces than dogs and trees do. The earth is evolving within the larger realm of energy flow and the feedback loops in which stored energy can create structures that can store even more energy. Survival is not its concern so its consciousness will be very different.

Besides, earth consciousness is still evolving. One barrier to contemplating "earth consciousness" is that if we get mystical about it, we bring in God-attributes such as "already formed," immutable, and perfect. This "earth consciousness" is only a few billion years old and it still has incredible unknown possibilities ahead. If this hypothesis of "earth consciousness" is true, then as our species internalizes the implications, we might start becoming the earth's "self consciousness". Just as self-consciousness has evolved somewhere along the path from lichens to people, so our self-consciousness could be part of the evolution of Earth consciousness. Humans first becoming self-conscious and then discovering that consciousness is a characteristic of complex connections rather than simply of life which then leads us to explore what a self-conscious Earth would be like--all these steps could be stages in the process by which the earth is becoming self-conscious. What would it feel like to be part of the Earth's self-consciousness? How would we behave differently? What happens to our own consciousness as we pave the Earth's surface? What would happen to our consciousness if we as a species used our gift of mobile consciousness to seek out wounds on the Earth and heal them?

What we call "self" is still evolving, still expanding.
 

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© 1996, Paul Krafel, P.O. Box 609, Cottonwood, CA 96022-0609
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