Most importantly for our concerns, Complexity Science has profoundly enlarged our understanding of where and how cognition and knowing occur. This is particularly true for the study of “liquid brains.” These are intelligences formed from collectives like termites, ants and bees. Such eusocial species have long been known to show attributes of distributed cognition, which was why E.O. Wilson called ant colonies and bee hives “superorganisms.” Recent work has also demonstrated aspects of distributed cognition even in microbial communities via bacterial “quorum sensing.” Chemical signals passed between individual microbes can allow communities to act collectively to, for example, fend off predators.
Additionally, there is ongoing research on how underground fungal networks linking tree roots can generate distributed cooperation. Initial studies have proposed that these networks allow trees to act collectively, moving nutrients from healthy regions in geographically extensive forests to distant unhealthy regions. While this work remains contentious, it demonstrates the range of debate on the subject.
Thus, how far can collective intelligence go? How large are the scales it can work across? Can a biosphere be a collective that exhibits some form of distributed cognition?
When we pull all these features of life as a complex system together with the planetary-scale function of biospheres, the possibility of planetary intelligence emerges. Life on Earth began at least 3.5 billion years ago in the Archean Eon. At first, it was an immature biosphere. That means life was too thin on the ground to exert strong feedbacks on the geospheres. Planetary characteristics like atmospheric chemistry could not be modified. Within a billion years or so, however, the biosphere had grown to the point where it was driving strong fluxes of oxygen into the oceans, atmosphere and land. In this way, it can be said that a mature biosphere was emerging.
Once life evolved into planetary networks of microbial communities collectively exerting pressure on the rest of the geospheres, it becomes possible to think of that collective as having a degree of knowing. There was, simply put, information being used by the collective which made up the biosphere. And it is information usage in the form of storage, copying, transmission and processing that are the hallmarks of agency in complex adaptive systems. This is how, across almost three billion years, we can speak of the emergence of planetary intelligence on Earth or on any planet where such a mature biosphere occurs.
The Coming Second Copernican Revolution - NOEMAhttps://www.noemamag.com/the-coming-second-copernican-revolution/