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Howard Bloom
(24 Jun 1943 - )
American science writer whose books include The Genius of the Beast (2010), The Global Brain (2000), and The Lucifer Principle (1995).
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Science Quotes by Howard Bloom (30 quotes)
A collective learning machine achieves its feats by using five elements … (1) conformity enforcers; (2) diversity generators; (3) inner-judges; (4) resource shifters; and (5) intergroup tournaments.
— Howard Bloom
In 'From Social Synapses to Social Ganglions', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 42.
Almost every reality you “know” at any given second is a mere ghost held in memory.
— Howard Bloom
In 'Reality is a Shared Hallucination', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 72.
Ancient stars in their death throes spat out atoms like iron which this universe had never known. ... Now the iron of old nova coughings vivifies the redness of our blood.
— Howard Bloom
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st century (2003), 223. Quoted in Rob Brezsny, Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia (2005), 228.
By 1999, over 880 studies suggested that some mutations might … be genetic alterations “custom tailored” to overcome emergencies.
— Howard Bloom
In 'From Social Synapses to Social Ganglions', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 44.
By the nineteenth century … new circumstances called for new conformity enforcers… The government locked you in a house of penitence—a penitentiary—where your feelings of remorse would theoretically pummel you without cease.
— Howard Bloom
In 'The Conformity Police', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 89.
Conformity-enforcing packs of vicious children and adults gradually shape the social complexes we know as religion, science, corporations, ethnic groups, and even nations. The tools of our cohesion include ridicule, rejection, snobbery, self-righteousness, assault, torture, and death by stoning, lethal injection, or the noose. A collective brain may sound warm and fuzzily New Age, but one force lashing it together is abuse.
— Howard Bloom
In 'The Conformity Police', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 89.
Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear. Some are those of childhood authorities and heroes; others come from family and peers. The strangest emerge from beyond the grave.
— Howard Bloom
In 'Reality is a Shared Hallucination', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 77.
From a few basic rules you can generate a cosmos.
— Howard Bloom
In The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012), 24.
From our best qualities come our worst. From our urge to pull together comes our tendency to pull apart. From our devotion to higher good comes our propensity to the foulest atrocities. From out commitment to ideals come our excuse to hate. Since the beginning of history, we have been blinded by evil’s ability to don a selfless disguise. We have failed to see that our finest qualities often lead us to the actions we most abhor—murder, torture, genocide, and war.
— Howard Bloom
In 'Who is Lucifer?', The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (1997), 3.
Humor is a conformity enforcer clothed in the garb of congeniality. It focuses on others’ weaknesses, disasters, stupidities, and abnormalities.
— Howard Bloom
In 'The Conformity Police', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 87.
If entomologists have things backward, their errors have spawned a host of others central to modern evolutionary science. … E.O. Wilson is … the founder of a rich and fruitful discipline—sociobiology. And sociobiology has … helped lay the groundwork for the dogma of the “selfish gene.”
— Howard Bloom
In 'The Embryonic Meme', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 34.
In a strange way, Marcion understood the situation better than the more conventional followers of the church, for Lucifer is merely one of the faces of a larger force. Evil is a by-product, a component, of creation.
— Howard Bloom
In 'Who is Lucifer?', The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (1997), 2.
In our preoccupations with sex, our submission to gods and leaders, our sometimes suicidal commitment to ideas, religions, and trivial details of cultural style, we become the unconscious creators of the social organism’s exploits.
— Howard Bloom
In 'The Clint Eastwood Conundrum', The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (1997), 8.
In the Vienna of the late 1920s and 1930s there throve an internationally famous philosophical bunch called the logical positivists. … They said that a key ingredient of knowledge was “sense data,” and proclaimed emphatically, in the words of … J.S.L. Gilmour, that sense data are “objective and unalterable.” …Good guess, but no cigar!
— Howard Bloom
In 'A Trip Through the Perception Factory', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 64.
Individual perception untainted by others’ influence does not exist.
— Howard Bloom
In 'Reality is a Shared Hallucination', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 71.
Men and animals do not merely struggle to maintain their individual existence; they are members of larger social groups. And, all too often, it is the social unit, not the individual, whose survival comes first.
— Howard Bloom
In 'The Clint Eastwood Conundrum', The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (1997), 7.
Primordial communities of bacteria were elaborately interwoven by communication links. … These turned a colony into a collective processor… The resulting learning machine was so ingenious that Eshel Ben-Jacob has called its modern bacterial counterpart a “creative web.”
— Howard Bloom
In 'Creative Nets in the Precambrian Era', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 17.
Reality is a fabrication slapped together by an often bumbling inner team. ...The proclamation that "there can be no such thing as an objective fact" has a great deal of validity.
— Howard Bloom
In 'A Trip Through the Perception Factory', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000),70.
Remember a networked learning machine’s most basic rule: strengthen the connections to those who succeed, weaken them to those who fail.
— Howard Bloom
In 'The Conformity Police', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 83.
Sociological researchers maintain a mask of objectivity. But … when students in these movements report facts that contradict the tenets of their group's creed, they are … punished for their heresy. … forcing them “to leave the movement.” A similar mechanism of repression is at work in every scientific discipline that I know.
— Howard Bloom
In 'The Conformity Police', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 86.
The first two rules of science are: 1. The truth at any price including the price of your life. 2. Look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before, then proceed from there.
— Howard Bloom
In The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012), 16.
The greatest human evils are not those that individuals perform in private, the tiny transgressions against some arbitrary social standard we call sins. The ultimate evils are the mass murders that occur in revolution and war, the large-scale savageries that arise when one agglomeration of humans tries to dominate another: the deeds of the social group. … only group efforts can save us from the sporadic insanities of the group.
— Howard Bloom
In 'The Clint Eastwood Conundrum', The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (1997), 7.
The microbial global brain—gifted with long-range transport, data trading, genetic variants … and the ability to reinvent genomes—began its operations some 91 trillion bacterial generations before the birth of the Internet. Ancient bacteria, if they functioned like those today, had mastered the art of worldwide information exchange. … The earliest microorganisms would have used planet-sweeping currents of wind and water to carry the scraps of genetic code…
— Howard Bloom
In 'Creative Nets in the Precambrian Era', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 18-19.
The notion that individualism came first runs against the very grain of cosmic history. … grouping has been inherent in evolution since the first quarks joined to form neutrons and protons. Similarly, replicators—RNA, DNA, and genes—have always worked in teams… The bacteria of 3.5 billion years ago were creatures of the crowd. So were the trilobites and echinoderms of the Cambrian age.
— Howard Bloom
In 'The Embryonic Meme', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 34.
The ultimate repository of herd influence is language—a device which not only condenses the opinions of those with whom we share a common vocabulary, but sums up the perceptual approach of swarms who have passed on.
— Howard Bloom
In 'Reality is a Shared Hallucination', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 77.
Through our sentences and paragraphs long-gone ghosts still have their say within the collective mind.
— Howard Bloom
In 'Reality is a Shared Hallucination', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 80.
We must build a picture of the human soul that works. … a recognition that the enemy is within us and that Nature has placed it there. … for a reason. And we must understand that reason to outwit her.
— Howard Bloom
In 'Who is Lucifer?', The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (1997), 4.
When Richard Dawkins first published his idea of a meme, he made it clear he was speaking of “a unit of imitation” … Memes were supposed to be exclusive triumphs of humanity. But memes come in two different kinds—behavioral and verbal. … behavioral memes began brain-hopping long before there were such things as human minds.
— Howard Bloom
In 'Threading a New Tapestry', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 62.
When you and I were born, only one thing was certain about the rest of our lives: that you and I would someday die. Just as a trillion, trillion, trillion (1036) microorganisms, animals and plants have died before us. … A God who slaughters is no God at all. Or if he i … He is a God who must be stopped.
— Howard Bloom
In The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012), 19.
When you repeat an old pattern in a new location, you sometimes make something new.
— Howard Bloom
In The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012), 24.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
