BookTalk Members:

I need to write a brief email to be sent to the 232 people on Howard Bloom's contact list. Some of you are great writers and could easily help word this nicely. This is a VERY important project guys. We could easily gain many new members, so please spend some time and help me.

Guidelines

1. It needs to have a catchy subject line that doesn't prompt the recipient to delete the email before reading it. Right now I am thinking about something along these lines:

Howard Bloom, author of "The Lucifer Principle" and "Global Brain" is inviting you...

These are ALL people that know Howard Blooms name, so it is vital to capitalize on this. The subject line must have his name.

2. The body of the message must be short and sweet. If it is too long people will not read it. Think about when you get long emails from people you don't know.

3. It cannot look like spam. Nothing about the wording can look like an advertisement. We need to try to maximize the number of people that read the email and respond.

4. Howard is going to be our guest in the BookTalk chat room on Thursday, January 2, 2003. This author is paid close to $5000 per appearance, so we should all be happy and honored to have attracted the interest of an author and scientist of this calibre. The email must mention that Howard will be our guest.

Howard Bloom has authorized me to use his name in the email. He fully understands that his name is what will attract the greatest number of respondents. I have given Howard Bloom my word that I will not abuse this list as they are his fans and are of great importance to him.

So there will not be many emails sent to these people. Each must be designed with care. Please help me write this so that we can get this email sent out in the next few days!

Remember - the goal of sending this email is two-fold:

1. Gain many new active members at BookTalk
2. Gain publicity for Howard Bloom

Howard Bloom would like feedback from our group on which one of his books we liked more, "The Lucifer Principle" or "Global Brain." Perhaps we could incorporate this into the email?

By the way...go check out our new site as it is being developed at poidesign.com/booktalk/ . I will create a thread to discuss this new site. Please keep this thread exclusively to discuss the email.

Chris O'Connor

Edited by: Chris OConnor  at: 10/30/05 4:08 pm

As my email to all members said...

I'll be in the chat room at 9pm tonight. Anyone who can stop by and lend a hand with writing the email message and giving some feedback on the new website please do.

Chris

Edited by: Chris OConnor  at: 10/30/05 4:09 pm

I'll take a look at it maybe tomorrow night, but I can't promise anything....got a paper due thursday, a lab exam tomorrow night, and thursday night I need to spend some time with my girlfriend :\

I have decided not to send the email message out until our new site is up and running. The way I figure, we will attract an equal number of people from Howard Blooms list whether the new site is up or not. But we will retain many more if they click on a link to our new site.

I think waiting the next two weeks is in our best interest. So please jump in here and help write a brief email to attract these people to BookTalk and to the reading and discussion of Howard Blooms books.

Chris

Edited by: Chris OConnor  at: 10/30/05 4:09 pm

I thought I'd give my answer to the question which book is best.
(raised in the opening message of this thread)

Global Brain was best for me.

Partly I guess because I was already interested in that topic and
I'm not terribly interested in "Evil", so I probably wouldn't have
read "The lucifer principle" if I hadn't already read Global Brain.

I did feel while I read "The lucifer principle" that there was a lot
of common ground between the books but a great deal worth reading
in the first book even after reading the second.
However, for me Global Brain was best, I think his thinking seemed
to have matured and the primary subject matter more constructive.

Roger Jones

Roger

I'm really happy to hear you liked Global Brain more. I just finished The Lucifer Principle and rank it as one of my alltime favorite books, so I'm fired up about diving into Global Brain.

Here is my concern, and please comment and help me through this...

The "global brain" concept sounds magical...mystical...supernatural. Please tell me Bloom is using these words figuratively, as he was with the "Lucifer Principle." I'm nervous that I'm getting sucked slowly into something irrational.

Any comments?

Chris

Edited by: Chris OConnor  at: 10/30/05 4:09 pm

There are lots of different conceptions of Global Brain.
I have a page on this topic at: www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/cs/ai014.htm

Bloom's take on the Global Brain is that its been around for a very long time, almost since the beginning of life on this planet.

For me and some others who think a global brain is something yet to happen we are just talking about different things.
Howards conception is different to mine, but just as interesting, and because the kind of global brain he is talking about has been around a long time, he can tell us a lot more about it than we can say about something which we think might happen sometime.

Quote:

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I'm nervous that I'm getting sucked slowly into something irrational.

---

Don't worry, it looks OK (or better) to me.
(mind you, I didn't really understand the guys who thought The Lucifer Principle mystical)

Quote:

---

The "global brain" concept sounds magical...mystical...supernatural. Please tell me Bloom is using these words figuratively, as he was with the "Lucifer Principle." I'm nervous that I'm getting sucked slowly into something irrational.

---

I haven't read Global Brain, but in The Lucifer Principle, Bloom is using the concept in a literal (not figurative) sense. He also constantly describes it as if it were conscious, etc. - whether he actually means that, I honestly can't tell (but it irks me because he is either wrong (if he means it) or IMO unconscionably careless (if he doesn't), and either way it's very misleading); but I think that sort of 'god-like' quality that he attributes to the superorganism makes it seem mystical. It reminds me entirely too much of the New Agers who go off the deep end with Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis.

Quote:

---

For me and some others who think a global brain is something yet to happen we are just talking about different things.

---

This is a much more defensible position; and one that I don't necessarilly disagree with, though I might certainly quibble over details of exactly what's going on and what it means. Call it a complex adaptive system rather than a brain or organism, and I think there's a good deal of explanatory power in it.

Quote:

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Call it a complex adaptive system rather than a brain or organism, and I think there's a good deal of explanatory power in it.

---

What's in a name?
Surely the explanatory power rests elsewhere?

For me "complex adaptive system" doesn't do it, we already have lots of those around.
The kind of system that interests me is one which is intelligent, more intelligent than humans.

Please don't ask me to define intelligence, but an example of the kind of thing which probably requires this level of intelligence is proving hard mathematical theorems like the four colour theorem.
This isn't of course the kind of thing which Howard is interested in, and the global brain he talks about can't do it.
(well, I suppose actually he would say that it did do it).

This "global brain" concept reminds me of how much "pantheism" annoys me. Pantheists view nature and the whole cosmos as divine. What a weak and meaningless concept.

If the universe and nature are not an actual entity, then what is the purpose is calling it divine? I love nature and studying the beauty and grandeur of the cosmos, but I recognize that there is nothing sentient, caring, or divine about it. Nature is indifferent. Nature cannot be anything but indifferent.

Should we pray to a rock? Are rocks divine? Meaningless mumbo jumbo to me.

So this "global brain" must be a concept, and nothing more. Surely Bloom isn't going to build an argument that this interconnectedness is an actuality...a physical connection between all of the subcomponents of the universe. Or is he?

Chris

Edited by: Chris OConnor  at: 10/30/05 4:09 pm