Once upon a time, the only libraries of information this planet's creatures passed down from generation to generation were the records of experience encoded in genes. Then, 2.5 million years ago, arose the first humans able to make stone tools -- artificial claws and teeth. Roughly 2.4 million years later, those proto-humans invented something else brand-new -- artificial memory. Language, sayings, stories, and cliches. The result was a whole new kind of reality -- an artificially constructed reality. A man-and-woman-made reality. We call it 'culture.' And that artificial reality would play a key role in the emergence of a global intelligence -- an intelligence whose full story you can read in my book Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the Twenty-first Century.
But there's an irony. If the group-brain's 'psyche' were a beach with shifting dunes and hollows, individual perception would be that beach's grains of sand. However, this image has a hidden twist. Individual perception untainted by others' influence does not exist."
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