 Blackstone Audio presents Global Brain, the evolution of mass mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century by Howard Bloom. This book is read by Malcolm Hillgartner. To Richard Metzger, Florian Retzer, Bradley Fisk, and E. Barton Chapin Jr. There are few observers who possess a clear and comprehensive view of the revolutions of society and who are capable of discovering the nice and secret springs of action which impel, in the same uniform direction, the bland and capricious passions of a multitude of individuals, Edward Given. Don Juan, out of all patience. By heaven, this is worse than your cant about love and beauty. Granted, that the great life force has hit on the device of the clockmaker's pendulum and uses the earth for its bob, that the history of each oscillation which seems so novel to us the actors is but the history of the last oscillation repeated. May more, that in the unthinkable infinitude of time the sun throws off the earth and catches it again a thousand times as a circus rider throws up a ball, and that our age-long epochs are but the moments between the toss and the catch. I, my friend, am as much a part of nature as my own finger is a part of me. If my finger is the organ by which I grasp the sword and the mandolin, my brain is the organ by which nature strives to understand itself. The Devil. What is the use of knowing? Don Juan. Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of the least resistance? Does a ship sail to its destination no better than a log drifts no wither? The philosopher is nature's pilot, and there you have our difference. To be in hell is to drift. To be in heaven is to steer. George Bernard Shaw. Prologue. Biology, evolution, and the global brain. Since the infancy of the personal computer in 1983, authors and scientists have been churning out works on the subject of a coming global brain strung together by computer networking. Today the Internet, the World Wide Web, and its successors allow a neuroscientist in Strasbourg to swap ideas instantly with a philosopher of history in Siberia and an algorithm juggler in Silicon Valley. But according to the visionaries who predict a world-spanning intelligence, this is just the beginning. They tell us that a radical human transformation has begun, one that will hook the millions of minds of humanity together into a single system, like Gaia growing herself a nervous system. Sample complete. Ready to continue?