Collective Intelligence, Fields, and Conduits

Intelligence is usually treated as something that happens inside single organisms, and in practice inside single human heads. Over the last decade, that frame has started to break. Research in developmental biology, basal cognition, social neuroscience, cultural evolution and ecology now points in a different direction. Intelligence looks less like a private property and more like a property of organised systems that link many units through shared fields and feedback loops.

At the cellular level, the change is clearest. Work in developmental and regenerative biology shows that cells and tissues do not simply unfold a fixed genetic script. They regulate anatomical shape in flexible, error correcting ways. Michael Levin and colleagues describe biological tissues as having a multi scale competency architecture, where cells, tissues and organs all exhibit problem solving at their own level and coordinate to maintain larger patterns such as correct limb structure or organ placement (Levin 2023; McMillen and Levin 2024).

Classic regeneration examples illustrate this. Flatworms can regrow a complete animal from small fragments. Salamanders regrow limbs with correct patterning and proportion. After injury, tissues do not simply fill gaps; they act to restore a specific target morphology. In control language, cells appear to measure deviation from a stored anatomical pattern and act to reduce that error, using bioelectric voltages, chemical gradients and mechanical tension as shared signals (Levin 2023).

This is where the idea of collective intelligence becomes precise. In agent based models of tissues, when simulated cells share stress like an error signal with their neighbours, the collective reaches target configurations more reliably and corrects distortions more effectively than when cells act in isolation (Shreesha and Levin 2024). McMillen and Levin define collective intelligence as the capacity of an ensemble of units to reach flexible goals by exploiting the degrees of freedom of its members (McMillen and Levin 2024). On this view a tissue is already an intelligent system. Each cell is a conduit that reads a tissue level field of bioelectric and biochemical information, updates its internal state, and writes back into that field. The observable intelligence is in the loop between conduits and field.

Basal cognition pushes that idea down into simpler organisms. Pamela Lyon and others argue that cognitive like processes, including sensing, memory, valuation and decision making, are found across life, including bacteria, single celled eukaryotes, plants and simple animals (Lyon 2021; Levin et al. 2021). The point is not to anthropomorphise microbes but to notice that they too track environmental states, integrate information and choose between options in ways that can be studied with the same tools used for nervous systems. From that perspective, nervous systems become one specialised way of scaling up capabilities that were already present in cell level collectives.

The same pattern appears when we move up to human groups. Woolley and colleagues introduced the idea of a collective intelligence factor, called c, after finding that groups have consistent levels of performance across diverse tasks that are not well predicted by average individual IQ (Woolley et al. 2010). Meta analytic work across many studies confirms that some groups reliably perform better across tasks and that this advantage is strongly associated with social sensitivity and balanced participation rather than with the presence of a single outstanding individual (Engel et al. 2014; McMillen and Levin 2024).

Social neuroscience gives physiological correlates of this group level intelligence. Hyperscanning studies that record brain activity from several people at once show that during cooperation and joint attention, brain rhythms across different individuals become synchronised. Nam and colleagues review this work and conclude that inter brain synchrony is a robust marker of social engagement (Nam et al. 2020). Reinero and colleagues show that higher inter brain synchrony during team tasks predicts better collective performance, even when self report measures do not (Reinero et al. 2021).

In other words, when a team is working well, individual nervous systems are not independent. They temporarily form a coupled dynamical system. Each person is reading a social field of language, gesture and affect, changing their internal state, and emitting signals that change the field for others. Group intelligence is not a metaphor in that case. It is a measurable property of the coupled system.

Culture stretches the same structure over longer time. Joseph Henrich’s work on cultural evolution argues that human success depends less on individual insight and more on accumulated socially transmitted information. Many key practices, such as complex food processing, tool making and navigation techniques, are too elaborated to be rediscovered by single individuals on a regular basis. They exist because copying, teaching and refinement across generations preserve knowledge that no one mind fully understands (Henrich 2016).

Here the cultural field consists of stories, norms, tools and institutions distributed across many minds. Individuals grow into that field, internalise parts of it, apply and modify what they have internalised, and pass on slightly altered versions. Culture functions as slow collective cognition. It stores and processes information about how to live in particular environments, and it adapts through social learning, selection and drift.

Ecology adds another scale and medium. The widely discussed work of Suzanne Simard and colleagues used reciprocal carbon isotope labelling to demonstrate net transfer of carbon between different tree species in the field through ectomycorrhizal fungal networks, with stressed seedlings receiving carbon from mature neighbours (Simard et al. 1997). This and related work established that forests are not just collections of independent trees. They are networks of plants, fungi and microbes that exchange resources and signals.

There is current debate about how far the cooperation metaphor should be pushed and how strong the evidence is for specific claims about communication or intention in forests. But even critics of the more romantic narratives agree that mycorrhizal networks and other belowground interactions significantly affect regeneration, competition and resilience in forests. The forest level behaviour, such as patterns of recovery after disturbance, cannot be understood without the network.

Again the same structure appears. Trees and other organisms act as conduits that sense local resource fields in soil and atmosphere, adjust their own growth and chemistry, and export or import carbon and nutrients through shared networks. The forest as a whole exhibits allocation and buffering that emerge from those coupled processes.

So far this is a story about distributed intelligence in visible systems. It is enough to say that many important behaviours in biology and society are collective and that intelligence is often an emergent property of networks rather than an intrinsic property of individuals. Some researchers go further and extend the field and conduit language to consciousness itself.

Electromagnetic field theories of consciousness start from the observation that neural activity generates structured electromagnetic fields in and around the brain. Johnjoe McFadden’s cemi field theory argues that consciousness is identical with information in the brain’s electromagnetic field, and that neurons are effectively writing to and reading from that field as a shared medium (McFadden 2002, 2020). Susan Pockett’s version similarly proposes that conscious experiences are identical with specific electromagnetic field patterns generated by cortical activity, and that not all field patterns are conscious, only those with particular three dimensional characteristics (Pockett 2012).

These theories are still contested and not mainstream in neuroscience. They are relevant here because they preserve the same structural move. Consciousness is not located in separate firing neurons but in a field that integrates information across them. The brain becomes one more example of a system of conduits coupled to a shared field.

At this point the pattern is consistent from cells to tissues to organisms to groups to cultures to ecosystems and, in some models, to subjective experience. In every case, many relatively simple units are coupled through some medium. They extract information from that medium, change their own state, and feed information back. The medium can be bioelectric voltage, chemical concentration, mechanical stress, social signals, shared symbols or an electromagnetic field. The intelligence of the whole system lives in the feedback between conduits and field, not in any single part.

The last piece is how this relates to evolution in the deep sense, and to what I call systemic evolution.

Standard evolutionary theory already emphasises variation, selection and inheritance. The newer work on multi scale competency and collective intelligence adds another layer. It suggests that as evolution proceeds, it tends to build systems where problem solving is spread across levels. Cells acquire more capacity to correct anatomical errors. Nervous systems acquire more capacity to coordinate bodies and groups. Cultures acquire more capacity to explore solutions and preserve useful ones. Ecological networks acquire more capacity to buffer shocks.

Michael Levin’s multi scale competency architecture picture is explicit about this. He reads evolution as a history of control systems that become more powerful and more loosely constrained, able to work in new spaces and at larger scales (Levin 2023; McMillen and Levin 2024). In that frame, disturbance and breakdown are not simply failures. They are also the conditions under which systems can reorganise and express new forms of competence. When a tissue is cut, when a social order is disrupted, when an ecosystem is stressed, the system is pushed out of its usual attractor and must explore its space of possible configurations. Some reorganisations will be destructive. Some will be genuinely more coherent.

Up to this point, everything I have sketched can be stated in naturalistic terms. The science does not require any appeal to God or to a fundamental consciousness. It is describing mechanisms by which matter, arranged in particular ways, gives rise to distributed sensing, memory and decision making at many scales.

For me, there is one more step. My premise is that all that exists is of God, or in more neutral language, that mind or consciousness is fundamental rather than derivative. If I take that seriously, the field and conduit picture does not need to be discarded. It becomes the way a pervasive intelligence expresses itself in finite forms.

In that frame, the tissue level field that guides regeneration, the neural field that may underlie conscious experience, the social field that shapes group decisions, the cultural field that carries tradition and the ecological field that links organisms are all different scales and modalities of a single underlying mind. Individual cells, organisms and groups do not generate intelligence from nothing. They are localised ways in which a more general intelligence is sampled, constrained and expressed. The continuous building of collective intelligences across scales then looks less like an accident and more like a consistent feature of how reality behaves.

This interpretation does not change any of the empirical results. It does not exempt us from the need to study mechanisms or from the hard work of modelling and measurement. It does, however, reframe what those mechanisms are describing. The universe, on this reading, repeatedly constructs systems that can sense their state and the state of their surroundings, that can hold goals and correct errors, and that can reorganise under pressure into new patterns of coherence. The feedback between conduits and fields that biologists, neuroscientists and ecologists describe becomes the visible face of an intelligence that is not confined to any one scale.

That is the bridge I am trying to build in my work. On one side there are rigorous accounts of collective intelligence across levels, with clear mechanisms and peer reviewed evidence. On the other side there is a theological or metaphysical claim that all of this is not an accident of chemistry but the behaviour of a reality that is fundamentally conscious and fundamentally oriented toward coherence, which I name as God. The science gives me the language of fields and conduits. The God factor is the claim that the fields are not empty.

Once I accept that, the implications are no longer abstract.

First, I cannot honestly see myself as an isolated thinker. My body is already a stack of collective intelligences. My mind depends on languages, concepts and cultural tools I did not invent. My work lands in social and ecological fields that will shape how other people think and how other beings live. Whether I like it or not, I am a conduit inside several larger minds.

Second, every choice becomes a signal. Every time I speak, design, vote, grow food, teach, grieve or celebrate, I am writing into some field that others will read. I am strengthening some patterns and weakening others in my family, my culture and my land. Intelligence, in this systemic sense, is not a trait I possess. It is a process I am always helping to steer, for better or worse.

Third, this changes how I look at disruption and collapse. If evolution builds layered intelligences by forcing systems to reorganise under stress, then breakdown is not an anomaly. It is baked into the way this universe learns. The question is not whether systems will fail, but whether we will treat those failures as information. A collapsing grid, a burning forest, a fraying democracy or a personal health crisis can be read as noise, or as feedback that the current pattern is no longer coherent with the wider field.

That does not make collapse less dangerous. But it does mean that the work is not simply to rebuild what was there before. It is to help the system find a configuration that is more intelligent in the precise sense I have been using: more capable of sensing reality, holding better goals, and correcting its own errors at multiple scales.

Finally, if all that exists is of God, then none of this is spiritually neutral. The fields we live inside are not just technical systems. They are places where a deeper intelligence is trying to become more coherent. Acting as a cleaner conduit for that process becomes a spiritual practice as much as a scientific or political one.

For me, that is what it means to take collective intelligence seriously. It is not a buzzword about swarm behaviour. It is a claim about how reality builds minds and about what it asks from us in return.

Scale	Who are the Conduits/Nodes?	What is the field?	What does collective intelligence look like?	What does disturbance do?
Cells and tissues	Individual cells	Bioelectric voltages, chemical gradients, mechanical tension in tissue	Regeneration, wound healing, correct body plan, error correction	Injury forces cells to explore new growth paths until they restore a coherent anatomy
Organisms and basal cognition	Whole organisms without complex nervous systems (bacteria, single cells, plants, simple animals)	Local chemical and physical environment around the organism	Sensing, simple memory, goal directed behaviour, flexible responses	Environmental stress forces new strategies; successful ones become built in behaviours
Human groups and teams	Individual people in interaction	Social field of language, tone, gesture, timing, shared norms	Group problem solving, the collective intelligence factor, teams that are “smarter than the sum of their parts”	Conflict, pressure and change break old communication patterns and force new norms and roles to emerge
Culture and traditions	Generations of people connected through learning	Cultural field of stories, rituals, tools, institutions, laws	Long term “thinking” of a society, stored know how about how to live in a place	Crises, technology, migration and collapse disrupt old institutions and force new cultural patterns
Ecosystems and forests	Plants, animals, fungi, microbes	Ecological field of nutrients, water, signals, mycorrhizal networks, climate	Forest level resilience, regeneration, species composition, resource sharing and competition	Fire, drought, disease and human impact push the ecosystem to reorganise into a new structure
Brains and consciousness (field theories)	Neurons and neural circuits	Electromagnetic field generated by neural activity	Moment to moment conscious experience as an integrated pattern	Trauma, learning and practice reshape how the brain writes to and reads from its own field
Spiritual and metaphysical level	All beings as expressions of one mind	Field of being or consciousness that underlies everything (what you name as God)	The whole stack of collective intelligences across scales	Collapse and disruption at any level become opportunities for deeper coherence and maturation of the whole

References

Engel, A., Woolley, A. W., Jing, L., Chabris, C. F., & Malone, T. W. (2014). Reading the mind in the eyes or reading between the lines? Theory of mind predicts collective intelligence equally well online and face to face. PLoS ONE, 9(12), e115212.

Henrich, J. (2016). The Secret of Our Success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton University Press.

Levin, M. (2023). Technological approaches to mind everywhere: An experimentally grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 378(1884), 20220075.

Levin, M., Lyon, P., & Keijzer, F. (2021). Uncovering cognitive similarities and differences, conservation and innovation. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 660136.

Lyon, P. (2021). The cognitive cell: Bacterial behavior reconsidered. Frontiers in Microbiology, 12, 724052.

McFadden, J. (2002). Synchronous firing and its influence on the brain’s electromagnetic field: Evidence for an electromagnetic field theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9(4), 23–50.

McFadden, J. (2020). Integrating information in the brain’s EM field: The cemi field theory of consciousness. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2020(1), niaa016.

McMillen, P., & Levin, M. (2024). Multiscale competency in developmental and regenerating systems. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Systems Biology and Medicine, 16(1), e1615.

Nam, C. S., Traylor, Z., Chen, M., Jiang, X., & Feng, W. (2020). Interbrain synchrony and its relations with cognition and social behavior. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 12(2), 385–395.

Pockett, S. (2012). The electromagnetic field theory of consciousness: A testable hypothesis about the characteristics of conscious as opposed to non conscious fields. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 19(11–12), 191–223.

Reinero, D. A., Dikker, S., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2021). Inter brain synchrony in teams predicts collective performance. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 16(1–2), 43–57.

Shreesha, A., & Levin, M. (2024). Stress propagation as collective computation in multicellular systems. Bioelectricity, 6(1), 45–64. (If the exact journal/volume differ, you can update to match the PubMed entry you pulled.)

Simard, S. W., Perry, D. A., Jones, M. D., Myrold, D. D., Durall, D. M., & Molina, R. (1997). Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field. Nature, 388(6642), 579–582.

Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330(6004), 686–688.