Watching Bison

Written at the Murie Center Artist Retreat in Moose, Wyoming
By Trent Alvey

Decentralized Intelligence Resides in Herds, Swarms, Crowds
And in the Minds of Creative People

All week, I’ve been watching Bison. The way they move in clumps, or randomly, some stragglers — lots of vocalizing — some humping and snorting. Even though they are not in a hurry, they move quite far in a short time. I would have to watch many, many years to start seeing the patterns of their community, the patterns of their communication.

Maybe their communication is as Rupert Sheldrake, a Cambridge University biologist, suggests, morphic resonance — morphogenetic fields — superimposing patterns on otherwise random or indeterminate patterns of activity, basically a magnetic field of energy that resonates non-locally, across time and space, informing all members of the species with evolving survival information.
Or is it by observation. Karsten Heuer, wildlife biologist, followed the Porcupine Caribou herd from their winter range in Canada’s northern Yukon to calving grounds in Alaska’s Arctic National Refuge. “It was though every animal knew what its neighbor was going to do and the neighbor beside that and the neighbor beside that. There was no anticipation or reaction. No cause and effect. It just was! When a hungry wolf came close, the herd moved with precision, as a unit. The herds evasive maneuvers displayed not panic, but precision. Each animal was following simple rules that have evolved over thousands of years of wolf attacks.” Predators see the incredible maneuverability of this unit.The herd moves as a complete organism twelve miles wide. There is no central control and there can be none but the herd intelligence.

Herd Intelligence simply has no single authoritative voice directing it, but each individual acts solely on local information. Craig Reynolds, a computer graphics researcher who devised a simple steering computer program that he named BOIDS, scientifically describes this information ascertain simple rules for the program: 1) avoid crowding nearby boids. 2) fly in the general direction of the other boids. 3) stay close to nearby boids.

Stephen Wolfram, the Oxford/Caltech theoretical physicist who wrote A New Kind of Science, believes that all life evolved from very simple rules, which produce highly complex systems. For ten years he ran simple computer algorithms such as, black is always next to white, except white can be next to white. He discovered that from these simple programs great complexity could emerge. It appears that all of the essential ingredients needed to produce the most complex behavior already exist in elementary rules. This suggests that in both abstract systems and nature there is an underlying program of universality. He proposes that simple programs will make it possible to construct a truly single, fundamental theory of physics, from which space, time, quantum mechanics and all the other known features of our universe will emerge. Wolfram believes that since we co-evolved alongside plants and other species, we now look laterally across species to see complexity equal to ourselves. We revel and marvel at our own complexity, a response that has been somewhat dampened by the human genome project, which found that humans actually are less complex than the average poplar tree.

If we apply Wolframs theory to Karsten Heuer’s observations, we see the similarities immediately. Wolfram suggests that complexity emerges from simply taking information from the squares next to you — or in the case of caribou — taking information directly from your nearest neighbors. I believe that herd intelligence is a working example of Wolfram’s theory of new science.

Environmental experts, for example, tell us what they see from their viewpoint about how to save the planet. Managers want to manage every detail of parks and even wilderness. The truth is that we need our experts, but we also need the entire diversity of the crowd. We need smart people, dumb people, inquisitive people, oblivious people, inward and outward people. The more homogenous a group, the less creative the group. Herd intelligence is realized by allowing self-organizing systems to self-organize. When creativity diminishes, wildness diminishes. Maybe we shouldn’t panic when things move slowly and we don’t see the herd turning away from danger. We should have faith that crowd intelligence is our ultimate guidance system. Sometimes we think too much and try to accomplish too much and end up frustrated and unresolved. Maybe we do need to trust average people, non-experts to come to a consensus of good judgment, to exercise self-organization, just as we advocate for wild ecosystems. We must really let go of our own fears and projections and allow the evolutionary system to work. Still, we remember those historical bison herds being rounded up and herded over cliffs, falling to their death one after the other until the entire herd was history. This is analogous to a corrupt government country leading its citizens into suppressing their wisdom and operating on fear and greed, rather than trusting in their universal consciousness. This, I think, is human nature to trust one moment and doubt the next. It is part of our self-guidance system at work alerting us to the deviance of greed and power.

Diversity in a herd, an ecosystem, a crowd, or the inside the creative mind will result in more options and solutions for survival. Diversity equals creativity. When we observe the wild we are observing our natural mind. Inside the mind, we find pluralism — a collective of voices — a complex system that records all phenomena that we encounter. Creativity inside the mind is directed not by a central authoritative voice, the voice of your own ego, but instead by the pluralist voice. This pluralist voice is not grounded in protocol or dogma, nor is it seeking a predetermined end, but this creative voice is the one that moves forward, or to the side, or soars without restrictions or approval. The artist’s hand simply executes and follows this universal creative force unquestioningly until stopping to look back on what has been created.

Since we evolved with radical freedom, we understand this plurality of voice. An artist entertains many options, probabilities, concepts, solutions, mediums, forms, colors, structures and words, before settling on certain ones. We find our way artistically by allowing one creative decision at a time and by listening to the amalgamation of voices. I am now describing my art as stylistic pluralism; I am refusing a single artistic identity, but allowing the intelligence of my many internal voices to point the way. Just as in swarm theory, there is decentralized control in my creative process, no one voice rules until many options are considered. In the end, you know when you have the perfect solution and no more deliberation is necessary.

My experience at the Murie Center is timely. I have taken the time to think through the concept of decentralized intelligence of swarms, herds, crowds and the minds of creative people. I have been able to watch the local wild herd of bison for many days. In addition I’ve enjoyed the collective intelligence that is embodied like morphic resonance in the Murie Center. In the Murie’s cabin I can almost hear the voices of Olas and Mardie Murie and the voices of their many and diverse visitors, including Aldo Leopold, George Schaller and John Denver, where the ideas for the Wilderness Act and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge originated. Brooke Williams continued the tradition while he was the director of the Center, by running small herds of diverse people through the center to see what creative ideas they come up with for conserving wild places and wild life.

Our small group of four at the Murie Center included: Tom Curry; pastel artist from Maine; Kim Ridley, writer and editor of Hope Magazine, also from Maine; Thomas Stimpson, photographer living in Jackson WY; and myself, Salt Lake City mixed media artist. We combined our collective intelligence into a community mini-caldron of experience, intuition, knowledge, wisdom, random thought, humor and the incidental. We walked the Murie labyrinth every morning together. We all added to the conversation, one furthering the other until we had a collective, cascading idea. The Murie Center visitors are a cross section of a beautiful herd.

In our general collective intelligence caldron, we can experience a glimpse of our true existence, our true collective consciousness. We are truly just a temporary collection of molecules receiving stimulus from the universe. We are not separate from it. If we believe that we are, then we are engaging in an illusion of separateness. We are part of a complex system, embodied in another complex system, a fractal arrangement of complexity. The idea of central control is absurd in any kind of open system. In order to maximize our creativity we must lose our borders, lose our skins, lose our attachments and just swim in the ocean of unity.

Many people think that we should bring experts together to propose a solution to solve problems like global climate crisis, but statistically experts are dumber than a diverse populace. A diverse populace embodies crowd intelligence. When a group of problem solvers are homogenous, say highly educated experts or all of similar backgrounds, their ability to solve problems creatively is diminished. We saw what happened when experts pointed out global warming in a panic. The populace paid little attention until the layman starting seeing signs themselves. But now the populace seems to be moving on its own toward good decisions. It is impossible to see the whole with all of its implications because when you are in the middle of the swarm or herd you cannot see what is happening at the edges. Likewise, if you are on the edges you cannot see the middle so you must follow the simple universal algorithm as best you can and go with the swarm toward survival. This universal algorithm is really our spiritual pattern.

Menas Kafatos and Robert Nadeau’s book, The Non-Local Universe, describes how humans evolved simultaneously with other plants and animals. They talk about improving the dialogue between the truths of science and religion, believing that we might begin to discover a spiritual pattern that could function as the basis for a global human ethos. “In our view the majority of human beings do apprehend or intuit on the deepest levels of their subjective experience the existence of Being as a self-evident truth.” I think that it is safe to say that if we evolved through radical freedom, which allowed us to fashion our own reality, then we already have a global human ethos – a spiritual pattern —that we simply need to rediscover and trust.

The wild is an amazing complex system whether in the creative space in our minds, a caribou herd, or a group of civic-minded citizens, instead of looking for centralized leadership to point the way, lets behave like the complex system that we are. We know what to do. The rules are simple and few. We have our instructions for survival. Complex systems are comprised of many individuals doing their part, not just the experts. When you see the Caribou herd moving like a flock of birds, agile, quick, elusive, creative – no one individual can design that. We need to be creative in mass, by letting go of our separate agendas and start to behave like the smart herd that we truly are.
Rules of the herd:

Don’t use more than your share / save something for the offspring
Let go of your individual ambitions / seek balance
Look for the simplest way

Trust in the herd – Trust in Universal Consciousness