{"id":312,"date":"2026-04-25T03:36:54","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T03:36:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/?p=312"},"modified":"2026-04-25T03:36:55","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T03:36:55","slug":"delerium-as-a-phase-transition-of-the-global-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/linas.org\/blog\/2026\/04\/delerium-as-a-phase-transition-of-the-global-brain\/","title":{"rendered":"Delerium as a Phase Transition of the Global Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Where, exactly, does the present-day spate of crackpot ideas come from? I claim that social media has fundamentally rewired how how the “Global Brain”<\/a> thinks. I claim it is due to a phase transition<\/a>, in the sense of statistical mechanics<\/a>. I replied in an email:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, given that this is the Lifeboat mailing list, I will attempt<\/em> to frame this as yet another existential threat. With lots of hand\u2013wringing. We approach a nexus of social media recommendation algorithms, financial flows driven by advertising, powerful but corrupt figures pushing hallucinatory propaganda, disinformation; I am a bit concerned that we are going civilizationally insane. The “Global Brain” is much smarter now than it was even decades ago, but is also increasingly delusional. This guy, Nassim Haramein, is yet another symptom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s different now, vs. what was common 30-40-50 years ago? When I was a kid, someone got a book about the giant caverns underneath Lake Michigan and the dinosaurs that lived there. We passed it around as a hoot, and marveled at the illustrations. A friend of my parents had a shelf\u2013full of books on UFO\u2019s. Up in Evanston, there was a cafe\u2013bookshop that served whole\u2013grain vegan meals, smelled of incense, and sold healing crystals. And books about the dinosaurs that lived in caves under Lake Michigan. Crackpot beliefs are not new. But something has changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s take a long view. Before social media and recommendation algorithms, we had “mass media”: TV, radio. The communications model was “hub and spoke”: a TV in the center, and “spokes” to millions of (passive) viewers. Some 2% of the population was involved with media production in some way: writers, actors, announcers, reporters, station owners. The nonsense was mostly filtered out, because (a) writers and reporters and station owners mostly weren\u2019t crazy, and (b) incoherent drivel got poor ratings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That all changed with the internet (and social media): The hub\u2013n\u2013spoke model is replaced by the many\u2013to\u2013many connection model. I really need some drawings<\/a> and pictures<\/a> here. The shape of the network changes. In physics, this is called a “phase transition”. There\u2019s a famous example from fracking in the petroleum industry. Natural gas. If you have “tight rock” (shale) with gas in it, that gas doesn\u2019t flow, because there are no pores, no holes, no openings through which that gas can flow. But if you break that rock, fracture it, the gas can now flow through the cracks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, duh. Here\u2019s the mathematical model: take a sheet of paper, draw some random dots on it. Now start connecting dots. Draw a random line. Then another, then another. When you\u2019ve drawn just enough lines, then a path appears from the left to the right edge of the paper. The path appears only when you\u2019ve drawn enough lines. This is called the “critical phase transition”; mathematicians have computed that it happens when you\u2019ve drawn 0.44… of the lines. (I forget the exact digits) Draw less, nothing flows. Draw more, and maybe the flow improves a bit, but the critical transition is between “off” and “on”. Shit starts happening at a certain point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This model got studied a lot in the 1980\u2019s and 1990\u2019s, because it models lots of other networks: the flow of electricity through power distribution grids, the blowing of fuses in a grid. The electrical breakdown of air in lightning. The propagation of cracks in steel boat hulls. The propagation of cracks in breaking ceramic. It was a generic model for what happens when the number of edges connecting the dots in a network changes. When the wiring diagram changes. Replace the dots by human minds, and it\u2019s clear that the hub\u2013n\u2013spoke model of TV\u2013radio\u2013newspapers\u2013books has been replaced by a wildly different network of social media. And what has happened? Like natural gas through fractured rock, crazy ideas flow freely in the new network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 1970\u2019s, there was one conference every two years that covered theories of Flat Earth. How do we know? Well, they actually published conference proceedings: maybe a dozen or two papers explaining how the Earth is flat, and what it means. And they\u2019d print maybe 1000 copies, and you could buy it at the hippy\u2013trippy cafe\u2013bookshops, next to the incense. (I didn\u2019t get that one, I got the one on UFO\u2019s. For my crank\u2013lit collection.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 2010\u2019s, there were one or two conferences a year, in each of the 50 states in the US. So, hundreds of these conferences. Every year. Rent a ballroom at a cheap hotel, print some posters, sell tickets and you\u2019re good. What changed? Social media. Ideas spread directly from brain to brain. They by\u2013pass the filtering of printed books and broadcast TV. In the past, your crazy uncle with his insane ideas about telephone wires had an audience that reached no further than the Thanksgiving dinner table. Now, crazy uncle has a youtube channel, 50K subscribers, and a silver youtube plaque hanging on his walls. A devoted fanbase that can explain how your soul flows downhill across telephone wires. Quantum is like grease that makes the wires slipperier when gravity pulls on your soul from the other end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is what we\u2019ve got. Throw in money, algos, and propaganda, and it\u2019s a bit more confused. There\u2019s a bright side to all of this. I, for one, have been able to learn far, far, far more about obscure topics, than I ever could have, when my “search engine” was a library card catalog. We now have millions of nerds debating philosophy, military strategy, medicine and martial arts at a level of involvement that was impossible in the 1970\u2019s and 1980\u2019s. In this way, we are perhaps the smartest generation ever, with access to stunningly vast reserves of knowledge, and the free leisure time to think about it and debate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the good news. The bad news is that lots of this info is polluted, and we don\u2019t know how to deal with the pollution. The “mind virus” is a real thing. But we are pre\u2013John Snow, who in 1854 figured out the germ theory for a Cholera outbreak in London, and got a poisoned water well padlocked to fix it. We don\u2019t know how to do this. The algos on youtube spread crank physics with far greater ease than legit knowledge (because, well, actually, see .. physics is **hard** …) So we, as participants in the Global Brain, are kind of drunk or intoxicated, because we do not know how to deal with it. Free speech and all that. If this was limited to crank physics, I\u2019d say, “who cares”. Want to pretend that sci\u2013fi is real? OK. Life is short, enjoy yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s not limited to crank physics; we elected a TV game show host as President of the US, and watch a daily drama of Soviet\u2013style dysfunction emanating from the White House clown show, It\u2019s no accident that Fox News sounds exactly like Pravda or Izvestiya of old. MAGA has achieved what Marx and Lenin could not: the total brainwashing of nearly half the population. The mind\u2013virus is real, and thanks to the fundamental change, the phase\u2013transition in the mind\u2013to\u2013mind wiring network, it has a grip on the population far stronger than what we\u2019ve seen in earlier eras. This phase transition is *why* we are so much more delirious than ever before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Personally, it feels like this could all end very well, or all very badly. Exactly which, I cannot tell. Collective insanity is not a good thing. It wasn\u2019t good, when Mao was doing the Cultural Revolution in China, and it\u2019s not a good thing when MAGA is trying to recreate the Taliban in the USA. This is personal. My cousin told my sister that she fought for the wrong side in WWII. She should have fought for the Nazis, not against them. My sister was born decades after WWII ended. My cousin is lonely and watches Fox News all day long. The electric\u2013guitar\u2013playing hippy flower\u2013child has morphed into a banal monster. “Why can\u2019t we all get along?” he says, quoting not John Lennon, but Elon Musk. Call him senile, and say it\u2019s an onset of dementia, but this is nation\u2013wide. We\u2019ve got civilizational\u2013scale psychosis, and this… well, I don\u2019t like it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Postscript \/ Footnote<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The above was a reply to an email on the Lifeboat Foundation mailing list. This list is very quiet, nearly inactive. But something interesting showed up recently. It was from Victor Vahidi Motti, on Fri, Apr 17, 11:47\u202fAM. He wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Quantum vacuum fluctuations are real\u2014but extracting usable energy from them is not currently possible, and most claims (including Nassim Haramein\u2019s) are not accepted by mainstream physics.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s separate the science from the hype, read more here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/altplanetaryfuturesinst.blogspot.com\/2026\/04\/is-vacuum-energy-next-energy-paradigm.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This provided an opportunity for me to talk again, about an old idea of mine (from before 2017; I recall trying to explain it to my sister, on the way home from my Uncle’s funeral.) I’ve surely blogged about this before, either here, or on the OpenCog blog. Or maybe on twitter. Or discord. I’ve excitedly explained this to many people, and am met by incomprehension. But I soldier on, anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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