We Are Agora: How Humanity Functions as a Single Superorganism That Shapes Our World and Our Future

A SUPERORGANISM IS A single life-form made up of other living organisms.

It would be easy to gloss over that short sentence of a dozen words, but it’s a big idea—as big as they come. Why? Just think about yourself for a moment. You are made up of cells, that is, living creatures. But you are a different creature entirely from your cells. Isn’t that strange? After all, if in some alternate universe people weren’t made of living cells but instead composed of equally talented pieces of inorganic matter, you could still picture a regular human being—just one made out of inorganic parts. Likewise, consider the opposite: If there were a universe where your cells were living creatures but there was no “you” that arose from them, that would make sense, too, right? You basically would be a mere bag of cells, something akin to an aquarium full of fish.

But now imagine a weird, crazy universe where both of those things are true. Your cells are alive and live full, complete cell lives, and somehow, superimposed on that, is an entirely different creature; that is, you. That would be a strange reality, and, as luck would have it, that is the one we find ourselves in.

We somehow live in a universe where multiple life-forms can share the same matter. That’s just mind-boggling to think about. They don’t share the same body, as in one of them gets half and the other one gets the other half; they actually coexist on the same exact material. You live in your body, and your cells live in your body, but you aren’t roommates. You actually share the same matter, superimposed upon itself. If we weren’t so accustomed to this idea by virtue of being taught it all our lives, it would sound preposterous.

It’s hard to even come up with a corollary to help conceptualize this, but let me try. Have you ever seen one of those posters of something like a kitten, and if you lean in and look at it really closely, you notice that it isn’t made up of pixels but of thousands of miniscule photos of other kittens? Then, hypothetically, you could grab a microscope and look at those tiny photos and notice that they are made up of even smaller photos of kittens. Stepping back and looking at the big poster, the thought might occur to you that maybe it goes the other way, too, that the poster you are looking at might itself be a miniscule dot in an inconceivably larger poster of a kitten.

Now, think of people again. We seem to operate at just two levels of life: the cell and the human, the dots and the poster. But is that all there is? Just two levels? Maybe cells are composed of even smaller living creatures. We don’t think they are, but there is nothing inherently impossible about that idea, right? Now go the other way: Is it conceivable that we in turn are cells in a larger creature that we are completely unaware of because it exists on such a different scale than we do?

We can observe things quite a bit like this in other species. Honeybees exist on at least three levels: there are cells and individuals, just as with us, but a group of individual bees forms a third level of being, the colony. A bee colony isn’t a mere heap of bees but an emergent creature that is created through the interactions of the bees. They are its cells, and it is a superorganism. The colony, the beehive, is not metaphorically a living being; it actually is one.

The question that this book asks, and tries to answer, is whether humans, each and every one of us, are part of a larger living organism. Again, not metaphorically but literally. Are we cells in a larger creature?

The challenge in answering that question is hinted at above: How would we know if we were part of some larger creature? It sure doesn’t seem like we are, but we can’t take much reassurance in that. We wouldn’t be able to perceive it, any more than our cells are able to perceive us. Humans occupy a pretty narrow band of reality, seeing only a small range of colors, hearing only a limited range of sounds. We aren’t aware of things at the microscopic level, like bacteria, nor at the macroscopic, that is, planetary, level. Some infinitesimally small cell within you, or some planet-sized being that you are a part of, may be at a death metal concert right now, and you wouldn’t have the slightest inkling. So, to repeat the question, how would we know if we were?

Science is the study of things that can be observed or measured in our material reality. We have built the modern world on a set of processes that we call the scientific method that advance our understanding of the nature of that reality. Metaphysics, on the other hand, is the study of the things that lie outside of that material reality, such as the nature of the mind, consciousness, being, causality, and, well, pretty much everything we wonder about but don’t have a scientific way to investigate. The line between the two is fuzzy, and it shifts as science solves old mysteries and uncovers new ones. But it would be a mistake to say that scientific truths are the only ones we can ever know for certain. Rather, they are the only ones we can prove—a very different thing. In point of fact, the vast majority of what you know cannot be scientifically proven. The old reporter’s adage, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” is funny because you can’t check it out, but you can obviously know it to be true.

This book is mostly about science—what we can observe and know about cells, life, intelligence, emergence, and how superorganisms such as beehives and anthills operate. But it is also about metaphysics, because it deals with mind, being, consciousness, and the nature of self. So it straddles that fuzzy line as it tackles the question of whether there is an actual superorganism comprising humans that I have named Agora.

Our pathway to answer this question begins in Section I—Life. We’ll start with the origin of life and try to understand the cell, the basic indivisible unit of life. I say “indivisible” because cells are alive but are made of entirely nonliving things. They are elemental life. What makes them, these little containers of nonliving stuff, alive? What force animates them?

From there, we will move to more complex forms of life. The next step up is multicellular life. It isn’t alive in the same manner as a cell. This distinction is seldom made, but you, along with beavers and begonias, are a different form of being from a cell. If I took you apart one cell at a time and deposited each cell in an appropriate medium, their lives would go on, but you would vanish. Where did you go? Were you ever even here? Maybe you aren’t, strictly speaking, even alive, only your cells are. You seem more like a community than a life-form. But mysteriously, you have attributes that none of your cells have, such as a sense of humor. Where did those come from?

That takes us up another notch in complexity. Somewhere along this chain of being come creatures that experience the world, as opposed to just exist in the world. A cell may react to being poked with a needle, but did it have an experience of pain? No. It didn’t experience it any more than a rock would. Likewise, you can feel the relaxing warmth of a hot bath in a way a cell can’t. We call this experience of sensation “consciousness,” and the big mystery is how mere matter can have an experience of anything. You are, after all, just a collection of cunningly arranged elements, the same exact ones that you can find in a cell or a rock, just arranged differently.

Our final step up in complexity is the thing we are really interested in. It turns out that some multicellular life-forms can come together and produce a new creature, with properties and abilities that none of its component life-forms themselves have. Examples of this include the social insects—the bees and ants—that come together to form living beings that we call hives and colonies. These hives and colonies are called superorganisms. And make no mistake, they are a new being. A beehive is alive. Not just the bees but the collective hive is itself a living creature, with different abilities and proclivities from those of any bee.

What we want to know is whether there is a human superorganism—a creature composed not of bees or ants or cells but of people.

Superorganisms all display emergent properties, that is, capabilities not present in any of their component parts. Where do those come from? That’s what we tackle in Section II—Forces. We will discover that we can explain these capabilities by understanding the interactions of just six forces. They are energy, information, communication, cognition, specialization, and technology. We want to understand how those interactions bring a beehive or an ant mound to life. Our goal will be to see these rather mundane topics anew, to contemplate them in a general sense. Only by doing this can we apply them to a quite different thing: human society.

That will bring us to Section III—Agora, where we ask if the collective population of this planet forms a superorganism. Do the forces from Section II interact in humans the same way they do in bees and ants? If so, then there really is a superorganism of us; there really is Agora.

But if we wouldn’t be able to perceive Agora even if we were part of it, how will we know for certain? While we cannot gaze upon Agora, we can discern its shape by the shadow that it casts. We will look at cities as hives, and people as specialized parts of a larger being. We will try to spot emergent capabilities and other hints that we are part of a larger whole.

From there, we will ask the even bigger questions. What does Agora want, if anything? Why did it evolve at all? What purpose does it serve?

Then we will ask the biggest question of all: Why are we here?

Usually, science is mum on all questions that begin with “why.” When those come up, it quickly tries to change the subject. Its normal purview is “how” questions, and it drones on and on about those. But we are going to buck convention and tackle the “Why are we here?” question scientifically, and answer it without any appeal to mysticism. And if it really is a scientific question, then, as mentioned above, not only can we know the answer, but we can prove it as well. I know that’s a tall order, and if you are incredulous, believe me, I understand.

Finally, we will come to Section IV—Meaning. We will ask if any of this matters in a practical day-to-day sense. Then we’ll explore what Agora teaches us about why history unfolded the way it did, and see if that gives us any insights into our future as a species.

That’s the journey ahead of us. Thank you for joining me on it.