Utopian thinking and the collective mind: Beyond transdisciplinarity

The future is frequently presented as a forced choice between human sustainability and human extinction, utopia or dystopia. This paper examines a different option: to develop the full capacity of the human mind to remain open to all possibilities, guided by utopian thinking. An inquiry into the creative potential of the human mind finds that collective thinking from a collective mind goes beyond transdisciplinarity as currently constructed. In collective thinking, knowledge boundaries are reframed as dynamic inter-relationships, and due weight is given to each of personal, physical, social, ethical, aesthetic, sympathetic and reflective ways of knowing. In applying the collective mind in these times of transformational change, there is hope is for innovative solutions to seemingly intractable, aptly labelled wicked problems.