The Noösphere, The Internet, And Other Related Concepts: An Interlinked System

World Brain is the title of a book of essays by English author HG Wells (1866-1946), written in 1938.

In the essay, The Brain Organization of the Modern World (1938:49), Wells lays out his vision for “ ... a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarised, digested, clarified and compared.” Wells (1938:54) felt that technological advances such as microfilm could be utilised towards this end so that “any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica”.

A similar view of an automated system for making all of humanity’s knowledge available to all had been proposed a few years earlier by the Belgian founding father of documentation science, Paul Otlet (1868-1944), one of the founders of information science – and therefore a precursor of the Internet.

The Internet is an electronic network of computers that includes nearly every university, government, and research facility in the world. It is a worldwide network of local area computer networks. The vast collection of inter-connected networks across the world all uses the TCP/IP protocols.

The Internet began in 1962 as a resilient computer network for the US military. It comprised four interconnected computers in 1969, known as Arpanet.

The Internet is a ‘network of networks’ that consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government networks, which together carry various information sources and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer, and the interlinked web pages and other documents of the world wide web (WWW). University, and other, libraries provide access to many periodical indexes through the Internet.

The Internet is therefore an electronic version of the noösphere.

The noösphere can be seen as the ‘sphere of human thought’ being derived from the Greek, ‘nous or noös’, meaning ‘mind’. In the original theory of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945), the noösphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter/energy) and the biosphere (biological life).

In theoretical biology, the noösphere is that part of the world of life that is strongly affected by man’s conceptual thought; regarded by some as coextensive with the anthroposphere. The noösphere, as proposed by scientific theorists Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, and Édouard Le Roy (1870-1954), is the level of the intellect (mind), as opposed to the geosphere, or nonliving world, and the biosphere, or living world.

Like a real brain, this network is an immensely complex, self-organising-system that processes information, makes decisions, solves problems, learns new connections, and discovers new ideas. It plays the role of a collective nervous system for the whole of humanity. No person, organisation, or computer is in control of this system: its ‘thought’ processes are distributed over all its components.

Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. In contrast to the conceptions of the Gaia theorists, or the promoters of cyberspace, Vernadsky’s noösphere emerges at the point where humankind, through the mastery of nuclear processes, begins to create resources through the transmutation of elements.

The concept noösphere is also sometimes used to refer to a trans-human consciousness emerging from the interactions of human minds. This is the view proposed by the French theologian (also a visionary Jesuit, palaeontologist, biologist, and philosopher) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), who added that the noösphere is evolving towards an ever-greater integration, culminating in the Omega Point – which he saw as the ultimate goal of history.

Teilhard de Chardin passed away a full ten years before James Lovelock (1919- ) ever proposed his Gaia Hypothesis, which suggests that the Earth is actually a living being, a colossal biological super-system. Yet Teilhard de Chardin’s writings clearly reflect the sense of the Earth as having its own autonomous personality, and being the prime centre and director of our future – a strange attractor, if you will – that will be the guiding force for the synthesis of humankind.

To this end, Teilhard de Chardin suggested that the Earth in its evolutionary unfolding was growing a new organ of consciousness, called the noösphere. The noösphere is analogous on a planetary level to the evolution of the cerebral cortex in humans. The noösphere is a ‘planetary thinking network’ – an interlinked system of consciousness and information, a global net of self-awareness, instantaneous feedback, and planetary communication.

At the time of Teilhard de Chardin’s writing, computers of any merit were the size of a city block, and the Internet was, if anything, an element of speculative science fiction. Yet this evolution is indeed happening, and with swiftness, that in Gaia time is but a mere passage of seconds. In these precious moments, the planet is developing her cerebral cortex, and emerging into self-conscious awakening. Are we indeed approaching the Omega point that Teilhard de Chardin was so excited about?

The Omega point is the ultimate maximum level of complexity-consciousness, considered by him the aim towards which consciousness evolves. This convergence however, though it was predicted to occur through a global information network, was not a convergence of merely minds or bodies – but of heart, a point that he made most fervently.

The idea that life on planet earth is not just a layer, or crust, over the lifeless ground, but makes a dynamic living whole with the planet (as a global organism), was included into the Gaia hypothesis (James Lovelock), and the Global Brain hypothesis (Peter Russell). In contrast to this Global Brain hypothesis, we can consider the Global Mind hypothesis, developed by Teilhard de Chardin.

This corresponds with James Lovelock’s model in Gaia: A New Look at Life on earth (1989: x). Lovelock writes, “… the hypothesis, the model, in which the earth’s living matter, air, oceans, and land surface form a complex system  which can be seen as a single organism and which has the capacity to keep our planet a fit place for life.” 

The idea that the earth is alive has existed since ancient times. The name Gaia is of a living entity and was used by the Greeks more than 2000 years ago. The first scientific expression of a belief that the earth was alive was from the Scottish father of geology James Hutton (1726-1797) in 1785 in a lecture before the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Russell’s Global Brain (‘noösphere’) is the name given to the emerging intelligent network formed by all people on this planet, together with the computers and communication links that connect them together.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1748-1832) idea of the planet as a living organism and of the ‘World Soul’ (Weltseele), which permeates and gives teleology to the dynamics and metamorphosis of the overall matter, was developed into various hypothesis and paradigms.

Ideas related to metamorphosis were incorporated into ‘implicate order’ (Bohm), ‘formative causality’, and ‘morphogenetic fields’ (Sheldrake).

Both David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake were pursuing the same goal as Goethe – to exchange the mechanistic model of explanation, with holistic, organic, and teleological explanations, in the spirit of Bertalanffy’s General Systems Theory, and to broaden the explanation basis by adding ‘paradigms’ to ‘natural laws’.

David Bohm (1917-1992) , for example, said that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

The ‘whole in every part’ nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding physical structure, organisation, and order. For most of its history, Western science has laboured under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this analytical approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made; we will only get smaller wholes.

British biologist Rupert Sheldrake (1942- ) posited a theory of ‘morphogenetic fields’ that has become well-known for the criticism and scepticism directed towards it by some prominent members of the scientific community.

The theory of morphic fields is not currently accepted by mainstream science. That a mode of transmission of shared concepts and archetypes might exist did gain some tacit acceptance, when it was proposed as the theory of collective unconscious by renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung. A ‘morphic field’ might provide an explanation for the theory.

Sheldrake trained as a plant physiologist and became interested in the way that living things took on their form. In particular, he was interested in how what began as a single cell that split into identical copies eventually changed to take on specific characteristics such as leaves or stems in a plant.

At the time of his research in the late 1960s and 1970s, the mechanisms for such development were unclear. In the 1920s, embryo regeneration and the ability of willow shoots to grow completely new trees implied to some researchers the possibility of some influencing field.

The later discovery of DNA appeared at first to offer a clearer explanation, but since the DNA remains largely identical throughout an organism, it was thought that DNA could not explain form. Subsequent research revealed that DNA controls the form of a creature through the complex mechanism of cellular differentiation.

Sheldrake then became interested in ‘holistic’ ideas after reading Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s works on the topic. He developed a theory to explain this problem of morphology, with its basic concept relying on a universal field encoding the ‘basic pattern’ of an object (Goethe’s Urorganismus). He termed it the ‘morphogenetic field’.

The morphogenetic field would provide a force that guided the development of an organism as it grew, making it take on a form similar to that of others in its species. DNA was not the source of structure itself, but rather a ‘receiver’ that translated instructions in the field into physical form.

A feedback mechanism, ‘morphic resonance’, would lead to changes in this pattern, as well as explain why humans did not ‘pick up’ the pattern of plants during development. In Sheldrake’s theory, the existence of a form is itself sufficient to make it easier for that form to come to exist somewhere else. [This also makes me think about Plato’s Forms – his archetypal concepts!]

Morphogenetic fields were also dealt with by the Scottish financier and industrial engineer, Lancelot Law Whyte (1896-1972) in 1949, while working on Einstein’s Unified Field Theory.

Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology originally coined by Carl Jung (1875-1961). It similar to the ‘Soul of the World’, in Latin Anima Mundi, or Goethe’s ‘Weltseele’.

Anima mundi is the World Soul, a pure ethereal spirit, which was proclaimed by some ancient philosophers to be diffused throughout all nature. It was thought to animate all matter in the same sense in which the soul was thought to animate the human.

Therefore, we may consequently state that, this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.

The idea is said to have originated with Plato (428/427-348/347 BCE) but the concept has been discovered to be of more ancient origin. It prevailed in systems of eastern philosophy in the Brahman-Atman of Hinduism and as Purusha in the Sankhya system of Hindu philosophy.

Subsequently the Stoics believed it to be the only vital force in the universe.

Similar concepts were held by hermetic philosophers like Paracelsus (1493-1541), and by Benedict (Baruch, in Hebrew) de Spinoza (1632-1677), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and later by Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854).

It has been elaborated since the 1960s by Gaia theorists such as James Lovelock and the American biologist Lynn Margulis (1938- ).

The collective unconscious refers to that part of a person’s unconscious which is common to all human beings. It contains archetypes, which are forms or symbols that are manifested by all people in all cultures. They are said to exist prior to experience, and are in this sense instinctual. Critics have argued that this is an ethnocentrist view, which universalised Jung’s European-styled archetypes into human beings’ archetypes. However, these patterns and primordial images are shared by all humanity.

Less mystical proponents of the Jungian model hold that the collective unconscious can be adequately explained as arising in each individual from shared instinct, common experience, and shared culture. The natural process of generalisation in the human mind combines these common traits and experiences into a mostly identical substratum of the unconscious.

Regardless of whether the individual’s connection to the collective unconscious arises from mundane or mystical means, the term collective unconscious describes an important commonality that is observed to exist between different individuals’ dreams. It was simply formulated by Jung as a model.

The American writer, psychologist, and advocate of psychedelic drug research and use, Timothy Leary’s (1920-1996) ‘8-Circuit Model of Consciousness’ includes the collective unconscious as being the seventh circuit, or the neurogenetic circuit of consciousness.

The term ‘Collective Consciousness’ is also referred to in Sahaja Yoga as an outcome of meditation and self-realisation.

Various forms of what might be termed ‘collective consciousness’ in modern societies have been identified by other sociologists, going from solidarity attitudes and memes to extreme behaviours like groupthink or herd behaviour. It has developed as a way of describing how an entire community comes together to share similar values.

Collective consciousness is a mode of awareness that emerges at the first transpersonal stage of consciousness, when our identities expand beyond our egos. A crucial capacity that accompanies this awareness is the ability to intuitively sense and work with the interactions between our and others’ energy fields, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. For example, just as Gene Rodenberry (1921-1991) imagined a future where Star Trek’s Spock could ‘mind meld’ with others, more of us are now becoming aware of our capacity not only to intuit each other’s thoughts and emotions, but also to consciously think and create together without communicating through our five senses.

The Akashic Record, in Hindu metaphysics, and occultism in general, is a compendium of pictorial records, or ‘memories’, of all events, actions, thoughts, and feelings that have occurred since the beginning of time. They are said to be imprinted on Akasha, the astral light, which is described by spiritualists and mystics as a fluid ether existing beyond the range of human senses.

The Akashic record (Akasha is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘sky’, ‘space’ or ‘aether’) are collectively understood to be a collection of mystical knowledge that is encoded in the aether; i.e. on a non-physical plane of existence. The Akashic Record is understood to have existed since the beginning of the Creation and even before.

Just as we have various specialty libraries (e.g., science, engineering, medical, law), there are said to exist various Akashic Records (e.g., human, animal, plant, mineral, etc.) encoding Universal lore. Most writings refer to the Akashic Record in the area of human experience but it is understood that all phenomenal experience as well as transcendental knowledge is encoded therein.

The Akashic Record is not kept physically but rather is imprinted on the astral plane via Akasha – the ‘astral light’. As such, the Akashic Record, like the Internet, is nowhere yet everywhere.

Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925) was an Austrian-born scientist, editor, and founder of anthroposophy, a movement based on the notion that there is a spiritual world comprehensible to pure thought, but accessible only to the highest faculties of mental knowledge. Later, he became more directly occult in his lectures and drew his information from his vision into the Akashic Record.

After the 1970’s, a new set of paradigms (in real Goethean spirit) was developed by the new generation in physics and biology (e.g. Fritjof Capra (1939- ) in The Tao of Physics [1975] and The Turning Point [1982]).

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995) and A Brief History of Everything (1996), Ken Wilber (1949- ) lays the groundwork for ‘integral’ thinking. De-emphasising his earlier emphasis on death anxiety and Atman projects, Ken Wilber now seeks to unite the perennial idea of The Great Chain of Being (Scala Naturae, in Latin), as informed by spiritual, cultural, social, and natural scientific evolutionary concepts, with a four-fold set of distinctions allegedly capable of analysing all phenomena.

Drawing on the notion of holons developed by Jan Smuts and Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), Wilber maintains that virtually all phenomena are wholes from one perspective and parts from another.

A Holon (Greek: holos, ‘whole’) is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. The word was coined by Arthur Koestler in his book The Ghost in the Machine (1967:48).

A Holon is a system (or phenomenon) that is a whole in itself as well as a part of a larger system. It can be conceived as systems nested within each other. Every system can be considered a Holon, from a subatomic particle to the universe as a whole. On a non-physical level, words, ideas, sounds, emotions – everything that can be identified – is simultaneously part of something, and can be viewed as having parts of its own.

Since a Holon is embedded in larger wholes, it is influenced by, and influences, these larger wholes. Moreover, since a Holon also contains subsystems, or parts, it is similarly influenced by, and influences, these parts. Information flows bi-directionally between smaller and larger systems. When this bi-directionality of information flow and understanding of role is compromised, for whatever reason, the system begins to break down: wholes no longer recognise their dependence on their subsidiary parts, and parts no longer recognise the organising authority of the wholes. Cancer is a good example of this breakdown in the biological realm.

A hierarchy of holons is called a holarchy. It is a natural hierarchy in the sense that it is objective rather than subjective.

Wilber comments that the test of a Holon hierarchy is that if a type of Holon is removed from existence, then all other Holons of which it formed a part must of necessity cease to exist too. Thus, an atom is of a lower standing in the hierarchy than a molecule, because if you removed all molecules, atoms could still exist, whereas if you removed all atoms, molecules would cease to exist. Wilber’s concept is known as the doctrine of the fundamental and the significant. A hydrogen atom is more fundamental than an ant, but an ant is more significant.

The same test holds for letters and words, or people and countries. This natural hierarchy contrasts with other types of hierarchy (such as human leadership) which are dependent upon consensus and may be subject to dispute or change.

A cell in an organism, for example, is a whole (a system) that includes parts, but is also a part of the organism (a part-system). Emphasising that holonic evolution generates emergent qualities; Wilber divides the ‘Kosmos’ into four grand domains: physiosphere, biosphere, noösphere, and theosphere.

The physiosphere (the physical universe) includes the non-biological features of the universe, including the stars and planets that arose in the billions (10⁹) of years following the Big Bang. (The hardware of the universe.)

The biosphere, the domain of life, depends upon the much older and much vaster physiosphere, but involves features that transcend the physiosphere. (The firmware on the universe.)

Finally, the biosphere gives rise to the noösphere, which includes complex sentient life such as mammals and humans. Again, the noösphere both depends on physiosphere and biosphere, but also transcends them, by exhibiting emergent characteristics, including self-consciousness, language, and rationality. (The operating system of the universe.)

The theosphere, which both includes and transcends the other three domains, refers to dimensions of consciousness that include what is traditionally understood by God. (The application software of the universe.)

Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870-1950) in his book Holism and Evolution (1926) was in fact trying to bring together the physiosphere, biosphere, and noösphere into one design – a real whole as in holism.

In a controversial move, Wilber argues that just as the biosphere contains the physiosphere in the sense of comprising all its basic features (although plainly not its material expanse), so too the noösphere contains the biosphere in the sense of comprising all its basic features (although not its biotic mass), while adding new ones.

Affirming that neither biosphere nor noösphere was ‘destined’ to emerge on earth, Wilber joins proponents of the Anthropic Principle in arguing that the cosmos is ordered such that biosphere and noösphere would, out of necessity, eventually emerge somewhere.

Lyall Watson (1939- ) is a South African born botanist, zoologist, biologist, anthropologist, ethnologist, and author of 25 New Age books, among the most popular of which is the bestseller Supernature (1973). Watson tries to make sense of natural and supernatural phenomena in biological terms.

He is credited with the first published use of the term ‘Hundredth Monkey’ in his 1979 book, Lifetide (1979). It is a theory that aroused both interest and ire in the scientific community and continues to be a topic of discussion over a quarter century later.

The ‘Hundredth Monkey Effect’ is the name for a supposed phenomenon in which a particular learned behaviour spread instantaneously from one group of animals, once a critical number was reached, to all related animals in the region or perhaps throughout the world. Largely due to popularisation of this story, the ‘Hundredth Monkey Effect’ phenomenon is now thought by some to occur in human populations with respect to ideas and beliefs in general even though the original story has been discredited.

In his book Lifetide, he claimed to describe the observations of scientists studying macaques (a type of monkey) on the Japanese island of Koshima in 1952. Some of these monkeys learned to wash sweet potatoes, and gradually this new behaviour spread through the younger generation of monkeys – in the usual fashion, through observation and repetition. However, according to Watson the researchers noted that once a critical number of monkeys were reached – the so-called hundredth monkey – this previously learned behaviour instantly spread across the water to monkeys on nearby islands.

It therefore seems that mind, consciousness, and intelligence is like Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) writes in Mind and Nature (1988:4-5), “ … mind became for me, a reflection of large parts and many parts of the natural world outside the thinker.” Universal Mind?

Are all of these interrelated concepts in fact signifying a kind of ‘planetary or universal thinking network’ – an interlinked system of consciousness and information, a global/universal net of self-awareness, instantaneous feedback, and planetary/universal communication as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin prophesied?

Moreover, what is the ultimate purpose of all these different interlinked systems of mind, consciousness, and information?

In 1971, John David Garcia (circa 1936-2001) expanded on Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point idea. In particular, he stressed that even more than the increase of intelligence, the constant increase of ethics is essential for humankind to reach the Omega Point. He applied the term creativity to the combination of intelligence and ethics (i.e. “Creativity = Intelligence * Ethics”) and announced that increasing creativity is the correct and proper goal of human life. He specifically rejected increasing happiness as a proper ultimate goal, “When faced with a choice between increasing creativity and increasing happiness, a person ought to choose creativity”, he wrote.

There is a mental world within – a world of thought, feeling, and power; of light, life, and beauty; and although invisible, its forces are mighty.

The world within is governed by Universal Mind. When we discover this world, we shall find the solution to every problem, the cause for every effect; and since the world within is subject to our control, – and all laws of power and possession are also within our control.