The Emerging Noosphere

Introduction & preliminary thoughts on de Chardin's theory of the Noosphere

README

The story goes that Thamus said many things to Thoth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Thoth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.” But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Thoth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.

It has always been the case, in human history, that radical discoveries would become smoothly embedded to the wider cosmology that interlaced the sociological mesh of a country. Thus the myths that informed man of his origin, place and role in the universe, customs, would also integrate e.g. the invention of the written word, as with the quote above. Societies of debased theological background would delegate this work to philosophers instead, who salvaged the situation by resorting to rationality as a best-effort approach to endure disintegration, as happened with Classical Greece. In the case of the 21st century western world we have neither common myth, nor proper intelligentsia, but we’re also met with the most important innovation in human history: the internet.

We’ve become too accustomed to the internet, many of us grew up with it since our formative years. We’ve been parts of it for too long, and now it’s hard to distance ourselves from it, analyze it objectively with “beginner’s eyes”. And we can’t rely on any experts to perform this task for us. But this task is as important as it is delicate, it cannot be ignored anymore. I write this post as an introduction and commentary to Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Noosphere, which models the digital cartography of the WWW and its information flows.

The Noosphere

To escape our current limited frame of reference, it’d be important to study the thoughts of thinkers who conceptualized something similar to the internet long before its invention, who can provide us novel ways of analysis and help us abstract away technical details and clean up contingencies that plague our minds, so we can focus on the big picture. Therefore we turn to the pioneer of the the Noosphere as a concept: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit priest and mystic.

The main mode of evolution in our planet has been geological for billions of years. After that, biological. We can think of animate matter as a biosphere that is layered upon the geosphere of Earth. But human consciousness is the start of yet another layer on top: that of the Noosphere. Since the past century, not enough time has passed for any significant geological or biological change, but human thought and its byproducts such as technology have completely changed the world. Noospheric evolution has outpaced the other ones.

There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.

Pierre de Chardin can be thought of as a whitepilled Nick Land, reinvigorated with the optimistic vitalism of his Deleuzian/Bergsonian roots. Instead of an all-devouring dark cybernetic abyss of autonomous capital, de Chardin puts forth a positive vision of an integrating noogenetic future that will unite the world, a Christian version of transhumanism associated not with freak bionics and accela-type biotech drugs but with increased understanding and reconciliation enabled by enhanced communication. Humanity will always be part of the future, and capital will always be tamed. Pro-tech, like Land, but pro-sanctity of life, as opposed to him. I’m not saying all this in a New Age manner, but maybe that too…

Since the beginning of time, the universe has been increasing in complexity, from inanimate matter to simple microbes to advanced vertebrate species. The insight is that this process does not stop at atomic human consciousness, but leads to its collectivization, through which the Noosphere materializes, an emergent structure greater than the sum of its parts. de Chardin’s mysticism identifies the telos of this harmonization with the Christian Logos, or Hegel’s absolute knowing. Civilizations, states, urbanization, trade, all were the primary steps towards this, but telecommunication technology has finally created the conditions for the emergence of a planetary neural overlay as intelligences unify and the human souls transmigrate into a single united World Soul, reminiscent of Gaia hypothesis theories.

Shockingly, de Chardin also predicted the role that electronic devices would play in the unfolding of the Noosphere. He intuited the role of computers as information-processing and exocortical-storage augmentations, and also the importance of computer networks in accelerating interconnectedness. Electronic devices can be seen as exosomatic extensions of the nervous system (stores info in neurons) which in turn can be seen as an extension of the immune system (stores info in modifiable DNA), so techonomics are simply the next step of our evolution. “Noosphere” is almost interchangeable with “cyberspace” now, as it emerges through it. The silicon of a grain of sand contains less information than a strand of human DNA, but this relationship has recently been reversed, with the silicon inside semiconductors containing the most information. de Chardin poetically describes Noospheric expansion:

A glow rippled outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever-widening circles, till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence.

Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love; and then for the second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire.

Needless to say, Pierre de Chardin was a proto-milady.

This section was a tl;dr of what I’ve gathered from his works. What follows is my analysis and commentary.

Proto-Noospheres

Noospheres have existed since the time of primitive human societies, in a fragmented and trivial manner, as every meatspace community can be said to be surrounded by one or even more overlapping ones, even before the advent of telecommunication. “Socialization” refers to just that: the integration of a person into their local Noospheric setting.

It has been noted by many before me that the average run-of-the-mill person is characterized by a poor connection to immediate objective reality, especially with rising complexity during the last century. Interfacing with this convoluted world is taxing to their intellectual ability, therefore more efficient means of decidability have evolved. To deal with the problem, they resort to outsourcing their decision-making process in daily life matters to a distributed neurotypical opinion nexus, also called a belief matrix. This nexus typically works as a provisioner of predetermined roles and behaviors one can assume to reliably navigate the world with low enough computational cost.

The neurotypical opinion nexus can be seen as a special main/“default” Noosphere that the average person belongs and draws mimetic axioms from. It has slowly arisen automatically-organically since ancient times through the daily basic interactions between humans. Over time, through iterative trial and error, it has integrated a decent set of behaviors and roles that individuals can use as to reduce friction in whatever dealings with society, to have a stable life, to use as social lubricants, to have peace of mind, etc.. Different physical places have notably converged to similar Noospheric settings, hinting at its nature as a reverse-engineering procedure of principles discovered and not invented.

Before the internet, the capacity for multiple Noospheres to coexist at the same physical place was minimal, cults being a primary example of this phenomenon. This bottlenecks the iterative process outlined above.

Neurotypical immunocrash

To account for the effects of the advance of mass media on the default Noosphere, it’d be illustrative to think how could a medieval king, as an example, emulate the function of a television in propagating his messages across the populace. This would obviously require a comically huge effort, sending delegates on every house of the kingdom to give 24/7 lectures to all their subjects. And this is still lacking the spectacular and entertaining elements of mass media.

In this substack’s first and last quotation of a french intellectual (excluding de Chardin okay), I remind you:

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

Mass media has changed the mode of communication between people. As they become absorbed into telecommunication technologies, socialization is hindered and increasingly references - is mediated by - TV monoculture. The interactions that gave rise to the opinion nexus are immunocrashed, stochastic gradient descent of the collective decompilation of beneficial behaviors comes to a halt. The nexus is now maneuvered by the elites in control of media, with disastrous results, either because of their disconnection from normal life or their purposeful misdirection. Sociable-agreeable characters that had the advantage of increased synergy with the nexus and relied on it for cheap decidability head to extinction as neurotypical assemblages hyperconverge to mass schizoconvulsion. Everyone that possesses enough capability to bypass harmful default behaviors opts out, necessarily damaging societal cohesion. So this is how normality dies… with a top-down hijacking of the cybernetic feedback loop of the Noospheric mimetoplectic reverse-engineering process.

The argument I’m making is that proto-Noospheres are not ontologi-, I mean, not really different from the Big One Emerging On The Internet that de Chardin wrote about, but are primitive version of it and will be obsoleted. The internet allows for a patchwork of multiple Noospheres to be created effectively and compete with each other. We call it the marketplace of ideas, but really it is a King of the Hill game.

Evolution of the Noosphere

cooperation vs competition

One of the parameters biological evolution optimizes is the ability to compete VS to cooperate, with neoteny being the phenotypical manifestation of the latter.

We have reached the end of the expanding, or "diversity" stage, and are now entering the contracting, or "unifying" stage. At this point, Chardin's theory runs completely counter to Darwin's, in that the success of humanity's evolution in the second stage will not be determined by "survival of the fittest," but by our own capacity to converge and unify.

With all tradeoffs priced in, recent developments have deemed cooperation a more effective strategy. This “expanding” stage of exploration and fronteering has not only occurred on the material plane of Earth, but also on the digital plane of the web, and so it’s also entering the “unifying” stage too. The days of the wild west WWW are over, and its power users will have to acclimate if they want to harness its full Noospheric prowess. As primitive hunter-gatherers became civilized men, so will black leather trenchcoat hackers become angelic anime girls - proper cartographic synaptic nodes in the network, as they realize they stand on the shoulders of giants.

web aesthetic novelty is best embodied rn in the shift away from cyberpunk historical baggage aka black leather trenchcoats & green n black terminals into a new understanding of the network as light—illumination—white—normal. its normal light ascent mode. it’s network spirituality

cephalization

Another trend we notice in evolution is that of cephalization of nervous systems. The starfish is an example of an acephalous organism, it’s a relatively primitive animal that is unable to centrally calculate it’s actions. Every arm overrides and interrupts the rest of the body upon detection of a signal of prey, performing independent actions to move towards it.

The principles of nervous systems are abstract and apply to many subjects. Instead of a biological organism evolving it’s detection systems for finding prey, we might have a state deciding to organize its economy centrally VS laissez faire, or a network of internet users setting priorities and optimizing their information flows.

Is this not like some great body which is being born - with its limbs, its nervous system, its perceptive organs, its memory - the body in fact of that great living Thing which had to come to fulfill the ambitions aroused in the reflective being by the newly acquired consciousness?

As cephalization in biological evolution seems to equip animals with a more efficient organization of their somatic constituents, with its clustering of neural and sensory nodes in a single front-facing format, de Chardin hints at the existence of an omega point of unification where the same intersection will occur with humans themselves in place of the neurons. Society, after all, is very elegantly modeled as a neural network itself, with its status and wealth allocations being the weights it assigns to its nodes, and its approximation of the natural law function its surviveability.

If this seems inconceivable, let’s not forget that the individual neurons of our human brain are not said to possess awareness of the consciousness they give rise to, so whether we can sense the higher Noospheric intelligence which we are contributors of does not necessarily need to be answered in the affirmative.

concluding remarks

I think it’s obvious where I’m pointing to with all this.

To put it in more operational terms with an example: I often wonder how would a person go on to find a bunch of intelligent people before the internet. University is the best I can think of, and it’s laughably suboptimal. The institution was at a marginally better position that it is today, but still unable to bootstrap and bolster a meaningful Noosphere. Even if the group was compromised by ultra high IQ’s, they were selected for specific subjects, possibly clueless on anything outside their expertise. Even further, the environment is unsuitable for information flow, with minimal discussions outside the narrow scientific subjects of the department.

The forum/imageboard/blogging/networking site allows for superior forms of self-organization and filtering, because of the signaling mechanisms it allows. The simple process of going through an user’s past posts can give the reader a good estimate of what to expect, and can chose to latch (whatever that means depending on site: subscribe/follow) to form a connection with them. Robust networks form this way. People that enter them benefit themselves, by gaining access to information structures built in those networks, and in turn contribute back to them. Users of low ability are deselected: they cannot navigate signals and find their way into networks, or are gatekept out of them, as they cannot contribute. Gatekeeping minimizes noise and maintains network efficiency. de Chardin’s theory stressed the importance of cooperation, but his optimistic egalitarian christian sensibilities ignored that most of the population is simply not fit to collaborate efficiently, and therefore will be left behind. Evolution for cooperation is as brutal as evolution for competition.

A lot more to say here. Last paragraph deserves a thousand words on its own, but I’m just aiming for an introduction here. A full modelling the Noosphere as a computational model (neural nets, associative memories, swarm algorithms), and a proper analysis of networks as life forms with their own immune/nervous/metabolic systems would be relevant here but is cut to be included in the next post.

Finally, since I already made a historical analogy, it’s interesting to notice how material technology effects the way power is distributed in society. We see in ancient and medieval times the cost of armor and weaponry sets a limit on what percentage of the population can function as warriors, and therefore an aristocracy is created by them. Modern rifles have democratized violence, therefore the organization of aristocratic peers is dismantled in favor of the mass and their elite handlers (see HLvM). I’d like to express my optimism regarding the change in organization that the WWW will bring about, similar to the cost of armor: those who can undertake the cost of wielding its Noospheric energies will rule the future, and those who can’t tame the infoconvulsive nature of media and algorithms will drown in the electronic maelstrom.

To be continued.