The world will look back at 2023 as the year humanity exposed its inability to mitigate the climate crisis, with temperatures higher than at any point over the past million years, floods in Libya killing more than 11,300 people and devastating wildfires in Europe and North-America. The year, also, of the Turkey–Syria earthquakes and genocidal cycles of violence in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza-Israël.
However, at CLEA we also would like to remember 2023 for a more hopeful and aspirational event: the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the noosphere (1923 - 2023), the “sphere of thought” enveloping the Earth. This global thinking circuit emerged together with human culture and symbolic communication and enabled the global spread, recombination and evolution of ideas. The noosphere has turned the globe into a thinking entity that is constantly producing new knowledge and insights. Such a global, distributed, collective mind is the only power that can, potentially, deal with our collective problems at the largest scales. CLEA seeks to contribute to this development.
To celebrate the noosphere's centenary, and muse on its future, a group of interdisciplinary thinkers and doers gathered in November 2023 at the University of California, Berkeley. They exchanged ideas at the conference “N2: The Noosphere at 100: The Future of Human Collective Consciousness”, spanning three days of lectures and workshops. The abbreviation “N2” points to the noosphere’s exponential pace of evolution. The 21st century will most likely far exceed the last one in rapid and radical change to the global mind. “N2” also suggests how the noosphere amplifies our access to human understanding beyond the individual, evolving into a layer of collective intelligence, consciousness, mind or “noos”.
The main aim of N2 conference (the first one in history) was to explore how to intentionally, collectively and ethically steer the future evolution of the noosphere. Initiated by the non-profit organization Human Energy, its undercurrent was the question how to develop a shared vision for the flourishing of our species and our planet. As founder Ben Kacyra states, most organizations similar to Human Energy are busy solving today’s unprecedented global challenges, but no one is asking the question, “Can we get humans to align?”.
In essence, coming together is prerequisite to deal with global issues, and fundamental for our future collective potential. We need to start thinking as a collective, build collective wisdom, and bring a renewed sense of meaning, direction, and values to our increasingly interconnected society. Human Energy wants to build a framework that supports such a form of global stewardship, by developing a network to advance interdisciplinary scientific research studying the noosphere, or the future of human collective consciousness.
“To understand to some extent how we work collectively, how we think collectively, is one of the great problems.”
– Dr. Terrence Deacon, Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley and Human Energy Advisor
Co-organized by CLEA, the N2 conference featured half a dozen CLEA-affiliated researchers sharing their insights during the plenary and parallel sessions, alongside many other experts on collective intelligence like Ben Goertzel, Terrence Deacon, Jaron Lanier, Johan Bollen, Kevin Kelly and Robert Wright. You can review the overall speakers schedule here. The parallel sessions are not yet available online, but you can already watch the three-day plenary sessions on Human Energy’s YouTube channel. Below, we take you through some of its highlights.
The N2 conference took off with a hearty goodmorning from Human Energy founder and president Ben Kacyra, telling a personal story leading to the foundation of Human Energy:
“As a student, I was confronted with the shortcomings of both religion and science to give my life meaning, direction, and purpose. Discovering Teilhard de Chardin’s Third Story opened my eyes. It is a story of the universe based on science, but with human evolution having a direction, and human life having meaning and purpose. I founded Human Energy based on the idea that today’s global challenges - social media addiction, disinformation, ecological problems, and so on - are only symptoms of an underlying root cause: humanity being fragmented, lacking a positive, unifying vision. As long as we don’t solve this root problem, the symptoms will persist. Providing a unifying vision through the Third Story, or a common goal we can work towards, is therefore one of Human Energy’s main objectives.”
Professor of Anthropology Terrence Deacon, the conference’s co-chair and Human Energy Advisory Board member, gave an introduction on why humans are able to tell such unifying stories. Symbolic communication turned us into a unique noospheric species able to tell stories that can influences worldviews. You can discover his ideas below.
CLEA researcher and member of Human Energy's research team Clément Vidal gave a talk introducing the mission and goals of Human Energy, and explaining the significance of its core concepts: the techno-social dilemma, the noosphere, and the Third Story of the universe. Rather than seeing the noosphere as a developmental stage (after the geosphere and the biosphere), considering it as (the brain of) a Global Superorganism is a much richer perspective, linking the Anthropocene discours, Gaia theory and the idea of a technological singularity. Clément ended his talk by presenting the challenges ahead, and making a bold call for action: to co-author and publish in a high-impact scientific magazine an open letter making the case for the noosphere, whose working title is: “The Noosphere and its Significance for the Survival of Humanity”. Its goal is to highlight the noosphere concept and its promise to provide a positive future vision to deal successfully with global challenges. Please contact Clément if you are interested to participate at clement.vidal@vub.ac.be.
In his talk, Clément also gave an overview of the outputs of Human Energy’s four major strategies to turn its vision into reality: outreach, science, ethics, and education. The educational strategy was illustrated by the plenary talk of Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Anthropology David Sloan Wilson on the last conference day. Among others, Wilson reported on Human Energy’s Science of the Noosphere Master Class, which was a beautiful experiment in worldview evolution.
CLEA director and member of Human Energy's Advisory Board Francis Heylighen presented “The Third Story: self-organizing evolution as a source of meaning". His talk touches upon the central Human Energy issue of how to address the techno-social dilemma - the loss of identity, meaning, coherence and direction - in our science and technology driven age. In our VUCA (or BANI) world, people are continuously bombarded with disconnected snippets of information, often referring to problems and dangers. Social progress can’t keep up with the fast technological pace, and scientific progress is eroding religion’s meaning-making role. Especially for young people growing up in such a world, like generations Z and Alpha, it is difficult to find a sense of coherence. They no longer experience the world as comprehensible, manageable and meaningful. The resulting psychological and ethical confusion, anxiety and stress constitute the “techno-social dilemma”.
How to make sense of it all? Religious narratives (First Story) have their shortcomings, like their large incompatibility with science and outdated values, but so does the traditional scientific, mechanistic worldview (Second Story), with its reductionist approach missing the big picture, unable to clarify the behaviour of complex dynamic systems. Both stories are in conflict and no longer provide a coherent source of meaning.
"It seems we need a new story. An integrated worldview based on scientific insights (what is going on), but also providing values (what should we strive for) and possible courses of action (what can we do)." - Francis Heylighen
Francis elaborated the idea of a "Third Story" providing a sense-making scheme in the form of a story of evolution, based on evolutionary and complexity science. Such a story looks at the big picture by explaining the development of the universe from elementary particles to human global society and beyond. It recognizes that evolution is not deterministic (there is no fixed end goal), but also that it has a preferred directionality towards greater integration, complexity and consciousness. In this view, humans are not subjected to the rigid Laws of God or Nature, but active participants contributing to a larger (and larger) whole through cooperation on larger (and larger) scales.
Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest, paleontologist and philosopher who co-developed the concept of the noosphere, already noted this intuitively, but you can also clarify this by analysing the mechanism self-organizing evolution, which Francis explained during his presentation. Long story short, it seems that humanity is self-organizing into a Global Superorganism with a relatively efficient metabolism (flow of goods, energy and resources), but with a consciousness (the noosphere) that has its pathologies such as the techno-social dilemma, conspiracy theories, fake news, and so on. Elaborating the concept of the Third Story could enhance collective consciousness and restore a new sense of coherence, encouraging humanity to explore synergies and avoid frictions.
Director of the Third Story at Human Energy and professor of evolutionary cosmology Brian Thomas Swimme further elaborated on the Third Story, which you can discover here.
A similar focus on storytelling, but from another point of view, came from author and educator Jennifer Morgan, founder of the Deeptime network. In her talk, she explains how Montessori schools are able to shape 'noospheric' adults from early childhood through the secondary level. While her pedagogy is often associated with infants and toddlers, few people know that Maria Montessori also developed a ‘Cosmic Education Curriculum’ for the elementary level (6 to 12 years). Children in this age group start asking questions like: Where do I (and everything else) come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? We shouldn’t wait until high school to tell them about the evolution of the universe. Before studying biology, physics, chemistry, or maths, let’s tell children the Great Stories first. Start with the big picture, explaining the stories of the universe, Earth/life, humans, and how commmunication, languages and math fit in, before explaining the details and interdependence of all things.
"Storytelling comes first, then study. Foundational stories provide a pedagogical scaffolding that connect school subjects into a larger context: from the universe, we get physics and chemistry; from the Earth, we derive biology and geography; humanity has led to writing, math, anthropology. When a child finds out she can write because her ancestors invented it, it will make her writing learning experience richer, more valuable and more embedded." - Jennifer Morgan
Finally, we need to learn children that our job as humans is essentially to participate in evolution. Our purpose is to evolve the universe. Or, in the words of Maria Montessori: “We are all cosmic agents”.
Staying within the realm of education, CLEA director of education Marta Lenartowicz explored ‘The Noospheric Frame of Mind’ during her plenary session. The main question: What dispositions should be cultivated in/by individuals to bring forth the/more noosphere? In her talk, Marta builds a parallel between the “noospheric frame of mind” and what psychologist Christopher Bollas calls the “democratic frame of mind”.
Democracy is not only a political arrangement, but also a theory of the mind. It is a reflection of psychological and subjective principles such as the emphasis on individuality, the recognition of plurality, open dialogue, and tolerance.
Knowing that the way we conduct our minds spills over into our social relations, we can only truly value the irreducible difference brought in by others during conversations, if we allow internal dissent. Of course, if the ability to constructively partake in a group of people is already a sophisticated disposition, how does the challenge of relating well extend in the context of the entire noosphere? Compared to a small assembly in which all voices are present and heard, the noosphere is filled with unknowns. It is ever more complex, internally inconsistent, ungoverned, always incomplete.
Marta argues that a noospheric frame of mind, able to relate to such complexity, demands a vast openness. Unfortunately, human individuals can fail entirely at adopting the noospheric frame of mind by focusing too much on safeguarding their identity, among others. The noospheric mindset is thus not a given, it needs to be adopted, and the curriculum is not always comfortable. It includes relaxing psychological, conceptual, and operational closures, appreciating and advancing complexity, befriending the unknown, and learning to trust and let go.
Computer science visionary Jaron Lanier - presently “Prime Unifying Scientist” at Microsoft - closed one of the conference days with verve. You can watch his performance here, recommended by Marta:
“For me, N2 was one of the most interesting and pleasant academic conferences I have ever been to. The choice of speakers was marvellous, the topic fascinating, the place and company great. My favourite moment was Jaron Lanier speaking about AI with the metaphor of Escher’s angels and demons drawing: you think you see a scary creature, but just look a bit differently and you will see a pattern of tightening human collaboration enmeshing its products together. This would be nice… His talk was super fun.”
Other plenary talks were given by the theologian Ilia Delio on the question whether science alone can advance the noosphere, by exploring Teilhard's Omega Principle (video part one and part two). Biophysicist, biotech entrepreneur and author Gregory Stock gave a presentation on large language models as noospheric portals that may redefine the distinction between individual and collective mind, which you can watch here.
Founding editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly wondered whether there was verifiable evidence for the existence of the noosphere as a planetary super-organism with autonomy (yes, he says). In his plenary talk, journalist and author Robert Wright asked himself the question “How right was Teilhard?" (from a scientific perspective), watchable here. French sociologist and philosopher Raphael Liogier talked about one of his hypotheses that modernity is not - like we usually assume - the disenchantment of the world and the questioning of transcendence, but quite the contrary. Discover his arguments here.
During one of the dinner sessions, Elizabeth Lee presented CyArk, a nonprofit organization committed to empowering connections with historic places (video). Professor of Informatics and Cognitive Science Johan Bollen (and former CLEA member) discussed the notion of collective emotions and how they can be observed in real-time from social media data. You can watch his presentation here.
Neurobiologist and psychiatrist Michael Jacob explored whether neuroscience, music, and mysticism could provide a transdisciplinary language for noospheric consciousness (watch here), which was followed by a plenary panel discussion between Jacob, Ilia Delio, Francis Heylighen and Terrence Deacon about the definition of noospheric consciousness, its importance to humanity, and how we can get to know more about it as a community. Finally, Artificial General Intelligence expert Ben Goertzel’s talk can be enjoyed here.
Some highlights from Francis’ perspective:
“I think N2 was a very successful conference, with a very broad and interesting range of topics and speakers, while being connected by offering a positive vision of the future without ignoring obvious problems. The plenary talks I considered most interesting were those of Terrence Deacon, Ilia Delio, Gregory Stock and Kevin Kelly. Ilia Delio offered a surprisingly clear and comprehensive review of Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary philosophy. Apart from her use of the term "Christogenesis" for what I would call a metasystem transition to the global brain, her ideas were perfectly in agreement with contemporary science. She even admitted - in response to my question - that Teilhard's conception of God not as creator but as an endpoint of a complexifying universe contradicts the standard religious dogma. Gregory Stock focused on the novel uses and benefits of Chat-GPT-style Artificial Intelligence, and Kevin Kelly smoothly presented the evolution of technology towards a noosphere."
Although the parallel sessions aren’t available online yet, rumours go they were even more interesting than the plenary talks…
CLEA director of Mathematical Modeling Tomas Véloz participated in two parallel sessions. In the first one, he talked about “Complex Adaptive Systems, the Noosphere, and Artificial Intelligence”. In this talk, Tomas explores some key concepts required to understand the noosphere in a profoundly scientific way. Examples of such concepts are contextuality, feedback, self-organization, emergence, agency, resilience, autonomy, affordance, and goal-directedness. Tomas draws connections between emergence and the evolution of autonomous agency in life sciences, and the technically and conceptually distinct - but epistemically interrelated - realm of artificial intelligence. This reflection should help to better grasp the noosphere, and help us tackle both technical and societal challenges at the individual and collective levels.
Tomas also took part in a panel discussion on how AI can help to develop a healthy or "purposeful" noosphere. He discussed philosophical, conceptual, social, and technical challenges together with Bill Duaine (Google advisor), Mizuki Oka (Director of the Artificial Life Society in Japan), Francis Heylighen, Terrence Deacon, Ben Goertzel, Zann Gill and Ben Kacyra. One conclusion was that such techno-social development is feasible but requires significant cooperation, which the Human Energy network is trying to build at the moment. To be continued, for sure.
CLEA PhD student Floor Schukking highlighted the important need to broaden the idea of intelligence in AI and the Noosphere. The field of AI and the noosphere share a common interest in intelligence. What this intelligence entails, however, has been mainly defined by the Euro-Western system of scientific knowledge, liberal-democratic progressive ideals and tech companies mainly driven by economic growth. As a result, intelligence is often reduced to mere technological advancement, with a focus on short-term benefits for a selected group and ignoring system- or long-term effects.
This narrow perspective on intelligence has not only resulted in many of our current global problems, but also indirectly implies the elevation of Euro-Western tech-societies above non-Western peoples. Critical thinkers have raised the need for alternative ways of thinking about intelligence, such as decolonial, indigenous or feminist approaches. While keeping the optimism of shaping the noosphere in a positive direction for all, we should broaden the definition(s) of intelligence to create a more inclusive, sustainable, and loving future. One of the questions is whether AI as a theoretical technical framework can help integrating these inclusive ideas to arrive at a globally intelligent, and perhaps more important, thoughtful mind.
CLEA affiliate researcher and professor of the Artificial Intelligence group (University of Utrecht) Stefan Leijnen presented "Purposeful AI between Biosphere and Noosphere". In his talk, he addresses the problematic assumption that developers provide the purpose of AI models, securing some level of human control. However, shifts in machine learning, including deep learning and attention networks, raise concerns about autonomy and purpose, prompting the need for a framework to regulate and understand the emergence of purpose in human, artificial, and hybrid organizations.
Intelligence research expert Olaf Witkowski, who gave a CLEA seminar in autumn 2023 on the concept of play and its role in learning experiences, talked about symbiotic interactions between autonomous forms of intelligence such as humans, animals, artificial beings, and others. He examined the possibilities and limitations of harmonious, hybrid intelligences consisting of positive, emergent, mutualistic interactions. How can we shape a future where humanity and technology seamlessly intertwine for the collective betterment?
Finally, CLEA researcher Shima Beigi moderated 12 parallel sessions at the N2 conference, and gave a talk on how to foster noospheric urban living with Mindful Smart Cities. As by 2050 more than 68% of the world's population will live in urban areas, a profound system-level paradigm shift is needed in envisioning and building future cities. Shima presented the noospheric framework of Mindful Smart Cities, a unique tale of human transformation, that can turn cities into evolutionary noospheric engines dedicated to human self-actualisation and awakening. You can explore her ideas more in depth here.
