Human Energy Podcast

Can Science Alone Advance the Noosphere? Understanding Teilhard's Omega Principle Presented by Ilia Delio as part of Human Energy 's 2023 N2 Conference at the University of California, Berkeley Scientists have shown a renewed interest in Teilhard de Chardin's ideas on directed evolution. While principles of natural selection, epigenetics and complexity theory undergird direction in...

A Human Energy White Paper  Presented by Clément Vidal as part of Human Energy 's 2023 N2 Conference at the University of California, Berkeley  Human Energy is a nonprofit research, media, and educational organization dedicated to addressing the techno-social dilemma: the loss of identity, meaning, coherence and direction in our science and technology driven age. I will introduce the mission...

On Being a Noospheric Species Presented by Terrence Deacon as part of Human Energy 's 2023 N2 Conference at the University of California, Berkeley Presentation Summary: Teilhard argued that the human evolutionary process does not exhibit the pattern of diversification and specialization characteristic of biological evolution in general. Rather it has a convergent character. This has parallels...

In an earlier Science of the Noosphere conversation with John Arquilla that was focused on an article titled “Whose Story Wins: Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft”, we touched on the subject of the global commons. The term “global commons” comes up 153 times in the Noosphere and Noopolitik article, so we thought another conversation focused exclusively on the topic o...

There is one sense in which people conceive of the noosphere as a futuristic planetary-scale entity of some sort—a fully functional superorganism with a global brain and collective consciousness, brought into being as the Internet evolves into an increasingly powerful and capable interconnecting force. In another sense, however, we live in the noosphere now—though perhaps not fully functional as a...

Kevin Kelly is an icon of the Internet Age. He co-founded Wired Magazine in 1993, where his current title is “Senior Maverick”. In the 1980s he was publisher and editor of Whole Earth Review, which, under his direction and editorship, “was the first consumer magazine to report on virtual reality, ecological restoration, the global teenager, Internet culture, and artificial life.” Many more milesto...

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Francis Heylighen collaborated with Shima Beigi on a research paper about the noosphere’s response to the global crisis. The paper is titled Collective Consciousness Supported by the Web: Healthy or Toxic? A full text PDF of the paper can be downloaded here. Francis and Shima are both based at the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) for transdisciplinary studies at th...

As with any form of technology, artificial intelligence has the potential to greatly benefit humankind, along with the potential to do real harm. Decisions we make today regarding how we implement AI in various aspects of our lives will have consequences far into the noosphere’s future. In this conversation, David Sloan Wilson explores those potential consequences with Stuart Russell and Terrence...

In the series of conversations that contribute to our exploration of the Science of the Noosphere, there is a great deal of discussion about the formation of a global brain, with collective consciousness. Those conversations are fascinating, but mostly speculative. While there are many theories regarding how a global brain will evolve and function, and how collective consciousness may work, these...

One of Science of the Noosphere’s central goals is to update Teilhard’s vision of the Noosphere with scientific discoveries that have been made since his death in 1955. Most of that will involve new knowledge from fields such as evolutionary biology, anthropology, human history, cultural evolution, and technology. However, Brian Thomas Swimme, an evolutionary cosmologist on the graduate faculty of...

This conversation between two science fiction writers — PJ Manney and David Brin — and Science of the Noosphere’s David Sloan Wilson, is the last in the series of conversations we’ve posted here. What does science fiction have to do with our quest to understand the modern scientific research that undergirds Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of a layer of human thought that envelops the earth? While tha...

Clément Vidal is a member of the research and development team of Human Energy, who identifies himself on his webpage as a big questions philosopher. He is also one of Human Energy’s resident experts on Teilhard de Chardin and the noosphere, which is what his conversation with David Sloan Wilson is primarily about. Clément is exceptionally well qualified in this regard. He wrote a wonderful illust...

Teilhard’s description of the noosphere covers various manifestations of human cultural and technological evolution. In explaining his vision as a “Plausible Biological Interpretation of Human History”, these are enumerated in three categories—the apparatus of heredity, the mechanical apparatus, and the cerebral apparatus. However, it’s the third feature of its anatomy—the cerebral apparatus—that...

This conversation between Shima Beigi and Science of the Noosphere’s David Sloan Wilson focuses on Shima’s book, Mindful Smart Cities: Rethinking Smart Cities with Mindfulness Engineering. What does Shima mean by “rethinking smart cities with mindfulness engineering”? This description of her book states it thusly: “The Artificial Intelligence fueled transition toward smart cities and network socie...

Michael Jacob is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of California in San Francisco, working on a project for Human Energy about the Global Brain. He and his team are in the early stages of trying to understand parallels and differences between the functioning of individual human brains and the large-scale collective consciousness that is currently taking shape in human society — i...

We first became aware of John Arquilla through a paper he wrote with David Ronfeldt, published by the RAND Corporation in 2020, titled “Whose Story Wins: Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft”. We learned later that this visionary pair of geopolitical thinkers had in fact coined the term Noopolitik 20 years earlier, in a paper they wrote when both were employed by RAND:...

According to his bio, Bruce Damer “has spent his life pursuing two great questions: How did life on Earth begin, and how can we give that life (and ourselves) a sustainable pathway into the cosmos? His primary research interest is “The Hot Springs Hypothesis for the Origin of Life”. Matthew Segall teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and has specialized in the study of Alfred N...

Paul Rainey is director of the Department of Microbial Population Biology at the Max Planck Institute. Rick Michod has a lab at the University of Arizona. Both study single-celled organisms that evolve into simple multicellular forms under certain conditions. Importantly, those conditions can be manipulated in the lab. Paul’s lab studies a bacterium called Pseudomonas fluorescens that you eat on y...

Athena Aktipis is the director and principal investigator at the Cooperation and Conflict Lab at Arizona State University, where they “explore how cooperation and conflict shape life, from human societies to cellular interactions”. Michael Levin is principal investigator at the Levin Lab at Tufts University, where they study, among other things, “bioelectrical signals that make up part of the lang...

Deborah Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University who “studies how ant colonies work without central control using networks of simple interactions, and how these networks evolve in relation to changing environments.” The Gordon Lab at Stanford researches collective behavior in many forms, “such as emergence, self-organization, superorganism, quorum sensing, artifici...

On his website, Pete Richerson introduces himself by stating, “My main passion is cultural evolution.” It’s not only his personal passion — along with frequent collaborator Robert Boyd, he’s one of the pioneers in the field. Together, Richerson and Boyd developed the theory of gene-culture coevolution, also called dual inheritance theory. Understanding cultural evolution is central to understandin...

Tyson Yunkaporta is the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. His short bio explains that “his work focuses on applying Indigenous methods of inquiry to resolve complex issues and explore global crises.” He is married to Megan Kelleher, who “is investigating whether blockchain technology can interface with an Indigenous knowledge system – and conversely whether an Indige...

When we think of psychology, it’s likely the first image that comes to mind is of a therapist in consultation with an individual patient. To explore the psychological aspects of the noosphere from a biological perspective—in keeping with Teilhard’s “plausible biological interpretation of human history” — we felt it was necessary to look at the psychology of human groups as organisms as well. Scien...

Josiah Ober writes about the evolution of democratic governance in classical Greece — the era from roughly 500-300 BC. His books on the subject include The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece and Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice. Why is Science of the Noosphere interested in learning about the rise democracy in Greece? One reason is that a concern voiced by many people r...

Central to our mission at Science of the Noosphere is an exploration of the modern scientific perspective on how the noosphere evolved and expanded over time, from its origins in small paleolithic human groups to our emerging global civilization. That is the central subject of this conversation between David Sloan Wilson and two experts from different fields, who approach these questions in intere...