Noospheric Consciousness: What Might That Be? How Can We Study It? Roundtable Discussion

Michael Jacob, Ilia Delio, Terrence Deacon & Francis Heylighen

N2 Conference 2023

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Learn more at https://humanenergy.io

Transdisciplinary Language for Noospheric Consciousness: Neuroscience, Music, Mysticism

Presented by Michael Jacob

N2 Conference 2023

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The study of noospheric consciousness demands a radical transdisciplinary approach. Given the major themes of the N2 conference: science, philosophy, politics, theology, and education - what ties them together? Can these disciplines contribute to a coherent ‘metascience’ to understand the meaning of noospheric consciousness?

This session will begin with an introductory presentation on the language of consciousness, using neuroscience as a case-study for a transdisciplinary approach. Following this presentation, we will discuss this topic with scholars who have bridged science, the humanities and religion to come to a new understanding of noospheric consciousness.

In the introductory presentation I will consider how terms such as ‘consciousness’ and ‘collective consciousness’ define both the what it feels like aspect of human experience and the creation of meaning from experience itself. Next, I will briefly explore the relevance of transdisciplinary approaches to neuroscience, generally considered the scientific launchpad for consciousness research. In the brain, meaning emerges from the collective communicative capacity of billions of electrochemically interacting neurons. It is not contained in any neuron or network, and must be understood as an emergent whole, like a piece of music. This approach reveals how consciousness research in neuroscience needs dialogue with the humanities, and also offers an entree into a transdisciplinary approach to the study of noospheric consciousness. While an individual neuron may only have the vaguest possible sense of their collective participation in the music of the brain, humans are drawn to experiences greater than any one individual. This perspective on noospheric metascience evokes the etymology of religion, as that which binds us, and mysticism, in that both the sciences and humanities are necessary to explore the mystery of life, consciousness and the cosmos.

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Toward an Evolutionary Ecology of the Noosphere

Presented by Jacob Foster as part of Human Energy's N2 Conference 2023 at the University of California, Berkeley


In this talk, I will explore the noosphere by close analogy with the biosphere -- in other words, I will advance concepts and methods for investigating the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of the noosphere. Drawing on ideas from cultural evolution, cognitive science, cognitive anthropology, cognitive sociology, and evolutionary biology, I will argue that the noosphere is populated with cultural lineages that compete for human attention and memory. Like biological organisms, these cultural organisms can also interact mutualistically. Most obviously, the introduction of novel categories of cultural lineage can increase the overall cultural carrying capacity. In other words, human creativity can lead to niche construction of the noosphere. I illustrate these theoretical ideas with an empirical example--the history of metal music—showing that this story is dominated by a series of key innovations in which new genres add to the overall carrying capacity and themselves incubate a combinatorial exploration of aesthetic possibilities. This perspective also sheds distinct light on the relationship between humans and the ongoing growth of the noosphere. On the one hand, individual humans can be viewed as commensal organisms whose culturally-mediated cognition is profoundly shaped by a population of noospheric symbionts. On the other hand, they can also be viewed as critical ecosystem engineers who shape the noosphere as a niche through their creativity. I also compare and contrast this view of individual and collective human intelligence with the view implicit in contemporary artificial intelligence, particularly when it comes to questions of meaning.


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