Noosphere

Definition

The noosphere is the sphere of human thought, conceived as a planetary layer in the same sense that the lithosphere is the layer of rock, the hydrosphere the layer of water, and the biosphere the layer of life. The word is built from the Greek nous (mind, reason) and sphaira (sphere), on the model of "biosphere."

The claim embedded in the word is that thought, once it reaches sufficient volume and interconnection, stops being a property of individual minds and becomes a geological force acting on the planet at the scale of weather or erosion.

Origin

The term emerged in Paris in the 1920s among three men reading each other closely, and its attribution has been disputed ever since. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin appears to have published it first, in his 1922 essay "Hominization," describing "a human sphere, a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious souls (the noosphere, if you will)." Édouard Le Roy, who held Bergson's chair at the Collège de France, developed and published the concept in 1927, and is generally credited with introducing it to the Russian biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky — who then took it somewhere the other two had not.

Two Conceptions

The word carries two substantially different theories, and confusing them is the most common error in its use.

Vernadsky's noosphere is a geological stage. Having established in The Biosphere (1926) that living matter redistributes atoms on a scale comparable to tectonics, he argued in "Some Words about the Noösphere" (1943–44) that human scientific thought had become a new such force — the third stage after the geosphere and the biosphere. This is a materialist and empirical claim, not a mystical one: the evidence is mining, agriculture, synthetic chemistry, and the deliberate transformation of elements. It is also, read now, a strikingly early statement of what would later be called the Anthropocene.

Teilhard's noosphere is a stage in a directed evolution. The layer of thought thickens and converges as human minds interconnect, moving toward an ultimate point of unified consciousness he called the Omega Point and identified theologically. This version supplies the concept's teleology, its optimism, and most of the reason scientists distrust it.

The Noosphere and the Network

The term was revived when computer networks made a global layer of thought concrete enough to point at. McLuhan's global village, Peter Russell's The Global Brain (1983), and the general run of 1990s writing about the web all borrowed Teilhard's convergence narrative, usually without its theology and often without attribution.

Its most durable technical use is Eric S. Raymond's "Homesteading the Noosphere" (1998; collected in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 1999), which treats the noosphere as "the untamed frontier of ideas" and asks how open-source developers acquire ownership of a region of it. Raymond's answer — that hacker ownership customs track the Lockean theory of land tenure, acquired by homesteading unclaimed territory, by transfer from a prior owner, or by adverse possession of abandoned work — makes the frontier metaphor load-bearing, with all the assumptions it carries.

Criticism

The concept's persistent problem is that it is not falsifiable. Neither version specifies what observation would count against it, and Teilhard's smuggles a destination into evolution, which is precisely what evolutionary theory declines to supply. It also flatters: every generation with a new communication technology has found the noosphere arriving in its own lifetime.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

The noosphere is the oldest available name for the thing cyborg anthropology studies at smaller scale — cognition distributed across people and their instruments rather than contained in skulls. Read alongside Pierre Lévy's collective intelligence, which makes a similar claim without the teleology, it is useful mainly as a record of how long people have wanted the network to mean something more than infrastructure.

Related Reading

• Pierre Lévy
• Collective Intelligence
• The Significance of the Frontier in American History
• From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
• Meme

External Links

• Vernadsky, "Some Words About the Noösphere" (English translation)
• Eric S. Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere"