A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain

[John21]

An obscure Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, set down the philosophical framework for planetary, Net-based consciousness 50 years ago.

Link to article

Excerpts:
"Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness. It sounds a little off-the-wall, until you think about the Net, that vast electronic web encircling the Earth, running point to point through a nervelike constellation of wires. We live in an intertwined world of telephone lines, wireless satellite-based transmissions, and dedicated computer circuits that allow us to travel electronically from Des Moines to Delhi in the blink of an eye."

"Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived. He believed this vast thinking membrane would ultimately coalesce into "the living unity of a single tissue" containing our collective thoughts and experiences. In his magnum opus, The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard wrote, "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?"

"What Teilhard was saying here can easily be summed up in a few words," says John Perry Barlow. "The point of all evolution up to this stage is the creation of a collective organism of Mind."

[Phil153]

He's not the first (or the last) fruitcake to believe that a global consciousness is the end product of evolution. Some invoke quantum mechanics, others invoke telepathy, others talk in metaphorical terms about the internet.

The internet is no more a global consciousness than books, televisions, and phones.

BTW, it's easy to shoehorn the words of writers past and shoehorn it to fit current technologies. But such an interpretation is not supported by an intellectually honest reading of their works.

[RJT]

John,

Not to be a nit (ok, I am being a nit, especially since you are quoting from the link and it isn‘t your own adjective), but Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is not obscure. He is fairly famous in Catholic theology.

RJT

[John21]

[ QUOTE ]
John,

Not to be a nit (ok, I am being a nit, especially since you are quoting from the link and it isn‘t your own adjective), but Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is not obscure. He is fairly famous in Catholic theology.

RJT

[/ QUOTE ]

Or infamous:

"For this reason, the most eminent and most revered Fathers of the Holy Office exhort all Ordinaries as well as the superiors of Religious institutes, rectors of seminaries and presidents of universities, effectively to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and of his followers.
"Given at Rome, from the palace of the Holy Office, on the thirtieth day of June, 1962.


Considering that one of his main tenets was that full consciousness, as it occurs in man, is defined as 'the specific effect of organized neural complexity' it's not hard to see why Rome had a problem. Those crazy Jesuits.