Francis Heylighen on the Global Brain

Video via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCZIEdhGTfQ

Description

"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 most compellingly embodies Teilhard’s definition of the noosphere as “an envelope of thinking substance”. That is commonly interpreted as a global brain with collective consciousness. But how would that work?

Teilhard himself acknowledged the primary challenge in making this leap:

“On the one hand we have a single brain, formed of nervous nuclei, and on the other a Brain of brains. It is true that between these two organic complexes a major difference exists. Whereas in the case of the individual brain thought emerges from a system of non-thinking nervous fibers, in the case of the collective brain each separate unit is in itself an autonomous center of reflection. If the comparison is to be a just one we must, at every point of resemblance, take this difference into account.”

One of the leaders in the field of research into the global brain and collective consciousness is Francis Heylighen. He is the director of the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) for transdisciplinary studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels)."