The Noosphere

Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir

Creating the noosphere

We create the world we live in; we are part of the world that others have created for us. Throw your mind back a hundred years, to 1911, just before the Jazz Age, before the Great War (which had to be renamed the First World War when we had another), when the telephone was still new and penicillin had yet to be invented. Throw your mind back another thousand years, to 911, deep in “the darkest of the Dark Ages”, way before printing, before the Norman Conquest, before the vast Gothic Cathedrals flung their spires into the air, when the Byzantine empire peaked and Mayan civilization collapsed. 

The world of the mind is as much part of our world as the landscape and the living environment around us. It’s called the noosphere, to match the geosphere (the physical earth) and the biosphere (the plants and animals) – in Greek, nous means “mind” and sphaira “sphere”. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin introduced the term in 1922 in his book, Cosmogenesis, although he and Edouard le Roy may have first heard at a lecture by Vladimir Vernadsky. It’s the sphere of thought, of our collective human intelligence: our spiritual, cultural, social, and technological abilities and development.  We can see the evidence of it in everything around us, in the patterns we use to think, in the assumptions we make. But there’s also a suggestion that we might be able to measure it directly.

Measuring the noosphere

As the noosphere is collective human intelligence, the Global Consciousness Project has set about to measure the effects of our thoughts directly – not just the actions and creations they lead to.  This project hypothesizes that our thoughts themselves have direct effects.  To prove this, they start with random-number generators, nicknamed EGGs. If numbers are really random, then you can actually expect certain patterns. Think of dice. If you throw a dice 1000 times, you’d expect about a sixth of your throws to give a “six”. If six comes up much more often, you know the dice is loaded.  In the same way, we can test the random numbers from the EGGs – are they properly random? Most of the time, yes.

But the Global Consciousness Project’s theory is that massive changes in our thought patterns will directly affect the EGGs, so that they start producing non-random numbers. They have 66 of these EEGs (it stands for electrogaiagram) distributed across the world, feeding their data into a central server. The project has analyzed data from large-scale events such as Princess Diana’s death, the 9/11 attacks, New Year’s Eve celebrations, and the Indian Tsunami.  The results, they say, show that the numbers really do become less random when large numbers of people are focusing on one thing. The numbers even seem to show a change before the event – for instance, spiking during and before the 9/11 attacks. (That would suggest either that our hive-mind has some kind of prescience, or that those events have backwards causality, which should be impossible.)

The critics have a different interpretation.  Truly random numbers will always create spikes and troughs. We expect randomness to create something smooth and even – tell anyone to draw random dots on a page and they’ll space them quite evenly. Really random dots, though, would be clumped and scattered. For instance, only two of these sets of dots are actually random:

In the same way, genuinely random numbers will create spikes. What’s more, say independent scientists Edwin May and James Spottiswoode, the project looks very selectively at their chosen time windows.  Another critic, Jeffrey D Scargle, suggests their data analysis is off. (For data analysts: they check the p-value but not the Bayesian analysis.) And finally, it’s not clear what – if anything – the EGGs are responding to. Even if there are statistically important changes, what are we actually measuring? It might not be the noosphere at all.

Analyzing the noosphere

Another way to come to grips with the noosphere is to analyze it by looking at memes. A meme is a cultural "gene" – a belief, idea, symbol, or practice, that is passed down through society, much like our genes are passed down from our parents. A catch-phrase can be a meme; so can a religious rite. A group of memes is a memeplex. The word was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, and has proven very useful as a way of talking about how ideas take shape and life beyond the individual person.  It’s also given rise to memetics, supposedly the study of how memes reproduce, transfer, and evolve. The Journal of Memetics was short-lived, though, running from just 1997 to 2005, and the concept is fraught with problems. Useful as the idea of memes might be, memetics doesn’t seem the answer to understanding the noosphere.

Our understanding of how to analyze and measure collective knowledge and awareness is clearly still incomplete – in its infancy, some might say. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use that collective knowledge and awareness.

Joy of the Collective

The joy of the collective is incredibly powerful: something larger than you, which can achieve so much more than just you, of which you are a part. Even witnessing a collective project is thrilling – look at Eric Whitacre’s choir and the spine-tingling goose-pimpling effect of having all those individual people’s voices, each singing in their own home to his silent conducting, come together in one chorus. A collective project, creation, or movement, especially a spontaneous or unled one, lifts us above ourselves.

Creating Heaven on Earth

Thoughts are energy and energy can be measured.   The purpose of our website and corresponding blogs is to get the human race to believe that creating Heaven on Earth is possible and can be achieved by December 21^st, 2012.  If the human race can create compassionate, loving thoughts through collective Intelligence (such as the internet and social media), mirror these loving thoughts through our day-to-day activities (by activating mirror neurons or by simple cause & effect), create a vibrant collective behavior, and energize our Noosphere with loving and compassion thoughts – is this creating Heaven on Earth?   Will a vibrant Noosphere light up this planet and trigger the collective consciousness of the human race to take a quantum evolutionary leap in consciousness?  We believe the answer is “Yes”.