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.
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 21st, 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”.
