The noosphère is a name given to the space of the ideas , by differentiation

• with the material world physical , nonalive, the géosphère
• with the biosphere , the world of the alive
• and with the Infosphère, imagined by daN Simmons.

The concept

This word, that Pierre Teilhard of Chardin borrows from Vernadsky, share of the observation that a film low thickness (a few kilometers) surrounding the Ground - that one would compare almost today with a Biofilm - contains at the same time all the Connaissance S of the Humanité and all its capacity of Data processing.

The noosphère is juxtaposed with the lithosphere (inert mass), the Biosphère (alive mass) and with the Sociosphère (together of the human relations and/or ecological S) and the whole of the activity Intellectuelle of the Earth: it is about a kind of “collective Conscience of the Humanité” which gathers all the cerebral activities and mechanics of Mémorisation and of treatment of the Information.

The scientific popularizers Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart gave him the more media name of extelligence .

The brain of the men belongs to the noosphère, but also all the Infrastructure S created by him which take part in the treatment as the storage of the Information: cities, Library S, political infrastructure, Culture, laws, networks of Communication.

Concept of unit of an organization

The Cerveau of the higher primates is composed of two hemispheres:

• a left hemisphere where would take place the majority of the analytical and rational activities
• a right hemisphere where would unroll in particular the phenomena of total and intuitive perception.

The left roughly speaking treats the Logique and the Raisonnement, the right rather the emotion S and Pulsion S. both communicate between them, although it was noted that an individual could still live when did not exist any more communications between the two hemispheres. If this distinction between left brain and right brain is sometimes called into question at present (2005), on the other hand no one does not dispute that the brain is well composed of inter-connected Neuron S.

The unicity of the spirit

The impression to be a single individual comes owing to the fact that the various parts of the brain - and not only of course hemispheres right and left - often communicate, quickly and with a strong flow of information between them (this idea will be recalled by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett in their compilation Vues spirit ( The mind' S I ).

What will it occur as this frequency, this speed and this flow also increase in the exchange S between people, raising what Paul Valéry names the “intellectual Température” of the Esprit, such as one can note it in the large metropolises like Cairo or Tōkyō?

Does one have to expect a qualitative change similar to the phase shift of the physicists noted when for example a tiny difference in temperature makes pass the Eau of the liquid state to the state vapor? Teilhard thinks that yes, and that the borders of the me cease starting from a certain flow of exchange becoming also clear. The Jésuite even goes - but we leave here, in the actual position of the Connaissance S, the field of the Cybernétique - until supposing that this technical increase coupling between the individuals is accompanied by an increasing solidarity in fact , and that this one has characteristics which are exactly those of the love (this assumption, obviously inspired by the dogma trinitaire, is however not essential to the Compréhension of the concept of noosphère, and exceeding the framework of this article will not be here detailed).

The process of convergence

Teilhard thus predicts a increasing unification of the activities Intellectuelle S (even “spiritual”) of the planet , just as the human activities unified within the frameworks of the companies and the Civilization S, or that of the cells in the organizations. Not for some mystical reason , but much more simply because the profits of effectiveness lead to it as surely as, for example, of the questions of potential leads a chemical reaction to occur or deuterium atoms to be amalgamated if the temperature lends itself to it. Carl Gustav Jung, with its idea of oceanic Feeling taken again Romain Roland, Henri Laborit with his of wide organization and Richard Buckminster Fuller in his work No more secondhand God will be shown fully in phase with this idea, already besides in its time expressed in embryonic form by Baruch Spinoza.

The development of the traditional media generated already a certain intellectual agitation in this direction (evoked in its time by Marshall McLuhan). It is however since the development of Internet that the idea of Noosphère becomes again of topicality.

History

Since the Origin of philosophy, in antiquity (concept of to be), with the the Middle Ages, at the time of discovered rotundity of the Earth, the concept of “total Conscience collective”, was felt. It is what Teilhard of Chardin named noosphère at the time contemporary.

The installation of the infrastructure

• With, Sumer: invention of the writing. The human memory has from now on a stable and durable support in time.

• IV E:
• Parménide develops the concept of to be as being.
• Plato in the Phèdre note already that the writing constitutes a danger because it deprives of the Interactivité of the oral examination which before went from oneself . He predicts that this absence of interactivity will create distortions in knowledge, even of the misinterpretation .
• Aristote : “Progress is not worth that if it is divided by all. ”
• 12th century: the philosophical writings of Aristote are represented into occident, initially since Arabic, then since the Greek.
• 1455 : 37 years before the discovery of the America by Christophe Colomb, impression of the first book by Gutenberg: the Bible. Information is diffused, for the best as for the worst.
• 19th century:
• Invention of the Rotary
• progressive planetary Cover of the telegraphic network .

• 1890 - 1980: progressive planetary cover of the telephone network

• First half of the 20th century: the Radiodiffusion spreads

• 1952 : first interconnection of Computer S (project Bizmac of RCA). During the eight years which will follow, the interconnection of Ordinateur S is a recurring subject without nobody however specifying which new services one can expect some compared to the regrouping on a machine single in conformity with what then named the Loi of Grosch.

• 1958 : launching of the first Modem by the company Beautiful. The communications between machines can consequently use the existing phone network, although still very slowly (a few hundreds of bits/second at the time). The number called must with this version of material made up being with the hand.

• 1960 : first interconnection of computers in production: the WISE monitoring system air .

• July 10th 1962: launching of the communications satellite TELSTAR 1: symbolically (because does it of them is not the first satellite of this kind; it is only more mediatized ), the noosphère extends until the low Orbite from orbiting.

• 1966 : geostationary first Satellite: the noosphère uses the high Orbite now of orbiting.

• 1969: creation of ARPANet: embryo of what will be later Internet

• 1980 - 1990: forums Usenet: the interrogations are exchanged with the Speed of light. Mutual incomprehension, alas, too.

• 1989 : birth with CERN of the Web, which is baptized the following year World Wide Web.

• 1990 - 1995: Arrival in the general public of the access to Internet: a great quantity of information accessible to all seems to be a Manifestation perceptible and spectacular of the noosphère.

• 1995 : the Canadian consultant Peter de Jaeger opens a site of alarm and world diffusion of information on the data-processing Passage to the year 2000 ( Y2K in American). This site at that time became the site more inter-connected with the world (200 000 bonds).

• 1996 : Arrival of Backrub, the ancestor of Google

• September 7th, 1998: official birth of Google which will become a Break point Web, after other search engines like Yahoo and AltaVista. The Notoriety Google, difficult to fake, constitutes a first reference on which to carry out soundings of the planet . Several articles are written on the subject. See also Google Trends.

The first planetary collaboratifs projects

The history of the Internet not being the object of this article, the present list mentions only some significant stakes .

• January 1984: birth of the project GNU (and later its alternative GNU/Linux). The fifth level of the Pyramide of Maslow becomes new a Factor of production, which had not been envisaged by Karl Marx. Combined with the infrastructure of the Internet, it is well new a Mode of production which has just appeared.

• the project Y2K, world project which cost between 300 and 600 billion dollars for the data-processing Passage the year 2000, distributed with equal shares primarily between America, the Europe, and Asia.

• March 25th, 1995: first Wiki . The communication with certain Web sites becomes completely bidirectional . Wiki has its own system of self-regulation too him.

• September 1997: appearance of Slashdot: the community Internet - and either only developers - start in its turn to be perceived like a mass of potential contributors and not of simple consumers of information. Birth of the concepts of electronic Self-regulation with the moderation , the metamoderation and the owe jury of Slashdot (see this article).

• 1998 : starting of the collaboratif project SETI@home (search for stellar signals by hundreds of thousands of simultaneous computers in the world). Other projects will follow, like the Généthon.

• January 2nd, 2001: appearance of the Wikipédia , first collaboratif project planetary general public.

• 2002 : appearance, after various more or less happy tests in this direction, of BitTorrent, which allows the sites exchanging of the information of autoorganiser, then autoréguler in an effective way.

Some final considerations

Pierre Teilhard of Chardin is considered, with Richard Buckminster Fuller and Paul Otlet, like one of the thinkers of Internet. Indeed, the fabric is sometimes regarded as new the Nervous system of the noosphère: a great quantity of Information S accessible to the very whole Humanity and which can be divided with double direction (since the Web 2.0) by all.

“… the advent of the man marks an entirely original stage, of importance equal so that was the appearance of the Vie, and that one can define as the establishment on planet, of a thinking sphere, superimposed with the biosphere, the noosphère.

In it, the immense effort of cerebralisation which started on the youthful ground will be completed, in direction of the collective organization or socialization…” Pierre TEILHARD of CHARDIN

Borrowed from Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky and developed by Teilhard of Chardin, the concept of noosphère owes also much with work of Edouard Roy.

Henri Laborit also worked on this concept, and presented it in its film Thousand billion messages .

The Political system and social which would result from the noosphère was indicated under the name of Noocratie ()

See too

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