Summary: In reply to some online discussions, I have thrown together a quick page on the significance of the noosphere, the concept of nous, and the connections to religion and to collective intelligence. The last two concepts beg for more consideration. My hope is that the reader discovers the latent implications of the noosphere.
There is solid philosophical ground for sustainability here. The Greek term, Nous, refers to Mind or Geist or Soul. The word is overloaded with meaning as it translates from Greek to English. Nous also points to a profound understanding of human nature, grounded in the Aristotelian tradition (De Anime) of soul, not the typical modernist assertions of egotism, materialism, and avarice.
The term noosphere was coined around 1926 by the Russian geochemist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky as a contribution to Russian cosmology. Vernadsky deepened the appreciation of a new idea of his time, the biosphere, which Vernadsky had advanced in his 1926 book with that title. The teleology, or end point, of the biosphere was to provide the physical conditions for the ultimate destination of evolution, the transformation of the biosphere into the noosphere. Just as the biosphere transformed the earlier geosphere, the noosphere would transform the biosphere, extending the culminating destiny of humanity.
His essential notion is that the Earth provided a cradle for the mind, which fulfilled evolution. Vernadsky's concept of the noosphere deepened the significance of the biosphere and opened up the possibilities inherent in what we now call the Anthropocene, the successor to the Holocene as a geological period in Earth history.
The aggressive assault on the biosphere by humanity makes this choice imminent and perhaps immanent, as Teilhard de Chardin espoused (below). This sharpens the global crisis and gives it potential not conventionally imagined. The noosphere should be regarded here as potentiality, not as predetermination. The fundamental choice by humanity looms (Hanson). The stakes are extraordinary, transcending talk about Malthusian overpopulation and global crisis. The notion of the noosphere enhances even the most enlightened visions of World Sustainability (Meadows).
Nous lies at the core of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. This gnostic and disputed Gospel has been banished from Catholicism and most of orthodox Christian teaching. The deprecation of women in Christianity and the particular misogyny of the Vatican is contested by the resurrection of the significance of nous. Mary Magdalene, to whom the resurrected Jesus by many accounts appeared, has carried the most spiritual meaning of all the gospels:
"There where is the nous, lies the treasure." Gospel of Mary Magdalen
The term Noosphere was adopted by the French paleontologist, philosopher, and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin to indicate a stage in human evolution marked by the intensification of human thought as an organizing principle. Teilhard has probably the most prominence in modern American religious thought. His writings reinforce the Christian doctrine of Christ's Second Coming. Teilhard was stigmatized within the Catholic Church hierarchy for his later writings and was officially banished from his ecclesiastical community. Father Thomas Berry has continued the message of Teilhard and is a prominent voice of social ecology.
The Internet itself might be construed as a form of noosphere. Consider the statement, below, by John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, Co-Founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and self-described Cognitive Dissident. View the web page on John Perry Barlow and his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace:
"Governments of the Industrial World," the Declaration began, "you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."
"Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here."
The doctrine of collective intelligence appears to point toward the noosphere as a specific form of social learning that transcends limits of physical space. Collective intelligence reinforces the hacker theme of this project. For example The Blog Of Collective Intelligence states:
Collective intelligence is the capacity of human communities to evolve towards higher order complexity and harmony, through such innovation mechanisms as variation-feedback-selection, differentiation-integration-transformation, and competition-cooperation-coopetition.