Noosphere

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In the Paris of the 1920s a single word entered circulation among three men who did not mean the same thing by it. The Greek roots are plain — nous, mind or reason, fastened to sphaira, sphere, on the model of “atmosphere” and “biosphere.” The thing it named was a layer of thought wrapped around the Earth, as real in its way as the layers of rock and air and life beneath it. But the layer was a geological force to one of them, a stage in the soul’s ascent to God to the second, and a moment of evolution turning reflexive to the third. The word survived all three readings and now carries them tangled together, which is the first thing to get straight about it.

The Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin appears to have set the word down in writing first, around 1922, in an early cosmological essay. The philosopher Édouard Le Roy — Henri Bergson’s chief disciple, his successor in the chair at the Collège de France — put it into scholarly print and into his 1927 lectures there, and is often credited as the coiner; the two were friends and were working the same ground at the same time, so the line of influence runs in more than one direction. Le Roy framed it within “hominisation,” the Bergsonian idea of the planet remaking itself through the emergence of intelligence, evolution’s creative push become aware of itself. Then a third man, present at those 1927 lectures, took the word away and built it into a science. Vladimir Vernadsky was not a mystic or a philosopher of élan. He was a Russian geochemist, one of the founders of the discipline, and what he did with the noosphere was strip the metaphysics out of it.

Vernadsky’s version is the one that has aged into established science, and it is the place to begin because it is the least exotic. His 1926 book The Biosphere had already taken Eduard Suess’s word for the living film of the planet and turned it into a theory: living matter is not a passenger on the Earth but a geological force, reshaping the planet as surely as wind or water. The free oxygen in the air is itself a biological product; the chemistry of the surface is run, in large part, by life. From there the next step followed without any leap into the supernatural. Human cognition, science, agriculture, industry, the deliberate transmutation of elements — these had begun to act on the planet at the same order of magnitude as life itself once had. The biosphere was passing into “a new state,” which he called the noosphere, the sphere of reason: not a soul added to the Earth but the Earth’s living layer becoming, through one species, a force that thinks and engineers. His schema runs in three stages — geosphere, the inert mineral Earth; biosphere, life as a planetary layer; noosphere, mind as a planetary layer — and the governing analogy is exact and deflationary. Just as the arrival of life transformed the dead Earth, the arrival of human cognition transforms the living one. He dated its onset partly to humanity’s mastery of nuclear processes, the capacity to make new elements and new resources. There is no telos in this, no destination the process is climbing toward. It is open and evolutionary. What it most resembles, named decades early, is the Anthropocene: the recognition that human technological civilization has become a geological agent. Read this way the noosphere is a claim about strata and chemical cycles, and it can be checked against the rock.

Teilhard’s noosphere is a different proposition wearing the same word, and the difference is not a matter of degree. He kept the three stages and added a fourth. In The Phenomenon of Man — written at the end of the 1930s, barred by his Church, published only in 1955 after his death — evolution runs from inert matter to life to thought, and thought is the noosphere, a “thinking layer,” a membrane of collective consciousness laid over the biosphere, the networks of mind and feeling in which humanity is immersed. So far the picture overlaps Vernadsky’s. But Teilhard’s evolution has a direction and a built-in law. Under what he called the law of complexity-consciousness, the universe drives toward ever greater complexity, and with rising complexity comes rising awareness; reflective thought is “the specific effect of organized complexity.” The noosphere does not merely thicken. It converges — folds in upon itself, in his image, like an enormous flower closing — toward a final point of unification he named the Omega Point, a supreme consciousness he identified outright with the Cosmic Christ, the Logos who draws all things into himself. This is theology, and Teilhard knew it; it is teleological in a way Vernadsky’s account specifically is not, and it cannot be tested against any rock. To file Teilhard’s planetary Christ-consciousness and Vernadsky’s geochemical force under one heading, as casual usage constantly does, is to lose the only thing that makes either claim interesting — that one of them is a description of the planet and the other is a hope for it. The noosphere is Teilhard’s stage three; the Omega Point is where it is bound, and the two ideas stand or fall together in his system.

The word’s third life is the speculative one, and it begins with a resemblance. The internet ties billions of people and their machines into a single information-processing system, and the image of the World Wide Web as an emerging noosphere — web pages as neurons, hyperlinks as synapses, the whole an associative net waking toward something like thought — has become a familiar one in popular technology writing. Its lineage is explicit: Teilhard wrote in 1945 of “planetisation,” a coming phase of human unification, and the British physicist Peter Russell coined “global brain” for the idea in a 1982 book of that name; later theorists tried to specify how a planetary network might become collectively intelligent. The pull of the analogy is obvious, and parts of it are simply true — there is a planetary communication layer, and it does concentrate and circulate human thought at a scale Vernadsky could only gesture at. What does not follow from any of that is that the network is conscious, or that it constitutes a planetary mind in more than a figurative sense. That step is interpretation, advanced by global-brain theorists and by Teilhard’s modern expositors; it is not a finding of computer science or neuroscience, and it should be read as the metaphor it is.

The same caution applies to the noosphere’s nearest neighbors, which the word keeps getting confused with. The Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock’s proposal that life and its planet form one self-regulating system, sits close enough to invite the merger — both speak of a single living Earth at planetary scale. But Gaia is a claim about homeostasis, not mind: feedback loops that hold the surface fit for life, with no awareness and no aim behind them. Lovelock was emphatic on exactly this point. “Nowhere in our writings,” he and Lynn Margulis wrote, “do we express the idea that planetary self-regulation is purposeful, or involves foresight or planning by the biota.” Gaia is the planetary body keeping its own temperature; the noosphere, at least in Teilhard’s hands, is the planetary mind — adjacent themes, opposite claims. Carl Jung’s collective unconscious is another such neighbor, a shared psychic stratum beneath individual minds, but it descends from depth psychology rather than geoscience or theology, and it is a substratum of the human psyche rather than a sphere of thought wrapped around the globe. The analogies are worth seeing. They are not identities.

One project has taken the speculative claim and tried to put a meter on it, and it is instructive precisely because it failed. The Global Consciousness Project, launched in 1998 out of Princeton’s laboratory for anomalous-engineering research, runs a worldwide network of some seventy hardware random-number generators and watches for moments when world events that “synchronize the feelings of millions” leave a faint nonrandom trace in the data — a measurable shadow, on the project’s reading, of a global consciousness. Its central data server is named noosphere, after Teilhard, whom its director read as a young man. The naming is the honest part. The data are not: mainstream science treats the project as parapsychology, attributing its results to selection bias and after-the-fact pattern matching, and an independent reanalysis of the September 2001 data found no statistically significant change in the randomness at all. The director himself concedes the evidence is not solid enough to say a global consciousness exists. The project is the point at which the planetary-mind idea reaches for instruments and comes back empty-handed.

Set the three readings side by side and the word’s whole history is legible in one frame. Vernadsky’s noosphere is a fact about the planet, checkable and increasingly checked. Teilhard’s is a doctrine about the planet’s destiny, a matter of faith and meant to be taken that way. The internet version and its kin are an analogy reaching after a fact it has not established. What the readings share — and the reason one word could stretch across all three — is the intuition that thought has become a planetary quantity, something with a magnitude and a location, not merely a property of individual skulls. By this site’s reading that intuition is the real prize, and what the word demands is that its three voices be kept apart while each is granted the same strange perception: that mind, late in the Earth’s history, grew large enough to register on the planet’s surface. Vernadsky pointed to the carbon and the cities and stopped there. Teilhard and the global-brain theorists took the same observation and asked it to mean more.

→ Related: Omega Point · Gaia Hypothesis · Global Consciousness Project · Collective Unconscious · Transhumanism