noosphere

A few day's ago I posted an update about being in chinatown. It wasn't what I would consider an engaging post. It was created entirely on my cell phone, posted to the internet from my cell phone and, more than anything, it was a slice of my real time experience in that moment. That aspect of the post is, to me, extraordinarily interesting. Revolutionary is a word that's used much to often when talking about technology so I'm not going to use it here. I do believe, though, that the ability to access other people's real time experiences, as mundane as they might be individually, is evolutionary.

We are living in an era where, for the first time ever, human beings have access to the knowledge from all the cultures of the world. Interestingly, one of the common pieces of traditional wisdom that has been / is shared by many cultures, is the concept that separation is a type of illusion and that we are all, ultimately, one. In the 1920's, this dude named Pierre Teilhard de' Charidin theorized that humanity was evolving towards something he called the "noosphere", which is essentially a global brain or global consciousness. Somewhat related is the idea of formative causation. This theory proposed by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake states that the human entity is more than that which is contained within the "boundary" of our skin. Our very beings are connected to and are influenced by "morphic fields", patterns of energy which organize systems at all levels of complexity, and are the basis for the wholeness that we observe in nature, which is more than the sum of the parts.

My point is that homo sapien's continued development of connective technologies has created, in a very short time, the structures for a new evolutionary stage. One where many individual human beings exist with the awareness of themselves within, and as expresions of, a greater intelligence. What that greater intelligence might look like and what that greater intelligence might mean is a discussion for another day. For now, I am simply left pondering if, given advancements of the last 20 years, we might already have evolved beyond the genus "homo sapien". Perhaps "homo transitionalis" is a better classification.