Eduard Suess introduced the term ‘Biosphere’ to describe the region of the Earth and it’s atmosphere in which living entities flourish. French Jesuit priest and naturalist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin added an extra layer to indicate the layer of consciousness, the ‘Noosphere’.
Teilhard had some fairly crude ideas about man being at the pinnacle of a creation and that every creature on a lower rung of evolution aspired to be human-like but had failed to get there. He seems to describe the noosphere as an actual layer.
Moving away from Teilhard but reconsidering the noosphere we can ask if consciousness really is responsible for a layer of something on the planet Earth.
What could we call the layer of buildings, roads, machines and other inorganic, nonliving entities that occur only because human’s have the belief that such luxury will make them ‘happy’, a concept so slippery as to defy an exact definition (consider the laughing depressive; weeping with joy; Buddhist ‘Happiness’ etc).
If one was to arrive from a planet so different that both life as we know it and fast food stores were completely novel, then the aliens (having abducted and examined only individuals of no social standing or prominence) would identify the natural geological layers, the atmosphere, the biosphere, and a curious layer that was neither alive nor natural.
If I was to examine animals as a biologist, just how much could I learn of animals nature and habits without the animal being present?? A surprisingly large amount! There are the scats (poo), the nests/habitats, the impact on the environment particularly the effect on other animal populations (their prey and predators) - indeed, without an examination of an animal’s habitat a complete picture of that animal can not be drawn.
Isn’t the noosphere the habitat of consciousness?? Lets not get confused with those bags of bacteria that support cells of consciousness , the real animal is consciousness itself. In developing any model of consciousness, researchers should never forget to carefully examine its habitat :)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 1881 - 1955 http://www.mnhn.fr/teilhard/indexE.html
Teilhard de Chardin in Le Phenomene Humain (The Phenomenon of Man) http://www.webcom.com/gaia/tdc.html
Teilhard De Chardin on Creation and the Christian Life By Robert L. Faricy http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/jan1967/v23-4-article4.htm
Noosphere http://www.technoetic.com/noosphere/
The Global Consciousness Project http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
Note: "Homesteading the Noosphere", found in most searches on the Noosphere, is about open source software.
© Robert Karl Stonjek 2002