New Sphere

We are on the verge…

The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail — a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.

…Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet.

…Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: “What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organising internet? Possibly… I think this could be big.”

Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as “how high is Mount Everest?”, but it will also produce a neat page of related information — all properly sourced — such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.

I read this article just after finishing a book by Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man. The book was published after the author died in 1955. The book was posthumously published because the author was a Jesuit Father, and his ideas were far from Christian orthodoxy. As well as being a Jesuit, the author was a paleontologist. His project was to create something like a scientific spirituality (nothing to do with intelligent design—there is no design in his concept of human evolution, just accidents and blind instincts). In the process of constructing this concept, a thorough materialism that has a mystical result, he began to see what we, the inhabitants of his future, recognize as the internet (his work also points to what we now recognize as emergence theory and biotechnology—he celebrates the future manipulation of genes, recombinant DNA, and bioinformatics). He calls the internet (and telecommunication) a noosphere.

The idea of the noosphere was borrowed from the Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, who in turn borrowed it from the Austrian geologist, Eduard Suess. The idea is this: There’s a geosphere (hot core, cold rocks, cool mud), then a biosphere (plants, insects, birds, mammals), and by way of the most reflective mammal (the human animal—other animals have self-consciousness but not to our degree) in the biosphere arises a noosphere (a layer of thought, interconnected thought).

Writes Teilhard de Chardin:

Beneath the pulsations of geo-chemistry, of geo-tectonics and geo-biology, we have detected one and the same fundamental process, always recognizable—the one which was given material form in the first cells and was contained in the construction of nervous systems. We saw geogenesis promoted to biogenesis, which turned out in the end to be nothing else than psychogenesis… Pychogenesis has led to man. …[Man lead to] noosgensis.

(“Nous” is the Greek word for “thought.”) Though we can see in Chardin’s writing and thinking a second-rate Spinoza and Bergson, his concept of the noosphere is impressive because it never breaks with the organic—thought is as natural as a rock. The layer of thought is made possible by the layer of animal life. Humans are not separated from but are a part of this layer that rises from the mineral layer, and that layer was once a part of a star.

Some thousands of millions of year ago, not, it would appear, by regular process of astral evolution, but as the result of some unbelievable accident (a brush with another star? an internal upheaval?) a fragment of matter composed of particularly stable atoms was detached from the surface of the sun. Without breaking bonds with the rest, and just at the right distance from the mother-star to receive a moderate radiation , this fragment began to condense, to roll itself up, to take shape. Containing within its globe and orbit the future of man…

Unbelievable accident? What kind of Christian was this one?