Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived. He believed this vast thinking membrane would ultimately coalesce into "the living unity of a single tissue" containing our collective thoughts and experiences. In his magnum opus, The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard wrote, "Is this not like some great body which is being born - with its limbs, its nervous system, its perceptive organs, its memory - the body in fact of that great living Thing which had to come to fulfill the ambitions aroused in the reflective being by the newly acquired consciousness?"
"What Teilhard was saying here can easily be summed up in a few words," says John Perry Barlow. "The Point of all evolution up to this stage is the creation of a collective organism of Mind."
- Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg: "A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain," in Wired 3.06, June 1995
1881-1955
- Frontspiece to The Web Empowerment Book, 1995, co-authored by Ralph Abraham, author of CHAOS, GAIA, EROS: A Chaos Pioneer Uncovers the Three Great Streams of History, 1994.
Barlow: "It's a little odd that the great Ralph Abraham would be writing a Web guide."
- An excerpt from the tape transcript of an interview between John Perry Barlow and Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg, December 1994
We're creating what Teilhard de Chardin called the "noosphere" - a mind world that's totally our own product. And yet the mind world does change the material world, because every time a part of the mind world is sufficiently accurate, it can be duplicated in the material world, and we've got a new tool, a machine, a new technology tht will do things we couldn't do before.
- Closing remark by Robert Anton Wilson, in an interview with Magical Blend, issue #48, September 1995.
As Abraham points out, Teilhard complexity-consciousness law is the same as what we now think of as the neural net. "We now know from neural-net technology that when there are more connections between points in a system, and there is greater strength between these connections, there will be sudden leaps in intelligence, where intelligence is defined as success rate in performing a task." If one accepts this power of connections, then the planetary neural-network of the Internet is fertile soil for the emergence of a global intelligence.
...We stand today at the beginning of Teilhard's third phase of evolution, the moment at which the world is covered with the incandescent glow of consciousness. Teilhard characterized this as "evolution becoming conscious of itself." The Net, that great collectivizer of minds, is the primary tool for our emergence into the third phase. "With cyberspace, we are, in effect, hard-wiring the collective consciousness," says Barlow.
...In introducing the idea of tangential energy - the energy of consciousness - as a primary factor in evolution, Teilhard opened the door for a new level of meaning. The history of the world, he wrote, "would thus appear no longer as an interlocking succession of structural types replacing one another, but as an ascension of inner sap spreading out in a forest of consolidated instincts." This could very well be what the Net is doing - consolidating our instincts - so that consciousness can continue to develop.
...When that happens, Teilhard wrote, "we have the beginning of a new age. The earth 'gets a new skin.' Better still, it finds its soul."
- Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg: "A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain," in Wired 3.06, June 1995
At first we described the purpose of the Electronic Frontier Foundation to be, simply, the "civilization of Cyberspace." Now, after almost two years of operation, we also think of ourselves assisting in some Great Work, creating what may be nothing less than the united Mind of Humanity, hard-wiring the collective organism of human consciousness.
- John Perry Barlow in Leaving the Physical World, an article he wrote for the Conference on HyperNetworking, Oita, Japan
As Barlow says, "Teilhard's work is about creating a consciousness so profound it will make good company for God itself."
- Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg: "A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain," in Wired 3.06, June 1995