Human Energy Podcast
Human Energy was founded to share a new scientific & cosmic story introducing the noosphere as a source of meaning for future generations in our globalizing world.
Today we face the unprecedented challenges of rapid social change and new technologies which, together with the scientific picture of an aimless universe, have created a crisis of orientation. Human Energy was founded by scientists, scholars, artists, and storytellers to highlight the causal conditions to our challenges and provide solutions for current and future generations. We articulate these solutions through the "Third Story" worldview (https://humanenergy.io/the-three-stories-of-the-universe/) with focus on the emerging noosphere.
We are beginning to visualize the noosphere’s formation; study its potential future scenarios as humanity takes more and more control of its future course; and explore how human beings connecting across the world may realize themselves socially and individually in its development.
Human Energy Podcast
How Right Was Teilhard? (from a scientific point of view) - Robert Wright - N2 Conference
How Right Was Teilhard? (from a scientific point of view)
Presented by Robert Wright as part of Human Energy's N2 Conference 2023 at the University of California, Berkeley
Teilhard de Chardin’s conception of the noosphere was shaped by his Christian faith and, more generically, by a philosophical orientation that was fundamentally religious and spiritual. This orientation helps account for several features of his conception of the noosphere that have been criticized and sometimes characterized as inconsistent with a scientific world view:
1. Teleology: The noosphere, Teilhard believed, served a larger purpose, and its evolution was bringing that purpose closer to realization, moving humankind toward the “omega point”.
2. Moral directionality: Teilhard believed that, as the noosphere evolved, and came more and more to resemble a global brain, there would be a corresponding unification of humankind, facilitated by the further moral development of our species (including a growth in brotherly love that he considered a critical part of our movement toward omega).
3. The “interiority” of consciousness: Teilhard believed that all matter—even inanimate matter—had a “psychic” aspect in its “interior” corresponding to its physical “exterior.”
It’s true that some of Teilhard’s characterizations of these ideas are hard to reconcile with a modern scientific world view. But it’s also true that there are alternative formulations that preserve essential parts of these ideas and are easier to reconcile with a modern scientific world view. In this talk I’ll try to convey the broad outlines of these alternative formulations.
Learn more at https://humanenergy.io