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
Evolving the Self: Cognitive Sciences, the Extended Mind, and the Noosphere - Abre Fournier - N2 Conference 2023
Evolving the Self: Cognitive Sciences, the Extended Mind, and the Noosphere
Presented by Abre Fournier (https://www.abrefournier.com/) and Brian Thomas Swimme at the N2 Conference 2023, University of California, Berkeley
Through the span of the scientific and industrial revolutions of the past two centuries, the Western conception of the self, anchored in Cartesian dualistic metaphysics, has predominantly viewed humans as entities distinct from an ostensibly inert universe. Increasingly challenged, such perspectives are no longer viable. Contemporary advancements in physical and cognitive sciences have begun to dismantle these assumptions, recognizing matter as life-generating and mind-generating.
The emerging trend of research in externalist views of the mind accentuates the mind's existence across multiple dimensions. Humans are embodied living organisms, situated across a matrix of environments. Our discussion of human beings as self-organizing dynamical systems brings forth the process of being that refers to the relational brain-body-world dynamics of the mind. Dynamical embodiment extends the realm of the mind beyond mere neurological boundaries, capturing the entirety of an individual's existence—from the intricacies of synaptic networks to broader societal and planetary interconnections.
Philosophically, these views point to a diverse, evolving self or dynamical selfing, argued on the basis of all aspects of self-consciousness being constructed, evolving within the ecosystems of personal relationships that include the intersubjective interactions with the world, a planet of living beings, and things. With this understanding, we suggest we are in the process of constructing a "noospheric self," where noosphere refers to human thought which now envelops the Earth. We assert that this transformation of self-consciousness—from the selves of the modern era developing into dynamical noospheric selves—represents the emergence of a new form of humanity.
Learn more at https://humanenergy.io