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A Global Human Consciousness?
In a time where it seems the world is fracturing, conflicts and wars raging and the threat of another world war looms, when politics are divisive and economic inequality rising, it seems odd perhaps, to think of humanity finding a global consciousness, unifying and finding a path forward. But what if it isn’t odd?
If we could arrive somehow, at this global consciousness, what might it look like and what would it mean? It could have significant implications, for example, on religions, spirituality and how we understand ourselves as Homo Sapiens, modern humans. It is unlikely to lead to a utopia or dystopia.
The idea of a global consciousness has been around for centuries, going back to Greek philosophers and other thinkers. In recent decades it has come out as a philosophical idea through the concept of the Noosphere and the Global Consciousness Project through the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) formed in the 1970s.
The idea of the Noosphere with regard to technology was set out in a 1947 essay by French philosopher and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard. Essentially, he proposed that as technology advanced it would eventually lead to a spiritual transformation of humanity. What he termed as a global “etherised universal consciousness.” Once all this came together with technology, we would reach what Teilhard called the Omega Point. Even Dante suggests this sort of mass human awareness.
If you’ve ever read any of Ray Kurzweil’s books or essays, you may be thinking of what he terms the Singularity. Which is when machine intelligence reaches and goes beyond, human intelligence. An idea that has in part fuelled recent societal angst around the rise of Artificial Intelligence and speculation of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which would be that singularity point. It is a hot topic of debate.
Artificial Intelligence is an umbrella term for a whole range of tools that includes the current overhyped and much misunderstood Generative AI or Large Language Models (LLMs.) Other AI tools like Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been around for decades and are quite good and useful. But they are all called Narrow AI because they’re only good at doing one particular thing.
