Monday, May 01, 2006

But...it's called the Noosphere!

I myself am not so comfortable with the name noosphere, as it has lots of Teilhard deChardinian evolutionary presups; not so much an issue with evolution do I have, as much as an apprehension that it's always "better every day in everyway" in that Modernist way, bound up with the idea of explicit stages of development with direction and whatnot. Why not a general concept of MERE accumlation of ideas, fears, rubrics, etc? A fudgey, vague notion of a sea of White Knowledge (appropriated usage of the term by Gaiman in Neverwhere, as I've never read a Pratchett novel), comprise of increasingly complex (generally speaking), and more recent residue of human thoughts, maxims, formulations, equations, data, information, knowledge, etc., that has fractaled of from the saga of consciousness in the Universe? It might be more closely situated, dimensionally, to Creation rather than mere causation, evolution, etc (which might be why consciousness, the source/engine/funnel/filter of thoughts, is so hard to pin down in the killing jar) - both of which I take for granted as being True. But I would propose that theres truth to such a realm of knowledge, data, worldviews, fears, etc, that can be accessed by various means/ends, but like I said - this realm includes ALL that has been thought, feared, etc, and there would be semiotic (which sounds good here) relationships between the fear of the child and the hope of the psychopath, the speculation of the medieval mystic and the equation of the physicist. Of course it would not be possible for there to be earthbound historical links in all instances - or the vast number of instances - considering the raw immensity of such a realm (bureaucratic tax data, bills, receipts, accountings of exchanges piling over millenia would probably constitute the datamass of such a cosmos). The "remarkable insight" of the mekubal and speculations on string theory would simply be what is. But isness would be nothing like either could grasp, only from what they had produced. That there might be dimensions to our words and chiddushim, where an insight becomes almost a bubble over our head. What would the internet do, if anything, to our grasp of this world? Is THAT where/how the noosphere is real, or is it merely incarnating something that exists in ways otherwise not generally accessible? feh.

<< List
Jewish Bloggers
Join >>