Realizing the Noosphere

Reflections on a Limicon dialogue with Layman Pascal and Brendan Graham Dempsey

Below are some reflections following my dialogue with

Layman Pascal

and

Brendan Graham Dempsey

as part of Limicon 2025. The video of our dialogue should be online soon, and I’ll be sure to share it here.

It seems to me that this conversation (see prior episodes) is necessarily transdisciplinary, drawing on natural sciences, aesthetics and art, myth and religion, politics, and of course philosophy. I tend to think of the philosopher’s role as a kind of diplomat, trying to get science to talk to religion—or any other major sphere of thought—and finding a language broad or generic enough that people with a more scientific bent and people with a more mythic-spiritual bent can still see themselves within one wider context.

In addition to being transdisciplinary, our exploration is also transhistorical. We are trying to integrate insights from ancient thinkers, modern thinkers, as well as post- and metamodern thinkers. For me, that immediately raises the question not only of where we are, as in “on Earth,” but when we are. As soon as we conceive a sense of history, describing various epochs we inherit, we presuppose that we stand with some vantage on the entire flow of the past. One way to answer “When are we?” is to say we live at the leading edge of a cosmic process billions of years in the making. The origin of life on Earth keeps getting pushed back; there is some evidence it may be around 4.2 billion years old—meaning that life emerged practically as soon as the material conditions allowed. Now we find ourselves billions of years later, looking back at this immense process.

A hallmark of our species, I would suggest, is our capacity to take responsibility for this evolutionary achievement. We certainly have the power to destroy it—or set it back—given our current technology and the various crises we face. This is the sixth great mass extinction, and unlike past mass extinctions triggered by asteroids, super-volcanoes, or tectonic shifts, this time it is us. Or, more precisely, it is certain industrialized societies, rather than all human communities equally.

I also want to comment on an idea that Layman proposed—a term like “ecodrome,” referring to the self-organizing structure and dynamics of ecological processes. It reminds me of a passage in Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas, where he says that nature has a tendency to be “in tune.” We may not want to affirm harmony in the same naïve sense as, say, Aristotle did (who emphasized a static cosmos with every element in its right place), but even contemporary evolutionary biology and complex systems science provide some justification for the notion of tendencies toward harmonization. In Plato’s Timaeus, there is already an acknowledgment that the rational dimension of the cosmos must contend with anankē—necessity or contingency—so there is always some measure of chaos alongside cosmos. That, I think, is precisely what evolution is: the outcome of the meeting and transformation of order at the edge of chaos.

All of this leads me to want to problematize the strict nature–culture bifurcation. From my perspective, animals and in fact all organisms have always been engaged in some degree of “cultural” or learned behavior, which can be inherited through epigenetic processes. Even Darwin affirmed a kind of Lamarckism, and although genetics seemed to refute the inheritance of acquired characteristics, epigenetics has, in a way, reopened that possibility. Not only complex animals but simple bacteria can laterally transfer learned or adaptive behaviors (eg, genes for enzymes to digest novel food sources), so in a generalized sense, culture has been unfolding since the origin of life.

That said, human symbolic consciousness clearly marked a massive shift in how rapidly culture could evolve, because we began to externalize memory in artifactual form. Another bifurcation I would challenge is the human–technology divide. We have always been in tight coevolution with our tools. Harnessing fire to cook our food literally shrank our jaws and grew our brains; thus from the beginning of our species, there is no strict line between our physiology and so-called external tools.

From my panpsychist (or “panexperientialist”) point of view, I do not see the question as “When did mind emerge from life, or life from matter?” I would say that from the very start—whatever we mean by “matter”—it is already seeded with the potency of life and mind. Thus, when human beings launch rockets and satellites that turn around to photograph the Earth, it is Earth in a sense looking back at itself.

In modern philosophy, especially since Kant, there has been a tendency to see human rationality as transcendental, somehow not derived from nature. In many ways, I think this separation has contributed to the ecological crisis because we end up imagining mind as external to the biosphere. I prefer the line of thinking inspired by Friedrich Schelling, who essentially reverses that Kantian question. Instead of asking, “What must mind be such that nature can appear to it in this way?” Schelling asks, “What must nature be such that mind could emerge from it?” We only get geology once we have Earth itself. In this sense, Earth is a seed that flowered into life; we human beings are part and parcel of this Earth-energy-event expressing itself, and we are at one far end of that process as a kind of flower or fruit.

Regarding the notion of “harmony,” there is a danger of a naïve environmentalism where we imagine if we just stopped interfering, nature would resume its perfect balance. Yet, as I said, we are in the sixth mass extinction, meaning there were five prior that had nothing to do with us. The history of life on Earth is a series of catastrophes. And yet, the previous five were each followed—over a few million years—by a proliferation of new lifeforms. Each mass extinction was followed by a greater diversity of living forms once the biosphere recovered. Creativity and destruction go hand in hand, and there is no such thing as a final “balance of nature.” Evolution unfolds not because of balance but because of disequilibrium.

I want briefly to note Heidegger’s critique of technology—his view that major machine technologies “enframe” the natural world, reducing it to “standing reserve.” Hans Jonas, one of Heidegger’s students, expanded the notion of care (or Sorge) to all living things, rather than restricting it to human Dasein alone. Jonas argued that nonhuman organisms also have a horizon of concern for their own existence. Moreover, Jonas wrestled with Whitehead’s panexperientialism because he wanted to maintain the non-life/life distinction, emphasizing that a metabolic being fights against nonexistence in a way that mere matter does not.

While Jonas criticized figures like Teilhard de Chardin for not having a fully serious concept of death in their cosmologies, I would point out that Whitehead’s “actual occasions” always perish, so there is room for a recognition of mortality and tragedy in process thought. In my perspective, history is indeed tragic: there is tremendous wreckage, and many lost possibilities that once seemed realizable but are no longer so. Failure is a real possibility—both for us as individuals and as a species.

Turning to the future, I am reminded of the tension between a modern Darwinian perspective emphasizing phylogenetic contingency and an ancient Aristotelian view emphasizing purposeful ontogenetic development. Preformationist doctrines (the OG “evolution”) once suggested that everything was already contained in each germ cell, while epigenetic thinkers insisted on genuine new creation. Darwinian evolution at the level of speciation or phylogenesis does not appear teleologically preordained, while Aristotle’s analysis of embryonic development does entail an internal purposeful unfolding. Many twentieth-century philosophers—Whitehead, Bergson, Teilhard—attempted to reconcile these two perspectives by suggesting that the Earth itself is a kind of seed, unfolding through various evolutionary phases without a predetermined outcome, but realizing new potentials at each stage.

That leads me to consider whether the emergence of the noosphere is in some sense inevitable. Could it be that the biosphere is being so profoundly transformed that we might not even recognize it soon, and that the wild, as we once defined it, might be lost? That is something to be mourned, but it may also be a reality we must face. Or perhaps the noosphere sustaining itself without a healthy biospheric base is yet another example of the delusion of mind/matter dualism: all our noospheric dreams of a technozoic future are in fact pipe dreams that we will soon be rudely awakened from.

I want to acknowledge that this can all sound like a kind of philosophical bypassing of the pain of what is happening right now. I do not intend it that way. I remember being 18 or 19, filling up my 1998 Toyota Avalon with gas using my mother’s credit card, feeling like I was mooching off her. I felt this guilt, and then suddenly shifted from the personal to the planetary to realize I was also mooching off Mother Earth by filling my vehicle with fossil fuels. I realized I was implicated in a system that I could not simply exit. None of us can claim ethical neutrality.

This reminds me of a scene from season 1 of The White Lotus, where Quinn reflects on the Australian wildfires a few years back that killed a billion animals and asks, “Where does all the pain go?” That question deserves our attention. We are not disconnected from the rest of life; what we do to life, we do to ourselves.

For me, honoring the dead—human and nonhuman alike—means recognizing that past lives still resonate within us. As Rudolf Steiner often said, the “so-called dead” are still very much here with us. All forms of life that have perished continue to inform and enable our present. Our aliveness today is a function of the achievements of those who came before, so when we allow ourselves to feel that pain, we are honoring them and perhaps preparing ourselves to make better decisions for the future.

Finally, I want to invoke Hans Jonas’s idea of an ethical imperative: to act so that the consequences of our actions remain compatible with the permanence of genuine human life, as he put it. But “permanence” may not be the right term. In an evolutionary cosmogenesis, we are always becoming something else, and we cannot arrest that process. The sun is heating up, tectonic plates continue to shift, and eventually, no matter what we do, life on Earth will continue to change and, if current scientific understanding is correct, eventually be extinguished by runaway climate change (human caused or not). So if not permanence (or “sustainability”), then what is our goal? Perhaps it is to foster forms of flourishing that remain open-ended, prepared for transformation, and aware that surprising possibilities may lie ahead.