Teilhard and the Web
Metaphors for New Space
James Hayes-Bohanan, Ph.D.
Bridgewater State College
Department of Earth Sciences and Geography
Center for the Advancement of Research and Teaching (CART)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• Born Auvergne, France 1881
• Studied geology and paleontology;
taught physics and chemistry
• Ordained as Jesuit priest 1912
• Sorbonne doctorate 1922
• Paleontology research in China
1923 to 1946
• Legion of Honor 1946
• Died in New York 1955
Unity of Creation
“… each of us is perforce
linked by all the material
organic and psychic strands
of his being to all that
surrounds him [sic].”
Continuity with Past
and Present
“If we look far enough back in the
depths of time, the disordered anthill of
living beings suddenly, for an informed
observer, arranges itself in longs files
that make their way by various paths
toward greater consciousness.”
Human Role in
Evolution
“… there is an absolute direction of
growth, to which both our duty and our
happiness demand that we should
conform. It is [the human] function to
complete cosmic evolution.”
Evolution is toward
greater complexity
• Geological Evolution: Energy
• Biological Evolution: Life
• Human Evolution: Consciousness
Noosphere
“… above the animal biosphere a
human sphere, a sphere of
reflection, of conscious
intervention, of conscious souls”
“human consciousness turned in
upon itself”
Science
For Teilhard, science was in the service of
directed evolution toward higher orders of
consciousness.
“… research students are numbered in the
hundreds of thousands -- soon to be millions -and they are no longer distributed superficially
and at random over the globe, but they are
functionally linked together in a vast organic
system that will remain in the future indispensable
to the life of the community.” 1961
World Wide Web
• Gophers
• Gopherspace
• Archie, Jughead, and
Veronica
• Hypertext
• Hyperspace
• Images
• Commerce-free
1999: The Year of eCommerce
0.1% of U.S. Commerce
Has the Internet Changed Our
Daily Lives?
Where did Jeremy’s message go on its way to his mother?
Noosphere?
Y2K Connection
The y2k computer failure problem is like a massive
intertwined ring of dominoes - one little nudge anywhere
in the rings and you stand to witness an amazing chain
reaction.
In this case the nudge is the year 2000 and the
intertwined rings of dominoes are those aspects of our
society - worldwide - that interact with computers.
Rev. Dacia Reid
An Ever-Denser Network
… at all scales
• “Net” gives way to “fabric”
• More information in smaller
spaces
• Oxygen
• Smart Dust
• Biological Models
Questions
• Is the Web really different from earlier
technologies - from Gutenberg to the
telegraph (the Victorian Internet)?
• Does the Web represent some sort of
collective consiousness?
• If not, is this nonetheless a good metaphor?
• Could better metaphors be found?
More Questions
• Will the Web do more to unite -- as
Teilhard might have hoped -- or to
divide?
• Given the bugs seen in today’s
technologies, are such developments
as Oxygen and Smart Dust really
possible?
More on Teilhard and
the Web
HTTP://TOPCAT.BRIDGEW.EDU/
~JHAYESBOH/TEILHARD.HTM