I think it’s supposed to be both but what is actually manifest is a profusion of individual consciousnesses.
That quote doesn’t make it to me explicitly clear one way or the other. It seems to suggest one transcendent consciousness.
Yes, I’m not sure that Teilhard saw the noosphere as self conscious, in and of itself, tho certainly we being part and parcel of the noosphere are self conscious.
“Teilhard imagines a critical threshold, Omega Point, in which mankind will have reached its highest point of complexification (socialization) and thus its highest point of consciousness. At this point consciousness will rupture through time and space and assert itself on a higher plane of existence from which it can not come back.”
Is this the noosphere?
“We’ll be uploading our entire MINDS to computers by 2045 and our bodies will be replaced by machines within 90 years, Google expert claims.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2344398/Google-futurist-claims-uploading-entire-MINDS-computers-2045-bodies-replaced-machines-90-years.html
It suggests a implicit collective aspiration in the direction of a noosphere but doesn’t name it as a goal or explain how it is to be accomplished.
A nice quote by Madison on this idea…
My emphasis.
I already stated that snooping would become a problem when judges, lawyers, and law-makers would be snooped on :
BUSH-ERA NSA WHISTLEBLOWER MAKES MOST EXPLOSIVE ALLEGATIONS YET ABOUT TRUE EXTENT OF GOV’T SURVEILLANCE
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/20/bush-era-nsa-whistleblower-makes-most-explosive-allegations-yet-about-true-extent-of-govt-surveillance/
The debate over privacy vs security has just begun.
The stupidity and ignorance of youth has never been a convincing argument to me.
The big idea justifying snooping by the government is that the innocent never need fear anything.
A totalitarian regime is only ever two elections away in any democracy.
Refusing to stand up against infractions to privacy is naive and ill advised.
My emphasis.
[/quote]
This is why the US is running around like a headless chicken looking for new enemies at the news that a moderate has been elected in Iran.
Oh, wait, Syria is brewing up - let’s get involved there asap.
Continuous warfare feeds the military-industrial complex.
If one does not believe the MIC thrives by snooping, he should bone upon what happened in the USA in the 1950s. Industry thrived then. And since we had only a cold war, attention shifted from finding enemies abroad to finding them at home. At that time Snowden would have been hunted down and executed, as were the Rosenburgs.
But I don’t think this is really about privacy vs security. My fear is that it’s about amassing ever more power over people.
And I don’t think it has anything to do with “government by, of, and for the people.”
This is why the US is running around like a headless chicken looking for new enemies at the news that a moderate has been elected in Iran.
Oh, wait, Syria is brewing up - let’s get involved there asap.
Continuous warfare feeds the military-industrial complex.
[/quote]
War for multinational corporations … war for profit. War to line our congressmen’s pockets.
Is Snowden a hero or a traitor?
I don’t know. Can’t. The data necessary to know that is classified.
Now the news is reporting that he sought the job at Booz Allen Hamilton just to get at top secret data and info. Now he’s painted as a terrorist that premeditated infiltrating our nations top secret agencies. But I’m cognizant that the news media, all of them, are on the hook with the government, so can we trust what we’re getting?
I’m just happy we have whistleblowers … so bravo to Snowden.
So forget al qaeda, let’s go after our own citizens. We’re all suspect terrorists now. We’re turning in on ourselves. Leaders can’t be trusted either. Homeland Security requires that all be snooped on … leaders more than the ordinary joe … or anyone with any power.
But who’s listening to the listeners.
The noosphere gone wrong :
[size=150]Bombshell: Government’s ‘Insider Threat Program’ Obligates Federal Workers to Spy on Their Colleagues:[/size]
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/bombshell-governments-insider-threat-program-obligates-federal-workers-spy-their
Excerpt from Interview with Christof Koch en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christof_Koch
Steve Paulson: Could the Internet feel happy or depressed? It’s a distinct possibility according to the pioneering neuroscientist, Christof Koch. He says, “The Internet is developing a staggering level of complexity, maybe even comparable to the wiring of the human brain.”Koch is the rare neuroscientist who speculates openly about all kinds of big questions - computer consciousness, God, and just what it means that our brains have a hundred billion neurons and trillions of synapses.
Christof Koch: It’s not the sheer numbers of it, it’s the incredible complex ways in which these things are wired up and so that makes it different from a galaxy. Our Milky Way, for example, also contains hundred billions of suns, but the way these suns interact is very, very simple compared to the way that neurons can interact with each other.
Paulson: This is an important point to make. You’re saying that it doesn’t matter so much what the neurons are made of, it’s how they’re organized, how were they wired together, that’s what counts.
Koch: Correct. So, unless you believe in some magic substance that’s attached to our brain or some magic stuff that exudes consciousness, what certainly no scientist believe, then the only answer is, as you said, it’s not the stuff the brain is made out of, but it’s the relationship of its stuff to each other. So it’s the fact that you have these neurons and interacting in very complicated ways. In principle, if you could replicate that interaction that’s in silicon on a computer, you would get the same phenomenon including consciousness.
Paulson: Is it entirely possible that the Internet could become conscious or maybe it already is conscious?
Koch: In principle, that’s possible. Correct. What matter for consciousness is the fact that you have these incredibly complicated little machines, these little switching devices called nerve cells and synapses and they’re inter-braded, they’re wired up in amazingly complicated ways. If you could mimic that, for instance, if the Internet taken as a whole, the Internet already now has a couple of billion nodes, each node is a computer, each one of these computers contains a couple of billion transistors. So, yes, it is, in principle possible that the complexity of the Internet is such that it feels like something to be conscious. Depending on the exact state of the transistors on the Internet, it might feel sad one day and happy another day, I mean whatever the coolant is in Internet space.
Paulson: You’re serious about using these words, that the Internet could feel sad or happy?
Koch: What I’m serious about is that the Internet, in principle, could have conscious states. Now, the exact meaning of these conscious states, do they express happiness? Do they express pain, pleasure, angry? That really depends exactly on the relationship of the transistors, of the nodes, and of the computers to each other. But there’s no question that, in principle, it could feel something, yes.
Paulson: Would we humans recognize whether there are certain parts of the Internet that are conscious? Or, is that somehow beyond our understanding?
Koch: Well, if suddenly, it develops some autonomous behavior that nobody poke on into it, where people just, “Woo! What just happened here?”I mean, it’s just sort of self-organized in some really weird way, it wasn’t a bug, it wasn’t some ad that was paid for some nefarious organization, but it did it by itself. Yes, and if this happens in some regular basis, then I think at some point, many people would say, yes, I guess it did something, that it’s alive and it may have conscious sensation.
Given the way advertisements follow me around on the web, based upon my browsing and searching, I’d have to say the internet IS conscious. You know the noosphere is alive and well by, the presence of advertising.