Human Energy Research Project on the Global Brain and the Noosphere
Description
"The Human Energy Project is in the middle of two research projects exploring the possibility that the Noosphere’s global brain has been emerging, accelerated by information technology:
- Global Brain Analysis: Neuroscience has radically transformed how we see our inner workings, defining the nature of our individuality.
Remarkably, this individual “I” reflects the work and evolution of ~80 billion cells that have reconciled their individuality for the entirety of the human organism. Do humans similarly transcend their individual “I” for a global human organism, a noosphere? Studying the global brain will be a massive undertaking, with radical implications for the neural and social sciences. The problem is of immediate concern for the human collective; we face economic, political and social crises and must mount a collective response. How does this happen? How do “we” decide what to do? To focus the immediate efforts of the Global Brain Analysis arm of the Human Energy Project, an initial comparative study of the decision making process in the human brain with the decision making process in societies has been undertaken. The goal of this project is to create a dynamic map of the decision making process that bridges the neural and social sciences, highlights key distinctions, and opens new avenues for research, technology and creative human endeavors. A team led by Professor Michael Jacob has begun this research.
- Modeling Brains: From Biology to the Noosphere: This project aims to study two successful recent brain models, the predictive processing theory, and the global neuronal workspace theory,
and to look for their equivalent in the noosphere.
The latter theory proposes that consciousness arises when particular messages in the brain are amplified, globally broadcasted and “reverberated”, thus creating synchronization between processes in different brain regions. Similar processes may be observed at the planetary level in (social) media. The former theory says that sense-making or understanding happens when bottom-up processing of incoming observations and top-down prediction of what can be expected match, creating coherent insight in the situation. “Higher” levels of consciousness/understanding are attained when this bottom-up/top-down matching extends to higher levels of abstraction, where observations are fit into increasingly global, long-term orders. A similar extension of consciousness should happen in the noosphere in order to deal with broad, global problems, such as climate change. This research is led by Professor Francis Heylighen and his team."
(https://humanenergy.io/projects/the-noosphere-and-the-global-brain/)