W EB S PIRITUALITY

In discussing the philosophy of the global Web mind and the global brain, one is always dancing around the edges of the notion of spirituality. The notion of

a global brain has strong religious overtones. There is something very deeply mov- ing about the idea of an overarching mind that embraces individual human minds, melding them into a greater whole. In fact, when phrased in appropriate ways, the global societal mind begins to sound almost supernatural, like some kind of divine overarching being.

Whatever one’s religious or nonreligious proclivities, these spiritual overtones in the concept of the global brain are genuine and important, and should not be mocked or ignored. For, whatever one’s opinion of its ultimate meaning, spirituality is a part of the human experience, and will continues to be as we move into a new era of digital being. First of all, where the Web and spirituality are concerned, it is impossible not to mention the work of mid-twentieth-century theologian Teilhard

de Chardin. Teilhard’s evolutionary, information-theoretic spiritual philosophy has reminded many people of modern communications technology, so much so that some have cited his work as a premonition of the Internet.

Teilhard de Chardin prophesied that our current phase of being, in which individual humans live independent lives, would eventually be replaced with something else—something more collective and more spiritual, something focused on information and consciousness rather then material being. He coined the word noosphere or mind sphere to refer the globe-encircling web of thought and information that he thought would arise at the end of our current phase of being.

Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest, and his ideas, for all their radicalism, emanate straight from the essence of Christianity. His vision is plainly an exten- sion of the conventional Catholic notion of Judgment Day, a day on which history ends and the angels descend from Heaven; the good are brought up to Heaven and the rest plunged down to Hell. What de Chardin offers is a more refi ned Catholic eschatology, a subtler vision of the spiritual future, with a focus on information rather than on good versus evil. The subtlety of his vision was not appreciated by the fathers of the Church, who forbid de Chardin to publish and even exiled him to China. Thus, his major work, The Phenomenon of Man (de Chardin, 1994), was only published after his death.

“Man,” according to Nietzsche (1991), “is something that must be over- come.” Nietzsche saw humans as stepping-stones between beast and Superman. Teilhard de Chardin, on the other hand, saw humans as stepping-stones between beast and global Mind. The justifi cation for humanity as it is, he declared, lies in what humanity is going to evolve into: a collective, electric mental organism, transcending the boundaries between individuals and the boundary between mind and body. A cosmic, intelligent, refl ective entity, transforming information within itself with perfect effi ciency. Teilhard de Chardin spoke of progress, of evolution,

12 World Wide Brain 329

of an inexorable, natural movement from simple material forms toward more and more sophisticated, abstract forms—from the mundane toward the spiritual. At the end of the line, he proposed, was the omega point—the emergence of a spiritually perfected global brain or noosphere.

What is the relation between the noosphere and the Net? Some would say the two are virtually identical. Jennifer Kreisberg (1995), writing in Wired maga- zine, put the case as follows:

Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness. It sounds a little off the wall, until you think about the Net, that vast electronic Web circling the Earth, running point to point through a nervelike constellation of wires.…

Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived. He believed this vast thinking membrane would eventually coalesce into “the living unity of a single tissue” containing our collective thoughts and experiences.

I suspect that this overstates the case—but not by a great deal. It is more imprecise than fundamentally incorrect. In truth, although the metaphors that Teilhard de Chardin conceived for talking about his noosphere do mesh well with the Web, the Internet itself does not fulfi ll his prophecy nor will the emergence of the global Web brain. But when the global Web brain advances to Phase Two, and humans are incorporated into the globally distributed intelligence matrix, then, at this point, Kreisberg’s statement will be better justifi ed, and one will have a digital system somewhat vaguely resembling a Teilhardian “mind sphere.”

The fi rst key point that Kreisberg glosses over is that Teilhard did not foresee that humans would create a superintelligent mind-sphere; he foresaw that humans would become one. What is required in order to even approximately fulfi ll Teilhard’s dream is, therefore, for humans to become part of the global brain, the intelligent Web. His vision more closely approximated a global societal mind than

a global Web mind. It is important not to fudge the distinction between these two different things: Phase One, the emerging global Web mind, and Phase Two, the Russellian possibility of a human-incorporating global bio–digital intelligence.

Even a global societal mind, however, is a long way from Teilhard’s (de Chardin, 1994) idea of the end of the world, the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and centrality. The end of the world, the overthrow of equilibrium, detach- ing the mind, fulfi lled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega. Ultimately, the global Web mind may indeed detach mind from its material matrix; and it may indeed represent a “phase transi- tion,” if not an “uttermost limit,” in the complexity of the global network of human information. But anyone who believes all this will bring divine perfection is being foolish. New advances always bring problems along with solutions. The Net bears some resemblance to Teilhard’s vision, but Teilhard’s vision was of the mind-sphere

330 Ben Goertzel

as a panacea, and that, one can be sure, the future Net will not be. At bottom, like all transcendental eschatologies, Teilhard’s vision is a bit of a cop-out. By telling us perfection is just around the corner, it relieves us of the responsibility of seeing the perfection within the obvious imperfection all around us.

In the end, perhaps the most striking aspect of Teilhard’s thought is the way it conjoins spirituality with information and communication. This, rather than his glittering portrayal of future utopia, is really what brings Teilhard so close to Internet technology. Many other theologians have written their own eschatologies, their own versions of Judgment Day. But Teilhard dispensed with the mythical symbols normally used to describe such events and replaced them with very abstract, almost mathematical notions. In doing so, he roused the ire of the Catholic church, and he also—quite unwittingly—helped to bring spirituality into the computer age.

The other theological thinker who is crucial for understanding the Web— though rarely, if ever, mentioned in this context—is Carl Jung. The Web provides

a whole new way of thinking about Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious,

a realm of abstract mental forms, living outside space and time, accessible to all human beings, and guiding our thoughts and feelings. And it gives new, concrete meaning to his concept of archetypes—particular mental forms living in the collective unconscious, with particular power to guide the formation of individual minds ( Jung, 1955).

The concept of the collective unconscious has never achieved any status within scientifi c psychology; it is considered too fl aky, too spiritual. Science, perhaps rightly, perhaps (as Card, 1996, argues) wrongly, has no place for an incorporeal realm of abstract forms, interacting with individual minds but standing beyond them. The global Web mind, however, will actually be an incorporeal—or at least digital—realm of abstract forms, interacting with individual minds, but standing beyond them.

Some of the “archetypal forms” that Jung believed we absorb from the collective unconscious are basic psychological structures: the Self, the Anima/Animus (the female and male within), the Shadow. Others are more cultural in nature: the First Man. Some are visual: the right-going spiral, signifying being “sucked in”; the left-going spiral, signifying being “spewed out.” But the most basic archetypes of all, in Jung’s view, are the numbers. Small integers like 1, 2, and 3, Jung interpreted as the psychological manifestation of order. In fact, Jung suggested that all other archetypes could be built up out of the particular archetypal forms corresponding to small integers. This is a strikingly computeresque idea; it is a “digital” view of the world, in the strictest sense. So we see that Jung’s thought, for all its obscurity and spirituality, was at bottom very mathematical; he viewed the abstract structures of the mind as emanating from various combinations of numbers. He viewed the collective unconscious as a digital system.

The global Web mind will fulfi ll Jung’s philosophy in a striking and unexpected way; it will be a digital collective unconscious for the human race. For, after all, the

12 World Wide Brain 331

memory of the global Web mind is the vast body of humanly created webpages, which is a fair representation of the overall fi eld of human thought, knowledge, and feeling. So, as the global Web mind surveys this information and recognizes subtle patterns in it, it will be determining the abstract structure of human knowledge (i.e., determining the structure of the human cultural/psychological universe. This is true even for the global Web mind as an independent entity; and it will be far more true if, as human beings integrate more and more with the Web, the global Web brain synergizes with humanity to form a global digital/societal mind.

Specifi cally, the most abstract levels of the global Web mind will bear the closest resemblance to the collective unconscious as Jung conceived it. These levels will be a pool of subtle, broad-based patterns, abstracted from a huge variety of different human ideas, feelings, and experiences, as presented on the Web, and this body of abstract information will be active. Initially, it will be involved in creating new links on the Web, in creating new Web content, in regulating various real- world and virtual activities based on this content. As it grows more pervasive, it will become involved in an interactive way with human thoughts and feelings them- selves. In other words, precisely as Jung envisioned, the digital collective unconscious will be involved in forming the thoughts, feelings, and activities of human beings’ individual consciousness.

But what, in the end, are we to make of these parallels between Teilhard, Jung, and the Net? Obviously, Carl Jung did not foresee the Internet and the global Web mind, any more than Teilhard de Chardin did, just as engineers and scientists who designed the Internet did not have any intention of realizing the spiritual ideas of these philosophers.

The situation is well understood in the language of Jungian psychology; what has happened is that the philosophers and the engineers and scientists have tapped into the same emerging cultural archetype. The philosophers have interpreted the global interconnected web in terms of the human meaning of the archetypes and the collective unconscious; the engineers and scientists, on the other hand, have made these archetypes physical and concrete. We humans, as a race, are forever trapped between philosophy and engineering/science—not a bad place to be trapped at all. We are on the very wonderful course of using engineering and science to fulfi ll our deepest philosophical and spiritual longings.

W EB S PIRITUALITY