Teilhard de Chardin and his relation with executive-secretary of UNESCO Julian Huxley. Evolution and Darwinism. (X-post from s/Jesuits)

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[–]Alan_Crowe 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Teilhard also posited the emergence of a new realm on earth in addition to the lithosphere (rocks), the atmosphere (the air), the hydrosphere (the oceans) and biosphere (life forms); he called it the noosphere—the interconnected realm of the human mind.

The biosphere is populated. We most notice the charismatic mega fauna: lions, bears, gorillas, humans. But what creatures populate the Noosphere? I suspect Teilhard was content with humans poking their heads into Noosphere and finding that they were the only occupants.

I think it makes more sense to see the Noosphere as having a native population of creatures of pure information. The closest existing name that we might use for such creatures is "Egregores". Yes, humans have a foot in both realms; both being mammals in the biosphere and participating in the Noosphere, but they have difficulty maintaining their individuality. Humans who participate in the Noosphere are often consumed by it. Those who work for IBM become IBMers. Many companies mold their employees, to the extent that the top managers are company men, sacrificing themselves for the company, as though the company were the organism and the men merely body parts. Religions are striking examples of egregores. Perhaps it is better to say that the religious doctrine is the egregore. The churches are important, but at the end of the day they are just buildings.

The most interesting part is the symbiosis between the egregores and the humans. We notice that human fertility has fallen with the decline of the Christian religion. Viewing Christianity as an egregore, we notice that it needs humans to give it an organic substrate. But humans have co-evolved with Christianity. Humans need it to help them reproduce. Without it, they are content with recreational sex and their numbers decline. Poison the Noosphere to kill the egregore and you deprive the mammals of their symbiote and kill them too.

[–]FlippyKing 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

He had bad ideas. I wish there was some other way to say that, but I can't find it. I can think a priest who was studied in biology (but he was a priest and not a scientist) along time ago (I think he lived roughly from 1880 to 1955 but I could be off) could be very enthusiastic about the developments in all the scientific fields of study. Too many were enthusiastic about applying "Darwinism" or evolution to everything. Social Darwinism was just taking already held bad ideas and dressing them up as sciency. Eugenics ran with some very bad ideas as well. Evolutionary psychology is BS, regardless of how applicable the ideas seem to be to some periods of history or the present. (I think it fails but tries to be a more serious cultural anthropology)

But De Chardin thought matter would evolve into spirit, he thought God was evolving and our flesh and everything was evolving into spirit. Uhm, no. There's nothing anywhere to indicate that, there's no way to see that, it is not even pseudoscience.

If that was the only bad idea he had though, no one would be thinking about him. Instead he has been a big influence in confusing his fans with hopeful ambiguities and new age bs before there was a new age. By thinking God and matter are both evolving, he pulls the rug out from under objectivism, and I think subjectivism too, by making everything an ever-moving target. There can be no truth and no reality that is coherent with the past if the goal is this unseeable evolution of both God and matter.

If you think "well, there's no God anway, so what?" In a sense he is agreeing with you because the finished product of what he thinks is God is not done evolving and neither are we or all matter. New Age people take about ascended beings, but before that was a thing, or at least before it was trendy and when it was either not an idea or it was just Golden Dawn etc "occult" stuff, he was using the idea of evolution to describe this idea he essentially dreamed up. Or, he recieved it in a weird and creepy vision where a spirit attacked him saying he (de Chardin) could save the spirit. Uhm, ... no.

[–]Alan_Crowe 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Thank you for that forthright comment. I found it clarifying.

The idea of the Noosphere is important, but I understand it as a mechanistic, materialist phenomenon. For example, once you network computers, you run the risk of your computer network supporting a worm or even a virus. Ultimately a computer virus is just bits, but if humans want to understand why their network has slowed down, then the humans are going to have to take a zoomed-out, approximate view, that sees the computer virus as an organism that is reproducing.

And something similar happens when you "network" humans, letting them exchange and store data with books and pamphlets. The humans end up supporting cults and religions. Ultimately, these ideas can be viewed from a reductionist perspective; they are just marks on paper. But that perspective has too much detail for humans to understand why, for example, their son has run away to join the Moonies. One has to take a zoomed-out, approximate view, in which a cult is enough like an organism for the analogy to help us understand how it "grows".

So I want to talk about this stuff. But I should steer clear of the word "Noosphere" and avoid linking what I want to talk about with Teilhard de Chardin, because, well, you put the reason why bluntly: "He had bad ideas."

[–]FlippyKing 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I hope you did not think I was suggesting you not talk about this stuff. I also don't want to skip around and respond to your ideas in a scattered way, but I am going to do that.

I don't think you can say humans have co-evolved along side Christianity. I don't know that humans are substantially different than we've been for an extremely long time, like since before Gobekli Tepe. Our evolution as viewed from the fossil record is more complex than we thought it was, and that complexity is not simplifying yet. It certainly does not seem to be the case that we evolved in Africa and spread from there in successive waves. Changes happened and populations appear have popped up in a number of places, and a variety of interactions seem to be indicated. The difficulty with any fossil record, especially for species that live above ground or out of water, is erosion erases the record as soon as it occurs. We can not expect a complete picture, but the picture is complicated already. It may not ever become clear.

I also don't think taking a zoomed out view is especially useful, because we as a group do not evolve, but individuals pass on traits and culture and all that. We right now are incredibly comfortable, we are one carrington event away from mass chaos and losing many people in a very short period of time. What ever cultural things we accumulated to get along in that comfort, and what ever ideas we have in our brains and what ever patterns became imprinted on the plasticity of our brains in those contexts, they will leave quickly as we adapt. We adapt fast. Changes to Native American cultures on the Great Plains after the horse was reintroduced prove this. Their mobility and dependence on the horse, the new conflicts it created with "neighbors" who were once at a distance, created a culture that if we accept their way of telling it always was. One tribe, or a few maybe, had a 5-direction way of seeing the world that was described and a analogized as being on a horse (I forget the details of it. Sorry, but it took something practical about being on a horse and generalized into a metaphysical concept. It really fascinated it me, a long time ago, but it slipped my mind now. Sorry.)

A problem I have with your approach to these ideas, a reason I don't really feel like I would gain from entertaining them for very long though I used to entertain them a bit, is that you or I do not stand outside the humans you see networking or the "one" who tries to take a zoomed-out view of themselves and where they actually are. We simply can't be objective about it, at best we can only pretend to be above it all when we are fully in it even in the thought experiment. It might be a matter of ordering ourselves. You and I sit in a particular place in time, in history, and geographically. And we are different people with different means and different ways of meeting our needs. We both have the luxury of entertaining these ideas, at least to some extent. Those contexts matter, because it will influence what ideas we might consider worth investigating and which to blow off.

I think, correct me please, that this noosphere is analogous or a new interpretation of some psychic connection between (all? some?) humans. That it sounds like a big, all encompassing, egregore: I agree. That idea, egregore, was greatly explored by people who are probably peers of de Chardin, Annie Besant wrote about them. They are ideas from occult circles, and I think they are attempts to put a modern (for then) psychological understanding to rituals and to their "magic" and to their uses of their imaginations to contact entities that could be called supernatural, and to observable phenomena resulting from group dynamics. Group dynamics was important at that time, because the art (well, science probably even back then) of propaganda was an important endeavor. It's all part of a Victorian or post-Victorian grappling with industrialization, Victorian "spiritualism", mass-everything (mass media, mass-manufacturing, wars on global scales, notions of morality and of sex and sexed differences), cultures from very different parts of the world beginning to communicate with each other, advances in every field of study so fast that they could not check each other or grow together harmoniously. Oh, and the mass manufacturing and the industrialization created a new class of people with so little to do, that they could entertain these ideas all day long.

Back then, even though anyone with the free time and funding to entertain these ideas could, so long as the found their way into those circles: they all knew they had to approach these things with a sound mind. It was recommended they could do these things, but only if they were working with a psychologist who understood what they were trying to do, and they were to proceed cautiously. Well, cautiously enough either to fool others or fool themselves, because really who would not open Pandora's box immediately (regardless of what we think her "box" is. I think it's at least at double entendre for ... her cookie)? They knew they risked mental illness. I think Lovecraft wrote along those lines but I don't know. And well, here we are.

But egregores are, if they exist, psychic or supernatural, not computer bits and not cultures. I think where you talking about them among IBM employees or religions (one could equally say nations, or neighborhoods), you are over-complicating cultures. IBM and all very big companies that are selective in who they hire do actively create a culture. Those leather-bound day planners (I forget the specific company a lot of the big corps used) were a big part of it, as it tried to balance the person's life and committments so that work could be tended to properly without cheating the others. Good executives make bad decisions when their kids are ignored the thought went, for a while it went that way anyway.

If you want to say religions do create them, well "maybe" but I'll say they have to exist and be create-able. I don't see how both of those could ever really be proven. If they exist and if they exist in the "noosphere" (what, is this the 90s again?) or in the supernatural or in psychic realms or where ever they exist, what else exists there? It stands to reason that the first egregore created by people (or trilobites or whatever) and placed in this space where it exists joined what ever else was there already, or are we the only ones that can do that? I don't want to run with anyone elses' idea on this, but just to consider what's probable or possible. But, I'm not sure you are talking about egregores, I think you're really just talking about culture.

Religious doctrine is not all that different than Stoicism or the rules one has to live by to wrestle in high school or college (wrestle well anyway, unless just "gifted"). It's no different than the world view held by horse-riding cultures, or agricultural cultures, or cultures with so much free time they to this. Classical musicians have "doctrines" they adhere to, it's a culture or a sub-culture. They train in very specific ways, go through the same "jury" and competition systems, they train their ears and hands and whole bodies (alexander technique usually), their voices, learn piano even if they never intend to play piano, and study similar aspects of history to round out their musicianship. It's culture (sub culture), not an egregore.

If we can create egregores as something above and separate from just cultural things, the questions are: 1) do other species do this, or is this some new thing unique to ours; 2) when did we acquire this; and 3) what purpose does it serve? How evolution happens is still debated, in fact new fronts in that battle of ideas have opened relatively recently. Lamarckian ideas are making a come back as other mechanisms do not explain what are seen in some species (bacteria, but they count). But, how this skill was acquired can not be glossed over either when "when" is being considered because it has to serve a purpose. It can't just be communication. Our ability to yell or grunt to share the idea that a pack of wolves is approaching, and the expansion of that vocabulary does not need it. We also do not need to communicate with those far away from us (really). If anything it's a distraction, it might be a maladaptation more than some new thing.

So, I'm just not seeing it, and certainly not seeing it above culture. I do have a perspective on religion, but not one that could see an egregore as anything other than either culture or as some other thing separate from the religion and perhaps the religion's ability to connect efficaciously with the supernatural. All religions, as far as I know, claim a purpose of understanding some aspect of the supernatural and to place us in a specific relationship to that. The religion would not see the "thing" that exists between their members and the supernatural as something created the way an egregore or a culture are created because they would see the supernatural as preceding the individual in the religion. To assume they are wrong, but to assume the thing exists in some other way seems presumptuous.

But, I think de Chardin was a snake oil sales man, and I think his "evolution" and his being a biologist/Jesuit was not really what he was on about. I think he was repackaging Victorian or post Victorian spiritualism, theosophy and occult (Golden Dawn type) stuff as a sort of bridge between then, and along side the "New Thought" movement (Phineas Quimby, Emmit Fox, Neville Goddard, Florence Scovel Shinn), and the New Age movement we still see today. These ideas morphed into the crooks of the prosperity gospel, and into the shallow kind of faux-mysticism around people playing with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics in ways that are laughable if not criminal (for the same reasons the prosperity gospel should be criminal).

[–]Alan_Crowe 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

But egregores are, if they exist, psychic or supernatural, not computer bits and not cultures.

My ontology is limited; I admit no psychic entities, nor any supernatural ones. So just reductionist, mechanistic, materialism? Err, there is a problem. The kinetic theory of gases explains pressure as due to molecules rushing about, bumping into things. That explains gas pressure, but does it explain it away? If you want to design a steam engine, you need to do your design calculations in terms of the concept of pressure. Trajectories of molecules have way too much irrelevant detail. So macroscopic thermodynamic properties, such as pressure and temperature, have micro-foundations. They are both justified by their micro-foundations and undermined by them. I think of them as second tier real. We know that they are not the ultimate reality, and we also know that they are real enough for many of our purposes. Can you help me out here with the official philosophical jargon for this?

Pressing on, I accept that egregores are traditionally understood as psychic or supernatural. That makes me sad. Since I reject the psychic and the supernatural, I believe that that traditional understanding wastes a good word by yoking it to the supernatural, which doesn't actually exist. So I want to re-use the word egregore to denote an aspect of culture that is second tier real.

I see culture as very complicated. To get any insight into what is going on requires an expanded vocabulary, so that subtle differences can be picked apart. For example, this business is just a business, with employees who work there. That business is a egregore and has followers.

To flesh this out, think about agency problems. Business A needs to purchase an X. Business B quotes high for supplying an X, while business C quotes low. Fred works for Business A and rigs the requirements for the X so that Business A buys from Business B. Expensive. Very profitable for Business B. Then Fred resigns from Business A and gets a shiny new job with Business B. A quid pro quo? Corruption? Did Fred just use Business A's money to purchase a sinecure at Business B?

This is the usual situation in business. The business employs people who are individuals with individual agency and who play the game to their personal advantage. The usual situation, but not the only situation. Sometimes a business has a company culture that commands loyalty. If Business A had a culture that molded Fred into being a company man, he would have accepted the cheaper quote from Business C, boosting the profits of Business A and continued to work there.

I want to say: in the first case, it is just a business. In the second case, there is an egregore, and Fred is one of the egregores followers. But the second situation lasts thirty years or sixty years (some number of years); the egregore gets old and dies. Then the business is just an ordinary business and, in time it gets looted and fails.

So, I'm just not seeing it, and certainly not seeing it above culture.

I'm happy to agree to that, not above culture. My controversial stance is that culture is very complicated. Sometimes the individual people have agency, and culture is just shrug lots of details of people interacting; the kind of thing Neumann and Morgenstern talk about. Other times, there is weird stuff going on, with people surrendering their agency and being part of a collective. Call it an egregore. Maybe that is a poor choice of name, but the underlying concept needs a name. Any suggestions?

I don't think you can say humans have co-evolved along side Christianity.

Fair enough. I was over-specific there. But I still think there is something interesting going on. Think about early humans leading lives dominated by tribal warfare. There is jockeying for position going on within each tribe. Suppose the battle with the neighboring tribe is a draw. Each tribesman is hoping to survive the battle to return to his village to shag the widow of one of the fallen. But too much of that cynical lack of solidarity and the tribe loses the battle. All the men are slaughtered in the rout. A conquering hero from the other tribe makes off with both men's widows.

If the tribal warfare is brutal enough, the mountain of skulls high enough, and the river of blood deep enough, group selection actually works. Humans evolve to surrender their agency to the collective, fighting bravely in the front line of battle. I speculate that there is an evolved biological basis to people surrendering their agency and becoming followers of an egregore.

[–]FlippyKing 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

but does it explain it away? If you want to design a steam engine, you need to do your design calculations in terms of the concept of pressure. Trajectories of molecules have way too much irrelevant detail. So macroscopic thermodynamic properties, such as pressure and temperature, have micro-foundations.

Uhmmm ... what? on what ever scale you are building a steam engine, you deal with the factors appropriate for it. "micro-foundations", whatever they might be, do not matter. Where ever they matter, deal with them there, right? (are you speaking of plasma? or smaller, like quantum level? Each of those levels are different, and plasma is plasma, so all the steam engine ideas go out the window). It seems like you found a non sequitur to distract you.

You really should not use the word Egregores when you mean culture, and I do think you mean culture. You may not want to deal in supernatural or the psychic but by using that word you are doing exactly that. Some who believe in the supernatural see such forces manipulating people into doing things they don't believe in because they don't believe, whether it is into lying because even if they think it is bad to lie they have to weigh it against keeping their bosses happy or getting away with something big, or into doing far worse things. If you don't believe in it, then reject the vocabulary of it. I assure you there is ample vocabulary for what you are talking about without it.

Have you studied any cultural anthropology? Within that field there are many sub-disciplines and many schools of thought applied to it, like "structuralism", "post-structuralism", "materialism", and so on. I prefer the materialism approach, grounding cultural factors in the day-to-day lives and material survival of the population.

I agree culture is complicated, but two things to bear in mind: they are individual cultures meant to pair a population to an environment which includes neighboring populations and neighboring cultures as well as the geography and technology they have. To many people see some idea in a culture as if it is on an a la carte menu and try to adopt the idea as if they can really use it in their culture. To me, that is the "bad" cultural appropriation, whereas a heavy metal band using Afro-Cuban rhythms (WELL!) is not (but using them badly or in a mismatched way should be punishable, but that's just my opinion).

I don't see your stance as controversial, I just think you have not really looked at the fields of study that already cover these ideas, and are pulling unrelated vocabulary into it because of that. Early humans leading lives dominated by tribal warfare is not exactly the case, only where populations grew and became competing populations or populations out of balance with their resources. In other places, further up your "evolution" of cultures, some populations in stable regions just engaged in child sacrifice to their gods to deal with it. Then some wars appear to have been started to stop that practice. Some think the Etruscan's (source word for Europe I believe, so hmmmm....) and Carthaginians both started as colonies of the Phoneticians who were attacked for that practice and wanted to just kill kids to their gods in peace. If you want egregores, there is where you should be looking, the supernatural.

You misunderstand those who go and fight in very ancient, prehistoric, times because you are overgeneralizing. For example, there are those, well me and others who I stole these ideas from, who see the "viking" age and their gods are reflecting a very real and material reality in far-northern Europe. Fact is that the viking age was a time of a massive population boom related to solar cycles and warming. Land owners and farmers were stable enough and they tended to worship Thor. The "father-god" was Tyr going far back. Look at all the cities with Tyr as a suffix. But, Odin was the god of adventure (to put it loosely. I do not want to type an essay in an essay) and of shamanism. Those young men who had no land of their own had to fight for their place. Tyr was a god of war, but also of self-sacrifice the way a father would for his children. Tyr has one hand which he allowed to be bitten off by a massive wolf as the others subdued it, he gave the hand as a sign of trust to distract it actually. But, that's Tyr. Odin was also a god of war, but of the glory of it and conquest, not of the defense of one's farm or home. So, different times and different people seeking different ends make different god, or raise up different ones. The young men who needed riches and wives and food needed to go and get the means to purchase it, or to immigrate (hello British Isles, then Normandy, and eventually Iceland) new lands. (The Immigrant Song is about that) The young men who needed to do that to survive, because over population in farmable Scandinavia forced them into it. They did not choose child sacrifice that I know of, but did sacrifice slaves and adults, but not on a scale that would deal with the problem. Those young men went raiding and either died or stayed or came home rich enough to buy food and shelter until they needed to go do it again. Dying in battle was an honor because coming back empty handed and defeated was almost as much of a death sentence, but generally (danes especially) never thought of dying for the sake of going into valhalla when they could retreat, regroup, and find an easier target. Heroism was always secondary to pragmatism.

The biological basis you look for is probably hungry mouths to feed, and you should not need egregores when material reality suffices. You need propaganda to get people to fight the way you have them fighting. The people atop those fighting forces who will never risk getting hurt, (so not Richard the Lion-hearted, Alexander the Great, etc. Different processes at work there, but overpopulation in specific local areats is at work there too) do believe in egregores or at least the supernatural even if they do not use such words. That's why they enforce rituals on their populations every where they can from schools to courts to political events. You can not believe in the supernatural and still study the use of egregores as the word is correctly defined because those who use them think they are real. But that is separate from culture. Most of what you talk about is culture.

Honestly Christianity, with it's stance that "Love" is the will for another's best well being without regard to the self and lust and sexual attraction is a disordering of love such that it wants from the other a kind of sexual devouring and satisfaction of a sexual appetite that at best is mutual satisfaction that should only be used for reproduction and not satisfying of urges. It's no different than to eat to survive not to be a glutton. It pulls the rug out from under your war ideas and your "tribal" war. Materialist approach to cultural anthropology explains your war, and Christianity attempts to deal with the drive towards those material problems without mass child sacrifice.

You can't really talk about surrendering agency without considering what is gained in return. Kids who repeat what teachers say unquestioningly give up agency to receive approval (ego-strokes in the transactional analysis approach to pysch). Plenty of adults do it for money or security. Whole generations of female sci-fi writers wrote of characters without agency because they grew up in a culture that forced women to give up agency for security (for food, for shelter, hopefully from violence) and be home-makers. You can kind of tell when someone is writing based on the characters they write. No egregores needed to understand tossing away agency in a deal with ... someone anyway.