The Library of Consciousness

Evolution isn't done yet, it's just getting started.

The universe is aware of itself through all of us. Come get lost in The Library’s virtual aisles to find out more about this astounding revelation.

Thanks to its characteristic additive power, living matter (unlike the matter of physicists) finds itself ‘ballasted’ with complications and instability. It falls, or rather rises, towards forms that are more and more improbable.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Phenomenon of Man
1955

Thanks to its characteristic additive power, living matter (unlike the matter of physicists) finds itself ‘ballasted’ with complications and instability. It falls, or rather rises, towards forms that are more and more improbable.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Phenomenon of Man
1955

New Additions

Nature Loves Complexity

Terence McKenna

Nature Loves Complexity

1998

Workshop
Added 3 weeks ago
01:14:40 8,114 4

A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals

Scott Gilbert

A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals

2012

For animals, as well as plants, there have never been individuals. This new paradigm for biology asks new questions and seeks new relationships among the different living entities on Earth. We are all lichens.

Article
Added 3 weeks ago
6,699 16

Ubuntu and the Law in South Africa

Yvonne Mokgoro

Ubuntu and the Law in South Africa

1998

While difficult to define, the concept of ubuntu is worth preserving and adapting to modern South African society.

Article
Added 6 weeks ago
2,751 6

Reflection of Energy

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Reflection of Energy

1952

Published in Revue des Questions Scientifiques, and later in Activation of Energy.

Essay
Added 11 weeks ago
5,323 13

Simulation, Consciousness, Existence

Hans Moravec

Simulation, Consciousness, Existence

1998

Like organisms evolved in gentle tide pools, who migrate to freezing oceans or steaming jungles by developing metabolisms, mechanisms, and behaviors workable in those harsher and vaster environments, our descendants, able to change their representations at will, may develop means to venture far from the comfortable realms we consider reality into arbitrarily strange worlds. Their techniques will be as meaningless to us as bicycles are to fish, but perhaps we can stretch our common-sense-hobbled imaginations enough to peer a short distance into this odd territory.

Article
Added 12 weeks ago
7,287 10

The Global Superorganism: An Evolutionary-Cybernetic Model of the Emerging Network Society

Francis Heylighen

The Global Superorganism: An Evolutionary-Cybernetic Model of the Emerging Network Society

2002

The organismic view of society is updated by incorporating concepts from cybernetics, evolutionary theory, and complex adaptive systems. Global society can be seen as an autopoietic network of self-producing components, and therefore as a living system or “superorganism”. Published in the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems.

Research Article
Added 16 weeks ago
20,128 31

The Global Brain as an Emergent Structure from the Worldwide Computing Network

Gottfried Mayer-Kress

The Global Brain as an Emergent Structure from the Worldwide Computing Network

1994

We propose that the existence of a globally and tightly connected network of computer workstations such as the Internet can lead to the emergence of a globally self-organized structure which we refer to as the Global Brain. Published 1995 in The Information Society, Volume 11, Number 1.

Research Article
Added 18 weeks ago
11,592 8

A Crisis in Consciousness

Terence McKenna

A Crisis in Consciousness

1995

Terence argues that a solution to our collective planetary crisis has emerged, and it lies in a commitment to shamanistic, feminized, cybernetic, and caring forms of being—to take what each of us is in our very best moments and extend it to fill whole lifetimes.

Workshop
Added 19 weeks ago
53:02 6,202 10

Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Alan Turing

Computing Machinery and Intelligence

1950

Computing Machinery and Intelligence is a seminal paper written by Alan Turing on the topic of artificial intelligence. The paper, published in 1950 in Mind, was the first to introduce his concept of what is now known as the Turing test to the general public.

Article
Added 23 weeks ago
11,942 5

The Theory of the Organism-Environment System

Timo Järvilehto

The Theory of the Organism-Environment System

1998

In any functional sense, organism and environment are inseparable and form only one unitary system. The organism cannot exist without the environment, and the environment has descriptive properties only if it is connected to the organism. Separation of organism and environment cannot be the basis of any scientific explanation of human behavior. The theory leads to a reinterpretation of basic problems in many fields of inquiry and makes possible the definition of mental phenomena without their reduction either to neural or biological activity or to separate mental functions. According to the theory, mental activity is activity of the whole organism-environment system, and the traditional psychological concepts describe only different aspects of organization of this system.

Research Article
Added 28 weeks ago
31,743 50

Understanding the Chaos at History's End

Terence McKenna

Understanding the Chaos at History's End

1989

Delivered at the end of McKenna’s first month as scholar-in-residence at Esalen, when he began a new phase in his public speaking career. This weekend workshop provides an early glimpse at Terence’s description of the looming “transcendental object at the end of time,” and the psychedelic insights which led him to become an oracle.

Workshop
Added 36 weeks ago
05:21:23 37,468 13

Modes of Thought

Alfred North Whitehead

Modes of Thought

1938

Whitehead believed that reality consisted of organic processes within processes, all interrelated and overlapping. These processes are the basis on which human experience, conscious and otherwise, becomes an ongoing center of integrated and novel freedom. In this collection of lectures he urges us to consider “Importance” as an ultimate notion underlying our impulse to create the various modes and sub-generalities of thought which guide our planning and acting.

Book
Added 38 weeks ago
49,421 42

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