The Library of Consciousness
The Library
of Consciousness
of Consciousness
Humanity’s power lies in unity: like molecules forming water, our connections create libraries, spaceflight, and cosmic insight. Swimme sees the noosphere—a planetary mind—emerging from our deepening bonds, part of a creative universe evolving toward greater complexity, consciousness, and community, even amid chaos.
Cosmogenesis portrays the universe as a living story, where matter, life, and consciousness unfold from a single cosmic origin. Swimme links human awareness to this grand process, urging us to see ourselves as participants in an evolving cosmos, shaping its next chapter.
Brian Swimme and Monica DeRaspe-Bolles explore heredity, tools, reflective consciousness, communication, population, trade, cerebralization, and convergence across four eras of human history. Based on contemporary science and empirical data, their book challenges readers to move past Modernity’s overemphasis on rationality and embrace the dynamism of imagination and reflection, into the noospheric era―the unification of humanity.
Brian Swimme explores the concept of the noosphere.
The Universe Story presents a narrative of cosmic evolution, from the Big Bang to the emergence of human consciousness. Fusing scientific discovery with spiritual insight, it offers a new, sacred story that redefines humanity’s place in the cosmos. This “New Story” replaces the outdated, mechanistic worldview that has led to ecological crisis, urging a shift toward ecological responsibility and a deeper connection to the living Earth.
A Landscape of Consciousness
Diverse explanations or theories of consciousness are arrayed on a roughly physicalist-to-nonphysicalist landscape of essences and mechanisms. Categories: Materialism Theories (philosophical, neurobiological, electromagnetic field, computational and informational, homeostatic and affective, embodied and enactive, relational, representational, language, phylogenetic evolution); Non-Reductive Physicalism; Quantum Theories; Integrated Information Theory; Panpsychisms; Monisms; Dualisms; Idealisms; Anomalous and Altered States Theories; Challenge Theories. There are many subcategories, especially for Materialism Theories. Each explanation is self-described by its adherents, critique is minimal and only for clarification, and there is no attempt to adjudicate among theories. The implications of consciousness explanations or theories are assessed with respect to four questions: meaning/purpose/value (if any); AI consciousness; virtual immortality; and survival beyond death. A Landscape of Consciousness, I suggest, offers perspective.
The Dream of the Earth
Noted cultural historian Thomas Berry provides nothing less than a new intellectual-ethical framework for the human community by positing planetary well-being as the measure of all human activity. Drawing on the wisdom of Western philosophy, Asian thought, and Native American traditions, as well as contemporary physics and evolutionary biology, Berry offers a new perspective that recasts our understanding of science, technology, politics, religion, ecology, and education. He shows us why it is important for us to respond to the Earth’s need for planetary renewal, and what we must do to break free of the “technological trance” that drives a misguided dream of progress. Only then, he suggests, can we foster mutually enhancing human-Earth relationships that can heal our traumatized global biosystem.