At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Francis Heylighen collaborated with Shima Beigi on a research paper about the noosphere’s response to the global crisis, titled Collective Consciousness Supported by the Web: Healthy or Toxic?

Imagine a giant, intelligent brain made of humanity and its computers—the Global Brain. This idea blends views of society as a living organism, a universal encyclopedia, and an emerging higher consciousness. Global networks like the Internet not only share information but also learn and adapt together. By combining insights from evolution and cybernetics, we can overcome conflicts and build a collective intelligence that makes solving world problems more efficient and creative.

In this roundtable, experts explore the noosphere—Earth’s emerging “thinking layer” of collective consciousness. They examine how global networks create a “planetary brain” integrating human knowledge, potentially developing consciousness-like properties through information exchange. The speakers envision this evolving noosphere as key to solving humanity’s complex challenges through collaborative intelligence.

Complex systems theorist Heylighen and evolutionary biologist Wilson discuss a possible phase transition of humanity in which the members of our species become neurons in a planetary brain, utilizing the Internet as a shared exocortex.

We approach the problem of the extended mind from a radically non-dualist perspective. The separation between mind and matter is an artefact of the outdated mechanistic worldview, which leaves no room for mental phenomena such as agency, intentionality, or feeling. We propose to replace it by an action ontology, which conceives mind and matter as aspects of the same network of processes. By adopting the intentional stance, we interpret the catalysts of elementary reactions as agents exhibiting desires, intentions, and sensations. Autopoietic networks of reactions constitute more complex super-agents, which moreover exhibit memory, deliberation and sense-making. In the specific case of social networks, individual agents coordinate their actions via the propagation of challenges. The distributed cognition that emerges from this interaction cannot be situated in any individual brain. This non-dualist, holistic view extends and operationalises process metaphysics and Eastern philosophies. It is supported by both mindfulness experiences and mathematical models of action, self-organisation, and cognition.

The world-wide web has been conceptualized as a global brain for humanity due to its neural network-like organization. To determine whether this global brain could exhibit features associated with consciousness, we review three neuroscientific theories of consciousness: information integration, adaptive resonance and global workspace. These theories propose that conscious states are characterized by a globally circulating, resonant pattern of activity that is sufficiently coherent to be examined and reflected upon. We then propose a correspondence between this notion and Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the noosphere as a forum for collective thinking, and explore some implications of this self-organizing dynamics for the evolution of shared, global understanding.

This paper explores Turchin’s metasystem transition concept in social systems, analyzing collective evolution principles and competitive/synergetic configurations. It highlights how similar systems engage in negative sum competition, hindering group optimization, and suggests shared controls to foster cooperation. Examples like multicellularity and human sociality illustrate this transition. However, ongoing competition among cooperators yields ambivalent sociality and weak integration. The study reviews social control mechanisms’ strengths/weaknesses and acknowledges the complex optimization challenges in societal evolution, suggesting a long, challenging path to global integration.

Could human consciousness transcend biological limits and merge with advanced technology to achieve a form of cybernetic immortality? In Heylighen’s vision, our essence suvives through evolving hybrid systems, preserving individuality while fostering unprecedented connectivity. This integration doesn’t diminish our humanity but amplifies it, allowing us to explore the cosmos and push the boundaries of existence. While not everyone may choose this path, those who do could shape the destiny of our species and the cosmos.

The Global Brain paradigm views the emerging global information network connecting humans and technology as a nervous system for Earth’s social superorganism. This special issue surveys opportunities and challenges in developing this potentially more intelligent, synergetic system. Contributions explore political, economic, and philosophical aspects, aiming to guide the transition towards a sustainable society empowering diversity.

The global brain can be conceived most fundamentally as a higher level of evolution, the way humans form a higher level of organization that evolved out of the animals. Although the analogy between an organism and a society can be applied even to primitive societies, it becomes clearly more applicable as technology develops. As transport and communication become more efficient, different parts of global society become more interdependent. At the same time, the variety of ideas, specializations, and subcultures increases. This simultaneous integration and differentiation creates an increasingly coherent system, functioning at a much higher level of complexity.

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”.

Society can be viewed as a multicellular organism, with individuals in the role of the cells. The network of communication channels connecting individuals then plays the role of a nervous system for this superorganism, i.e. a “global brain.”

If society is viewed as a superorganism, communication networks play the role of its brain. This metaphor is developed into a model for the design of a more intelligent global network. The World Wide Web, through its distributed hypermedia architecture, functions as an “associative memory”, which may “learn” by the strengthening of frequently used links. Software agents, exploring the Web through spreading activation, function as problem-solving “thoughts”. Users are integrated into this “super-brain” through direct machine interfaces and the reciprocal exchange of knowledge between individual and Web. (Published in Cybernetics and Systems ’96, p. 917–922.)