Toward an Evolutionary Ecology of the Noosphere

Presented by Jacob Foster as part of Human Energy's N2 Conference 2023 at the University of California, Berkeley


In this talk, I will explore the noosphere by close analogy with the biosphere -- in other words, I will advance concepts and methods for investigating the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of the noosphere. Drawing on ideas from cultural evolution, cognitive science, cognitive anthropology, cognitive sociology, and evolutionary biology, I will argue that the noosphere is populated with cultural lineages that compete for human attention and memory. Like biological organisms, these cultural organisms can also interact mutualistically. Most obviously, the introduction of novel categories of cultural lineage can increase the overall cultural carrying capacity. In other words, human creativity can lead to niche construction of the noosphere. I illustrate these theoretical ideas with an empirical example--the history of metal music—showing that this story is dominated by a series of key innovations in which new genres add to the overall carrying capacity and themselves incubate a combinatorial exploration of aesthetic possibilities. This perspective also sheds distinct light on the relationship between humans and the ongoing growth of the noosphere. On the one hand, individual humans can be viewed as commensal organisms whose culturally-mediated cognition is profoundly shaped by a population of noospheric symbionts. On the other hand, they can also be viewed as critical ecosystem engineers who shape the noosphere as a niche through their creativity. I also compare and contrast this view of individual and collective human intelligence with the view implicit in contemporary artificial intelligence, particularly when it comes to questions of meaning.


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