Teilhard and the Web

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Teilhard and the Web

• Metaphors for New Space
• James Hayes-Bohanan, Ph.D.
• Bridgewater State College
• Department of Earth Sciences and Geography
• Center for the Advancement of Research and
  Teaching (CART)

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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

• Born Auvergne, France 1881
• Studied geology and paleontology taught physics
  and chemistry
• Ordained as Jesuit priest 1912
• Sorbonne doctorate 1922
• Paleontology research in China 1923 to 1946
• Legion of Honor 1946
• Died in New York 1955

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Unity of Creation

• each of us is perforce linked by all the
  material organic and psychic strands of his being
  to all that surrounds him sic.

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Continuity with Past and Present

• If we look far enough back in the depths of
  time, the disordered anthill of living beings
  suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges
  itself in longs files that make their way by
  various paths toward greater consciousness.

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Human Role in Evolution

• there is an absolute direction of growth, to
  which both our duty and our happiness demand that
  we should conform. It is the human function to
  complete cosmic evolution.

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Evolution is toward greater complexity

• Geological Evolution Energy
• Biological Evolution Life
• Human Evolution Consciousness

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Noosphere

• above the animal biosphere a human sphere, a
  sphere of reflection, of conscious intervention,
  of conscious souls

human consciousness turned in upon itself
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Science

• For Teilhard, science was in the service of
  directed evolution toward higher orders of
  consciousness.

research students are numbered in the hundreds
of thousands -- soon to be millions -- and they
are no longer distributed superficially and at
random over the globe, but they are functionally
linked together in a vast organic system that
will remain in the future indispensable to the
life of the community. 1961
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World Wide Web

• Gophers
• Gopherspace
• Archie, Jughead, and Veronica
• Hypertext
• Hyperspace
• Images
• Commerce-free

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1999 The Year of eCommerce

• 0.1 of U.S. Commerce

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Has the Internet Changed Our Daily Lives?
Where did Jeremys message go on its way to his
mother?
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Noosphere?
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Y2K Connection

• The y2k computer failure problem is like a
  massive intertwined ring of dominoes - one little
  nudge anywhere in the rings and you stand to
  witness an amazing chain reaction.
• In this case the nudge is the year 2000 and the
  intertwined rings of dominoes are those aspects
  of our society - worldwide - that interact with
  computers.
• Rev. Dacia Reid

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An Ever-Denser Network
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at all scales

• Net gives way to fabric
• More information in smaller spaces
• Oxygen
• Smart Dust
• Biological Models

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Questions

• Is the Web really different from earlier
  technologies - from Gutenberg to the telegraph
  (the Victorian Internet)?
• Does the Web represent some sort of collective
  consiousness?
• If not, is this nonetheless a good metaphor?
• Could better metaphors be found?

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More Questions

• Will the Web do more to unite -- as Teilhard
  might have hoped -- or to divide?
• Given the bugs seen in todays technologies, are
  such developments as Oxygen and Smart Dust really
  possible?

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More on Teilhard and the Web

• HTTP//TOPCAT.BRIDGEW.EDU/
• JHAYESBOH/TEILHARD.HTM