1/28/12

On the Question-Does an Intelligent Super-Organism Exist on Earth?

Pierre Telhard De Chardin wrote of a layered life approach and of a noosphere. The cosmogenesis approach is interesting. Telhard was a World War One French Army officer who got so drunk on Armistice Day that he couldn't get the key into the lock on his door. He was also a priest and theologian. It is impressive that he could view stomachs hanging in trees and later write such interesting and optimistic philosophy.

http://www.bizcharts.com/stoa_del_sol/plenum/plenum_2.html

James Lovelock and the Gaia hypothesis argued that the world ecosphere behaves like an intelligent organism. The complex feedback mechanisms of which there are a zillion act together. One can consider Elton's research on the way bare post-glacial era northern island became populated with vegetation and other, larger life as guano from seabirds and seabirds themselves as food and in other capacities helped to reinforce an increase population of life forms. If bees were taken out of the life equation on Earth that would present quite a few problems.

Regarding the web of life as an integral whole is a fundamental parameter of contemporary ecospheric research I would guess. Several books have been published on ecosystems integrity from the requirement that large predators exist to the harm done to the American southwest by the removal of mammoths of the elephant family whose footprints allowed seed to grow.
Human beings are too a part of the ecosphere as are their intellect such as exists outside the beltway. Some of the intellects are daft regarding the ecosphere and do their best to exterminate much of it en mass instead of conserving it while they advance science and technology to the purpose of knowledge and human well being. The ecosphere isn't just an aesthetic luxury.

Inevitably the political trail returns to the oval of NASCAR and high-octane automobile pollution-that may not change soon.

Lovelock wrote in 'The Final Warning' that the human population may drop to about 200 million in the future as a result of global warming and other issues. At that point the global temperature may stabilize. Lovelock conjectures that if humanity continues its usual greenhouse gassing at that point Gaia will simply remove the remnant of humanity.

Life may act on Earth as a giant organism. G.W.F. Hegel believed that life on Earth is a process of God realizing awareness of Himself in history that fits rather well with the Gaia criteria.

There are additional ways to consider an ecosphere in larger, intelligent organisms in discrete or monistic guise. Ant colonies sometimes seem to act as intelligent collectives-one must consider the Borg obviously as a future mode of ultra-right-wing or left wing consumerism.
Of even more concern to some is the potential that some of those giant fungi discovered now and then to be the largest organisms in the world have as much intelligence as federal budget planners. Then there are whales and ravens-seemingly happy creatures of moderate intelligence in tune with the temporal times even as they decline.
The entire quantum universe could be a super-intelligence, quantum computer or God running this Universe as a sub-routine.

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