CONCEPT
The Cognitive Biosphere
The global system of intelligence — human, cultural, institutional, and increasingly artificial — that has been building since the emergence of symbolic thought, structurally analogous to the biological biosphere as a self-organizing system whose components modify the conditions for further organization.
The cognitive biosphere is to the domain of information what the biological biosphere is to the domain of chemistry: a self-organizing system whose components modify the conditions for their own continuation. The definition is structural. It does not require consciousness, does not require intention, does not require any organism within the system to understand the system it participates in. The cognitive biosphere has undergone a series of modifications — language, writing, printing, science, technology, and now artificial intelligence — each of which created conditions for the next, and each of which exhibited the same perturbation-and-reorganization pattern that characterizes Gaian transitions in the biological domain. The current modification differs in a structural way: every previous modification externalized a human cognitive function while leaving the mind as the site of cognition. AI externalizes cognition itself, producing conditions for forms of cognitive organization that cannot be predicted from within the current equilibrium.
