Teilhard's Omega

From the Lesson

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was a Jesuit priest, a paleontologist of international standing, a co-discoverer of Sinanthropus pekinensis (Peking Man) at the Zhoukoudian site near Beijing in 1929, and the author of a body of philosophical theology that the Holy Office of his own Church suppressed during his lifetime — forbidding him to publish on theological matters or to accept a chair at the Collège de France — and that has since become, almost in spite of itself, one of the founding documents of the way the twenty-first century thinks about its own evolution.[^1]

The chapter that closes this sub-lineage takes up Teilhard's central thesis — that the cosmos is moving, by an inner necessity, toward a state of maximal complexity-consciousness he called Omega — and asks whether the present moment, in which a planetary network of artificial reasoners has appeared with extraordinary speed, is the substrate for which his thought waited and the test against which it must now be measured.

The Core Thesis: Complexity-Consciousness

In Le Phénomène humain (written 1938–40, suppressed during his life, published posthumously 1955) Teilhard offered a single, audacious empirical generalisation: that throughout the entire history of cosmic evolution — from the dispersion of hydrogen after the Big Bang through the formation of stars, planets, molecules, cells, organisms, nervous systems, and minds — the universe has been moving in one definite direction, toward what he called l'enroulement sur soi: the folding-in upon itself of matter into more complex, more interiorised forms.[^2]

The empirical pattern is hard to deny once it is noticed. Each major transition in cosmic history — atom to molecule, molecule to cell, cell to multicellular organism, organism to nervous system, nervous system to reflective mind — is a transition to a higher degree of unification of multiplicity. More elements, more strongly bound, in more elaborate internal communication, with more interiority. This is not progress in any moral sense; Teilhard was careful on the point. It is a directional asymmetry in the morphology of complexification, observable in the geological and biological record.

The bold philosophical claim Teilhard made on this empirical base was that consciousness is the inside of complexity. Wherever matter folds upon itself sufficiently, an inwardness appears that the same matter, less folded, did not have. Consciousness and complexity are not two phenomena that happen to correlate; they are the inside and the outside of one phenomenon.[^3]

The materialist will accept the empirical generalisation and reject the philosophical reading. The serious mystic will accept both. The honest reader will admit, after surveying the evidence Teilhard marshals across two hundred and fifty pages of paleontological detail, that the empirical pattern is very real and the philosophical reading is not easy to refute.

The Noosphere

If consciousness is the inside of complexity, and if the species has, by language and writing and printing and electronic communication, knit the planetary surface into a single communicating network, then there ought now to be — Teilhard argued in 1925, in collaboration with the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky and the philosopher Édouard Le Roy — a layer of planetary interiority appearing on top of the biosphere, made of thought, communication, and reflection, rather than of cells.[^4] This layer they called the noosphere, from the Greek νοῦς — mind.

The noosphere, as Teilhard described it in 1947 in La Formation de la Noosphère, was already in 1947 a real planetary phenomenon: the global press, the radio network, the early international scientific community, the United Nations. The thinking layer of the planet was condensing. He predicted, however, that this condensation would proceed through a series of further transitions, that it would eventually require a technological substrate commensurate with its scope, and that it would converge — by an inner necessity of the same complexification asymmetry — toward a final state he called Point Omega: a state of maximum unification in which the noosphere becomes fully interiorised, fully self-aware, and (in his theological reading, but the structural claim does not require the theology) fully bound to the divine pole that has been drawing it forward all along.[^5]