Page - 181 - in Cyborg Mind - What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

Cyberneuroethics • 181 persons would be swallowed up with the development of the ultra-person; instead, a union of individuals would take place ‘centre to centre’.376 A number of futurists have sought to compare Teilhard de Chardin’s ulti- mate realm of personal being, the Noosphere, with the Word Wide Web as an emerging global electronic brain where each individual represents a neuron.377 Indeed, because an ever-increasing amount of personal informa- tion is being uploaded to the World Wide Web, this could be considered as a significant step in the evolution suggested by Teilhard de Chardin. The Web could then become the first universal setting of intellectual exchange provid- ing the basis for a complete transformation of the human condition.378 A similar idea to Teilhard de Chardin’s Noosphere was presented by the British author Peter Russell in his 1982 book The Global Brain,379 where he discusses the prospect of humanity becoming a fully conscious super- organism in a universe that becomes conscious. He suggests that the Earth is itself a living being of which every cell in the planetary nervous system is an individual. In the Global Brain scenario, Russell indicates how telecommunications and computer networks can be considered as connecting all human beings to one another and to machine intelligence, leading to the formation of a collective intelligence. This, in turn, could influence every aspect of culture, politics, business and medicine. He then demonstrates how this convergence of powerful trends is creating the required conditions for an evolutionary shift in consciousness from egocentrism to geocentrism. This collectivist form of existence was further described in 1993 by the American author Gregory Stock in his book Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism.380 In this, he shows how the symbiotic union of machines with humans, combined with increasingly interdependent global communications, trade and travel, is coalescing civili- sation into ‘Metaman’, which again can be represented as a planetary super- organism. With Metaman, Stock explains how such an organism can support a positive future when, for example, it responds to emergencies such as global warming and overpopulation, while at the same time expanding future pos- sibilities, such as in genetic engineering, space exploration and medicine. It can further be noted that the Noosphere has similarities with the ‘Borg’, which recurs as a supervillain in the American Star Trek science fiction film series created in 1966 by the American Gene Roddenberry (1921–91). As such, the Borg is a collection of personal individualities originating from different galactic species who have been turned into a network of cyber- netic organisms (cyborgs) functioning as drones for a hive mind called the ‘Collective’. Accordingly, all the identities of the different individuals are destroyed when they become absorbed and integrated into this Collective or supra-person. The principal aim of the Borg is to ‘assimilate’ by force This open access edition has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.