Noosphere, a Protocol for Thought
subconscious.substack.com
subconscious.substack.com
Originally, the term "noosphere" appeared in the work of the Russian-Ukrainian Soviet scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, The Biosphere, first published in 1926. The word "biosphere" was invented by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, whom Vernadsky met in 1911.
> In Vernadsky's theory of the Earth's development, the noosphere is the third stage in the earth's development, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition will fundamentally transform the biosphere. In this theory, the principles of both life and cognition are essential features of the Earth's evolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vernadsky
Another thinker who developed the concept of the "noosphere" is a French Jesuit priest and scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In his book The Phenomenon of Man, written in the 1930s, he:
> set forth a sweeping account of the unfolding of the cosmos and the evolution of matter to humanity.
> The unfolding of the material cosmos is described from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere, and finally to his vision of the Omega Point in the future, which is "pulling" all creation towards it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin
This "Omega point" is a precursor to the concept of the technological "Singularity" - but with a more explicit religious/spiritual connotation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point#Technological_sing...
Space marines have been a staple of the genre since forever, titans come straight out of anime, starch cubes are quite literally soylent green (it's even given a wink in Necromunda, being called "Soylent Viridian") and of course the God Emperor was there first in the Dune series.
https://youtu.be/_J_WtktTzEI?t=3386
As a student, I was very persuaded by that old French theologian, teilhard de chardin, who wrote a book called the phenomenon of man, which is...Pretentious gibberish,, but it fooled me when I was a student.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin#Inf...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Age#Christian_perspectives
Published in 1937, it's in public domain (in Canada at least), and can be downloaded in various formats here: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20200108
> Star Maker tackles philosophical themes such as the essence of life, of birth, decay and death, and the relationship between creation and creator. A pervading theme is that of progressive unity within and between different civilizations.
> Some of the elements and themes briefly discussed prefigure later fiction concerning genetic engineering and alien life forms. Sir Arthur C. Clarke considered Star Maker to be "probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written", and Brian W. Aldiss called it "the one great grey holy book of science fiction".
That's high praise coming from these classic authors of the sci-fi genre.
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Would you mind elaborating on Bogdanov? It's apparently a common family name, and I couldn't find anyone in relation to Teilhard de Chardin. Maybe you mean Alexander Bogdanov, who was a philosopher and science fiction writer?
Personally, I've tried maintaining a personal knowledge graph and it's...not for me. I find having to process everything digitally and dealing with the sheer amount of information presented to be too overwhelming. I much prefer notebooks, where I only ever see "one thing at a time" even though there's a sea of information in there. The only substantial benefit digital tools provide over notebooks, to me, are hyperlinks, and that's even marginal if you mostly reference only either your own notes or complete books (vs. websites, at which point it becomes substantially more useful).
Notebooks are still way faster for information capture, have no restrictions in terms of formatting, don't waste time with matters of using separate commands/ui/concepts for organization: tagging, folder structure, etc. Sure no hyperlinks but it takes 5 seconds to flip through pages to find things if you use some personal approach to indexing. I don't think any digital counterpart has really surpassed pen and paper when it comes to private notes--sharing notes, on the other hand, does seem like a good fit for digital tooling and I'm curious to see if the noosphere will beat out tools for this already built on http
Inevitably, Subconscious (our companion notebook app) will manifest some opinions that not everyone will love. But, it has some qualities that you may find appealing (given your stated preferences):
- Almost no formatting in the default note syntax: https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/subtext
- De-emphasis on hierarchy (flat namespace for notes; no semantically meaningful nesting in note content)
- The core of the Noosphere protocol is designed to enable ergonomic linking
Noosphere will also bring end-to-end encryption for securing private notes or sharing with specific groups of others.
Teilhard de Chardin calls this third world the "Noosphere", that is, the world of the mind.
https://genius.com/The-orb-oobe-lyrics
I was curious if anybody would pick up on it, but I guess it's a pretty obscure song. Not sure where the sample is from originally, actually.
Gee, ya think?
And it's not just prose, it's prose of the sort that one might expect to find here on HN. So you should not be surprised when someone's Bayesian prior on that passage leans heavily towards original prose.
(The real irony here is that it actually is a deepity, it just happens to be sourced from a context where deepities are normal.)
It's important to understand the history, context, and dialogues of noetics otherwise one might be taken advantage of. The noosphere is none other than an ecological adaptation of noetics confirmed to fit modernism ie: the inexorable march of progress narrative.
Roughly mid-20th century, noetics we're reframed as a process of externalizing/alienating internal social ontologies as if they were real things. Again, it's important to understand this so as not to commit the previous historical sins. The reason I bring this up is because people inadvertently (or purposely) externalize their personal ontologies as fact nearly all the time. There's great constructive power in "is" and anyone interacting with the "Noosphere" should be actively aware as such.
[0] https://github.com/interplanetarymindmap/docs/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9TudZ_fC3o/ [2] https://xavivives.com/
I'm also concerned about the immutability of information stored in this way. [2] There are a number of reasons why immutability (in this case a fully public version history) is an anti-feature, with significant real-world risks. I would push the protocol authors to fully consider the ramifications of doxxing, harassment, accidental self-disclosure, etc—especially in authoritarian nations. If they don't have a story for how they'll handle this, it's not an appropriate foundation for the internet of ideas.
[1]: https://subconscious.network
[2]: https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/blob/main/d...
>three things average users demonstrably don't care about
I always ask this question myself (and have an interest in all things no-code). But this is about the underlying Internet layers.
For decades, from the ARPANET to the IETF, a small clique were unchallenged and unhurried in presenting their solutions methodically in RFC after RFC. They did a great job.
Now The upper OSI model is breaking up. Everybody has a vision and a voice. Every day brings new projects like this one here in HN.
There is not even large consensus around that leading Web3 banner [0]. So, IMO this natural selection process will take us at least a decade (or two?) to coagulate into standards that support mainstream "normal users" use cases
I'd argue that a similar thing happens with end-to-end encryption. A lot of users don't care or even think about whether their Twitter or Mastodon direct messages are encrypted, until a malicious actor reads these messages or a data breach has them released online.
In other words, you own your data because you can change infrastructure providers as it suits you, and other users who interact with you on the network generally won't notice or otherwise care that you did that.
This is a topic that we take seriously and think about a lot together. We've had some good discussions in our Discord, and some of our motivating goals have manifested as issues on Github: https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere/issues?q=is...
Our work is open source, and we are building it in the open hand-in-hand with our community. I personally respond to as many issues and stray comments on Discord as I can. If this is a topic that you care about, your feedback, comments and ideas would be very welcome.
> I would push the protocol authors to fully consider the ramifications of doxxing, harassment, accidental self-disclosure, etc—especially in authoritarian nations. If they don't have a story for how they'll handle this, it's not an appropriate foundation for the internet of ideas.
My personal opinion is that we need more than a story. Our users need tools that empower them to be in control of their data, and that includes being able to keep private data private, fix mistakes and execute countermeasures when they are threatened with abuse.
And it's true: immutable data is a double-edged sword. The primary benefit we seek from it is content addressing, which enables us to look up some data in a way that makes data providers fungible. This has an advantage when it comes to censorship: if censored network A can't give you your data, you may be able to find it on uncensored network B as long as your know the content address. It also presents a challenge: sometimes a user may rightly wish for data to be removed from the network; content addressing creates the possibility that an abuser may have access to data in a way that further dis-empowers users who are already vulnerable today.
Here is a strong opinion (weakly held) that I have about mutability: the "mutability" of the hypertext web has not spared us from the kinds of danger described above. We have leaned on mutability as a privacy crutch, and in turn we have excused ourselves from providing capabilities and interfaces that enable real privacy and agency for users under threat. For example, a user may think a Snap message is extra private - from their perspective, the message is ephemeral - but others will still find ways to make copies and propagate the data across the network, and Snap the company certainly has access to the data (perhaps in perpetuity). What recourse does that user have once their data escapes the mutable sandbox?
It's possible that immutable data will enable us to build better tools for taking pro-active action against abuse. For example: today on the hypertext web, the recourse for most users to head off the propagation of harmful data is to reach out to service providers individually, file abuse claims and hope that the content is eventually removed. Victims are burdened with both identifying that the data is stored with a provider, and also the clerical task of reporting the abuse over and over again. In a world with content addressing, anti-abuse filters full of content addresses may propagate fluidly from provider to provider, which suggests a far less burdensome process for the abuse victim - they don't need to know that the content has surfaced on some provider in the distance, because the provider is already aware of the abuse claim and can pro-actively refuse to propagate the data.
In the end, I think the best solutions to the problems of this kind of abuse will be social/legal ones, supported by a technical foundation that can enable pro-active countermeasures.
All that said, I'm not an expert on this topic, I just like to spend a lot of time thinking about it. If you or someone else reading this is an expert, and you have some time to spare, please come hang out in our Discord or on Github and teach us what you know!
Are there any envisioned use cases highlighting the value proposition?
Absolutely it would. Just as a quick example, there was an author whose name was red on Wikipedia, which I think means that someone intended to make a page for them at one point.
I created this page and it got blocked by a 17 year old because there wasn't enough citations. This was an author of 20 books, but Wikipedia won't allow his page because there wasn't... newspaper articles written about him??
Why should this information be lost to the world because Wikipedia is run by bored megalomaniacs?
I think that Larry Sanger's vision is to create a federated network of multiple encyclopedia's that can each specialize in their specific area. But Noosphere seems to want to be the P2P version of that. Cut out the middle man, I suppose.
I would assume that there will also be indexes that curate and collect the best spheres for people to search as well.
> @gordon/composability
This is where (one of) the problem lies, in my view.
@gordon is essentially an equivalent of a DNS system. The difference, however, is that you are trying to identify a file. There should be only one namespace, not many. @gordon/composability shouldn't be different than @simon/composability. "composability" should be simply the unique ID for a specific file.
> The plot twist is that spheres don’t point to a particular server! Instead, spheres are data structures that live on IPFS.
Oh, but it seems that you agree with me!! Except, you don't.
I'm just very confused.
People should try to ELI5 things, instead of trying to sound too smart but failing at serving a clear explanation.
Thanks for this interesting provocation!
In Noosphere and Subconscious, we are trying to relax the tension between "I can write to any name in the space" and "I don't want what I write to be clobbered by other people writing to the same name in the space."
So, you have a personal scope where only you have write access. We call it a sphere. Within the sphere, you save files to a flat namespace. Other users can write to the same flat namespace in their spheres. And, when you follow another user, Subconscious will collide the namespaces in the UI. So, the content in @gordon/composability and @simon/composability will appear next to each other.
Am i missing something?
One of the essential benefits of this protocol above and beyond content stored on IPFS is: you get human-readable names for your content and your peers, and you can use those names to form links that refer to other data. Memos give us a way to deliver free-form headers up-front that are also decoupled from the raw data of the content, which is very nice to have when resolving links to content you don't know much about.
Other protocols in this domain start with the premise: in order to organize thought, we should crystalize the data structures to represent thought.
In our approach we seek to develop a substrate that such data structures may emerge from, but without a rigid presumption of how they ought to form (or even that there should be only one representation).
Are there Math theorems that "proves" this sort of "highly abstract" level of designs? Are there Academics working on this? or is this uncharted territory?
- https://subconscious.substack.com/p/compositionality
- https://subconscious.substack.com/p/provoking-emergence-with...
- https://subconscious.substack.com/p/coevolution-creates-livi...
- https://subconscious.substack.com/p/simple-seeds
Gordon and I both try to be available to talk as often as possible in our Discord, though.
tft is at the intersection of so many currents, and these articles prove it. This is exactly what we need more of.
I'm not versed in those "highly abstract" designs either. I'm just hoping you start this ambitious project on the best foundations possible.
Perhaps we could use something to assist the flow of information between researchers within syntopic fields. So to see a generic system like the Memo / Spheres system makes me pretty happy.
Edit: It's in one of the images. Content ID.
To offer one distinction: while both projects are at an early stage and undergoing development, Noosphere has been open source from the beginning. You can scrutinize our work and kick the cans on it today (warning: very alpha / do not use in production). We invite active participation from all who are interested, and welcome contributions to our Github projects.
Is there a text editing app with a social element where you follow other people?
Also, we have recently released a Swift package that gives a path to easily install our project as a dependency in XCode. We're turning the corner on offering the same FFI backing implementation as a TypeScript + WASM package, too. But, as I mentioned it's early days for us, so set your expectations accordingly.
The best way to stay up to date with new things you can do is join our Discord. I make regular announcements there about our technical progress.
This is (I think) supposed to be a shared language between note-taking apps (and eventually others that include "thoughts" I presume). The hopes are that it does "affect everybody," but it is not something that can "affect everybody" without "apps" speaking in this shared language.
If you are not somebody who works on these kinds of things, then yea, probably useless to you for now. I think the author wants interoperability at the "thought" level between apps that support users inputting their ideas.