Consciousness and Technology

Psychology extends tentacles into many subjects and the relationship with technology is of great significance. This is a vast subject and one which is difficult to comprehend completely. The influence of technology began in the stone age with the first flint tools and axes. People began to change their environment to suit themselves in various ways, such as making clothes and cutting down trees to provide a secure area to live in.

The history of human development traces how life has been moulded by human discovery in increasingly complex ways. Fire, cooking and the smelting of metals were significant steps forward. Metal tools and metal aids of various kinds have increased the range of human capability. Fire not only led to the making of metal tools but also became an important source of energy, eventually leading to steam which drove machinery and transport in the industrial revolution. Steam power became replaced by oil as a source of energy and at the same time the discovery of electricity marked a major step forward.

The ability to generate light and control it by means of lenses, lasers and optical fibres has obvious advantages for us, as have the television and computer screen. What started as a slow flow of innovations in the past has been increasing ever more rapidly. Today new innovations in many fields come flooding in. A little thought will illustrate how, at various stages, we have shaped technology which in its turn has impacted us. It is impossible to catalogue it all.

A person who expressed the developing relationship between consciousness and technology well was Pierre Teihard. The life forms encircling the earth are collectively referred to as the Biosphere. He visualised the spread of the Biosphere around the globe ultimately causing competition between living forms leading to the upward developments in evolution. His individual contribution was to claim that the earth had become surrounded by the Noosphere. This is a term which he used to describe the collective conscious minds of animals and human beings around the globe. Just as competition in the Biosphere had resulted in upward physical development, so competition in the Noosphere led to the development of the quality of consciousness in species and individuals. This has resulted in invention and innovations of various technological kinds.

The two, consciousness and technology, have become, as Pierre Teilhard put it, enfolded on each other at various levels. You can see this in the case of steam and electricity which have many practical applications. Some of these are very complex, such as production line machines, and some are humble solutions such as the calculator or the supermarket checkout till. The example of the technology involved in a cataract operation illustrates how technology can impact consciousness by restoring vision, which in turn enables the patient to engage in normal life. Viewing a television screen showing a refugee camp can result in arousing compassion, which often leads to some activity to bring aid.

Consciousness and the effects of technology on our minds are intimately linked and Pierre Teilhard did not distinguish between the two in his term, the Noosphere. Sir Julian Huxley, in the introduction to Peirre Teilhard’s book ‘The Phenomenon of Man’, said that he might be criticised for not defining the term more explicitly. Sir Julian suggests that it might have been better if Pierre Teilhard had reserved the term ‘Noosphere’ for the collective conscious minds around the globe, using a term such as ‘Noosystem’ to describe those systems which interact with the human mind.

Pierre Teilhard considered that the complexity of the Noosphere was necessary for the development of the human mind and that it was the continued interplay of ever increasing complex systems that drove intelligence forward to greater levels. He also held definite views about how the coming together of different races and cultures was important in future development.

We shall see later in the book how his ideas of the way consciousness arose took place. Bertrand Russell had similar ideas. These ideas could lead to pantheism but Pierre Teilhard avoided this conclusion by stressing the personality of individuals. Although, as we have seen in individual consciousness, personality may have a genetic basis, at the conscious level it still represents something of a mystery.

What can be said is that as a result of the communal way that we live together, most people become aware of these technological advances and the effect that they have on our consciousness. Both Sir Julian Huxley and Pierre Teilhard, looking at this phenomena were of the opinion that in the developing Noosphere a new kind of being was being created. James Lovelock had suggested that the Biosphere was interconnected and functioned as an organism. Sir Julian and Pierre Teilhard suggested that the same thing is happening in the Noosphere.

Technology has made it possible to examine the very small, at the level of the atom and subatomic particles. This has increased our understanding of the world in which we live. It may throw light on some of the problems we have encountered with consciousness. Therefore in the next chapter we will look at quantum theory and the strange phenomena of quantum weirdness.