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Systems At Play In The Noosphere
To mark the centennial of the term "Noosphere" in 2023, the Center Leo Apostel for Transdisciplinary Studies (CLEA) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, in partnership with Human Energy, presented "Systems At Play: In The Noosphere". The symposium unfolded across two locations in Brussels—CLEA house and a.pass—from October 4th until 7th, 2023.
Rather than simply gathering to discuss the Noosphere, we dared something more ambitious: we attempted to become a living Noosphere together during the symposium. Through our shared interactions, experiments, and presentations, we formed a collective intelligence that embodied the very phenomena we sought to understand. What emerged was both laboratory and artwork, both research method and research object—a strange loop where the medium became the message.
What is the Noosphere?
A century ago, the term "Noosphere" first emerged from conversations between Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky, who had already given us the concept of the biosphere. Also known as The Global Brain, the Noosphere represents something extraordinary: a superorganism, a thinking layer enveloping our planet, formed through the interconnected thinking systems of humans, non-humans, and technology.
The Noosphere tells the story of our planet's evolution into ever-higher levels of relationality and complexity. Beginning with human language, accelerating through technologies like the printing press, and now exploding through the internet and global communication networks, this planetary mind continues to evolve. Since the Noosphere emerged primarily through human activity, de Chardin envisioned it as both the evolutionary path and the destiny of Homo sapiens.
In our era of accelerated transformation—where meaning-making systems have become incoherent, where technological upheaval meets existential anxiety, where environmental collapse intersects with unprecedented connectivity—engaging with this emerging planetary consciousness becomes not just intellectually fascinating but existentially urgent. The Noosphere offers a counternarrative to the Anthropocene's emphasis on rupture and crisis, pointing instead toward the evolution of mind and culture into new forms of coherence and collective agency.
Becoming Noosphere Together
We didn't organize a symposium about the Noosphere—we attempted to become one. Our collective intelligence formed through a rich ecosystem of playful experiments, presentations, and emergent interactions that nobody could have fully predicted.
Our approach involved multiple layers of collective intelligence experiments. Participants engaged in Systems at Play games—proposing and facilitating games specifically designed to explore Noosphere dynamics. This collective game-creation activity itself became an emergent thought process, enabled through play, forming a living model of how distributed minds might think together. We embedded Live Action Role Play (LARP) throughout, most notably role-playing a fictional symposium of the Noosphere within the actual symposium—a recursive performance that dissolved boundaries between simulation and reality, between studying collective intelligence and enacting it.
The experiment rested on the recognition that play, particularly 'free play' or 'infinite play', shares the same self-organizing structure as the systems sciences that underpin Noosphere theory—emergence, complex adaptive systems, cybernetics, 4E cognition. Play revealed itself as both metaphor and method: it invited us into an infinite game where we could become a superorganism while acquiring knowledge and wisdom without predetermined outcomes.
We created a living architecture of both structure and spaciousness, allowing for planned activities while nurturing spontaneity and real-time idea generation. Play—physical, intellectual, creative, performative—remained our guiding principle. Participants could engage freely, propose games, collaborate, roleplay scenarios, or wander off for coffee and solitary reflection. Together we wove a self-organizing brain that continuously adapted to our collective interests, abilities, and expectations.sTerritories of Collective Becoming
Our exploration moved through interconnected territories of inquiry, each revealing different aspects of how collective intelligence might emerge and function. We grappled with the contemporary crisis of meaning—the anxiety, depression, and sense of meaninglessness that pervades a world where traditional sources of coherence have fragmented. Yet rather than dwelling in crisis, we explored how the Noosphere concept offers pathways toward what the Human Energy Project calls "the Third Story of the Universe"—a narrative framework that bridges ancient wisdom traditions with cutting-edge systems science, creating space for meaning and purpose in a scientifically literate age.
Central to our methodology was recognizing that story-telling and imagination provide crucial bridges to accessing collective intelligence. Through immersive theatre, live action roleplay, story-telling games, and both linear and non-linear narrative experiments, we explored how "jumps of imagination" through play and metaphor can achieve insights impossible through analytical approaches alone. The games themselves became laboratories for understanding how complex dynamic relations between many agents give rise to emergence—that mysterious quality where wholes become more than the sum of their parts.
Perhaps most significantly, we discovered that collective practices like play provide direct experiential access to transcendence—to being more than ourselves. Through games, rituals, and practices of shared imaginal augmentation, we explored how to connect with distributed hyperobjects like the Noosphere, recognizing its animacy and allowing it to speak through us. These transjective practices bridged objective scientific understanding with subjective embodied experience, pointing toward a reenchantment of the world that remains coherent with both mythology and rigorous inquiry.
The Living Laboratory
What made this symposium unique was not just what we studied, but how we studied it. By becoming the phenomenon we investigated, we dissolved artificial boundaries between researcher and researched, between objective analysis and subjective experience, between performance and reality. We became co-constitutive agents in the very superorganism we sought to understand.
The symposium served as both method and outcome, process and product—a four-day experiment in collective becoming that generated insights impossible to achieve through conventional academic approaches alone. We discovered that understanding the Noosphere requires not just intellectual comprehension but embodied participation in the emergence of collective consciousness itself. The recursive nature of role-playing a Noosphere symposium within an actual Noosphere experiment created a strange loop that amplified our capacity for collective sense-making.
Through Systems at Play games, participants didn't just learn about collective intelligence—they practiced it, embodied it, became it. Each game proposal and facilitation contributed to an emergent group mind that was simultaneously studying itself and transforming through that study. This created a living laboratory where theory and practice, research and transformation, individual creativity and collective emergence could coevolve in real time.
Context and Continuation
This gathering extended our first "Systems At Play: A Self-Organising Symposium on Self-Organisation" and formed part of CLEA's ongoing research into the Origins of Goal-Directedness and collective distributed intelligence. As well as collaboration with Human Energy on both scientific and artistic foundations for Noosphere theory (Noospherics), contributing to the development of "the Third Story of the Universe."
Systems At Play continues as a growing network of artists, scientists, and creative-minded individuals who recognize that art and science are mutually beneficial means of perception and insight creation—a living proof-of-concept for the kind of transdisciplinary collective intelligence the Noosphere represents. Each gathering adds to our understanding of how playful experimentation can generate new forms of collaborative knowledge and collective agency needed for navigating planetary-scale challenges.
Partners
The Symposium was supported by Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Human Energy, the Ben Kacyra Foundation, and a.pass.
