This chapter is focused on the concept of noosphere. Focusing on the noosphere means analyzing the actual complexes of knowledge production: the physical locations, incentives, material conditions, economic arrangements and social formations that make possible the knowledge, theory, observation, description and ideas that constitute the noosphere. This chapter aims at studying human knowledge considered as a global network of interacting constituents in self-replicating loops and nested systems. That is, knowledge considered on the model of the biosphere, and as part of the biosphere. The key question deals with an investigation concerning the connection of the concept with human thought. Starting from the idea that noosphere’s input comes from humans, is it possible that non-human entities contribute to the noosphere? If we consider that the basic criterion for recognizing something as part of the noosphere is relational, we should be aware that the influence of external ideas can be considered an element of the noosphere. And what if a machine intelligence produces knowledge that interacts with other knowledge and therefore partially constitutes the noosphere? The answer should be positive. We can consider the chess engine Deep Blue’s 1997. Its move against Kasparov contribute to a chess match now learned by human grandmasters and new chess programs alike, which themselves combine and recombine to generate new variations, new brilliancies. Machines can give their contributes to the noosphere. To consider the new noosphere is also to see it as a made object that subsists on physical conditions, not a mind floating frictionlessly above the world. This allows us to argue about what we want this made object to look like, how we want it to function, whose contributions we emphasize.
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