Noosphere, infosphere and quantum field: we're planes walkers in complexity !

Michel Fortier

Titular professor

UQAR

Claudine Desrosiers (2020). Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? 12 X 16, mixed techniques on paper.

Foreword

Before going further I suggest, and it is entirely up to you the reader, that you go somewhere where you are in peace and comfortable. In your home or outside; maybe sit in your favorite chair or sofa with music playing that touch you deeply. Take your time. We are in no hurry. Writing this text, I listen to music that lifts my spirit and soothe my heart. For a long time, I felt like the character Nowhere Man of the Beatles psychedelic art project Yellow Submarine. Having been raised to the ideal of science, my life was like his complaint: so little time, so much to know! In the end, marvelously, the Sergeant’s Pepper Lonely Heart Club Band began to play. In all the realm, the dull gray covering everything transforms in glowing and wonderful colors. Nowhere Man, the residents and even the Blue Meanies are healed with magical music. As we hear the song All You Need Is Love, we realize that love is all we need. And in the spirit of Lennon’s love: imagine and give peace a chance.

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Michel Fortier, Eye in the Sky.

Introduction

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? These are profound questions for some, although for others the answers are already obvious. Pondering the possibilities, it's imaginable to see countless perspectives and ways to look at them. So let me count the ways…

In this text, I will invite you to sail with me on the oceans of being from my frail vantage point and my life experiences. My path was sometimes messy and still is. At other times, I have gone sideways to explore an inlet or enjoy myself in discovery. Maybe at other times, I have dived in the waves to see underwater and marvel at the deep and the abyss. Light and dark, all sides seem to be equally fascinating.

It's also possible that I’ll end up in a dead end. I have hit walls and fell many times. And almost die on a few occasions. Maybe we must backtrack on our road sometimes, maybe not. True storytelling healed me and false and nefarious lies wounded me. I’m still not always sure how to make the difference. Intuitions I guess. The road goes on ever!

Virtual and embodied situations in life are closely related experiences. Even if consciousness does not cover all the dimensions and intricacies of being, you follow my words to grasp what I’m talking about at a conscious level. But there are other effects and other levels. I want to expose, as I understand it now, our creations, the web we have sown in an already complex quantum web. The starting point is our ability to tell stories to each other. We will set the needle of our compass in the gentle waters of Teilhard de Chardin (1922) Noosphere, a concept not far from the «critical zone» of Latour (2018) to reach the Infosphere of Luciano Floridi (2002, 2010). With inspiration from Edgar Morin (1986, 1991 and 2017) and our life experiences, I want to share with you the music, the smell, the voice of water, air, fire and earth (Serres’s Biogea) with our spiritual ties in the web of being. In that sense, we are all planes walkers either as sleepwalkers or enlightened ones. Let’s journey together…

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When you create the boat, you also create the shipwreck

Michel Fortier, Smooth sailing Caribbean style.

There are many sides to almost anything. But we often forget, and forgetting as Ricoeur (2000) explore, is as important as remembering. And writing this text made me remember many defining experiences in my life. And one most important is this realization that with each invention that foster our needs, we also inadvertently create problems stemming from the very success we produce, as Edgar Morin (1973) has aptly observed, and he is not the only one. In sociology, Merton (1936) and Giddens (1984) warned us long ago about the unintended consequences of social actions. What we have in mind here is similar, but more general in scope. This realization will accompany us in this text. All our endeavor generates ripples in reality’s fabric. For some, those ripples are insignificant. I hope to convince you that no ripple is insignificant.

When humans craft vessels to sail the seas, explore and fish, they also permit getting lost at sea, sinking (with or without the boat) and in our days and times, it can foster overfishing to the point of no return for many species of marine life. Life is complex in many ways, but that fact is often forgotten. The problem is not in itself the downside of things. The problem is the quest for an elusive purity which discard the messy part of things. Simplicity is so attractive. Our very way of knowing is plagued with abusive shortcuts, hopes of absolute unity, of clear and unfoggy thoughts, of Occam razor’s giving us aesthetic and uncomplicated solutions, of clarity without ambiguity, in brief a vision in concordance with our desires or beliefs. Alas, it is not the world we inhabit.

In the next sections, we will explore shipwreck of a kind more damaging than sinking boats or crashing airplanes. Shipwreck of a magnitude unseen before our times, a shipwreck so dire that a great part of humanity will surely suffer, a shipwreck that has led us on the brink of losing a great part of the living species on our planet, a shipwreck that engages all our being: emotional, physical, cognitive and spiritual. Will we be able to avoid the worse or will we behave as sleepwalkers oblivious of ourselves and of our surroundings? Frankly, I don’t know, but first, imagination could help us traces the outline of the situation.

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Tales of the imagination

Claudine Desrosiers (2018), Femme panache, 48 X 36, acrylic on canvas

Humans have always defined themselves from and for themselves. We don’t have another species to exchange notes and compare ourselves. We are the only advance technological species on this planet. But before contemplating that we are star dust, let’s go back in time on this planet.

We were not always as we are. From Homo habilis to Homo sapiens, we slowly, but relentlessly began to transform ourselves and the world, adding layers and layers of cultural complexities. Does the adjective sapiens defining our species is reflecting our most basic characteristic? For Edgar Morin, it is at best an incomplete picture, and at worse a misleading one. In his book Human Nature: the Lost Paradigm (1973), he argued that not only we must ponder and look differently at the consequences entailed in our sapiens nature, but also consider the inevitable shipwreck inscribe in it. We are not only Homo sapiens, but also Homo demens, the excessive, the mad, the delirious, the criminal, in brief a being immersed in irrationality and hubris. It’s like the two sides of a coin, one showing more at some point.

If the sciences have heavily insisted on the sapiens side of the coin, to the point of dismissing demens importance and considering this dimension of human nature a sickness, a

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flaw or a deviation easily corrected by more rationality, the arts have shown us otherwise. It is a side of ourselves that we told stories about since the beginning of historical time at least. We are a storytelling species. Nancy Houston (2008) in an illuminating essay depicts us as a tale-teller species (in French l’espèce fabulatrice, maybe in Latin Homo fabulator?). The arts have long recognized our complex nature and have ventured much farther than the sciences in using our experiences and with the help of imagination to come to term and to acknowledge what Bataille called la part maudite [the cursed part], which is the complex nature of our being in the world neglected by the disciplinary way of seeing things instead of the richness, but difficulty, of interdisciplinary thoughts informed by physics, ecology, complexity theory, communication and information. A project similar in ambition, but never realized, until Morin Method. The arts didn’t wait for express permission to explore, although they were enslaved by religion for a long time. But, as Dylan sings, The Times They Are Achangin’.

Imagination, once seen as a source of disorder and error, in Durand (1992) term the mad woman of the house, is now rehabilitated (well, in a published text where I used this historic expression, a reviewer accuse me of gender bias. I understand why, but at the same time this is missing the point entirely and, furthermore, I can’t change what others have written. Seeing slander when discussing how imagination was slandered is for me ironic).

Imagination leaves traces. In artifacts and in the scars to the world. We have carved in landscapes all over the world while we clear-cut forest for agriculture and with buildings since the agrarian revolution and after, with the city’s revolution millennia ago. But the most important traces are those left since we have invented writing (Christin, 2011). With writing, imagination gain a more solid footing in material reality. From the start, letters and words are deemed magical and are invested with power. At first, only erudite and priests and priestess are learned in their use. But over time, the parchment became books, and the books filled libraries, and with printing, books became available to the common person.

Books are stored knowledge that the reader, the person that has acquired the ability to read, can activate when his mind interacts with the words assembled in phrases on the pages, but not only. Even simple lists could be highly informative. Most importantly, more knowledge could be transferred across generations. Once written, words escape their author’s intent and acquired a life by themselves. And hermeneutic taught us that many interpretations are possible of the same text. For good and for worse, the power of words transformed the world and represent a major building block of our species education. Even though a majority of humans are illiterate or functionally illiterate. And the new “icon” revolution is just adding another layer to the current complexity of available meaning.

Books are wondrous objects. Since childhood, I had a passion for books, all sorts of books: some for deep learning, some for works, some for leisure, and some to share with friends or as gifts. With books, universes open. Our mind changes in the encounter with new thoughts, new experiences, new cultures, and new ways of seeing or doing things. In short, we take a highway to roam the Noosphere.

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Noosphere: the sphere of human thought

Claudine Desrosiers (2004), Connecting Dimensions.48 X 48, Acrylic on canvas.

Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest. It is not surprising that in that context he was a progressive, multidisciplinary and bold thinker for his time. The Catholic Church has a long tradition of producing high-level thinkers. The Jesuit and Dominican orders were famous for their scholars, a ferment of modernity inside the Church. I had a Jesuit uncle who earned his Ph.D. in biology in the 1930s and his thesis was on the effects of radiation on animal cells. I remember him fondly as he was a gentleman and an example of goodness in his general behavior. Alas, over time, his order was harsh on him bordering on cruelty for many trivial reasons. Not everybody appreciates the dedication of scientists. He ended his life doorman for the monastery and heartbroken, he who was a university professor. And the Church had a steady history of problems with the sciences in general and biology in particular.

Teilhard was not only a theologian, but also a paleontologist, a geologist and a philosopher, and he tried to take into account the scientific theories of his time not only in his field of expertise. His cosmogenesis for instance needed quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. As a believer in Christ, he reinterpreted with the best sciences of his time the divine revelation of the Bible. In coherence with those beliefs, he proposed a teleological process of increasing complexity where all life is directed to the Omega point. For him, the Omega point represents the ending point in the development of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe is heading. His views were sophisticated and for him spirit and matter were not mutually exclusive, but the different side of the same coin, each contributing to the expansion of complexity in the universe. Needless to say, he was not popular with the

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traditionalists. For some he represented anathema. His views on Darwinism had him sanctioned by the Vatican.

Nevertheless, he persisted in his projects. He was convinced that there really was an evolutionary process in action in the world, most visible with the unfolding complexity of human consciousness, which needed the material world and the biological world to exist. With Vladimir Vernadsky, he proposed a new concept, the noosphere, the sphere of human thought. The word is derived from the Greek words νοῦς (spirit) and σφαῖρα (sphaira). It is a lexical analogy. The noosphere is therefore as much part of nature as all the other spheres like the barysphere, the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere. I first encountered this notion in the work of Edgar Morin (1991). Later, I understood that I had seen it in action many times.

Edgar Morin most ambitious endeavor was the construction of his Method. I became aware of it when I was studying for my master’s degree in management (1980-1982). Our organization theory professors were enthusiastic about his contributions to help us go beyond the systemic synthesis dominant in the field. At that time, only the first two books had been written. I cannot convey with words strong enough the amazement and curiosity that those books steered in me. The first volume was The Nature of Nature (1977) and it is about what physics and chemistry have taught us so far about the complexity of the universe, mostly the cycle «order, disorder and organization,» but also what is complex causality in a systemic process. He also set the stage for what was to come in his future books with the epistemological loop «physics, biology and anthropo-sociology» and the physic of information, in what was the dawn of the information age. The second volume was The Life of Life (1980) and in it, he not only try to explain how from non-life, life emerges, but also important notions like eco-organization, auto-organization and the intrinsic complexity of life leading to us.

The third volume The Knowledge of Knowledge (1986), is an attempt to establish an anthropology of knowledge while considering the discoveries of the neuroscience and our exploration of the human psyche, the interactions between Mythos and Logos, but most importantly the dialogic of the relation of intelligence (the intelligence of human intelligence), thought (dialogic of thought and creativity) and consciousness (the consciousness of consciousness and the problem of the unconscious). The volume ends on a discussion of the possibilities of knowledge, but also its limits.

When the fourth volume was published, I was about to finish my Ph.D. Titled The Ideas: Their Habitat, Their Life, Their Mores, Their Organization (1991), the Noosphere is introduced to help explain the life of ideas. The title of the introduction is very telling: the idols of the tribe! Ideas submerge us all. So true then and even more now… He then proceeds to explain the ecology of ideas, since in a sense ideas never really dies (we think here of the Zombie Economics of Quiggin (2010) which exposes how dead ideas like trickle-down economics or efficient financial markets continue to circulate). Certain ideas are biodegradable, others seemed immortal. In the life of ideas, the third kingdom of Karl Popper and of Teilhard de Chardin, the Noosphere is explored with an in-depth look at the systems of ideas and its genesis and metamorphosis.

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When the fifth volume appears, I had created a master’s program in Person Management, and this program was greatly inspired by his work. Human Identity (2001) was used as a mandatory reading in my course in Business Ethics. This opus is about our cosmic grounding leading to humanity, it is more to the point about the humanity of humanity. Most importantly, it explores the trinity of human nature: an individual (a psychological being), a member of society (a social being) and an animal (our biological being). Each aspect is always there and we cannot be reduced to only one of them. We have three identities contributing in building Homo complexus.

The last volume Ethics (2004) is the culmination of the knowledge and analysis developed in all the other volumes. It is about the relations we have with ourselves and with the Universe. Morin never offered definitive answers. He always tries to expose what is known, but also what is not known. Complexity theory is a bridge construction project; between disciplines, between cultures, between religions, between beings human, non-human and even inhuman. It is an enterprise that may succeed or not. That is not the main interest, the journey in itself is already richly rewarding and enlightening. There is, as he recently discussed (2017), certain things that we think we know well; we can understand ignorance and sometimes cured it. As a professor, I share that view. Nevertheless Morin insists, deep mysteries persist. We must contemplate the possibility that humanity may not be equipped to grapple with the real complexity present in the universe, so think about what that enterprise becomes in a multiverse!

Another aspect of the Noosphere must not be neglected. Our mind expands itself with the creation of tools. Contrary to a popular belief, machines are the most humane thing of all. With the domestication of fire, the manufacture of tools was an outside the brain extension of mind. With times, these tools became more and more sophisticated. Lately, the so-called intelligent objects, like washing machines, telephones or cars, are materialized support of our mind’s will and capabilities. They made our life easier while producing new possibilities. Each day networks and interconnectedness expand. But reading me you are aware that they also contain their very specific shipwrecks. But before examining the Infosphere, I invite you to ponder an important creation of our imagination: mythos!

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Of gods and (wo)men

Michel Fortier, The Gate to the Underworld.

In the Noosphere, the deepest stories that humans have created (or the stories that had been revealed to them for some) concern what Morin called Mythos, our spiritual nature and the existence of gods and goddesses that may help us, hinder us, sometimes shepherd us on this planet. More than 50000 gods and goddess in human cultures are identified from all over the world. The nature of those divine entities and our relations to them are fascinating, but also very telling of ourselves. In the like of Chomsky universal grammar theory and generative grammar theory produced by our biological mind, Witzel (2013) proposes an African origin for all mythologies on our planet, a matrix of Mythos, a species-related production that accompanied us from the dawn of our storytelling. Even if we don’t endorse totally his view, it is interesting to know that if, at first glance, gods appear to be different, there is often profound similarities between systems of beliefs about them.

For a long time, a god was something akin to our modern superheroes. A being with great, even immense powers, capable of wonders, at times immortal, but not an absolute, not an all-powerful entity. The Roman Pantheon was an example of a space of tolerance in antiquity, a space where all the gods and goddesses were welcome. Religious tolerance was common; I may think that my gods are better than yours, but I understood that yours may be your choice. Babylonians stole the gods of other people. Gods could freely be adopted from other countries, like the Greek did with Hecate, a powerful goddess whose origin was from Anatolia or maybe from Egypt. She was worshipped as the goddess of crossroads and Zeus is said to recognize her power over land, air and sea. Those were probably not halcyon days and I am not pretending that there was no war caused by religious beliefs. But as a general attitude tolerance was the policy.

Monotheism at first was present only in certain Middle Eastern sects. It is a patriarchal stance on godhood, and from that point on, women will be relegated, more and more, to only

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the domestic sphere. Not all women, but most. This new perspective took a certain time to impose itself because it implied that there was only one true male God and all the others were false: I hold the true perspective and all of you are in error. This is not very conducive to living peacefully with neighbors that revered other gods and not very diplomatic either. And things get worse when the persons holding those beliefs try to impose them on others by force.

A strange thing happened when the Christian god was adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century of our era. An astounding conception of the already almighty God was infused with Neo-Platonic and absolute ideas (O’Donnell, 2015). This god was profoundly different from all the other gods and goddesses that were worshipped in antiquity (and even elsewhere after that) because he was not only immortal, he was omniscient and he caused what was, what is and what is to be, forever. And he revealed himself to the Jews and the through the life of Jesus to the new Christian faith. His disciples were speaking in his name and his Gospel spread in the Empire and after to the rest of Europe. Mahomet did the same thing with the hegira and the extension of Muslim faith around the Mediterranean basin and elsewhere with time. A male god very similar the Christian one as also for Judaism for that matter.

This transformation will have profound impact on our planet since that god created the great chain of beings with humans at the pinnacle. He supposedly made human in his liking with the capacity to know right from wrong and knowing what is good from what is bad. He also gave them authority over the world and the right to do as they wish with it. In that sense, the world is only a temporary dwelling for his favorite creatures until the end times when everybody will be judged and the saved will live with him forever in a realm not of this world, and the damned will burned eternally in Hell. Furthermore, some humans pretend to talk in his name and know his thoughts. There is for them, but one true God and all else that pretend otherwise is the Devil’s work. Carl Sagan (1995) explained what happened in a world constructed on those beliefs, a Demon-Haunted world.

Looking at history from the 5th century, things didn’t go very well, to say the least. Since that time, religious wars were waged that produce genocide and a plethora of woes to this day... It is for me another example of shipwreck, but this time more spiritual in nature. But now, with consequences for all life on this planet.

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Boundless capacities: trying to manage the world

Michel Fortier, Living in a Cantina at the edge of the perfect storm.

I live in the North of the northern hemisphere. It’s where the global planetary warming is most noticeable. I’m a walker. I walk two to four hours almost each day of the week, all year long. I notice the rise in temperature and that things are now changing faster. We see more heatwaves in summer and we rarely see minus 20 Celsius temperature in winter. For those connected to nature, it is impossible to miss. We feel it in our bones, we feel it in the earth, and we feel it in the air. In my childhood, we had weeks in a row of Siberian frost. Although the climate is the warmest in millions of years, the winter where I live could still last up to six months, on the south shore of the Saint-Lawrence River in Rimouski.

One of those endless winter, Claudine, my favorite artist and partner in life, suggested that we escape the gray and snowy sky of Québec to the glowing and warm sunshine of the south. We decided to go to Riviera Maya in a resort. Since it was my first trip to Mexico, we talk to a Mexican friend of our project. He looks at us laughing and said: Oh! You are going to a cantina. A cantina? We exclaimed. He replied softly: you are going in a place exclusively for tourists where you will be in a gated community, with an air-conditioned room, many restaurants and all you can eat buffets, where alcohol is freely flowing and where the local people will be your servants. This is what we called in the South a cantina. You are not traveling to meet the Mexican people and learned about their life. You are pampered rich white tourists using our beach… His words still ring in my mind.

The picture that I had taken and titled Living in a Cantina at the Edge of the Perfect Storm was taken on this journey. It is a metaphor of what I perceive is coming our way on a planetary scale. On the picture, you see tourists near palapa roofs on a beach in Riviera Maya while a thunderstorm is coming. Nobody seems to notice it. We are collectively, with our deeply entrenched individualism, acting like them. We have been warned many times of the incoming tsunami and the probable effects it will bring.

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Many warnings about the results of our actions have been made since Rachel Carson Silent Spring about the effects of the chemicals used in agriculture on our health and the environment, then the Limits to Growth also known as the Meadows report for the consequences of the increasing world population and its uses of resources, and in the 80s the Brundtland Commission’s conclusions on the necessity of sustainability if we want to have a future. The scientific community tried to sound the alarm about the cascading problems stemming from our seemingly blind endeavors: the acid rain problem, the hole in the ozone layer, the destruction of most planetary forests, the poisoning and rarified drinking water, the destruction of wildlife on land and in the oceans, and, of course, the global warming.

When I wrote my book Les enjeux éthiques de l’entreprise (2011) [Ethical Stakes of Enterprise], I included the 1992 Scientist Warning to Humanity and discussed it in a chapter. Most of the living recipients of Nobel Prize in sciences and 1500 other leading scientists in their fields signed that dire written warning. The reviewers of my editor almost accused me of inventing it. They said to me: it is not possible, if it was true, we will have heard about it. Well, it is true that the mass media on our planet didn’t report seriously about it; after all, scientists are often wrong in their predictions. Silence it was.

I joined the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice in November 2017 and published in Bioscience in December of that year. This time nine metrics were chosen to explain the situation. The first metric was the ozone depletors that were controlled as an example of what we could accomplish if we decide to listen to science and cooperate to solve the problem. The other eight were what must be corrected: the dwindling freshwater resources per capita, the dwindling marine catch, the growing dead zone in the oceans, the dwindling forests surface, the vertebrate species abundance (a loss of 60% since 1970), CO2 emissions (Gt CO2 per year), temperature change, and human and livestock growth. Who heard about that warning when it was issued? Who heard about it after? The silence is deafening…

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Coercing persons: culture as human resources management

Michel Fortier, We were warriors, now…

At the beginning of the 90s, I became deeply unsatisfied with the ways things were going in society at large and in management in particular. The official discourse at that time was jovial and triumphant. The USSR was no more, the Berlin Wall has collapsed and Fukuyama declared the End of History. But it was not what I was experiencing. In fact, before creating the master’s program in Person Management, I had been a rather angry young man fueled in his anger and sadness by the lived injustices and mistreatment of a great part of humanity.

An important starter event was when I learned of the fate of indigenous people in an anthropological course in college. I was thunderstruck and understood that what I had learned about them since childhood was almost completely false. I then read Robert Jaulin (1970) The White Peace: Introduction to Ethnocide. It was a shattering experience. Since it biological expansion in the 9th century, mostly in the temperate zone (Crosby, 1990/2004), the West have destroyed most of the culture that it encountered; the heaviest toll being on the indigenous people of the Americas and Oceania, but not only. Africa was also badly abused.

So, I began a path of trying to decolonize my mind that I have pursued since. I read Jaulin other works on Ethnocide and on the twisted relations we had established with people different from us in appearance and lifestyle, that sadly were still mocked, exploited, despised, when they were not simply murdered for their land, often under the pretense of civilizing them, revealing the true god to them or saving them from their supposed miserable life in nature. I remember vividly reading Hannah Arendt (1968) The Origins of Totalitarianism and in a note p. 185 she wrote: An even worse case is, of course, that of Leopold II of Belgium, responsible for the blackest pages in the history of Africa. Worse than what? Nazi Germany Holocaust? Stalin gulag and mass murder of the peasantry? I don’t know what shocked me the most, the staggering number of deaths in Congo (between 10 and 20 million people) or the totally insignificant place of this gigantic genocide in her work. I admire Arendt as a philosopher, but less as a political thinker and certainly not her stance on racism which is a convincing demonstration of

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intellectual blindness. The horrendous fate of black people in Belgium ruled Congo were not relevant in understanding totalitarianism, reserved for the advance white societies? Furthermore, in her book On Violence (1970), the comments she made on the students’ movement and the civil liberty actions of black people is appalling. I understood then that even great thinkers could harbor inhuman aspects.

Later, I encountered Bartolome de las Casas (1552) A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and for a long time I was unable to talk about it without tears in my eyes. The more I learned, the more I was appalled. Dee Brown (1970) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee kindle something deep in me. I was raised a Catholic, but now, I connected more to Nature and the Great Spirit than to the Middle Eastern mythos of a patriarchal and abstract order. That order, I sense with horror, has and was destroying a great part of life, humans and beauty on this planet.

I also discover that I had ancestors who were Abenaki by adoption. In my family, at that time it was still considered a stain to be of first nation descent. My brother has done extensive research about our ancestors and his finding were amazing. One of them was the great Abenaki Chief Joseph-Louis Gill (1719-1798) (named Magouaouidombaouit, the friend of the Iroquois) who participate in the American Revolution as an Indian captain. After the revolution George Washington offered him to be major in the US Army, but he returned to his tribe in Québec.

The picture of the Mayan warriors at the beginning of this section is an illustration of what was and, at the same time, of the current fate of many indigenous people. They are working as actors in a recreated village near a cenote, a tourist attraction. They are part of the resources exploited there. We can see a good side to this arrangement, but there are also many pitfalls. As an example, the water is scarce in Yucatan and the resorts are pumped it like there will be no tomorrow. Since I began my studies in management, I had a hard time coping with the general attitude and practice of treating human being as a mere object, factor, category or worse, as a resource to be acquired, leased, sold, exchanged, discarded and ignored. The violence of it seemed plain to me. But not for most persons that peopled management studies and management in organizations. Coercing persons was almost considered an art form explained in management with military metaphors and vocabulary. We were in an economic war, and in war we must do anything to win. Competition was dominant and collaboration depreciated.

With two colleagues, I created a master’s program called Person management welcoming its first students in 1998, a program deeply inspired by the works of Edgar Morin on complexity with an emphasis on ethics that I deemed lacking in management. An ethics applied not just to humans by also to our relations with the world. Our contention was that HRM (Human Resources Management) was not only poorly and awfully named, but it was now conceived as a specialty, not a general knowledge for all managers. A tragic mistake. Taking care of people was almost unimportant, one small thing among others. Another mindless shipwreck, from my point of view. The fourth industrial revolution we are immersed in could amplify both the possibilities and the problems we face. We are learning to live in the infosphere. Culture for Bauman is the cultivation of human beings. A king of generalized HRM. What must be done with industrial agriculture to save ourselves, must be done also with the industrialization of work. It must be rethought and reform.

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The Noosphere expands: welcome to the Infosphere

Michel Fortier, In the Game with Big Brother watching.

In my lifetime, I had seen unfolding before my eyes the birth and expansion of the infosphere. One of my best childhood friends was the son of the founder of the department of computer science and the first director of the center for informatics service of Laval University in my home town of Québec. He had an IBM terminal in his house and was connected to ARPANET. We were fascinated by his work and when Star Trek aired we became instant fan. We embraced enthusiastically the premises of the show of a unified humanity exploring space peacefully. Sadly, I also became aware of racism and unbridle violence with that remarkable family. I must take a side road before returning to the infosphere and share a short and profoundly sad story.

My friend was very fortunate to have parents so cool and educated. His father had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, he was from the Province of New Brunswick, and his mother, who was a native from Colombia in South America, earned her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Not only there was a mind-blowing IBM terminal in the basement, but everywhere in the house there were shelves with books on almost any subject, many sorts of musical instruments, in the backyard a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome over the pool, but most importantly 5 happy kids playing with us the kids of the neighborhood. Their parents and their scientist friends were always ready to answer our questions or to tell us wonderful stories.

I was about ten years old when I lost my innocence about the good nature of human beings. It was a fun, but a rough time to be a boy in the 60s. In almost every house, there were between 3 and 6 kids not only on my street, but on every street. Sometimes we fight and hit each other, as kids did in that period. But it was only kid stuff, no one got really hurt. One day, my friend's older brother, who was 16 at the time, was attacked by four boys his age. It was not a fair fight and they almost beat him to death. The chief of the boys, while the others were keeping him immobile on the ground, broke his teeth with a stone. When I found out, I was devastated. How could it be possible to do such a cruel and senseless thing to a kind and intelligent boy?

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My father tried his best to comfort me and help me understand what had just happened. As a lawyer, he began to explain to me that it was illegal, even for kids, to beat like that a human being, that it was called an assault. From my ten-year-old experience of life, I kept asking: but why did they do that? He took a deep breath and said: because they are racist… Seeing I didn’t understand, he added: they did it because they think he is different from the rest of us. Still, I didn’t comprehend what he means by different. He put his hands on my shoulders and look me in the eyes. I saw he was also hurt. He finally told me: they didn’t like him because he looks like a foreigner, his skin is dark…

At the time I began my university studies, computers were huge and we had to use punch cards and wait for a response on large paper sheets spit by IBM typewriters. After that, I lived the wonderful revolution that was the invention of small computers, programmed in BASIC, then in DOS with the dark screen and the fame C: /. Only a few years after that, WSIG and the mouse offered us the pleasing and more intuitive graphic interface and HTML birth the WWW and seeded social media. Well, the rest is history; a story and a journey far from over.

The infosphere is the noosphere with new capabilities, unprecedented possibilities and, alas, new kinds of shipwrecks. I have described elsewhere the ethics pertinent to information systems in management (Fortier and Dion, 2011, 183-190). Three domains are blended to produce the ethics of the infosphere: computer ethics (computer, phone, server and other so-called intelligent objects), communication ethics (the old telegraphic network, the phone networks of copper and optic cables, the satellite links, the Bluetooth and microwave connections, etc.) and the information ethics (data, software, other numerical entities like AI and for some the twenty-inch error from the screen i.e., human beings). In a sense, the infosphere is a technological metamorphose of our minds expanding itself with a new kind of tool.

Floridi warned us of two profound divides in the Infosphere. The first is the access to its bounty. Many humans have limited access to a computer, to databases or networks even in some case no access at all. It is the fracture caused by money and economic power. The second divide is more subtle. Most users are only users. This is a fracture that in the long run could be most problematic. Who is capable of writing programs? Who is fluent in C++? In UNIX? Few of us indeed. And now, more and more, it’s AIs that are writing programs. Consider the consequences...

Floridi also offered suggestions for establishing and maintaining an ethical Infosphere. We must try our best to prevent, avoid creating and fostering, even removing entropy in the infosphere. Furthermore, information must be promoted by expanding, improving, enriching and opening the infosphere, which means ensuring the flow of information in terms of quantity, quality, variety, security, property, privacy, pluralism and access. The advantages and benefits are considerable. But Edward Snowden (2019) in Permanent Record made us aware of a dark side of our connected life. Not only are there nefarious consequences with the bogus dark web, but simply by living in the clear net where most people don’t understand what it means, serious problem will inevitable arise. This is a mostly untold and stilt unfolding story.

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Quantum entanglements: How do we know what we believe we know?

Michel Fortier, Texture.

How real is real? We can only speculate on the correct answer. But the response we choose to adopt will have important and possibly concrete consequences. The Noosphere and the Infosphere are the results of human minds interconnected, sharing and fighting, doing and undoing things. The global result is not easy to grasp, if it is possible to grasp. Our frail standpoint is individual. It is already very complex to understand from that standpoint, but it’s nothing compared to the complexity of our collective existence.

I pointed earlier to my childhood upbringing. My parents highly valorize science and knowledge. My mother is proud to have raised 3 Ph. D. and a successful business man (a lawyer with a master’s degree). As a kid, I wanted to be a scientist. My parents made me attend summer camps were sciences were central to many activities, mainly naturalism. But when I studied chemistry and physics in high school, I lost interest for a time in the sciences. It’s probably me, but the teachers of those discipline were boring to a point difficult to express. I had good grades, but I found other disciplines to be more interesting. As I began dating girls, psychology appears a good intellectual investment.

So for a time, I decided to become a scholar in psychology. Instead of being admitted in psychology, my entry exams made me land in psychological counseling, a multidisciplinary program in the Education Faculty. The rest of my university cursus was in the same teeming direction. At the time I did my master’s in management, that program was the most interdisciplinary in the Faculty of Business Administration and the same was true of my Ph.D. in Industrial Relations in a Social Sciences Faculty. But I didn’t lose interest in the sciences. In fact, with Edgar Morin works guiding me, I developed an interest in human communication and epistemology. Allow me another brief side road.

It took me a long time to understand privilege. Being raised in a loving family shielded me from many harsh aspects of our modes of living. I remember the first time I understood what poverty was all about. I had a rational and intellectual understanding of it, of course. But not a felt one, not one that reach to my heart. But when it happened, I became an angry young man and I develop an acute interest in sociology to help me understand why that calamity came about and what we could do to correct it. I had tried to read Marx Capital in high school, but like my reading of Kant Critique of Pure Reason, it didn’t go well for a sixteen-year-old. But in

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college, just a few years later, my course in sociology gave me keys to understand all the seemingly murky concepts encountered in high school and applied them to work and working, the real sources of wealth.

In my studies, I became very interested in epistemology to the point of reading most of the classic authors like Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Suppe, Toulmin and recently Stenger. But my favorite remained Thomas Kuhn because of his style and historical perspective. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) was a real eye-opener, but it is another of his books that have brought me back to physics. The Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (1978) made me aware of the mind-blowing discoveries that baffle the human mind. Not only discontinuity have entered physic to stay, but quantum theory and its effects place us in a new and astounding universe.

The solid classical world transformed itself before my eyes and became an energetic universe, maybe infinite in scope and eternal. Even now, new propositions and perspectives emerges almost each week. Roger Penrose recently pointed to the possibility of empirical traces of a prior universe. If string theory is correct, we may live in a universe that is but one universe in an infinitely complex multiverse. We are also connected to each other at the most fundamental level. Our atoms were forged in stars and in supernovae explosions; we are star dusts. Quantum entanglement open vistas on the interactions of the geosphere, biosphere and noosphere that we have expanded in the infosphere in ways unimagined before our times (Or is it? From a spiritual point of view, it is another thing, but I will leave it at that here). Our exploration of the Milky Way galaxy and the trillions of others have just begun. Edwin Hubble made his fame discovery on the nature and distance of the Andromeda galaxy about a hundred years ago. He used Cepheid variable stars as cosmic benchmark for calculating distances. The Hubble space telescope named after him still delivers astounding pictures of our universe. And everybody in love with astronomy is eager to see what its replacement, the James Webb Space telescope, will deliver. If we find a way to endure, no doubt, many surprises are still in store for us.

Consciousness as a mechanism that doesn’t want to die

Michel Fortier, Blanket of Diamonds.

We are all going to die. Period. As I grew older, I often ponder with amazement what that could mean to me and my loved ones. Is there something after life? I could only answer

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maybe. When I was 15 years old, the very first book that I read in English was The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. It opened me a door to roam a fantastic universe and a journey I am still on with the intricacies of the English language. I soon discover the Lord of the Rings and from that time on, I returned almost yearly to Middle-Earth for days and days of immensely pleasurable reading. After the death of his father, Christopher Tolkien assembled and presented the texts his father had worked on all his life known now as The Silmarillion. I bought that enchanting book when it became available in 1977 and discovered the stories of the Elder days.

The book begins with the Ainulindalë, the Music of the Ainur, which is the creation of Ëa the world, similar to the genesis in the Bible and foundational in Tolkien universe. The angelic beings he created first participate in the composition of the music that Illuvatar, also named Eru, the One, and the great creator, started and conducted. After, they became aware of the wonders they created together and incarnate in it. In the third movement of the music and in response to Melkor and other Valar persistent attempt to rebel against him and broke the harmony of the music, and unknown to all, he gave a special gift to humanity that those angelic creatures, the elves, the dwarfs, the ents and all the other fantastic beings had not; humans go beyond this universe and are not tied to it. Nobody knows their fate except Illuvatar himself. This is his greatest gift to mankind; transcend even the world. One thing is sure, most humans construct mechanisms and contraptions to cope with this inescapable fate that death entails. Imagination really runs wild with possibilities when mortality is in the balance. In short, it is our consciousness of death that matters in the noosphere and many deeds could be explained by it.

What is consciousness? For Krishnamurti and Böhm, consciousness is a mechanism that has a hard time accepting that it is finite and will one day die, even though each night it partially disappears as it is turned off in sleep. But consciousness is only an element. A very powerful one, but an element nevertheless. An element placing rationality and material result above all else, a part that wants control and dominion in the world. A part that tries to silence emotional and spiritual dimensions of realty. A part that is human, and only for humans.

Napoléon Bonaparte is famous for having said that the word impossible is not French. In that spirit, it is possible that modern humans believe that no problem is insurmountable and that science is a cornucopia, an infallible tool that will always protect us from the often forecasted and predicted apocalypse. The end of the world had been anticipated many times just around the corner. Think about how people felt during the Black Plague in the Middle Ages or what catastrophe it was for indigenous people when the Spaniards invaded the Americas with powerful arms and new sickness. For some, even if the last centuries have seen some problems, but do we not enjoy the bounties of modernity, science and technology? Our affluence is a sure sign of success. Are we not, as Huxley astutely exposed in his novel, in a brave new world? Slave and dependent, but alive and prosperous. Finally, our victory over nature is almost achieved.

The most violent thing that human has accomplished on this planet is severe themselves from the natural world and tried instead to dominate it. It is an almost absurd undertaking. It reminds me of the 60s of my youth, when sending a man in orbit or landing on the moon was described as the conquest of space! And the same hubris applied to our recent creation, the consumer society. Not only does the consumer society affect adversely all life forms and beings on this planet, but it destroy the very possibility for most of us to being ethical (Bauman, 2007).

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This is an ongoing story. A tragedy for some, a triviality for others. Life chances as always are unequal. As Latour (2018) described recently, many in the economic elite know what’s happening and they have decided to barricade themselves in gated communities while denying there is a problem. We are probably at a crossroad. What is next? Well, crossroads are special. We’ll see...

Conclusion: this is not an ending…

Michel Fortier, The world in a grain of sand, here is a galaxy!

We will never have a definitive and absolute answer to the mystery of the world. Certainly not in our flesh and blood form. This is at the same time sobering and endlessly fascinating. We have seen and lived wonders in our lifetime. Still, there are many surprises coming our way I’m sure. My perception of life, to this day, is a succession of new and unforeseen discoveries, of unexpected happening, for better or for worse. I could be a pessimist and entertained only the perils that lurk in front of us: the eventuality of a global nuclear conflict, the catastrophic consequences of a major asteroid hitting earth, the awakening of Yellowstone super volcano, a pandemic like the Black Death, the collapse of our planetary environment, even if it’s not near us, Betelgeuse exploding or another celestial catastrophe. But the worse is never certain. And even if it is, I adopted, as Hubert Reeves once said, a willed optimism. I prefer to go in that direction, it creates better perspectives and inner peace. The vibrations are also better along that path.

Imagination is a marvel and an illusion at the same time. Intellectual shipwreck could have enduring consequences and our civilization is founded on quicksand. The infosphere in which we lived is in that perspective a wonderful home for some and a total mess for others. Individually, we do not have control on what is happening, but we could at least try to do our part to better things up around us. In my text, I have hinted at some means, some strategies and tactics that could be used to steer us in that fruitful direction. If we want to achieve a semblance of trust and peace around us, we must engage our heart not only our head. But things go in spiral and we must be aware of the advantages, but also the possible shipwrecks. It’s always complex, I know.

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I acquire few certainties through my experiences, but here is what I believe is of great consequence. We must refrain from imposing our beliefs on others and the world. We must strive for tolerance except for the intolerant. It is for many the difficult part, accepting what is different from us. The easiest path is not always the more fruitful or the more important. Who am I to judge others? Alas, sometimes I must judge, at least to fend off those that are hostile and sworn enemies of life on this planet. I have no great insight or wise words of wisdom to offer to all humankind. I have just my frail existence and the point of view I developed in my life path. But I truly believe that we are planes walkers, capable of connections across ways of being and dimensions. We appeared for a time somewhere in the multiverse. Then we depart for somewhere else, we forget each time to live a fresh experience. And the cycle continues in an infinite spiral. The universe is perceiving itself in us. My imagination leads me to that insight. My heart made me hope for it.

Finally, for now, I will add: I strongly believe in taking a chance with deep spirituality, friendship and love. I am grateful to all my friends in storytelling who have opened my eyes on ties that bind spiritually, emotionally and with love. This is not what I have encountered in Business schools, in the behavior of most managers or politicians, or in the accomplishments of the rich people of this planet. It is nevertheless what I deemed the very essence and meaning of existing: live and be in peace, all we need is love!

References

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Michel Fortier, Green Hope.

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