The biosphere is today and will be in the future more and more a technobiosphere. A bigger part of the earth's surface is modified by agriculture, livestock farming and urbanization. Marine and earthly ecosystems carry the ever growing weight of human intervention. Man's activities have already affected in sensible ways the atmosphere, its composition, its temperature with all the repercussions on all forms of life that we can imagine. With biotechnologies, we rapidly create new species of plants and animals but also new ecosystems, creation on which we have lesser control.
If we consider the human society as being part of life itself, then these new situations represent an acceleration of the global evolution of the biosphere under the effect of its most virtual and powerful offspring: language (and techniques accompanying its expansion).
The human race becomes a superorganism building its unity through cyberspace. And because this superorganism is becoming the principal agent of transformation and maintenance of the biosphere, cyberspace grows, by extension, as the biosphere's nervous system. If we can witness the evolution - organic, sensitive and linguistic - as a sole movement, if we understand the profound unity of the cultural and biological evolution and their interdependence, therefore we can discover that cyberspace is at the peak of this unified evolution.
The idea that I am introducing to you in this paper is quite simple. It can be formulated into three propositions.
First proposition: there is a cultural evolution.
Second proposition: the cultural evolution is the continuation of the biological evolution.
Third proposition: the unfolding of cyberspace is the latest step of the cultural / biological evolution and the basis for future evolution.
What is the role of collective intelligence in this theoretical framework? I would like to saythat each step, each layer of the evolutionary continuum brings an improvement and a new realm of collective intelligence.
I know that these ideas are very controversial and I don't expect that you will immediately agree with them. I just want to give you an opportunity to reflect on my point of view, hoping that this experience will help you to build your own point of view.
For a correct understanding of the three propositions above, I must first give some definitions, and particularly about the nature of life. In my definition, life is a process, an evolutionary process. More precisely, life is a process of creation, reproduction and selection of forms. When there is creative reproduction, there is life. Here, I must stress the word "forms". Of course, life is a reproduction of organic forms. But there are other kinds of forms that are also able to reproduce themselves: forms of perception, emotion, forms of experience, forms of actions, and even linguistic, technological and social forms. Because, as a philosopher, I take seriously the abstract definition that I just gave you, I must draw the conclusion that life does not stop at the organic layer. Since there is still reproduction of forms in later layers, life continues at the higher (or more virtual) levels ofperceptual experience and culture.
In this expose, I will try to show you that there is a direction in the evolutionary process - or rather, as you will see, in the meta-evolutionary process - and that this direction is a progress towards digitalization, virtualization and collective intelligence. Of course, I know that the word "progress" is taboo in the academic community. Nevertheless, I see a kind of progress in the emergence of the nervous systems and bigger brains, in the emergence of the human culture, in the invention of writing, of the alphabet, of the printing press and of the computers. I do not mean that there is an almighty god planning the evolution and that everything was already written in His mind. I just notice that there is a movement towards complexity. Of course, this direction concerns only certain branches of the evolution (not necessarily the branch of bacteria or worms), and this progress is the result of a good old Darwinian process: self-reproduction, mutation and selection. In fact, the progress lies essentially in the emergence of new powerful reproductive mechanisms. New media, one could say.