Expanding the Noosphere and Re-elevating the Anthropos

Summary

The article argues for the importance of psychedelics as a nontechnical means to expand human consciousness beyond digital influences in the context of the Anthropocene. It suggests that embracing these substances could help humanity navigate its survival challenges and facilitate a transformation into a more constructive society, termed the Neganthropocene. This transformation may enable interactions with nonhuman intelligences, which are deemed essential for success in this new era.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Stiegler understands the Anthropocene as the age in which planetary enframing engenders an avalanche of entropization, putting humanity’s survival at risk. To avoid catastrophe, the so-called technosphere should be transformed from an entropic-destructive into a negentropic-constructive assemblage, ushering in the Neganthropocene. Stiegler’s focus is on the noetic dimension, in particular as constituted and conditioned overwhelmingly today by the digital pharmakon. In this article I want to make a case for the importance of an entirely other noetic pharmakon not addressed by Stiegler: the nontechnical pharmakon of psychedelics, which allows for the expansion of humanity’s noetic frontier beyond the digital, providing access to dimensions of experience—and possibly also of reality—that may support the emerging neganthropos to awaken on a postanthropocentric planet in which it is enabled to commune in a noosphere made up by many other, nonhuman intelligences, which may prove essential for the neganthropic transformation to succeed.

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