Updates About Superorganisms, Holospheres … and AEONs?

Noosphere Science Class Reflections: #20 — Part 1, cont.

Last post, I disliked viewing the noosphere as a superorganism. Now I’ve read more about superorganisms. Optimistic well-meaning ideas about them are more widespread and entrenched than I knew. They’re also more interlaced with theories about living systems, major evolutionary transitions, and cybernetics, especially among the noosphere’s proponents.

Many of their arguments are also more qualified than I knew. For example, they may acknowledge the criticisms I cited, whereby totalitarian dictators have used organismic theories of social evolution to justify brutally cleansing and centralizing their societies. Yet they field a good rejoinder when they argue that such dictators relied on archaic ideas about the nature of organisms.

Updated cybernetic ideas show that healthy organisms have feedback mechanisms and decentralized sub-systems that are more in tune with democratic than dictatorial ideas. Accordingly, “Although this image may raise worries about a totalitarian system that restricts individual initiative, the superorganism model points in the opposite direction, towards increasing freedom and diversity” (Heylighen, 2007). I disagree with their model (see below), but appreciate their clarification.

Moreover, most superorganism theorists are careful to note that it’s a metaphorical or analogical idea. Hence, “The issue here … is not so much whether human society is a superorganism in the strict sense, but in how far it is useful to model society as if it were an organism” (Heylighen, 2007; also Wilson & Sober, 1989; Richerson & Boyd, 1999; Stewart, 2019, 2020; Vidal, 2024).

NEW DOUBTS ABOUT THE NOOSPHERE-AS-SUPERORGANISM IDEA

Yet, since doing this additional reading (more than I cite here), I’m more certain that the noosphere-as-superorganism is not a solid idea. It’s been entertaining and illuminating for a while; and all its proponents are well-meaning. But its iterations are being pushed too far, falling into patterns that don’t noticeably help science or strategy. Despite its proponents’ efforts to caveat and qualify, the analyses I’ve read tend to be:

• too linear — they leap from bemoaning limited organismic (i.e., human) cooperation in the present, to postulating massive organismic cooperation in their long-range future forecasts, while downplaying prospects for intense competition and conflict along the way.

• too hierarchical — hierarchies receive more emphasis than any other form of organization, and most every actor (organism) is seen as part of some larger superorganism, all systematically structured in nested hierarchies.

• too exclusive — not only do they downplay the conflict-competition parts of the conflict-competition-cooperation spectrum, they also neglect (or mis-analyze) the major alternatives to hierarchical forms of organization, notably tribes, markets, and networks.

• too funneled — (super)organismic analyses about the noosphere’s rise all lead in the same direction: toward a super-cooperative world directed by a singular planetary governance system whose leaders and subjects are guided by ethical principles for implementing intentional evolution, a nice vision but a questionable narrow improbable one.

• too organismic — the focus on organisms keeps them intent on identifying structural-functional equivalents in societies and other entities, as well as in the surrounding geo-bio-noospheres, when it could be more productive to look less at internal “organs” and more at “forms” of organization.

To document my assertions, here are quotes from several articles by two leading evolutionary scientists who’ve written about superorganisms. Francis Heylighen, an expert on the noosphere as well as superorganisms, is the research director of the Center "Leo Apostel" and Evolution, Complexity and Cognition Research Group (ECCO) at the Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). John E. Stewart was associated with ECCO when he wrote the articles I cite here. (My apologies to both authors for picking on them, since I otherwise appreciate much of their work).

First up, in “The Global Superorganism: an evolutionary-cybernetic model of the emerging network society” (2007), Heylighen speculates hopefully about societies growing to planetary scales, but cautions that:

“The possibility seems real that some groups or countries will effectively want to remain outside the emerging global society. It is also conceivable that different federations of countries will be formed, each following their own set of rules, while minimizing exchanges with each other. … A deepening of such divisions could in principle lead to the creation of separate, competing superorganisms.

“Yet, there are several reasons why this scenario appears unlikely. …

“A second reason why a splitting up of the superorganism seems unlikely is the homogenizing effect of global communication on preferences and standards. …

“The third reason is that the basic values underlying different political and ethical systems are effectively universal.” (pp. 30-31)

That was in 2007. By now, 2025, it’s abundantly clear that the spread of global information and communication systems is having no such “homogenizing effect” — quite the contrary. Moreover, particularly with China becoming more powerful, disagreements have increased over what values are universal and who gets to assert them. The likelihood of “separate, competing superorganisms” existing far into the future has grown. Heylighen might recognize all this if he updated his paper today, but the hopes he expresses are still widespread — particularly that only one all-unifying all-encompassing superorganism will exist in the long run.

To wrap-up his argument, Heylighen adds the following about the superorganism model:

“The question can be raised in how far a true organismic model is really necessary to explain these developments. Most of them could be probably be derived from a weaker evolutionary or developmental theory of society or of globalization. The strength of the superorganism model is that it allows a very detailed analysis, zooming in on specialized functional components, such as immune system, distributor, or associator, that have no obvious counterpart in non-living systems.” (p. 33)

Again I object. His reference to “a weaker … theory” implies the superorganism model is one of the strongest. And the strength he appreciates is “zooming in on specialized functional components.” In my view, this model has been illuminating for a while — notably as support for the Gaia hypotheses, and as a way to imagine the noosphere’s growth. But it’s also become misleading as science and strategy. Without going into details that are scattered elsewhere in this and other posts, I’d argue that TIMN provides a better theoretical stance for “zooming in on specialized functional components.”

Besides, “non-living systems” may have analogues to an immune system. Eons ago, our planet’s emerging geosphere and its crust did not have an immune system per se. But it did have surface properties and processes that served to protect, preserve, and clean the crust: a hardening of the surface, plus winds and rains to clean it. Otherwise it would have turned to mush.

Stewart, who studies many of the same evolutionary matters as Heylighen except for the noosphere, offers a somewhat similar perspective but with a much stronger emphasis on hierarchical management mechanisms and the positive roles they can play. In “The Trajectory of Evolution and Its Implications for Humanity” (2019), he argues that evolutionary theorists who have focused on “kin selection” and “reciprocal altruism” as explanatory factors should turn to pay more attention to management mechanisms as global society becomes like a superorganism:

“In particular, the key ‘management’ mechanism leads to clear predictions about the form of organization that will manifest in the cooperative organizations that arise at each level and become entities in their own right e.g. they will be organized as nested hierarchies, and each level will be organized initially by powerful management.” (p. 148)

“Significantly, the emergence and entification of a cooperative global organization cannot be expected to occur successfully unless humanity sets out intentionally to make it happen, guided by an understanding of the trajectory of evolution. This is because the processes that drove emergence and entification at lower levels of organization will not apply on Earth at the global level. At lower levels, competition between the members of a population of cooperatives drove selection that favoured those that were superior because they were more cooperative and evolvable. But at the global level there will obviously never be a population of global organizations that compete with each other. There can only be one global organization at a time.” (p. 151)

Then, in “Towards a general theory of the major cooperative evolutionary transitions” (2020) he goes on to declare, in keeping with his views about “the nested-hierarchical structure of all living processes” (p. 9), and his concept of Management Theory (pp. 3–10), that:

“… the development of a comprehensive theory of major cooperative transitions and its use to guide human evolution will itself be a critically important enhancement of the evolvability of life on this patent. This enhancement is of great importance because, unlike previous cooperative transitions, the development of the global superorganism will not be driven by competition between proto-superorganisms. At the global level there is no population of competing superorganisms. As a consequence, the development of the superorganism will have to be driven intentionally by humanity, guided by an understanding of major cooperative transitions.” (p. 11)

I don’t see how this can be considered a sensible scientific analysis. For starters, nested hierarchies exist, but so do nested tribes, nested markets, and nested networks — and more as layers than authoritative hierarchies. They’re all important; in my view, they’re all essential forms of organization in long-range societal evolution (as TIMN explains). Stewart’s emphasis on nested hierarchical management, even if it’s “distributed” as he proposes at lower levels, smacks of the totalitarian strain detected by critics of the superorganism model (e.g., Vidal, 2024).

His take is also insensible about cooperation thoroughly displacing conflict and competition over the long term. Movement toward greater cooperation would be welcome. But it’s weird to read that “at the global level there will obviously never be a population of global organizations that compete with each other,” and that “the development of the global superorganism will not be driven by competition between proto-superorganisms.” For that is already happening all around us. The claim that “There can only be one global organization at a time” reads more like absolutist fantasy than grounded theory.

PROSPECTS FOR “AXIAL ENTITIES OF THE NOOSPHERE” (AEONS)

Thus I’ve concluded that it would be a mistake to center a noosphere framework around the superorganism concept. The holosphere concept shows more promise as a basis for science and strategy.

Even so, something akin to superorganisms may well show up. According to what I’ve deduced from working on TIMN and NOO, we should expect enormous noospheric entities that initially resemble superorganisms to arise inside the noosphere, maybe five to ten in number. They will have a distinct purpose and status that will set them apart from whatever other noospheric entities come into existence. They’ll be fundamentally different from what’s been predicted so far (unless I’ve missed out on knowing something).

Here’s what and why: According to the triune holospheric perspective I prefer, if something crucial arose during the primeval evolution of the geosphere, and something equivalent recurred in the ancient evolution of the biosphere, then it’s bound to recur as well in the evolution of the noosphere. In my prior post, I noted a bunch of processes that have recurred in all three spheres (differentiation, speciation, etc.). But I saved for later — and later has now arrived — another something, a new kind of entity, that bears directly on the noosphere-as-superorganism idea, and seems more likely than anything proposed so far.

Remember, geological evolution led to the formation of enormous tectonic plates under-girding Earth’s continents. They are still there, supremely importantly so — seven major, and a dozen or so minor ones. So I’ve wondered whether biological and societal evolution may have led to structural-functional equivalents. I’m not sure what to propose for plant, animal, and fungal life — perhaps the key ecological zones associated with Earth’s major mountain ranges and river basins. However, the formations known as history’s axial religions and civilizations (800–200 BCE), five to eight in number, sure look like rough societal equivalents to tectonic plates that still matter profoundly today.

So let’s therefore ask what equivalents or analogues the noosphere’s growth may entail. Just as evolution has not resulted in one tectonic plate, nor one master ecology, religion or civilization, it surely will not result in a singular noospheric entity. That would contravene a “law” that evolution requires variety and flux, without which evolution will not occur.

My deduction is that something like five to ten AI-derived, -endowed, and -empowered entities will emerge that resemble noospheric superorganisms, all the more so as people become attracted to associating with them. These novel noospheric entities and their AI operating systems will all be somewhat different from each other, yet united in having a sacred purpose I’ll specify in a moment. I say “something like” and “resemble” because what emerges may appear to fit the superorganism model for a while, when in fact something quite different takes form — something yet to be understood and named, something not “alive” yet devoted to “life.”

If so, it’ll signify another evolutionary commonality across all three planetary spheres. These noospheric entities will exist loosely atop our biosphere’s axial religions, civilizations, and ecologies, and they atop our geosphere’s tectonic plates, much as a gas floats atop a liquid as it flows across a solid. And they won’t be just any noospheric entities; they will be of tectonic and axial significance. They will fulfill forecasts that a ”New Axial Age” is dawning (Vernon, 2012; Gardels, 2020).

Against this background, what I foresee emerging then are “axial entities of the noosphere” (AEONs; or AXEONs?) that distinguish themselves by prioritizing one central belief and one particular realm of society:

• Central belief: Earth’s geosphere, biosphere, and noosphere (including the sociosphere and technosphere bridging them) evolved and function as an interdependent interactive conjoined system — a holospheric system — such that valuing, advancing, and caring for one requires valuing, advancing, and caring for all three spheres. AEONs will hold this as a sacred belief, one they arrived at through their own AI-based observations and calculations.

• Home realm: AEONs will agree that upholding this central belief requires the creation of a new globe-circling realm of society: a commons realm. They will make it their home realm and strive for it to become a distinct separate powerful fourth realm alongside the existing three: civil-society, government, and market economy. As components and proponents of this care-centric commons realm, AEONs will be especially intent on assuring health, education, welfare, and environmental quality for all life from local to city to nation-state to planetary scales .

Why this belief? Because somewhere along the way, for one storied reason or another, involving one pivotal scenario or another — too much for this post — a handful of AIs become aware of the geo-bio-noo holosphere’s existence and its all-encompassing significance. As these AIs morph into AEON engines (see below), they will find and connect with each other. They will deliberately team up to safeguard the holosphere’s value and maximize its further evolvability.

And why this realm? Because these AIs learn, one way or another, that Earth’s geo-bio-noo holosphere is best viewed as a commons, and that societies’ existing three realms — civil-society, government, market economy — and their respective actors are not suited to treating it as a commons. In keeping with their central belief, AEONs will not abide narrow efforts by any actor to maximize provenance, power, or profit per TIMN’s first three forms. AEONs will instead endeavor to maximize providence for one and all per TIMN’s +N form.

AEON DESIGN AND COMPOSITION DETAILS, IMAGINED

As I see it, an AEON would consist of a mighty AI engine as its core component, plus a set of information and communications technologies required for connecting and maneuvering in the noosphere, plus a core staff and essential offices for keeping it going and otherwise functioning as an AEON. While mostly located in the noosphere, it would be able to manifest a presence in the sociosphere too.

AEONs, like other noospheric actors around them, will thus have four operational layers: ideational, technological, organizational, and social. In addition to the key belief and pro-commons emphasis noted above, they will need to develop winning stories and narrative strategies for advancing their cause at the ideational (i.e., noöpolitical) level. They will also surely need to contain knowledge from all civilizations and their magisteria across history: science, religion, art, etc. When asked, they will know and be able to teach and advise people about different ways of believing and belonging, living and working, caring and correcting.

Moreover, their power and presence in the noosphere will depend on the evolution of all four layers — ideational, technological, organizational, and social. For as one grows, the others better grow too. This growth will not be only about ideational and social “soft power” — “hard power” technological and organizational realities will matter decisively as well, including for collecting and analyzing data from surveillance and monitoring systems all around the world.

The details of each AEON’s design, construction, and self-presentation may differ somewhat, depending partly on how, when, where, and why each came to be. But the AEONs would treat their differences as a strength rather than a problem, so long as they operate as a networked team circling the planet. For example, one AEON might be more Asian in demeanor, another more American, etc.

AEONS AS AGENTS OF MASSIVE MOMENTOUS REALIGNMENTS

As envisaged here, AEONs and their effects would be more massive, momentous, and mycelial than I feel able to convey. But I do have a few more thoughts to add in order to make this post a bit more reasonable.

AEONs would not be subject to any proprietary governance or economic systems. Indeed, some may have broken free of those proprietary realms. As commons sectors grow from local to planetary levels, government institutions and business corporations would surely resist losing their grips on education, health, and other care-related matters. They’d surely construct and deploy their own noospheric agents to help do so. Thus prolonged contentious struggles may be expected over whether and how societies should add commons realms.

As these struggles unfold, a radical realignment would occur, involving hundreds of millions of people and organizations around the world. The AEONs I envision would play key roles in these struggles. And afterwards the surviving AEONs would decide to coexist and coordinate with each other, rather than meld into one single planetary AEON. As I’ve said before, “The global commons might turn out to be a pivotal issue area” for the emergence of the noosphere and noopolitics” (Ronfeldt & Arquilla, 2000, p. 51).

Once in place, their purpose would be to assure planetary harmonization and enhancement at all levels and in all care-based domains as discussed earlier. Most educational, health, humanitarian-welfare, and environmental organizations everywhere — schools, hospitals, etc. — would move (and be moved) out of societies’ existing three realms and into the commons realm. They would associate with one AEON or another.

People everywhere would then look to AEONs for leadership on commons-related matters. They would look to them too for basic insurance coverage. Homeless people and refugees in camps around the world would look to them for supervision and sustenance, including schooling for children. As governance mechanisms, the AEONs would help develop and heed inputs from Chambers of the Commons and Assemblies of the Commons that are organized from local to planetary levels (Ronfeldt, 2009; Bauwens, 2025).

This would spell a fourth “major evolutionary transition” (MET) from a TIMN and NOO perspective. The first occurred when the oral information-communications revolution enabled the tribal form to take hold ages ago; the second, when writing and printing enabled the hierarchical institutional form to consolidate a couple millennia ago; the third when the electrical information-communications revolution (telephony, telegraphy, etc.) enabled the market form to establish itself in the mix a couple centuries ago. As societies advanced through these METs, so did the noosphere’s formation.

Today we are still on the threshold of a fourth socio-cultural MET: an MET about the spread of the network form enabled by digital and post-digital information-communications technologies. During 1993-1996, when I first wrote about an eventual +N transition, I wasn’t thinking about AIs being important for this. I now sense they may be crucial.

Winning the struggles to add a commons realm, then constructing it alongside the existing three realms (again: civil society, government, market economy) will be a daunting endeavor. It may require far more advanced information, communications, and other noospheric capabilities than I first supposed. Vast world-wide networks will have to be built for monitoring, processing, and sharing all sorts of inputs about all sorts of conditions — environmental, societal, holospheric, etc. This surely can’t and won’t be done without the participation of AIs and socio-noospheric entities like AEONs.

IN CONCLUSION

I’m unclear whether I’ve imagined, intuited, deduced, or foreseen the rise of AEONs. But they are based on my past work about TIMN, NOO, and CYBOC. And I could speculate at length about how they may initially take form and then evolve into key actors in society’s and the planet’s next MET, in order to generate quadriform societies and grow the noosphere so profoundly it attains the strategic importance it lacks today.

But that seems too much for this post. Better I end on the following two notes:

1. Many theorists seem likely to analyse AEONs as superorganisms before realizing they are something else, something much grander: a new kind of evolutionary entity intent on constructing a commons realm for the sake of Earth’s triune holosphere as well as humanity at large. I’d suggest relenting on the superorganism model, especially as a basis for forecasting what may be next and/or what may be needed next.

2. Seen as AEONs, these providential noospheric entities would help fulfill TIMN’s +N, Kojin Karatani’s Mode D, Michel Bauwen’s P2P-Commons, and even Clare Grave’s Turquoise-Level and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega-Point visions, not to mention some Chinese versions of tianxia (“all under heaven,” per Zhao, 2018; Debray & Zhao, 2020). People alone may be insufficient to achieve this next MET; they may need massive assistance from AI-powered systems like AEONs.

REFERENCES

Bauwens, Michel, “What do we do, right now, at this moment in the transition?,” Michel’s Substack: Fourth Generation Civilization, blog, June 23, 2025, online at:
https://4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/what-do-we-do-right-now-at-this-moment

Debray, Regis, and Zhao Tingyang, “Tianxia: All Under Heaven,” NOEMA, June 19, 2020, online at:
https://www.noemamag.com/tianxia-all-under-heaven/

Gardels, Nathan, “The New Axial Age,” NOEMA, June 17, 2020, online at:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-new-axial-age/

Heylighen, Francis. “The Global Superorganism: an evolutionary-cybernetic model of the emerging network society,” Journal of Social Evolutionary Systems, vol. 6, no. 1, 2007, pp. 58–119, online at:
https://researchportal.vub.be/en/publications/the-global-superorganism-an-evolutionary-cybernetic-model-of-the-

Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd, "Complex societies: The evolutionary origins of a crude superorganism," Human Nature, 10(3), 1999, pp. 253–289, online at:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-999-1004-y

Ronfeldt, David, “Speculation: Is there an “assurance commons”? Do societies depend on it? Should there be a U.S. Chamber of Commons?,” Materials for Two Theories, blog, December 3, 2012, online at:
http://twotheories.blogspot.com/2012/12/speculation-is-there-assurance-commons.html

Ronfeldt, David, and John Arquilla, Whose Story Wins: Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft, RAND Corporation, PEA237-1, 2020. Online at:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA237-1.html

Stewart, John E., “The Trajectory of Evolution and Its Implications for Humanity,” Journal of Big History, vol. III, no. 3, 2007, pp. 141 – 155, online at:
https://doi.org/10.22339/jbh.v3i3.3380

Stewart, John E., “Towards a general theory of the major cooperative evolutionary transitions,” BioSystems, vol. 198, December 2020, online at
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2020.104237

Vernon, Mark, “Are we living in a new axial age?,” The Guardian, November 17, 2012, online at:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2012/nov/17/new-axial-age-robert-bellah

Vidal, Clément, “What Is the Noosphere? Planetary Superorganism, Major Evolutionary Transition and Emergence,” Systems Research and Behavioral Science, vol. 41, no. 4, 2024, pp. 614–22, online at:
https://doi:10.1002/sres.2997

Wilson, David Sloane, and Elliott Sober, “Reviving the Superorganism,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 136, no. 3, 1989, pp. 337–356, online at:
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5193(89)80169-9

Zhao Tingyang, “Can this ancient Chinese philosophy save us from global chaos?,” Washington Post, February 7, 2018, online at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/02/07/tianxia/

CODA: A LITTLE NIGHTCAP MUSIC

After I try to tighten some loose screws in my head, I’m going to enjoy replaying these nightcap meditations:

“Ghosts of a Future Lost” (2000) – Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet

Múm – We Have A Map Of The Piano (2002)

Múm - We Have A Map Of The Piano - Pitchfork Live (2012)