RYV Lecture | Panacea of the Planetary: Must we build a world-brain?

Raise Your Voice Lecture ✨ Panacea of the Planetary: Must we build a world-brain?

In recent decades, we've become accustomed to claim that, through the weaving of information exchange across the surface of the globe, we might be building a sort of "planetary brain", whether we like it or not. But the idea has surprisingly deep historical and philosophical roots. This talk explores the history of such claims, tracing them through ancient ideas of "group minds" through pre-Darwinian theories of the "cephalizing" trajectories of evolution. Aside from discussing prominent names such as the Chardin and Vernadsky, we uncover forgotten and discarded voices. We will explore visions which have cast the coalescence of the coming "world-brain" in both a positive and negative light: as either our salvation from extinction or the irreversible annihilation of human autonomy.

➡️ Meet the speaker

Thomas Moynihan is a historian of ideas & writer. He holds a DPhil from Oriel College, Oxford, and is currently a Research Affiliate at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, as well as an Berggruen Fellow at the Berggruen Institute, and an Affiliate Researcher at the Antikythera think-tank. His writing and work appear in publications like BBC Future, The New Scientist, The Guardian, Aeon, Noema Magazine, The Independent, MIT Press Reader, Vice, Tank Magazine, and The Daily Mail. Thomas studies how worldviews transform over time, in often radical ways, as more is learnt and revealed about the cosmos and our placement within it. In particular, he is interested in how accumulating insights about the external universe have, again and again, reorganised our sense of the biggest picture priorities, potentials, and perils facing our species.

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