The ideosphere—like the

noosphere The noosphere (alternate spelling noösphere) is a philosophical concept developed and popularized by the Russian-Ukrainian Soviet biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, and the French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Vernads ...

(i.e., the realm of

reason Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, ...

)—is the

metaphysical Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...

'place' where thoughts,

theories A theory is a rational type of abstract thinking about a phenomenon, or the results of such thinking. The process of contemplative and rational thinking is often associated with such processes as observational study or research. Theories may be s ...

, ideas, and ideation are regarded to be created, evaluated, and evolved. Analogous to the biosphere (the realm of biological evolution), the ideosphere is the realm of memetic evolution, where ' memes' take the role of biological genes.Grant, Glenn. 1990.
Memetic Lexicon
" '' Principia Cybernetica''. (Also available in Hofstadter, Douglas R. 1985. '' Metamagical Themas: Questions for the Essence of Mind and Pattern''. New York: Basic Books.
ideosphere
" As such, the ideosphere is an entire memetic

ecology Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps wi ...

: the collective intelligence of all humans wherein memes live, reproduce, compete, and mutate. The health of an ideosphere, in this sense, can be measured by its memetic diversity. Moreover, like the biosphere, it has

ecological niches In ecology, a niche is the match of a species to a specific environmental condition. Three variants of ecological niche are described by It describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors (for ...

, which serve as environments for groups or audiences. For instance, some entities compete for ecological niches in the ideosphere, such as

Buddha Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha, was a śramaṇa, wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism. According to Buddhist tradition, he was ...

Laozi Laozi (), also known by numerous other names, was a semilegendary ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher. Laozi ( zh, ) is a Chinese honorific, generally translated as "the Old Master". Traditional accounts say he was born as in the state ...

, the ''

kami are the deities, divinities, spirits, phenomena or "holy powers", that are venerated in the Shinto religion. They can be elements of the landscape, forces of nature, or beings and the qualities that these beings express; they can also be the sp ...

'' of

Shinto Shinto () is a religion from Japan. Classified as an East Asian religion by scholars of religion, its practitioners often regard it as Japan's indigenous religion and as a nature religion. Scholars sometimes call its practitioners ''Shintois ...

Satan Satan,, ; grc, ὁ σατανᾶς or , ; ar, شيطانالخَنَّاس , also known as Devil in Christianity, the Devil, and sometimes also called Lucifer in Christianity, is an non-physical entity, entity in the Abrahamic religions ...

Jesus Christ Jesus, likely from he, יֵשׁוּעַ, translit=Yēšūaʿ, label=Hebrew/Aramaic ( AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth (among other names and titles), was a first-century Jewish preacher and religious ...

in Christianity and in other religions, etc. Another example, an ideosphere is formed around a

linguistic system {{Essay-like, article or section, an essay, date=February 2020 idea of language as a linguistic system appears in the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, J.R. Firth, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Louis Hjelmslev, and Michael Halliday. The paradig ...

that involves a mixture of cynicism and sentimentality as well as the violent appropriation of the other's word.

Douglas Hofstadter Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, an ...

and Aaron Lynch are considered to have independently co-invented the term ''ideosphere'' in the mid-1980s.Kryger, Meir H., Tom Roth, and William C. Dement. 1994. ''Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine''. Saunders
p. xxiii
The ideosphere is not considered to be a physical place by most people; instead, it is "inside the minds" of all the humans in the world. It is also sometimes believed that the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

, books, and other media could be considered to be part of the ideosphere—however such media lack the ability to process the thoughts they contain. According to philosopher Yasuhiko Kimura, the ideosphere is "

concentric In geometry, two or more objects are said to be concentric, coaxal, or coaxial when they share the same center or axis. Circles, regular polygons and regular polyhedra, and spheres may be concentric to one another (sharing the same center point ...

" in form, as ideas are generated by a few people with others merely perceiving and accepting these ideas from these "external authorities."Kimura, Yasuhiko Genku. 2000.
A Vision Fulfilled
" He advocates an "omnicentric" configuration, wherein all individuals create new ideas and interact as self-authorities. There is the notion that most of humanity remains the consumer instead of producer of ideas. To address this, Kimura proposed the so-called ideospheric transformation, triggered by a synergetic phenomenon produced by the emergence of a sufficient number of authentic and independent thinkers.

References

External links

Memetic Lexicon
Principia Cybernetica {{Cultural-anthropology-stub Memetics Thought

See also

References

Further reading

External links