Today’s word is “Biopower” (also sometimes referred to as bio-techno-power), first used by French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe how a state controls its citizens, not through negative means (such as the threat of death or physical coercion), but through more positive means such as by promoting a better life, namely by emphasising the protection of life. As the word implies with “bio”, it has a specific biological aspect to it.

According to Foucault, biopower is how capitalist and democratic societies controlled their citizens, and it was “an indispensible element” for the “development of capitalism” because it helped adjust “the phenomena of population to economic processes”.

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The “noosphere” (sometimes referred to as the neurosphere) can be described as “the sphere of human thought”. First used by geochemist Vladimir Verdansky, he believed that there were three stages in the development of the earth: the geosphere (inanimate matter), which was then transformed by the biosphere, (animate matter), which in turn would be transformed by the noosphere that arose from human cognition.

It’s interesting to note that Verdansky’s ideas helped contribute to a natural philosophy from the 19th and 20th Centuries called Russian Cosmism, which attempted to use empirical research combining elements of philosophy and religion to explore the origin and evolution of mankind and the universe, as well as to try and predict its future. Many of the ideas from this school helped contribute to transhumanism and is often seen as its natural precursor.

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Today’s quote comes from an old (1995) interview in Wired with AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter where he talks about the complexity of the human spirit:

“If such minds of infinite subtlety and complexity and emotional depth [like Bach] could be trivialized by a small chip, it would destroy my sense of what humanity is about - what humans are about, what love is about, what caring about people is about, and what humor is.”

One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groupsâ??and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it’s all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. Andâ??cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another.

From Philip K. Dick’s work, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978