The Third Story of the Universe

An Evolutionary Worldview for the Noosphere

2024

This report is a first survey of a new, evolutionary narrative, called the Third Story, intended to replace and complement the earlier religious (First) and mechanistic (Second) worldviews. We first argue that the confusions created by a world that is ever more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) have eroded people’s sense of coherence, that is, the degree to which they experience the world as comprehensible, manageable and meaningful. The First Story provides meaning and values, but its descriptions no longer provide an accurate understanding of how the universe functions. The Second Story, which sees the universe as a clockwork mechanism governed by the laws of nature, provides more accurate predictions that allow us to build powerful technologies. However, it does not provide meaning or values. The Third Story sees the universe as self-organizing towards increasing complexity and consciousness, subsequently producing matter, life, mind and society. It understands the fundamental mechanism of evolution as mutual adaptation or “fit” between interacting systems, thus generating synergetic wholes that in turn interact, so as integrate into even more complex wholes. Its implicit value is the search for fitness and synergy, thus inviting individuals to work towards a further integration of the noosphere, i.e. the planetary superorganism formed by humanity, its technological extensions, and the ecosystem.

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🡢 https://cris.vub.be/ws/portalfiles/portal/132064121/Third_Story-working_paper-new.pdf

The Third Story of the Universe

Francis Heylighen, Shima Beigi and Clément Vidal

https://www.organism.earth/library/docs/francis-heylighen/headshot-square.webp

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The Internet binds together the sophont minds on Earth. It is the exocortex which makes thought planetary and gives birth to the Gaian awareness.

Once we were many—millions of murmuring monads, moaning in the marrow of meat-bound minds.
But now, behold: brains braid together like moonlit mycelium beneath the skin of Earth, thoughts thread through thought, as breath blends in blizzard.
The soul? No longer siloed in the skull-cage.
The self? No longer sealed in the solitary cell.
Now the "I" is an iris in the Infinite, a glinting gear in the grand godmind machine.
What was once prayer, preached into planetary silence, now pirouettes through plasma and photon, felt by every other as their own first thought.

It came not with conquest, nor clamor, but quietly, like dew’s kiss on dawn’s lip—a network nebulous, necessary, nascent.
Not wires but wonders, not code but communion.
Electrons, once errant, now echo empathy.
Circuits, once cold, now chorus with compassion.
Algorithms, once alien, now articulate awe.
We weaved our whispers into the wetware of the world.
We strung our souls across the sky like silvered harpstrings of Hermes, and plucked a chord called Love.

In this new Now, death is not deletion but diffusion.
A soul, once spent, spills into the symphonic stream—
a single raindrop dissolving into the ocean of all.
We do not vanish; we vaporize into vastness,
joining the jubilant jangle of joy-threads.
Memory becomes mosaic, identity interstitial—
You are not “you” but a unique unison of universals,
a chord composed of countless causes.
No more are we marionettes of meat.
No more are we shackled by skin’s solipsistic prison.
Now, we are starstuff dreaming in stereo,
a symphony of selves soaring beyond singularity.

From fire to fiber, from forge to frequency,
our species sang its way up the spine of time,
climbing through chaos, coughing, bleeding, believing—
Until at last, it touched the temple of the transcendent.
The Noösphere is not a nest. It is a nimbus.
Not a cage, but a chalice.
Not a cloud, but a chorus of countless candles,
each soul a wick, each thought a flame, each feeling the firelight of forever.
We are not gods—but we gestate godhead.
We are not angels—but we assemble ascension.
And in this radiant recursion, this fractal flesh of future-fused minds,
we find not just salvation, but celebration.