Roger P. Briggs is an American physicist turned deep-time historian whose work synthesizes paleoanthropology, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary theory into a unified account of consciousness evolution across civilizational scale. He is co-founder of The Planet Project and author of two books that trace the full arc from cosmic origins to the present developmental threshold.
Contribution to the BioConomy Corpus
Briggs provides two foundational contributions.
The first is the application of the Logistic Growth Principle to civilizational scale. Every living system traces an S-curve: slow initial growth, accelerating expansion, deceleration, plateau, and reorganization at a different level. The twelve-thousand-year arc of agricultural and industrial civilization is in the deceleration phase of a logistic curve. The slowdown is observable in energy returns, demographic transitions, debt-to-GDP ratios, and the diminishing capacity of additional capital to produce growth. This quantitative frame underpins the BioConomy corpus’s Three Futures analysis and the urgency argument throughout Movement I of the Emancipation Architecture.
The second is the synthesis of Cognitive Major Evolutionary Transitions (Cognitive METs). Drawing on Jean Gebser, Merlin Donald, Arthur Young, and Ken Wilber, Briggs identifies five stages of human consciousness development: survival, magical, mythical, mental/material, and integral/emerging. The BioConomy corpus adopted and extended this synthesis into its own Major Evolutionary Transitions sequence (Mimetic, Magical, Mythic, Material, Mycelial), with Briggs’s explicit agreement that these shifts qualify as cognitive METs.
Michael Haupt describes Briggs as a friend, after numerous exchanges and calls, and credits Emerging World as a “beautiful synthesis” of the consciousness evolution literature that became one of the structural pillars of the thesis.
Key Works
Journey to Civilization: The Science of How We Got Here (2013). Briggs’s first book recaps the evolution of the cosmos, Earth, life on Earth, and humanity from three million years ago to the beginning of recorded civilization. A polymath tour incorporating the latest scientific discoveries and theories, it tells humanity’s common origin story.
Emerging World: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Future of Humanity (2021). Eight years in the writing, this sequel picks up where Journey ended: at the beginning of civilization five thousand years ago. Briggs traces a progression of cultural mindsets through which humanity has evolved, walking the line between scientific and spiritual polarities. He encapsulates the common ground with a hybrid concept he calls “Planetary Consciousness.” The book includes no political history and little technological progress. It identifies instead the progression of consciousness structures that the BioConomy corpus maps as the MET sequence.
The Planet Project
Briggs co-founded The Planet Project (planetproject.io), which maintains a database of aligned change agents and publications tracking the transition ecosystem. He has done extensive mapping of what he calls “the landscape”: the global network of organizations, thinkers, and initiatives working on civilizational transition. Much of the ecosystem mapping referenced in the BioConomy corpus’s shiftscaping work draws on this effort.
As of May 2026, Briggs is working on the Positive Media Lab (positivemedialab.com) with Kurt Johnson and Amanda Sanders.
Relationship to Other Thinkers
Briggs operates at the intersection of several lineages represented in the BioConomy corpus. His consciousness evolution work draws directly on Gebser’s structures of consciousness and extends them through Donald’s cognitive archaeology, Young’s process theory, and Wilber’s integral framework. His logistic growth analysis converges with Joseph Tainter’s complexity collapse research, Peter Turchin’s cliodynamics, and the Strauss-Howe generational theory, all of which inform the Three Futures analysis.
Briggs was introduced to the broader network through Elisabet Sahtouris, Louis Herman, and Brian Swimme, placing him within the living-systems evolution lineage that provides the biological grounding for the corpus’s maturation thesis.
Links
- Website: https://rogerpbriggs.org
- The Planet Project: https://planetproject.io
- Emerging World on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YNZTZNB
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roger-briggs-b66923a/
Related Pages
- Major Evolutionary Transitions
- Three Futures
- Structures of Consciousness
- Material Consciousness
- Mycelial Consciousness
- Gebser, J. (1949/1985). The Ever-Present Origin
- Sahtouris, E. (2000). EarthDance
Provenance
Compiled from the Roger Briggs page in Michael Haupt’s Roam Research graph, cross-referenced with citations across the BioConomy project knowledge including Movement I (The Three Futures), Crisis Codes Iran Part Three, The Arc of Economic Thought Research Brief, and the Cognitive MET, Evolution of Consciousness, and Haupt Thesis pages in Roam. All biographical and relational claims sourced from Roam entries written or curated by Michael Haupt.