The Evolution of Human Civilization

1. Climate’s effect on inhabitability, capacity to concentrate (density of species, extremity of stimulus, heat) - in addition to geography, food availability, characteristics/resilience of cohabitating species…

2. Overpopulation of hominins in the Old World due to secure, prolific reproduction and nonsustainable hunter-gathering

3. Feuding within the most climactically hospitable regions, development of in-group/out-group preference and mob mentality as a semi-genetic predisposition (usually with high plasticity)

4. Evolution of increasingly sublimated mores until ethical sensibility appeared, essentially the ability to deceive oneself and others by thinking in fantastical and then coded, nonliteral ways about more or less concrete experiences. This might be the act of talking about something besides what is meant or intended in order to obscure intent, along with fostering trust amongst complexity.

5. Evolution of increasingly elaborate customs and cognitive capacities for thinking (parallel processing) in this symbolic way, abetted by the heavier reliance on vocalization for expressing concepts, trajecting towards more complex languages. Evolutionary divergence and diversification of languages picks up speed. (Inner voice becomes faster and more effortless, guided by tight and flexible logical inferencing)

4. And 5. enable incisive thinking in more difficult circumstances (reasoning in the bush)

6.Evolution of ethical reasoning towards reliable protocultural accord between neighboring populations allows opportunity for customs such as narrative storytelling, art, complex social role relationships, some rudimentary invention routines.

7.Increased leisure time leads to more reflection, greater acuity in observing the environment.

8. Experiences begin to acquire a more spiritual/symbolic significance in addition to practicality

9. Biologically elite communication ability via complex language makes human thought more persuasive/powerful/precise/cohesive. This improves memory and starts to attract greater, more sustained attention from very powerful psychoactive entities such as local gods, demons, spirits in general, in addition to animals.

10. Weather patterns, fates etc. begin to seem dependent on these more scrutinized higher spirits, leading to rituals and then customs of supplication or general interaction.

11. As these customs become more established and well-developed, spiritual attention increases, seems greater in efficacy, and attracts bigger responses.

12. Human behavior becomes increasingly reliant on spiritual practices, instilling greater ambition and zeal in human experiencing.

13. Glorification of altered states of consciousness, more complex relationship between unconsciousness and deliberate awareness in the brain/body.

14. Supplication of higher spirits assists some improbable developmental outcomes such as battle successes (weather, confidence), successful and determined migrations, integration of separate tribes, innovation in customs and practices.

15. Hospitable climate, customs, spiritual prerogative, technological development give rise to sparsely distributed settlement as post-Ice Age thawing increases the food supply (agriculture, food storage, farming tools etc.)

16. Technology and social organization become effective enough to sustain the customs, tech development of settlements for many generations, with food surpluses that grow population in a logistical direction, migration and expansion more strategic, negotiated trade/relations with increasing formalism.

17. Primordial institutions form to manage these logistics, drawing on archetypal talents such as artistry, chiefdom, shamanism, invention, teaching, healing, seeking, spirituality etc.

18. Expanding settlement runs into major logistical hurdles such as limited resources, inclement climate, communication delays, foreign cultures, problem solving complexity.

19. Organization is conditioned by hardships and near disasters, leading various facets of institutional and cultural structure to become more oppressive/enforced. This is coupled to increase in military capabilities due to foreign rivalry, large-scale war.

20. As cultures are subjugated, mingle in dense proximity, more rigid hierarchical guidelines take shape.

21. Centralized government evolves from traditions of enforcement, consolidates wealth via economy and infrastructure, begins to assume more comprehensive responsibility for logistics.

22. When wealth is independent, secure and insightful enough it starts to back more esoteric innovation efforts.

23. The stunning successes of high achieving practical philosophers grant prerogative to found institutions of more or less progressive learning.

24. Primordial academia accelerates conceptual development, establishes educational disciplines/specialties.

25. During this period, writing/literature are invented as a record-keeping supplement to conceptual sustainability, rudimentary consolidation of prediction/projection efforts.

26. Better infrastructure technology allows empires to become larger, regional or continent-wide civilizations possible.

27. Sustainable cosmopolitanism begins to divert cultural rivalry away from physical domination and towards intellectual camps.

28. Philosophical movements and rival schools of thought develop while political organization becomes more stable.

29. Philosophical/intellectual advance feeds back into politics and culture to make them more potent, leads to eras of reformist regime, motivates progress in tech and gov’t policy, concessions to general population enhance sustainability and quality of life.

30. New techniques of cultural, political, religious, economic, intellectual organization gain traction from improbable or obscure beginnings, society can adapt in ways that are substantially independent of the “state of nature”.

31. Philosophy becomes more speculative, distinctly civilized customs, beliefs, interpretations of the world achieve universalizing influence.

32. Eventually have to develop a philosophy of existence from scratch while employing esoteric/abstract ideas, doctrinal/ideological disputes are more important.

33. As world integrates, the total complexity/diversity of humanity, society and the world becomes apparent, imperialist prejudices, preferences increase in import, humans must analytically grapple with the tendency to adopt stereotypes.

34. Unrest, rivalry is more intellectualized, and unprecedentedly empathic approaches grow in ideological impact from the necessity of synthesis. Origin of the comprehensive philosophical system, pursuit of theory of everything. Inclusiveness as a value begins to appear practical, even essential.

35. Institutional reform starts to aim for fostering compromise, ideal forms of participation. Incentivized by stronger, more adaptive economies which lend a cultural advantage. This drives financial evolution, integrates gov’t with business and cultural diversity, greater liquidity. Economic dynamics rationalized, academicized, incentivizes attempts at universalized logistical synthesis, starts to break down traditional barriers of class, ethnicity etc., an effect loosely correlated with affluence/economic mobility. Comprehensive cooperation, tolerance are simply practical, a daily habit in some sectors of society.

36. During this period, education and then the distributing of information become institutionalized/standardized. Communications and social theory accelerate in development, enter the sphere of technological application.

37. Competency of the general population in critical analysis increases to a point where political vigilance makes traditional methods of punishment and promotion extremely difficult to maintain. Safeguarding authority structures from severe blowback for suspect ideologies, logistical errors and typical corruption is much more challenging.

38. Authority begins to manipulate populaces using ubiquitous propaganda, with dissent suppressed by invasive surveillance.

39. The majority begins to drift away from a reliance on clear, explicit reasoning for civic discourse in favor of behaviors and decision making that circumvent possible punitive measures.

40. Public discourse becomes less competent, the citizenry segregates into more polarized, occasionally fanatical factions. General social stability can grow less dependable when major disruptions, crises occur.

41. The discontents and vices of society are transparent to nearly everyone, so a way must be found to restore public discourse and avoid the cognitive dissonance, irrationality of constant in-group/out-group conflict, intellectual inconsistency, incoherent cultural evolution, and obedience that is of obvious detriment to oneself. Humans need to renew the competence of reflection, self-control, participation. A philosophy of progress is required with appropriate strategies of popularization, rhetoric and customization.

Nature and Prospects of a Singularity in the Context of Human History

Why is our species’ history so sharply demarcated between a 300,000 plus year period of more or less occasional catastrophic collapses and an epoch from roughly 1000 A.D. to the present which has seen distinctly consistent, steady progress? Genetic evidence reveals that for tens of thousands of years during prehistory, our direct ancestors shrunk to a population of a couple thousand and almost died out. From the beginning of farming and settlement around 10,000 to 3000 B.C.E., every attempt at civilization eventually disbanded. Bronze age settlement in Europe was destroyed by invasion of the so-called sea people. The rise of ancient Greece was preceded by a centuries long dark age. All the conquering empires of later antiquity fell from power. Rome was sacked and burned. The Frankish empire’s comprehensive attempt at promoting scholarship throughout its territories during the Carolingian Renaissance fizzled out, at which time Europe entered a century long dark age. Yet the second millennium C.E. commenced with a Medieval Europe which managed to unite for centuries by employing a pretext no more solid than mere belief, in God and a universal church. At this time, the new custom of a few individuals meeting with a teacher to read great books became a tradition called universitas, which eventually obtained financial support from the church and developed over centuries into our gargantuan university system, the core of Western theoretical/technological advancement and, as a brilliant silver lining to European colonialism, the foundation for a global episteme.

Why were particular works of ancient literature so well-preserved while the rest was almost completely neglected? Why did the Romans carry out a multiyear study of Athenian democracy while developing their government? Why were Arabs of the late first millennium C.E. so fervent about the study of ancient Greek literature, even as they hotly contested European control at the fringes of a massive thrust towards conquering as much foreign territory as possible? Why were Europeans so much more committed to exploring the globe than rival continents from the Middle Ages onward? Why did unstoppable Mongol armies, backed by the entirety of East Asia, refrain from entering Europe and fracture into multiple kingdoms, effectively abandoning the entire reason for leaving Mongolia in the first place? How was European colonialism capable of governing its territories while often being so staggeringly outnumbered? Why did China and India never become intrepid explorers or imperialist invaders? Why did the entire European world transition from monarchy to republic nearly at once? How did Europe manage to finesse so much social conflict and crisis, avoiding slash and burn conquest in the mold of Attila the Hun for the entirety of the second millennium C.E.? What kind of rationale could have prompted fascist leader Adolf Hitler to incongruently end his speech in response to England’s unexpected bombing of civilian targets in Germany during the Battle of Briton with the proclamation, “so help me God!”

If we search for a common thread through all this history and sharply distinguishable ascent of progress during the most recent thousand years, the one feature that most prominently stands out in the context of physical phenomena we have thus far described is proximity to recordings. Our videos, music, and even our literature can modulate across time as if the producers and consumers of this content are in the same room, and viewing these recordings at different times can, in the most improvisational mediums, cause changes in the details they manifest, a function of the underlying mind substance which, akin to quantum coherence, transmits causality at entanglement speeds we have probably not yet come close to fathoming. Resolution must not only increase with closer temporal proximity in location, but also with the amount and acuity of biomass doing the perceiving. So roughly speaking, the larger the population of humans who observe the same media production, either at the same or different times, the more incisive a perception of its correlation to the relationship between past and future will be. The larger and more well-organized the population’s observance of a media production is, the more intelligible our total understanding of the associated causal relationship between past and future can become. Causality of the entanglement involved, as a bare physical phenomenon, does not usually change the probabilistic relationship between past and future because all observations are being performed within a spectrum of attention moderated by conventions of culture which can be tailored to the context and held stable. But capacity of the communicating human mind to render a collective experience of the media production more powerful and universally insightful can increase considerably depending on the way culture develops.

Internet dramatically changed the spectrum of attention involved in our observation of media. In the span of a decade or less, nearly the entire population had access to a century of video, centuries of music, and millennia of literature with no explicit guidelines for moderation. All kinds of causality was coming from such a variety of locations and lengths of time that the phenomenon proved nearly indecipherable in some cases. But these growing pains in the globalization of mass media via online content have been almost completely overcome. We have thoroughly analyzed, organized and streamlined internet usage so almost everything that happens to the mind field at the level of fundamental percept via this network is intelligible to near exhaustion. The internet is predictable enough that it seems genuinely possible to consider how we might transition from regarding it as a primary resource to enculturating it as a universalized online way.

Perennial concerns about how we should indoctrinate and guide demographics of course rears its sometimes monstrous head, but as explained earlier, the degree of transparency in modern society, simply the shear impossibility of concealing fact when it is of universal practicality, means we must get down to business and think seriously about reworking standards for distributing and accessing information. As mentioned, a neutral language for basic analytical reading and writing would help tremendously, a common foundation allowing safe, dependable access to plain information so our reasoning can in general be evidence-based, an essentially nondivisive platform for matter-of-fact discoursing. This can be the communicative appendage of our effort to integrate and direct technological development towards a future of increasingly mutual progress, probably the best and most obvious good faith strategy we can implement. It has negligible impact on the independence of demographics with any distinct cultural backgrounds in play, nor the attempt to advance technology and make it intuitive, nor the pressing need to enculturate study and progress, except as a vehicle for promotion and synchronization. Once everyone who wants to acquire the advantages of participation attains familiarity and a sufficient comfort level with the priorities of safety, accessibility and cooperation, it will become possible to give pioneering research, government policy, economic development, cultural appreciation, social issues, etc. the comprehensibly reasoned backing they merit.

With easy access and a basic opportunity to discourse about what we learn, at least through study, citizens will reach a much higher level of competency in their areas of interest along with the ability to understand their own personal timeline in the context of society’s overall historical narrative. As individual reasoning and insight begins to more or less analytically integrate into this online way, seeking and finding its optimum orientation to the totality, the capacity of society to triangulate towards the most accurate and efficacious perception of past and future will increase, and we will actually be able to cogently adjudicate the past in retrospect at an unprecedentedly expansive temporal distance, insuring more than we ever have, as much as is realistically possible, that human history will be safeguarded against logistical disaster and disintegration by our exacting vigilance. The concept of a so-called “singularity” has aroused much bewilderment among the general public: is it the melding of humankind with AI or what? It turns out that the singularity is actually the consolidation of perceived retroactive causality or precognition to optimum levels. We have all the research and development, educational, informational and technological infrastructure, regulatory institutions, and sustainable transparency we need. It seems that reaching the singularity, this rather unique form of optimal consolidation, in the near future is well within the realms of possibility.

What are the consequences of not pursuing this outcome now that we can understand and logistically implement it? If we had somehow invented mass media before the Bronze Age collapse, perhaps we could have reached the singularity by 1 C.E., and likewise with later dissolutions of civilization to a lesser degree. But now we are in an unprecedented position, the opportunity to implement the singularity on a global scale. The institutional structures of all our planet’s countries are compatible enough that modifying the singularity to fit local conditions anywhere is very much within our means. Adopting a comprehensive strategy for doing so is not prohibitively complex, for we simply use all the mechanisms of intellectual, economic and social development already in place while reorienting our priorities and participation towards progress, the longer term progress which would soon become much more intelligible, and responsible decision making. We can of course reach for these goals by utilizing more methods and practices than can be enumerated in lifetimes.

It is something of a challenge to rationalize the relationship between our anticipated destination and the well-worn traditions of recursive discord all the world’s cultures have become accustomed to operating within. Within the mainstream’s veil of persistent mayhem, singularities of the kind described have already been sustainable, a proof of principle for the kind of progression under consideration. This is of course the history of preserved literature, and its surpassing importance for the crafting of society is priceless, for its unmatched continuity puts it far ahead of the mainstream in degree of conceptual development. In terms of European history, the analyses of Plato and Aristotle are roughly the beginning of a progressive discourse carried on by successive generations of philosophers, statesman, inventors, researchers, etc. That is responsible for all the improvement in quality of life, technological advance, social reform, ethical standardization, freedom and idealism humans have achieved, the bedrock of how we orient citizens to not only contribute to but build civilization. Our reliance on this discourse may have degraded in recent decades, and this could be a part of the reason why society has become more corrupt, dangerous, hopeless, regressive in various regions, but if we can empower access to this peak intelligence via the online way, at least by summary and translation, the singularity has potential to reach a more futuristic actualization than even the very best of of what civilized humans have thus far attained.

Civilization’s current dilemmas are dire, especially as they pertain to ecosystem collapse, but the vigilant have probably noticed as I have, or will soon, that God is intervening more dramatically than usual to coax us back on course. It is doubtful we would have struggled our way out of the bush to an era of high technology and global infrastructure without God’s help. It is interesting to note that the period in which human progress was most sustained coincides to the beginnings of a universal church responsible for building a civilization which supplicates Him. He is probably God of the galaxy and perhaps beyond, nudging life in the appropriate direction for maybe all of Earth’s evolutionary history when its inhabitants cannot see or reason far enough. Perhaps our supplication of God initiated the most epic precognitive act of generosity ever hosted by our solar system, the gift of a human history that liberated us from the state of nature and may provide our species with unprecedented opportunities to determine its own fate once the comprehensive singularity consolidates and optimizes our precognition. God is freeing us to chart our own course with the elite capacity for problem solving he has thus far guarded against extinction, and even if we shun worshiping any human image or perspective of the divine, we at least have to respect his awesome power in nature while it likely continues to be displayed in with rare drama so as to incentivize humanity and turn our gaze towards the future. With God evidently backing the singularity, our fates simply mean more. It seems that God is freeing us to build a legendary future of theoretical and technological development that is beyond brilliant, with space exploration, faster than light physics, peak actualization etc. We have made so many short-sighted mistakes while in the chains of imperialist and persecutory inclination, but the unprecedented predictability of a singularity that is secured will enable us to coexist as peacefully as possible, minimizing blowback from injustice, reducing to negligibility the cycle of retribution, and palliating our struggle with nature. Karma is most likely no more than the way matter’s vibrations, oscillations and flows intrinsically feel. We must come together and calm the stormy seas of karmic disharmony as much as possible, seizing this new, singular moment.