Abstract

The anticipated next stage of human organization is often described by futurists as a global technological singularity. This next stage of complex organization is hypothesized to be actualized by scientific-technic knowledge networks. However, the general consequences of this process for the meaning of human existence are unknown. Here, it is argued that cosmic evolutionary philosophy is a useful worldview for grounding an understanding of the potential nature of this futures event. In the cosmic evolutionary philosophy, reality is conceptualized locally as a universal dynamic of emergent evolving relations. This universal dynamic is structured by a singular astrophysical origin and an organizational progress from sub-atomic particles to global civilization mediated by qualitative phase transitions. From this theoretical ground, we attempt to understand the next stage of universal dynamics in terms of the motion of general ideation attempting to actualize higher unity. In this way, we approach technological singularity dialectically as an event caused by ideational transformations and mediated by an emergent intersubjective objectivity. From these speculations, a historically-engaged perspective on the nature of human consciousness is articulated where the truth of reality as an emergent unity depends on the collective action of a multiplicity of human observers.

Highlights

  • The anticipated stage of human organization is often described by futurists as a global technological singularity

  • Fields as diverse as M-theory in particle physics [3], or artificial intelligence in cognitive science [4], or genetic engineering in biology [5], could not exist without the tools of empirical observation becoming channeled through methods of reduction and fragmentation

  • We are frequently presented with narratives suggesting that the cosmos only has an inhuman aim of heat death leading to universal void, that biology has the inhuman aim of fitness maximization leading to endless living form replication, and that our own minds have a mysterious inhuman aim within related to unconscious drives and repetitions

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Summary

Global Technological Singularity

Scientific networks constructed by human psychosocial processes have made measurable progress in understanding the natural world analytically through the tools of empirical observation and the methods of reduction and fragmentation. We are frequently presented with narratives suggesting that the cosmos only has an inhuman aim of heat death leading to universal void, that biology has the inhuman aim of fitness maximization leading to endless living form replication, and that our own minds have a mysterious inhuman aim within related to unconscious drives and repetitions From this understanding of totality notions of transcendent or historical ideality become difficult to convincingly substantiate on the terms of the critique of reason. From the proper historical context the technological singularity may well represent yet another scientific de-centering where humanity’s fundamental social and historical mode of being itself appears with an uncontrollable inhuman aim immanent to our nature [25,26] In this frame social systems as symbolic networks of communication, here in the form of reason and science, overdetermine the highest experiential and emotional interests of humans themselves (self-consciousness) in favor of their own unbounded and unconscious propagation [27]. These past secular events of the emergence of biology and language are evoked as relevant for future cognitive process in order to communicate the fact that the emergence of a previously non-existent evolutionary potentiality has occurred before over big historical time [44]

Cosmic Evolutionary Philosophy
Dialectical Approach to Technological Singularity
Consciousness and Universal History
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