Is Singularity a Scientific Concept or the Construct of Metaphysical Historicism? Implications for Big History

Snooks, Graeme Donald

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-33730-8_12

Cited by 6 publications

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References 9 publications

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“…But sometimes good things come in small packages. The good thing, if it can be expressed as a generic thing, is that, although there are only two chapters in this section, the good thing in question is the disparity between the two chapters, one a review of the indications of an impending singularity and the basic models used in the study of singularities, at least as they are understood in a Kurzweillian context, and the other, a unique look by one scholar of his perspective and perception of mathematized Big History trends; the first, by LePoire and Devezas (2020) on the Near-Term Indications and Models of a Singularity, and the second by Graeme D. Snooks (2020) dealing with the reality of a 21 st Century Singularity. In the first chapter, Le Poire and Devezas review the mathematics applied to the study of singularities currently and then provide very basic evidence of the consequences of our human behavior that are potentially pushing us toward a singularity.…”

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Fresh Look at the Global History. A Review of the Twenty-First Century Singularity and Global Futures: A Big History Perspective

Antony¹

2020

jogs

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Amazon Books lists seventy-five pages of books associated with the topic, singularity, and these range from a variety of fictional offerings to speculative entries of ambiguous focus to serious works of research scholarship. The edited book by Andrey Korotayev and David LePoire, The 21 st Century Singularity and Global Futures: A Big History Perspective (2020), is the epitome of this last category of scholarly efforts. It is organized into a series of topics listed in sequence as: An Overview, Historical Megatrends, Models, Future Implications, Epistemology and Ontology, Perspectives and Perceptions, and a closing section, Conclusions. The contributing authors come from a wide range of scholarly backgrounds indicating the diversity of expertise being brought to bear on this timely and pressing topic. These are in no particular order: archeology, history including of course Big History, nuclear physics, systems research, informatics, cognitive science, education, mining science, and pediatrics. Collectively, this group of researchers brings both an eclectic focus and a depth of scholarship that are well adapted to analyze the state of knowledge on what may probably be one of the defining events of the 21 st Century. Dictionary definitions of singularity include: from mathematics-a point at which a function becomes infinite; with respect to humanity-a point of dramatic, irreversible change, and generically, a unique event, as in a singular event. In the initial section, 'An Overview' (Panov, LePoire, and Korotayev 2020), the topic of singularity is given a carefully described foundation, then reassessed to bring clarity to the reality of singular change, and finally given appropriate conditions under which such a change might occur and also the basis of future possibilities. The second offering in this section by Andrey Korotayev (2020b) is particularly important as it places the notion of singularity within a framework of macroevolutionary regularities. Here the author takes great pains to establish the relationship between differing scales of complex organization with respect to some elegant mathematics showing the commonness of hyperbolic growth, a form of growth characterizing much of the thinking in this volume, to those differing levels of organization, and which has embedded within its structure singularity as an endpoint. Diversity of opinion is always required for depth of understanding, and the author of the first chapter, Theodore Modis (2020), ultimately suggests that forecasting a sin

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confidence: 99%