eschaton
The eschaton is the end of the world as we know it. while the word
itself is very old [according to the OED, eschatology is the the
department of theological science concerned with the four last things:
death, judgement, heaven, and hell] it has acquired a recent
connotation: the end of the world brought on by increasing technology,
communication, and connectedness: a singularity or omega point.
Terence McKenna has this to say (original here)
An interesting thing about this concatenation of connectedness
is that each stage of its condensation took place more rapidly than
the stages that preceded it. At its birth the Universe was as a pure
plasma, there were no atomic systems; there was so much energy within
the system that electrons either did not yet exist or were unable to
settle into stable orbits. Then, as the Universe cooled, atomic
systems began to form; stars condensed and through nuclear chemistry
cooked up heavier elements, from which eventually developed a carbon
based chemistry. This opened the possibility of molecular
chemistry-new realms of connectedness-a new proliferation of
opportunity for novelty. This opportunity led to life, to higher
animals, to culture and eventually and comparatively recently to
culture and epigenetic coding systems such as language and even more
recently writing. The legacy of the conservation of connectedness is
the meta-connected chaostrophy of Twentieth Century planetary
culture. My model-building has sought to unify all of these diverse
phenomena and to treat them as manifestations of a single set of laws;
laws which describe the ingression of novelty into time And its
conservation and concentration in ordinary space/time and ordinary
immediate experience.
he uses Alfred North Whitehead's definition of novelty (original here):
Creativity is the principle of novelty. Creativity introduces
novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe
disjunctively. The creative advance is the application of this
ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it
originates. The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from
disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the
entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the
togetherness of the 'many' which it finds and also it is one among the
disjunctive ' many' which it leaves; it is a novel entity,
disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesises. The many
become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are
disjunctively 'many' in process of passage into conjunctive unity...
Thus the 'production of novel togetherness' is the ultimate notion
embodied in the term concrescence. These ultimate notions of
'production of novelty' and 'concrete togetherness' are inexplicable
either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components
participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components
abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to
intuition. (Process and Reality, p. 26)
Did you understand that? I'm still thinking about it. It sounds like
he's talking about emergence more than anything else. Maybe I should
read the book...
Though I think McKenna is crazy in many ways I think the basic idea of
increasingly increasing novelty/life/complexity is correct. The
fundamental question: what is the topology of the curve? Some predict
it becomes infinite in finite time (in 2012 in McKenna's case), this
is a singularity. But this injection of the infinite is a religious
assertion, just like Tipler's Omega point.
Feigenbaum and Jumping Jesus.
I see no reason for this. To me, the curve appears exponential. This
has the important property of scale-neutrality: no matter where you
are on the curve (ie no matter what age you live in) it looks the
same. Everyone always thinks they live on the verge of great change,
because relative to their past, they are! Until we approach the
physical limits of computation and energy (if there are any) I see no
reason for this to change.
Hans Moravec has some cogent words about the future, see Pigs in Cyberspace and
these excerpts from The Age of Mind: Transcending the Human
Condition through Robots: one and two.