The Deductive Approach to Big History’s Singularity

Abstract

Traditional ideas about the singularity of human civilizational development are based on the extrapolation of empirical data (inductive approach). Since a mathematical singularity is just a special point of a function, it is not necessarily associated with an infinite increase at the point. This concept also applies to time series, which converge to a particular point in time. The proposed concept of an “informational-systemic singularity” (ISS) is such a series (deductive approach). One example is the chronology of basic information technologies (BIT). This chronology is within the informatics-cybernetic model (ICM) which represents a social component of Big History. ICM uses the Zhirmunsky-Kuzmin series—a temporal geometric progression with the denominator “e to the degree minus e.” The identified times in this series include the approximate times of 30 million, 2 million, 120 thousand, and 8 thousand years ago, along with the more recent times of 1446, 1946, 1979, 1981 CE. Another example of a chronology is the archaeological “Fibonacci’s” model, where the time around 1981 CE corresponds to a transition between the pre-historical stage of humanity and its following stage. This event is defined as the ISS—the time of the maximum possible number of levels/tiers in the human system hierarchy. Further development processes would be co-evolutionary and co-adaptive. Evidence suggests that the ISS is an inflection of the transition from the long 10 million years trend to another starting at about the 1981 CE timeframe.