At the heart of our struggle to understand consciousness within the integrated history of the cosmos is an apparent paradox: we are both “within” and “outside of” any description of the universe we can formulate. This essay explores a way to resolve the paradox by recognizing the inherent limitations of a description. Any description is incomplete in the sense that it exists only in relation to...
Big History provides an integrative framework linking cosmic, biological, and cultural evolution within a unified narrative. Yet, several foundational mysteries—dark matter and energy, the quantum nature of reality, the origins of life, and the emergence of consciousness—remain unresolved. This paper argues that the study of Big History could benefit from incorporating speculative but...
Interest has been renewed in the study of consciousness, both theoretical and applied, following developments in 20th and early 21st century logic, metamathematics, computer science, and the brain sciences. In this evolving historical narrative, I explore several theoretical questions about the types of artificial intelligence and offer several conjectures about how they affect possible future...
Current models of Big History customarily take the observed increases over cosmic time of material-energetic complexity as their central concept. In this paper, we use Erich Jantsch’s pioneering masterwork The Self-Organizing Universe as the primary perspective from which to extend the customary ‘increasing material-energetic complexity’ view of Big History in two principal ‘directions’....