what are the three main revolutions in human culture?
Answers
Answer:
The “two revolutions” projected at the end of my last post are expanded here to “three revolutions”. These are major transformations that bear emphasizing among a large number of significant changes over time in how humans have looked at the Universe they occupy.
My objective is to move from a view in which the technosphere is assumed to be an entity built and maintained by the purposeful actions of humans, to consideration of the technosphere as a natural phenomenon that emerged from the Earth without an intelligent designer, human or otherwise.
This is not to say that the combination of human agency and intelligence is not an indispensable component of the technosphere. It is. But this property is not a human property, just as in the hydrosphere the collective property of wetness is not a molecular property.
This is not to say that the combination of human agency and intelligence is not an indispensable component of the technosphere. It is. But this property is not a human property, just as in the hydrosphere the collective property of wetness is not a molecular property. Here I argue that the effect of collective agency in the technosphere is best thought of not in terms of a “designer”, but as an emergent quality that should be treated on its own merits.
The Copernican revolution and the Anthropocene revolution.
This transformation or change of perspective can be thought of as the historical product of three revolutions, i.e., three fundamental changes in how we look at our place in the world. The first of these was the Copernican revolution, sparked by the publication of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by Polish astronomer and polymath Nicolaus Copernicus in the 16th century. Copernicus argued that the Earth was not the center of the Universe about which the Sun circled, but occupied a more subordinate position, the Earth orbiting instead around the Sun. The Earth became just one more object in a spectrum of planets, moons, comets, and falling stars. By extension humans were also demoted to a peripheral position, raising doubt about their primacy in the order of things.
The second revolution in this transformative process was spurred by Charles Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in the middle of the 19th century. Darwin introduced natural selection as a key mechanism for explaining how biological species, including Man, could arise by natural processes without the aid of a plan or a designer.