Of Butterflies and of Apples Narrative, History and Philosophy in the Cyber Domain

The Information Age has dawned.  The singularity approaches; the children of Colossus are approaching adolescence.  Humanity is now compelled to contemplate the inevitability of a transformation in the nature of its condition and of its affairs of at least equal magnitude to the sum of the Neolithic Revolution, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.  At the heart of this is the phenomenon to which we have given the uneasy name of Cyber.  At the heart of the Cyber phenomenon sits the Internet.  We apprehend that Cyber is greater than merely the Internet under another name, at the same time as we confess to the admission that we comprehend neither.  Society, and with it humanity, is now utterly dependant upon the Internet and upon the Cyber domain.  This dependence is irreversible.  Robots and micro fabrication alone will ensure that the Cyber domain continues its inexorable disruption of every facet of society.  We are confronted with a reality that we created; that we do not understand; that is changing us beyond recognition.  And we are afraid.  The Cyber domain is the new evolutionary context for humanity.  It's existence is external to us and will become in independent of us.  Whatever this new construct is, we will fail utterly to understand it if we restrict our sense making activity to the previously dominant academic disciplines of science and mathematics.  It is not possible to simply STEM the tide of this ignorance.  In order to begin the process of understanding our new context we must build a new conceptual approach.  One that relinquishes the artificial division of the human sense making activity in to academic disciplines.  One that seeks to arrive at an understanding of the nature and origins of the Cyber domain in space, time, mind and matter.  To do this we must first attempt a new multi disciplinary synthesis in our study of the the current form of the Cyber domain.  This talk is an exposition of work in progress to construct a candidate narrative of the history of the Cyber domain.  This work seeks to illustrate how we might better set about the task of enhancing the human experience of the Cyber domain if we deploy the disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology and narrative analysis at the fore of our endeavours.  This talk will draw out a number of areas where current practice could be significantly improved by so doing.  We must seek to understand this new context as a necessary precondition of our ability to adapt to it.  To understand this new context we need new tools of the mind.