Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0

In this course

John Fiske was a nineteenth-century American philosopher and historian who theorized cosmic evolution as a unified framework connecting physical, biological, and cultural development across the universe. The course readings invoke him primarily through historian Michael Crowe's scholarship on the plurality of worlds debate, using Fiske's work to ground discussions of how evolution—understood not just biologically but cosmically—became entangled with Victorian ideas of progress and universal development. His framework enabling distinctions between physical, biological, and cultural evolution proves useful for thinking through how AI and machine learning might participate in or extend these evolutionary narratives into the present.

Mentioned in 1 reading

Steven J. Dick

Cosmic Evolution, from Cosmos and Culture

4

Although the question of extraterrestrial life is very old, the concept of a full-blown cosmic evolution—the connected evolution of planets, stars, galaxies, and life on Earth and beyond—is much younger. As historian Michael Crowe has shown…But such a set of general ideas is a long way from a research program. In the first half century of the post-Darwinian world, cosmic evolution did not find fertile ground among astronomers who were hard-pressed to find evidence for it. Spec…3. In making the distinctions between physical, biological, and cultural evolution, I do not mean to deny their physical basis, but rather to imply that the three possible endpoints of cosmic evolution are physical, biological, and cultural…

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