Part VI: Transcendence

The Scientific Revolution: Expanding the World Model

The Scientific Revolution: Expanding the World Model

The Scientific Revolution—the 16th–18th century transformation in how humans construct world models through systematic empiricism, mathematical formalization, and the experimental method—expanded human consciousness in several distinct ways:

  1. Vastly enlarging the world model: From geocentric cosmos to billions of galaxies; from static creation to 13.8 billion year evolution
  2. Introducing scale-relative truth: Different scales require different descriptions
  3. Creating new curiosity motifs: Institutionalized wonder
  4. Demonstrating collective intelligence: Knowledge accumulated across generations

Science’s affect signature reflects a distinctive configuration:

ascience=(+Valunderstanding,moderate Ar,high Φ,high reff,moderate CF,low SM)\mathbf{a}_{\text{science}} = (+\Val_{\text{understanding}}, \text{moderate } \Ar, \text{high } \intinfo, \text{high } \reff, \text{moderate } \cfweight, \text{low } \selfsal)

The scientific frame produces high integration without self-focus—the mind coherent and attending to structure rather than self.

The Scientific Revolution as Training

The Scientific Revolution was, among other things, the systematic installation of high ι\iota in a population. The trained practices of science—stripping agency from natural phenomena, replacing narrative causation with mathematical regularity, demanding reproducible mechanism over teleological explanation—are precisely the practices that raise the inhibition coefficient. This was enormously productive: high ι\iota is what makes science, engineering, and medicine possible. But it also means that the population-mean ι\iota has been rising for four centuries, and the felt cost—what Weber called the Entzauberung der Welt, the disenchantment of the world—is not a cultural mood but a structural consequence of a perceptual parameter shift. The world goes dead because you have been trained to experience it in parts rather than as a whole.

The historical arc from Axial Age through Scientific Revolution through Digital Transition can be reinterpreted as a civilizational trajectory through ι\iota space: from ι≈0.1\iota \approx 0.1 (fully participatory, world alive and agentive) through ι≈0.5\iota \approx 0.5 (mixed, science emerging alongside residual animism) to the present ι≈0.7\iota \approx 0.7–0.90.9 (hyper-mechanistic, even persons modeled as data profiles). Each step gained predictive power and lost experiential richness.