This is an article in the series of “what is an intellectual life”. It is written to explore the current intellectual landscape, and to understand where human civilization is heading. This is only an early draft, and revisions are underway.

We are living in a bifurcation point of human history, and sadly or excitingly, at the ending of an era. The era dawned at Renaissance, and apexed at Enlightenment. Since then, the high and low tides of reason manifested as interlacing ages as we know them by their dominant philosophy, Romanticism, Positivism, Modernism, and eventually died down into our times known as Postmodernism. The life blood of reason is not merely the philosophical scaffold that it provides for human mind, but more importantly in the eyes of the general public, the individual empowerment and society betterment that it delivers. But none of the two hold in our times: some segments of the societies have already lived in material abundance yet still quest for more but not sure of more of what, while some segments struggle to survive in the world that was nominally made by reason; and reason in the sense of logic has been proved by Incomplete Theorem of Godel as not self-consistent, which if misleadingly stated, sounds like human reason is not self-consistent. The intellectual havoc set off by the theorem had killed off the logic positivism project of intellectuals, put off the last hope in reviving the spirits of Age of Enlightenment that human lives and societies could be intelligible and thus humanistic order and a certain sense of progress is possible. And we might say, this was the intellectual turmoil that underlied the World Wars, Ideological Contests, Counter Culture, Disintegrating Globalization, Climate Change, and the current geopolitical drama of which the worst outcome would send humans again into another dark age.

However, despite the gradually dying down tides, something new was quietly developing unnoticed by the general public. In the following, we give a simplistic scaffold of the development, from the fundamental to the practical.

The intellectual confusions of logic positivists have started being understood. In Probability: the Logic of Science, E. T. Jaynes describes another layer of mathematical structure underlying the formal logic, probability, and discusses that the axiomatic inconsistency identified by Godel is not an inherent property of the proposition or event, but signifies the incompleteness of information. And in Being and Events, Alain Badiou clarifies that events are manifestation of hidden structure in things as they are, and mathematics are the accumulating ontology from such events.

The mystery of life has been being understood. First, a series of concepts to understand biotic life had been developed in the past century: feedback-control loop in goal-directed behaviors in Cybernetics, dynamic system in Self Organization, and edge of chaos and complexity in Complex Adaptive System. A historical narrative is given in Keller, Evelyn Fox, Organisms, machines, and thunderstorms: A history of self-organization. Second, Information is becoming the another pillar of science among energy, matter, and this triad, the concept of evolution that unifies the triad, and the derivative concepts (e.g., complexity, organization, structure, uncertainty reduction, slow timescale) has shed light into organic matters. An edited contributions to summarize some of the progress could be found in From Matter to Life: Information and Causality, and The Philosophy of Information - An Introduction by The Π Research Network. Third, the epistemology of physics has been clarified for biology, see Perspectives on Organisms: Biological time, Symmetries and Singularities.

An umbrella (though somehow misleading) concept, Global Brain, that summarizes the current technological societal advancement and globalization has been being developed for some decades. Edited contributions to summarize the concepts are given in H. Francis, L. Marta, The Global Brain as a model of the future information society: An introduction to the special issue.

Informatization and digitalization have shortened the timescale to gather data on social behaviors, and thus started to make hypotheses on societies falsifiable; in other words, a science of societies first envisioned by Enlightenment thinkers and then Positivists is becoming possible. A glimpse into this possibility could be found in A. Buyalskaya et al. The Golden Age of Social Science.

Lastly, to quote Marx, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”. Societies are intricate systems where the infrastructure and institutions operates in a circular causality. And infrastructure are the coarse-grained outcome of technologies over decades. Thus, simplistically, social system evolution ultimately requires fundamental progress in technologies (which itself again is the outcome of progress in science, institutes, education, etc.). A exposition of the idea might be found in Kelly, Kevin, What Technology Wants. We have reached a point where technology could have powerful influence on social system within a career-time of individuals.

The materials given previously should only be seen as seeds that are already well known to demonstrate the concept, and a family of them, well known or not, would grow and synthesize into an era that might be called the Second Renaissance, the Next Enlightenment, and a more descriptive name when the era matures, where a scientific humanistic intellectual system (e.g., worldview, value system and destiny) of human, societies, civilizations and universe could finally take shape since the humanistic turn from theological intellectual system (in Renaissance of Western Civilization and the Zhou Dynasty of ancient Chinese Civilization). A foundation of this era likely would be a scientific understanding of human mind, where speculatively rationality and irrationality are two sides of the same coin, and human mind is embedded in a unified understanding of biology, phenomenology, psychology, logic-mathematics-probability-statistics, sociology and cosmology. The technological derivation of this foundation likely would lay the infrastructure for a different kind of society similar to what the first industrial revolution did to the previous mode of agricultural civilizations.

However, the process of such a transition would probably be prolonged, both as a result of the intrinsic timescale of the science, and the time needed by infrastructural and social-economical condition for their development. There has been some very respectable calls for a transition to new macro-economic models (e.g., Internation, or Great Transition Initiative) to address the urgent challenges of Anthropocene. And a decade would be long enough to see the outcome of the climate change, the geopolitical struggle and many other things. But intellectual argument and political mobilization alone would not make the transition happen; perhaps not widely acknowledged, human societies could only fundamentally restructured, for better or for worse, when science and technology made breakthroughs—“what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Thus, the crisis of climate change might scare the system to change cause, but the next mode of society would not materialize without a positive framework support by a different kind of productivity instruments, which what I have in mind is the understanding of intelligence such that, for example, they could be used to manage cities, biodiversity, and provide robotic labors. And it is this kind of development that would induce a new society, again, for better or for worse.

A demonstrative perspective into this era from the lens of Artificial Intelligence (AI)—which does not merely refer to technology, but an instrument to understand human mind and to build organic societies—is given in the essay Era of Planeterization: Managing Complexity with Intelligence, but there should be a family of instruments alongside this specific instrument of AI. A sample of the instruments is given as follows: technology-wise, hydroponics farming, nuclear fusion, planetary wind and solar energy grid, cryptocurrency, autonomous robotics, smart cities, and quantum computing; natural-science-wise, advance in the Theory of Everything (e.g., string theory), panoramic landscaping regular update on empirical biology, molecular science and material science; social-science-wise, thematic trends, existing global issues (e.g., migration, poverty, gender), and the interface with public policy; and also humanities and arts. It is not possible to track every details of these areas, but the goal is to grok the fundamental assumptions, concepts, trends and limitation of state of the art, and utilize and push those instruments to develop a humanistic intellectual system described previously and corresponding infrastructures to support human ideals.