Abstract Accepted for Paper at

2025 International Big History Association Conference

By Barry Borgerson

Barry@2Selfs.com

 

Leverage Big History Framework to Construct Big Future

 

This article develops and integrates four fundamental concepts.

 

Reveal the unavoidable transformation point we have slouched into. The Big History activity provides an empowering perspective to organize past mega events. The human-development segment can enable a fundamental advance by exposing that modern societies have reached a future-determining tipping point that includes existential threats to our self-governance and freedoms.

 

Embrace threshold criteria switch. We should acknowledge that Big History thresholds added discontinuous advances in the mental domain to those in the physical domain during two transitional thresholds. We can progress in a crucial new direction by changing the criteria for mental-domain thresholds from increasing complexity to greater capabilities. Scientists working in the physical domain view Thresholds 6 and 7 as producing discrete advances in human-brain complexity. Scholars working in the mental domain should view these thresholds as creating discontinuously greater human capabilities. Threshold 8 completed the threshold-criteria transition by identifying a mega-ascent of humanity’s capabilities without determinative increases in human biological complexity.

 

Recognize two distinct mental modes. We can elevate Big History from creating powerful narrations to enabling a success-determining creation by formalizing that we operate in two distinct modes and then providing our wide-angle perspective to highlight the necessity to conquer our chronically neglected automatic mode.

 

Promote our framework to empower constructing the next phase of human development. Theories and processes executed by our thinking mode produced technologies that are visible manifestations of the Science Revolution that impact us daily. However, behind the scenes, the fundamental basis for Threshold 8 was the construction and propagation of an unnoticed emancipating worldview buried in the automatic mode of the mind. Problem-solving worldviews are an incarnation of hidden certainty illusions that provide benefits but have now become major impediments to prosperity and well-being because our involuntary mode can no longer accommodate many ramifications of our technological progress, particularly digital processes. The Enlightenment created indirect mechanisms to manage human-nature quirks sufficiently to make self-governance temporarily viable. However, those weak work-arounds of robot-like activities have become ineffective, so we must learn to manage them systematically if we are to secure a widespread desirable future.

 

We face currently unsolvable problems in many areas including ubiquitous digital-communications-based voter manipulations and most organizational leaders’ inability to make systematic strategy changes to accommodate disruptions in their business environments.

 

Increased pretending has now escalated to widespread delusional certainties. Concerned and even terrified scholars and media personalities are unfortunately focused on treating visible symptoms. This article, which addresses all seven call-for-papers topics to varying degrees, will demonstrate how to conquer hidden causes, which requires developing capabilities to understand and manage involuntary human activities.

 

We have the opportunity to elevate Big History to greater global relevance by leveraging thresholds to provide context to establish a big future – the next phase in the maturation of humankind. This can lead to reversing our mega-descent by creating greater capabilities of Big History Threshold 9, which should produce a similar mega-ascent to the one Threshold 8 constructed!