BEYOND TECHNOLOGY
Eight layers · One temple · Bilingual archive
1500 BCE → 2050 CE

Three thousand years of opening layers.

Each event below is an opening of one of the eight layers, by some hand, in some civilization. Hover a node to highlight it; click to enter the layer it belongs to.

BCE
  1. 1500 BCEL8 · Existence
    The Vedas crystallize Indian cosmology
    An early sustained inquiry into what exists and why.
  2. 600 BCEL6 · Consciousness
    Laozi and Zhuangzi · Daoist mind
    Chinese tradition formulates negative metaphysics two millennia before Wheeler.
  3. 550 BCEL6 · Consciousness
    The Buddha · the analysis of experience
    First systematic phenomenology of consciousness.
  4. 500 BCEL3 · Mathematics
    Pythagoras · number as substance
    The first claim that mathematics is more fundamental than matter.
  5. 350 BCEL2 · Science
    Aristotle's Lyceum · classification
    Reality treated as a structure that admits exhaustive categorization.
  6. 300 BCEL3 · Mathematics
    Euclid's Elements · the axiomatic method
    Two millennia of mathematics organized around one book.
  7. 250 BCEL3 · Mathematics
    Archimedes · the method of exhaustion
    First operational use of an integral 1,900 years before Newton.
0–1000 CE
  1. 800L3 · Mathematics
    Al-Khwarizmi · algebra is born
    Baghdad's House of Wisdom names a new mathematical layer.
1000–1700
  1. 1054L7 · Laws of Reality
    The supernova in Taurus
    Recorded by Song astronomers; the empirical attitude that becomes science.
  2. 1300L2 · Science
    European universities institutionalize learning
    The institution that hosts the scientific revolution two centuries later.
  3. 1543L2 · Science
    Copernicus · De revolutionibus
    The Earth ceases to be the cosmic center.
  4. 1632L2 · Science
    Galileo · the Dialogue
    Mathematized experiment opens the science layer.
  5. 1687L2 · Science
    Newton's Principia
    Universal gravitation; the second opening.
  6. 1697L8 · Existence
    Leibniz · why is there something?
    The question that the entire eighth layer is built around.
1700–1900
  1. 1763L4 · Information
    Bayes's essay on probability
    Foundational text of every later AI inference engine.
  2. 1865L2 · Science
    Maxwell's equations
    Electromagnetism unified mathematically; the first information-bearing physics.
  3. 1872L7 · Laws of Reality
    Boltzmann · entropy as statistics
    Thermodynamics becomes a property of microscopic counting.
20th c.
  1. 1900L2 · Science
    Planck's quantum
    The third opening of the science layer begins.
  2. 1915L2 · Science
    Einstein · general relativity
    Gravity is the geometry of spacetime.
  3. 1925L2 · Science
    Quantum mechanics (Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac)
    The science layer is now statistical and observer-entangled.
  4. 1931L3 · Mathematics
    Gödel's incompleteness theorems
    Mathematical knowledge is genuinely bounded.
  5. 1936L5 · Computation
    Turing's universal machine
    The computation layer is opened.
  6. 1945L5 · Computation
    Von Neumann's EDVAC architecture
    Every general-purpose computer since.
  7. 1948L4 · Information
    Shannon · A Mathematical Theory of Communication
    The information layer becomes quantitative.
  8. 1953L4 · Information
    Watson and Crick · the structure of DNA
    Life shown to be operationally informational.
  9. 1972L4 · Information
    Bekenstein bound
    Information capacity scales with area, not volume.
  10. 1974L6 · Consciousness
    Nagel · 'What is it like to be a bat?'
    Subjective experience renamed as a distinct problem.
  11. 1989L4 · Information
    Wheeler · It from Bit
    The strongest form of the information-substrate hypothesis.
  12. 1995L6 · Consciousness
    Chalmers · the Hard Problem
    The central question of layer 6 is named.
  13. 1997L4 · Information
    Maldacena · AdS/CFT correspondence
    A worked holographic universe.
21st c.
  1. 2002L5 · Computation
    Wolfram · A New Kind of Science
    Cellular automata proposed as the substrate of physics.
  2. 2003L8 · Existence
    Bostrom · the simulation argument
    Reality may be a computation. Probability argument, not metaphor.
  3. 2004L6 · Consciousness
    Tononi · Integrated Information Theory
    Consciousness becomes mathematically measurable in principle.
  4. 2008L8 · Existence
    Tegmark · the Mathematical Universe
    Every consistent mathematical structure is a universe.
  5. 2012L5 · Computation
    AlexNet · deep learning is taken seriously
    The AI computational layer begins its compounding phase.
  6. 2017L5 · Computation
    Vaswani et al. · 'Attention Is All You Need'
    The transformer architecture; every frontier model since is one.
  7. 2020L5 · Computation
    Wolfram Physics Project launched
    Hypergraph rewriting as candidate substrate of reality.
  8. 2022L5 · Computation
    ChatGPT released
    Frontier AI enters every workflow on earth.
  9. 2024L5 · Computation
    AlphaFold receives the Nobel in Chemistry
    Machine learning crosses formally into natural-science contribution.
Futures
  1. 2030L8 · Existence
    AGI · plausible threshold (consensus 2026)
    The next phase of the universe's self-modeling, if frontier-AI scaling holds.
  2. 2050L8 · Existence
    Post-geography civilization (speculative)
    Either the Compute Empire or its decentralized successor.