This article may rely excessively on sources too closely associated with the subject , potentially preventing the article from being verifiable and neutral.(December 2020) |
Graeme Donald Snooks (born 1944 in Perth, Western Australia) is a systems theorist and stratologist who has developed a general dynamic theory to explain complex living systems. [1] His resulting "dynamic-strategy theory" (DST) has been employed to analyse the fluctuating fortunes of life over the past 4,000 million years (myrs) and of human society over the past 2 myrs; to analyse contemporary economic problems (inflation, [2] financial crises, [3] climate change [4] ); to explore socio-political issues (population expansion, the emergence of democracy, the "clash of civilizations", disease (COVID-19) control, the failure of strategic leadership); to analyse the emergence, operation, and malfunction of the mind; and to make scientific predictions about the future. [5] New discoveries emerging from Snooks' publications include: existential schizophrenia, strategic frustration, strategic selection, the growth-inflation curve, the strategy function, the logological constant (akin to the cosmological constant), the Snooks–Panov Vertical (or the singularity), technological paradigm shifts, the Solar Revolution, and, most importantly, the strategic logos. His body of work challenges the existing paradigms of orthodox (neo-classical) economics, climate-mitigation economics, Marxism, neo-Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, self-organisation theory, and all other supply-side systems.
For twenty-one years, from 1989 to 2010, Snooks was the foundation Coghlan Research Professor of Economics in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. Currently he is the Executive Director of both the Institute of Global Dynamic Systems and IGDS Books [6] in Canberra. He was educated at Mount Lawley Senior High School (1957–1961), the University of Western Australia (BEc, 1966; MEc, 1968), and the Australian National University (PhD, 1972). Snooks has been elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences (1991), Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK) (1990), and Fellow of the Russian Academy of Humanities (elected 2006, resigned in protest 2022).
Snooks has published more than 30 books, including: Depression and Recovery (1974), Domesday Economy (with J. McDonald) (1986), Economics Without Time (1993), Historical Analysis in Economics (1993), Portrait of the Family within the Total Economy (1994), Was the Industrial Revolution Necessary?, (1994), The Dynamic Society (1996), The Ephemeral Civilization (1997), The Laws of History (1998), Longrun Dynamics (1998), Global Transition (1999), The Global Crisis Makers (2000), The Collapse of Darwinism (2003), The Selfcreating Mind (2006), The Coming Eclipse, or The Triumph of Climate Mitigation Over Solar Revolution (2010), [7] Dead God Rising. Religion and Science in the Universal Life-System (2010). [8] The Death of Zarathustra. Notes on Truth for the Risk-Taker (2011), Ark of the Sun: the improbable voyage of life (November 2015), Ultimate Reality & its Dissidents (March 2016), Time's Gateway: a personal quest for ultimate reality (August 2017), Great Myths to Die For: essays on the ship of metaphysical fools (February 2021), and Paradox of a Mindless AI: the compelling case for a general dynamic theory of the mind (2024).
Snooks' book, Ark of the Sun provides an overview of his thinking over five decades on the dynamics of life and human society and reveals the underlying reality of life – the strategic logos – which is the ultimate complex living system. Ultimate Reality & its Dissidents provides a unique philosophy of life based on his realist general dynamic theory. Time's Gateway shows how these ideas emerged over the past fifty years. And Great Myths to Die For shows how the metaphysical interventionists are undermining the survival of human civilization. He is currently researching the contribution of DNA testing to the exploration of societal dynamics over the past 60,000 years.
Articles on the theory of complex living systems have been published by Snooks in Advances in Space Research (2005), Complexity (the journal of the Santa Fe Institute) (2008), and Social Evolution & History (2002, 2005, 2007). In a November 2016 article – "The Triumph of Trump and the failure of the intellectuals" – he applies the dynamic-strategy theory to the recent US Presidential election and provides suggestions for the type of dynamic strategy that the USA would need to pursue in order to "make America great again" and to position itself at the forefront of a forthcoming technological paradigm shift. Snooks's most recent articles include: "Exploding the great singularity myth" (February 2019), which critically examines the futuristic concept known as the technological singularity – an issue that he first addressed in his 1996 book The Dynamic Society; "Exploding the Great Climate Mitigation Myth" (May 2019), which claims that the impact of the economic interventions to address climate change have been grossly underestimated; "Fight the Virus (COVID-19), Not the Economy! How to Avoid the 'Interventionist Storm'" (March 2020), which discusses the dangers of complete economic shut-down; "COVID-19 and the Great Lockdown Fiasco" (April 2020), which claims that the emerging 'lockdown depression' is the outcome of a failure of strategic leadership in Western Civilization that has been emerging since the late 20th century; and "Will the world ever recover from the Great Lockdown? Counting the costs of waging war on the economy", which estimates and analyses the impact of massive government intervention on world real GDP and GDP per capita in both the short and long term. In 2022 Snooks published a series of papers on the philosophical implications of his dynamic-strategy theory and his discovery of the strategic logos. More recently (2023 and 2024) he has shown how artificial general intelligence (AGI) will only be achieved once the AI community expands to include the essential science of life-dynamics and adopts a realist general dynamic theory of the mind.
Existence is the state of having being or reality in contrast to nonexistence and nonbeing. Existence is often contrasted with essence: the essence of an entity is its essential features or qualities, which can be understood even if one does not know whether the entity exists.
Idealism in philosophy, also known as philosophical idealism or metaphysical idealism, is the set of metaphysical perspectives asserting that, most fundamentally, reality is equivalent to mind, spirit, or consciousness; that reality is entirely a mental construct; or that ideas are the highest type of reality or have the greatest claim to being considered "real". Because there are different types of idealism, it is difficult to define the term uniformly.
Process philosophy, also ontology of becoming, or processism, is an approach in philosophy that identifies processes, changes, or shifting relationships as the only real experience of everyday living. In opposition to the classical view of change as illusory or accidental, process philosophy posits transient occasions of change or becoming as the only fundamental things of the ordinary everyday real world.
The world is the totality of entities, the whole of reality, or everything that exists. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique, while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object, while others analyze the world as a complex made up of parts.
Cosmogony is any model concerning the origin of the cosmos or the universe.
Political economy is a branch of political science and economics studying economic systems and their governance by political systems. Widely studied phenomena within the discipline are systems such as labour markets and financial markets, as well as phenomena such as growth, distribution, inequality, and trade, and how these are shaped by institutions, laws, and government policy. Originating in the 16th century, it is the precursor to the modern discipline of economics. Political economy in its modern form is considered an interdisciplinary field, drawing on theory from both political science and modern economics.
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States".
Systems science, also referred to as systems research, or, simply, systems, is a transdisciplinary field that is concerned with understanding simple and complex systems in nature and society, which leads to the advancements of formal, natural, social, and applied attributions throughout engineering, technology and science, itself.
Thomas Crombie Schelling was an American economist and professor of foreign policy, national security, nuclear strategy, and arms control at the School of Public Policy at University of Maryland, College Park. He was also co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a Brazilian philosopher and politician. His work is in the tradition of Western philosophy and classical social theory, and is developed across fields in legal theory, philosophy and religion, social and political theory, progressive alternatives, and economics. In natural philosophy he is known for The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time. In social theory he is known for Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory. In legal theory he was associated with the Critical Legal Studies movement, which helped disrupt the methodological consensus in American law schools. His political activity helped the transition to democracy in Brazil in the aftermath of the military regime, and culminated with his appointment as Brazil's Minister of Strategic Affairs in 2007 and again in 2015. His work is seen to offer a vision of humanity and a program to empower individuals and change institutions.
A price signal is information conveyed to consumers and producers, via the prices offered or requested for, and the amount requested or offered of a product or service, which provides a signal to increase or decrease quantity supplied or quantity demanded. It also provides potential business opportunities. When a certain kind of product is in shortage supply and the price rises, people will pay more attention to and produce this kind of product. The information carried by prices is an essential function in the fundamental coordination of an economic system, coordinating things such as what has to be produced, how to produce it and what resources to use in its production.
David John Teece is a New Zealand-born US-based organizational economist and the Professor in Global Business and director of the Tusher Center for the Management of Intellectual Capital at the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to metaphysics:
Thomas James Snooks (1890–1958) was a pioneering picture-show man and a developer-builder in the north-eastern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. In addition to his professional interest in cabinet-making and building, Tom possessed a love for live theatre, staging a number of Gilbert and Sullivan productions in the Maylands Methodist hall, when he was in his early twenties. Not long after the First World War he began showing silent films at a number of venues in Maylands - at the Maylands town hall and the old Lyric Theatre - as well as in Bassendean, and Inglewood, under the business name Central Pictures. By staggering the starting times, Tom and his brothers were able to shuffle canisters of film between competing venues via a speeding motor cycle, thereby keeping the local police force on its toes. In the early days, Tom would go on stage to introduce the silent films, as he believed in the power of the word as well as the image.
Ernesto Screpanti is a professor of Political Economy who worked in various universities, like Trento, Florence, Trieste, Parma, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Siena. He did research in the “rethinking Marxism” scientific programme, in the attempt to update Marxist analysis by bringing it in line with the reality of contemporary capitalism, on the one hand, and to liberate Marxism from any residue of Hegelian metaphysics, Kantian ethics and economic determinism, on the other.
The Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, referred to as the DICE model or Dice model, is a neoclassical integrated assessment model developed by 2018 Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus that integrates in the neoclassical economics, carbon cycle, climate science, and estimated impacts allowing the weighing of subjectively guessed costs and subjectively guessed benefits of taking steps to slow climate change. Nordhaus also developed the RICE model, a variant of the DICE model that was updated and developed alongside the DICE model. Researchers who collaborated with Nordhaus to develop the model include David Popp, Zili Yang, and Joseph Boyer.
Behavioral strategy refers to the application of insights from psychology and behavioral economics to the research and practice of strategic management. In one definition of the field, "Behavioral strategy merges cognitive and social psychology with strategic management theory and practice. Behavioral strategy aims to bring realistic assumptions about human cognition, emotions, and social behavior to the strategic management of organizations and, thereby, to enrich strategy theory, empirical research, and real-world practice".
The Great Barrington Declaration is an open letter published in October 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. It claimed harmful COVID-19 lockdowns could be avoided via the fringe notion of "focused protection", by which those most at risk of dying from an infection could purportedly be kept safe while society otherwise took no steps to prevent infection. The envisaged result was herd immunity within three months, as SARS-CoV-2 swept through the population.
The Great Reset Initiative is an economic recovery plan drawn up by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project was launched in June 2020, and a video featuring the then-Prince of Wales Charles was released to mark its launch. The initiative's stated aim is to facilitate rebuilding from the global COVID-19 crisis in a way that prioritizes sustainable development.
Dynamic-strategy theory (DST) is a realist general dynamic theory developed inductively by Graeme Snooks in The Dynamic Society (1996) and Ark of the Sun (2015). The DST was constructed to explain the fluctuating fortunes of both life and society over the past 4,000 million years. It also offers an explanation for the great biological and technological paradigm shifts throughout time, and predicts the exhaustion of the present industrial technical paradigm and its replacement with the imminent solar technical paradigm. Over the past 40 years the DST has been applied to many species, societies and intellectual issues by Snooks. More recently it has been successfully adapted and applied by Huw McKay to analysing and predicting the socioeconomic transition of China.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link){{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)