Multicultural situations are not a new phenomenon in the World history : in the Middle East and the Mediterranean World, a multiplicity of cultures coexisted in rural areas as well as in cities since Antiquity. From the time of Alexander the Great, Greek speaking urban elites dominated lower groups pertaining to a wide variety of languages, religions and cultural traditions from Egypt to Centra...

In seeking to understand the root causes of the events of 9/11 many accounts have turned to Samuel P. Huntington’s provocative and controversial thesis of a ‘clash of civilizations’, arousing strong debate. Evidence from the 1995-2001 waves of the World Values Study allows us, for the first time, to examine an extensive body of empirical evidence relating to this debate. Comparative analysis of...

In the context of a homogeneous universe, we note that the appearance of aggressively expanding advanced life is geometrically similar to the process of nucleation and bubble growth in a first-order cosmological phase transition. We exploit this similarity to describe the dynamics of life saturating the universe on a cosmic scale, adapting the phase transition model to incorporate probability d...

In this short essay, we discuss some basic features of cognitive activity at several different space-time scales: from neural networks in the brain to civilizations. One motivation for such comparative study is its heuristic value. Attempts to better understand the functioning of"wetware"involved in cognitive activities of central nervous system by comparing it with a computing device have a lo...

With Huntington’s warning of a “clash of civilizations” following the end of the cold war, “cultural pluralism” has become important for enhancing world peace and supporting development. In this paper, cultural pluralism is viewed as a “knowledge society” problem, where intercultural knowledge is produced, disseminated and used within an ecosystem of mutual understanding and respect. The author...

Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order has sent intellectual shock waves through the international affairs academic and policy communities. According to the editors of Foreign Affairs, the article that Huntington (1993a) wrote in 1993 generated more discussion in three years than any other article they had published since the 1940s. And deservedly so: of ...

Eternal inflation, black holes, and the future of civilizations. Abstract We discuss the large-scale structure of the universe in inflationary cosmology and the implications that it may have for the long-term future of civilizations. Although each civilization is doomed to perish, it may be possible to transmit its accumulated knowledge to future civilizations. We consider several scenarios of ...

Eternal inflation, black holes, and the future of civilizations. Abstract We discuss the large-scale structure of the universe in inflationary cosmology and the implications that it may have for the long-term future of civilizations. Although each civilization is doomed to perish, it may be possible to transmit its accumulated knowledge to future civilizations. We consider several scenarios of ...