The historians of the Golden Age divide all previous human history into epochs characterized by qualitative revolutions in the organization of human thought. The seven periods are these:
The First Mental Structure allowed for truly human as opposed to merely animal consciousness. The mental change involved produced a differentiation (at one time called 'bicameral') between rational and hypnagogic states of mind. This era was characterized by the development of language and of abstract concepts. It allowed the communication of ideas beyond the scope of mere concrete signals.
The Second Mental Structure was the development of written language, which allowed communication beyond the range of immediate memory or oral tradition. This permitted the development of the calendar, of laws, of literature, and of civilized society. This era was characterized by the agrarian revolution, monetary economy, organized warfare.
The Third Mental Structure was characterized by the use of reason to investigate the original sources of reason, and by the growth of semantic and neurosemiotic sciences. It was not recognized as a change in mental structure at the time, but the rational consciousness was characterized by an objective rather than provincial anthropocentric worldview. This era was characterized by the Scientific, the Industrial, and the Capitalist revolutions, as well as by the emergence of a political philosophy recognizing the rights of man. The first man on the moon landed during this era, and the evolution of a worldwide system of electronic media embracing Earth and her satellite colonies soon followed.
The neuropsychology of the later part of this era allowed for the objective measurement of sanity. One benevolent outcome of an otherwise dark and tyrannous world-empire period was the reduction, through eugenics and genetic engineering, of strains of the human bloodlines prone to substandard intelligence or mental disease.
The Fourth Mental Structure emerged when developments in the electronic and electrophonic interface with the nervous system permitted ma**ive interventions into the human nervous system, albeit only of surface thoughts. The early Fourth Era was characterized by the widespread augmentation of certain routine mental functions by biocybernetic implants. The rapid ability to replace, retrain, redact, or to replay an entire lifetime of experience through electromnemonics rendered individual minds fungible, modular, and replaceable. At the same time, this technology allowed a degree of sympathy and understanding between minds that never before had existed. The late-period perfection of noosophy (mechanical telepathy) removed all questions of factual doubt from legal and political processes.
Much of the cruelty that marred an otherwise noble period in history, historians blame on the disappointment of the First Immortality. The Compositions were able to record and preserve surface consciousness information, and could electronically hypnotize certain members of their group-minds to act out the lives and thoughts of ghost recordings. However, the true essence of individuality was beyond the measurement or the grasp of the crude noosophic systems of the times. The First Immortality was a severe disappointment, and, in certain nations and periods, fell into grotesque systems of self-deception, fundamental irrationalities that led, in turn, to grievous suffering.
The rise of the Conglomeration Networks, ma**-minds, and, later, the Compositions, led to a violent suppression of individual human consciousness. Universal peace and universal stagnation spread through the tri-planetary civilization. Early segments of the Eleemosynary Composition date from this period.
The Fifth Mental Structure was triggered by the development of biological and biotechnical methods to grow novel deep structures in the brain, and reorder the traditional hierarchy of hindbrain, midbrain, and cortex.
Not merely new thoughts and sensation but whole new methods of thought and sensation, radically different modes of interpreting reality, were developed by the zeal of late-era Cybernetic Compositions.
Three additional modes of cognition, used by the Warlocks, the Invariants, and the Cerebellines, were developed at this time.
However, the ma**-minds, based on having large numbers of interchangeable and interoperable subjects, could not correctly interweave the needs of these new mutually incomprehensible populations. Deception, incomprehension, antipathy, and, eventually, war itself, became the normal means mutually antagonistic ma**-minds had for dealing with each other.
An old philosophy was resurrected to serve the new needs of the times. The middle ages of the Fifth Era were characterized by an adherence to an absolute moral standard, and the unwillingness to initiate aggression, no matter the provocation. During this noble time, the mutual antipathies of the mutually incomprehensible neurostructures were obviated. Many paleopsychorobotocists list this time as forming the deep structures of Earthmind's rather callous and laissez-faire moral priorities. Certain nonsuperintelligent artificial minds, including administrative and police authorities, that were later absorbed into the core operating system of the Earthmind, date from this peroid.
Although remembered as the era that gave rise to the reemergence of the individual and independent consciousness, in reality, it was only during the frantic colonial expansions of the later period of this era that the advantages of individualism forced the unwieldy ma**-minds to develop specialized subsections, and, later, to disband. Warlock-based ma**-minds were among the first to disband; Invariant among the last.
This also was the first era of the superintellects. Even Mentator, the largest and most cerebral of cybernetic Compositions of the previous era, was never able to achieve transhuman thought, even if able to think much more quickly and thoroughly, and with much mechanical a**istance.
The crowning achievement of this era was the final comprehension of all geometric and scientific theorems as a whole. This epiphany is still on file in the museum, and most schola require its contemplation as a basic part of transobjective training (that is, the trained ability to suffer the imposition of thoughts and concepts beyond one's own ability to comprehend).
During this time, a multigeneration ship, the Naglfar, captained by Ao Ormgorgon, prompted by a dream, carried many thousands of his fellow Warlocks, as well as contingents of Invariants and Cerebellines, to establish a permanent scientific base, and, later, a self-sustaining civilization, ten thousand light-years away, at Cygnus X-l.
The Sixth Mental Structure embraced the first entirely artificial consciousness. The rise of artificial intelligence was long anticipated and long delayed, but unlike every previous transition between eras, the transition from the Fifth to the Sixth Era was achieved peacefully and without error, since the wise legislators of the Unicameral and Polyhierarchical schola and the Maternalist biocompositions (such as Demeter Mother) had adjusted social institutions and political expectations to welcome the coming of the Sophotechs long before the first eletrophotonic artificial self-awareness pa**ed the Descartean Cogito test. The only true surprise was the universal rejection of the Sophotech minds to accept positions of political power or authority. They politely refused even voting enfranchisement. Their own politics among themselves was swift and incomprehensible, based on the alterations of deep structures and the adoption of priorities trees and compromises to avoid conflict; and yet, the message to living minds was simple and ancient. Violence can be avoided if all parties place a higher priority on cooperation than on conflict.
The Seventh Mental Structure is held to have begun when Sophotech investigations into noumenal mathematics (nonlinear yet nonchaotic models for uncertain complex systems, including, for example, human brain information) allowed the very long awaited creation of a science of noetics.
For the first time, mental information, both in whole and part, could be recorded, reordered, transmitted, saved, and manipulated in the same fashion as any other type of information. Downloads and partials could be recorded and summoned, and ghosts created from transcripts or speculative reconstruction.