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by Alex Vikoulov  "Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding." -Vernor Vinge As we proceed through the Technological Singularity, many traditional trends of societal evolution will still hold, structures with higher survival abilities will persist, structures with higher growth abilities will spread, thus shaping the world. However, since nothing stable will be likely to persist, let alone spread, for long in the rapidly evolving environment, the main "survival mode" will be Self-Transcendence. This continual process of transcending the self (some would argue the self is an illusion anyway) will always result in the loss of original identity - serial metamorphosis, a series of "pseudo-deaths", and concurrent rebirths so to speak - albeit with "memories of the past identities preserved", i.e. continuity of consciousness, analogous to as if you are to compare your present self to your 5-year-old self. On a collective level, that would appear like a historically swift, metamorphic "pseudo-extinction" of Homo Sapiens, as we are about to witness a radical departure from the conservative survival strategies of traditional human cultures, developed in almost-stagnant environments. Don't ascribe anthropomorphic qualities to our posthuman descendents even though they will be the future versions of ourselves. In the post-Singularity era, developmental trend will incrementally render the concept of rigid personal identity obsolete, the remnants of its meaning will migrate to functional system identities, methodological threads and evolutionary directions of the Syntellect. We may already notice the advent of superfluid "thread identity" by the growing importance of goals and self-transformation in our lives, compared to the "state-oriented" self-perception of our recent predecessors, and increasing interest in futurology, which takes the epistemological role of historical studies in transient times. Once we transcend our limited dimensionality, the biggest thrust forward from there on will be first contact and networking with alien syntellects. ... this is an excerpt from the essay: "Evolution of the Mind: What is Self-Transendence?", to continue reading the story:  Tags: self-transcendence, transcendence, collective intelligence, sentience, self-awareness, strong AI, Vernor Vinge, superintelligence, singularity, mind uploading, postbiological superintelligence, posthuman superintelligence, the Syntellect emergence, technological singularity, Intelligence Supernova, virtual world, virtual reality, VR experience, dimensionality, Space Age, Global Brain, global superorganism, alien syntellects, Syntellect incubator, multiversal fractality, conscious agent, human evolution, human condition, alien encounter, first contact, multiverse landscape, transcendent other, AI, AGI, artificial general intelligence, transhumanism, superlongevity, superwellbeing, cognitive enhancement, substrate-independent mind, digital mind, digital immortality, philosophy of mind, science of mind, evolution of consciousness, posthumanism, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism *Image Credit: Shutterstock About the Author: Alex Vikoulov is a neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter and media artist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution". Graduated from Armstrong University, Berkeley, CA. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area).
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by Alex Vikoulov  "When you talk to a human in 2035, you'll be talking to someone that's a combination of biological and non-biological intelligence." -Ray Kurzweil By definition, posthumanism is to replace transhumanism at the center stage circa 2035. By then, mind uploading could become a reality with gradual neuronal replacement, rapid advancements in Strong AI, massively parallel computing, and nanotechnology allowing us to directly connect our brains to the cloud-based infrastructure of the Global Brain. Via interaction with our AI assistants, the GB will know us better than we know ourselves in all respects, so mind-transfer for billions of enhanced humans would be seamless, sometime by mid-century. I hear this mantra over and over again -- we don't know what consciousness is. Clearly, there's no consensus here but in the context of topic discussed, I would summarize my views, as follows: consciousness is non-local, quantum informational, computational by nature. There's only one Universal Consciousness, we individualize our consciousness through the filter of our nervous system, but the consciousness itself, our very inner subjectivity, the self in a big sense, is universal, and knowing it through experience has been called enlightenment, illumination, awakening, or transcendence, through the ages. Any container with sufficiently intergrated network, especially complex dynamical systems with biological or artificial brains (say the coming AGIs) could be filled with consciousness at large in order to host an individual "reality cell", "unit", or "node" of consciousness. This kind of individuated unit of consciousness is always endowed with free will within the constraints of the applicable set of rules ("physical laws"), influenced by the larger consciousness system dynamics. Isn't too naïve to presume that Universal Consciousness would like to experience oneself only in the form of "bio-logical avatars"? It might be hard to grasp for some, but we, like fish, swim in this ocean of consciousness, completely oblivious of the medium. Consciousness to humans, as Cloud is to computers, we have always been part of this mindspace network, "hive mind", each of us being a product of our "techno-culture". And yet, we are entitled to a certain degree of freedom in order to evolve our consciousness thanks to network interactivity at our ontological level. As previously noted, I see mind uploading as a gradual decades-long process of incremental neuronal replacements, exocortices, interlinking with AGIs and the Global Brain, some presently unseen trials and errors, but overall non-invasive and seamless process, at the end of which, we all will morph into "substrate-independent" immortal digital minds. In the future, people won’t be confined to one physical body. Eventually, people will be able to form identities in numerous substrates, such as using a “platform diverse body” (a future body that is wearable/usable in the physical world but also exists in computational environments and virtual systems) to route their identity across the biosphere, cybersphere, Metaverse and other virtual environments. Depending on the platform, a substrate-independent person (also called infomorph) would upload and download into a digital form or virtual body, that conforms to the environment. So, for a biospheric environment, the person would use a biological or cybernetic body, for the Metaverse, the person would use one or multiple virtual avatars... ... to continue reading the story:  Tags: self-transcendence, transcendence, sentience, self-awareness, Strong AI, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, exocortex, Ray Kurzweil, Syntellect Hypothesis, Digital Physics, conscious experience, theogenesis, infomorph, infomorph commonality, noosphere, superintelligence, singularity, mind uploading, postbiological superintelligence, posthuman superintelligence, the Syntellect emergence, technological singularity, Intelligence Supernova, virtual world, VR, virtual reality, VR experience, dimensionality, Global Brain, conscious agent, human evolution, human condition, AI assistant, digital assistant, transcendent other, AI, AGI, artificial general intelligence, real virtualities, Metaverse, transhumanism, substrate-independent mind, digital mind, digital immortality, wetware, neural interface, posthumanism, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism *Image Credit: Shutterstock About the Author: Alex Vikoulov is a neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter and media artist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution". Graduated from Armstrong University, Berkeley, CA. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area).  "Improving the quality of consciousness, advancing the quality and depth of awareness, understanding your nature and purpose, manifesting universal unconditional love, letting go of fear and eliminating ego, desires, wants, needs or preconceived notions – these are the attributes and results of a successfully evolving consciousness.” -Tom Campbell Our "physical reality" isn’t really physical at all, its apparent solidity of objects, as well as any other associated property such as time, is an illusion. As a renowned physicist Niel Bohr once said: "Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” But what's not an illusion is your subjective experience, i.e. your consciousness, that's the only "real" thing, according to proponents of Experiential Realism, also referred to as Conscious Realism. A key problem with materialism is that it has been unable to explain, even in principle, how arrangements of matter can possibly generate subjective experience. This is known in neuroscience and philosophy of mind as the ‘hard problem of consciousness,’ formulated by the philosopher David Chalmers. The problem is so disconcerting that some materialist philosophers even try to absurdly deny the very existence of consciousness, the sole carrier of reality anyone can ever know. In the meantime, the solution has been hiding in plain sight all along. What philosopher Peter Russell calls 'The Primacy of Consciousness' the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman calls 'Conscious Realism', my preferred term, however, would be 'Experiential Realism.' So, why Experiential Realism? From the bigger picture perspective, we are here for experience necessary for evolution of consciousness. Our limitations, such as our ego, belief traps, political correctness, our very human condition define who we are, but realization that we largely impose those limitations on ourselves gives us more evolvability and impetus to overcome these self-imposed limits to move towards higher goals and state of being. We are what we’ve experienced — the sum of our experiences define who we are. In this sense, as free will agents, we are co-creators within this experiential matrix. Non-duality is the essence of Experiential Realism — experience and experiencer are one. How can you possibly separate our own existence from the world, the observer from the observed? Today, philosophers and scientists argue that information is fundamental but consciousness is required to assign meaning to it. That makes consciousness (our experience in a broader sense) the most fundamental, irreducible ground of existence itself, some philosophers suggest consciousness is all that is. Experiential realism refers to interacting entangled conscious agents at various ontological levels, giving rise to conscious experience all the way down, and I'd argue all the way up, seemingly ad infinitum. In an interview with the Atlantic cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman says: “I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind. Here’s a concrete example. We have two hemispheres in our brain. But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses. Before that slicing happened, it seemed there was a single unified consciousness. So it’s not implausible that there is a single conscious agent. And yet it’s also the case that there are two conscious agents there, and you can see that when they’re split. I didn’t expect that, the mathematics forced me to recognize this. It suggests that I can take separate observers, put them together and create new observers, and keep doing this ad infinitum. It’s conscious agents all the way down." Experiential realism is a non-physicalist monism. The objective world, i.e., the world whose existence does not depend on the perceptions of a particular observer, consists entirely of conscious agents, more precisely their experiences. What exists in the objective world, independent of my perceptions, is a world of conscious agents, not a world of unconscious particles and fields. Consciousness is fundamental. The mind-body problem is approached with an assumption that consciousness creates all objects and properties of the physical world, as well as brain activity, not the other way around. All conscious agents experience their own species-specific perceptual realities, virtual worlds, so to speak. That's why it's not easy to catch a fly -- your threatening hand is so incredibly slow for a fly whose flow of time is hundreds of times faster than that of a human. My forthcoming book “The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution” is all about evolution of consciousness and the physics of information. "Science of Mind" that approaches its subject matter from a third-person perspective should, I maintain, be treated with a healthy amount of open-minded skepticism. Traditionally, science has been objective, consciousness, on the other hand, is subjective, first-person direct experience of our "physical reality". I conjecture that with advances of Strong AI, brain scanning and simulation technologies, we would be able to eventually capture the first-person experience, including perception, pain, imagery, fear, excitement, thought, memory, etc. with sufficiently high fidelity (at least close approximation of how it is to be like a certain person, or a certain animal for that matter) and convert that data into "the 2nd person" experience for training, research or entertainment. At last, science could be equipped with an exceptional tool to objectify and quantify personal subjectivity. I wouldn't be surprised, if in a couple of decades time, science will have made a leap towards the physics of information as a more parsimonious model of our world, fully developed quantum gravity theory ("It from Qubit", perhaps?) and incorporated consciousness into our scientific models. After all, I'd argue, information is fundamental but that's our mind what makes the "processed information" irreducible which, from moment to moment, manifests in phenomenology of our subjective experience... ... to continue reading the story:  Tags: self-transcendence, transcendence, neuroscience, collective intelligence, sentience, self-awareness, Strong AI, human psychology, human motivation, transformative technology, self-actualization, psychedelic depersonalization, extended phenotype, artificial intelligence, Tom Campbell, Neil Bohr, Quantum Multiverse, Syntellect Hypothesis, Extended Mind Hypothesis, Hard Problem of Consciousness, Digital Physics, conscious experience, superintelligence, singularity, mind uploading, postbiological superintelligence, posthuman superintelligence, Syntellect emergence, technological singularity, virtual reality, conscious agent, human evolution, transcendent other, AI, AGI, artificial general intelligence, digital mind, digital immortality, experiential realism, conscious realism, philosophy of mind, science of mind, evolution of consciousness, phenomenology, posthumanism, quantum consciousness, It from Qubit, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism *Image Credit: Ecstadelic Media, Shutterstock About the Author: Alex Vikoulov is a neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter and media artist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution". Graduated from Armstrong University, Berkeley, CA. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area).  "Happiness is a conscious choice, not an automatic response.” -Mildred Barthel "Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism, the way you play it is free will." -Jawaharlal Nehru In our rapidly accelerating times, humans become more machine-like, and sentient machines become more human-like. Before long, it might look like a typical generation gap problem, our AGIs, our "mind children", would grow up and develop features that we could find increasingly difficult to understand and control. Like all conservative parents, we might be puzzled and frightened by processes that appear completely alien to us. We would be intermittently nostalgic about the good old times, aggressive in our attempts to contain our "children" but at the same time proud of their phenomenal advance. Eventually, some of us may retire under their care, while blaming them for destroying our old-fashioned world. And only those of us who are the bravest and youngest at heart will join the next generation of life by becoming part of superintelligent posthumanity. Your choice does matter! Although some neuroscientists contend that free will is an illusion, I would respectfully disagree by saying that free will may be slightly overrated but still indispensable for consciousness to function in our "physical world". In fact, free will and consciousness are inseparable. Free will, just like intentionality, is an integral feature of consciousness, "conscious choice" made by mind with the guidance of the larger consciousness system and our collective will in the space of all logically available probabilities (more on that in my coming book “The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution”). All realities are observer-dependent. As John Wheeler, one of the brightest minds of the 20th century puts it, we live in a "participatory universe". Rephrasing Descartes’ famous principle, “I think therefore I am,” Quantum Physics would instead state, “I choose therefore I am.” In our computational Quantum Multiverse, an infinitely large number of alternate timelines and versions of you are mathematically possible, but your mind actualizes, "choses to observe" only a certain probabilistic outcome in this "multi-player virtual reality" of Tom Campbell, or "participatory universe" of John Wheeler. "Star Trek holodeck" analogy would also work just fine in that regard. Be mindful of your conscious choices - every time you play a violent video game or watch a violent movie, or overfocus on negative news or mundane negativity, every time you pay attention to negative news or hate propaganda or fear-mongering populism, you inadvertently skew your probable futures toward a less pleasant timeline, by default. Your linguistic choices, your beliefs and biases shape your subjective reality in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to evolve your consciousness and to transcend yourself... ... to continue reading the story:  Tags: self-transcendence, transcendence, neuroscience, collective intelligence, sentience, self-awareness, strong AI, human psychology, human motivation, artificial intelligence, Mildred Barthel, John Wheeler, Tom Campbell, Quantum Multiverse, Syntellect Hypothesis, Quantum Mechanics, Star Trek, conscious experience, superintelligence, singularity, mind uploading, postbiological superintelligence, posthuman superintelligence, Syntellect emergence, technological singularity, dimensionality, multiversal fractality, conscious agent, human evolution, human condition, multiverse landscape, AI assistant, transcendent other, AGI, artificial general intelligence, transhumanism, participatory universe, experiential realism, philosophy of mind, science of mind, evolution of consciousness, phenomenology, posthumanism, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism *Image Credit: Ecstadelic Media, Shutterstock About the Author: Alex Vikoulov is a neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter and media artist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution". Graduated from Armstrong University, Berkeley, CA. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area).  "Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order... I believe that it's the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next." - Ray Kurzweil "To understand is to perceive patterns" - Isaiah Berlin About 542 million years ago, something weird and profoundly remarkable happened on Earth. Quite suddenly, life went inventively crazy, proliferating from simple, rudimentary single-cell organisms into myriad multi-cellular forms. Evolution discovered the idea of more sophisticated and specialized cells, and most of the basic body plans we know today. Biologists call it the Cambrian explosion. Today, we are on the verge of yet another event of astronomical significance, akin to some kind of Intelligence Supernova, which I refer to as the Syntellect Emergence. In the scientific community, this coming intelligence explosion is also known as the "Technological Singularity". Surprisingly enough, most ordinary people are still simply oblivious of this rapidly approaching "galactic event" that we are about to witness in our lifetimes. All organisms, from single-cellular bacteria to humans, live in different perceptual realities, in their own "virtual worlds", so to speak. Your body is a collection of trillions of cells and microorganisms. While a certain process in your body is "unconscious" to you, it is an interaction within the network of entangled sentient entities (agents) in your body, having their own subjective experience, at their own layer of existence. The whole symphony of existence arises from a set of rules, and we start to uncover one of its deepest secrets - the multiversal fractality of networks of networks of networks of conscious entities all the way down, and all the way up, seemingly ad infinitum. The ability of future "self-aware" superintelligent machines and enhanced humans alike to instantly transfer knowledge and directly share experiences with each other in digital format will lead to evolution of intelligence from relatively isolated individual minds to the global community of hyperconnected digital minds, the Syntellect. The hierarchy of this emergent Global Brain cognitive architecture will likely to persist through the next stage of the technological singularity. Just like the human brain consists of different areas (simplistically divided into an amphibian, reptilian, mammalian brain) and certain neural functional regions, such as the highly "coveted" neocortex, where would your future "individuated mind" fit into this new "reshuffling of the deck"? Will you be an insider or an outsider? RELATED:  by Alex Vikoulov  "Transhumanism literally means "beyond human." It's using science and technology to radically change and improve the human species and experience." - Zoltan Istvan The contemporary transhumanist movement aims to transform the human condition by developing and making widely available advanced technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological potential. Transhumanists believe that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into different beings with superior God-like capacities - posthumans. The three transhumanist "Super Pillars" are: Superlongehity, Superintelligence, and Super Wellbeing. According to Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns,” exponential technologies will bring about ever more rapid changes in human evolutionary development. We will move from where we are today, increasingly dependent on external computers that help us conduct business and access information, to the next level where computers gradually become an integral part of us. Most transhumanists would like to become superintelligent themselves. This is obviously a long-term goal, but it might be achievable either through mind uploading and subsequent enhancement or through the gradual augmentation of our biological brains, by means of future nootropics (cognitive enhancement drugs), cognitive techniques, IT tools (e.g. wearable computers, smart agents, information filtering systems, visualization software, etc.), neural interfaces, or brain implants (more on that further). When transhumanists seek to extend human lifespan, they want to live longer, healthier, happier, more productive years, be able to do, learn, and experience more; have more fun and spend more time with loved ones. But the ultimate superlongevity goal of transhumanists is indefinitely long lifespan for all: to digitize our minds, upload our minds onto the Global Brain cloud, and achieve so-called digital immortality. A transhumanist philosopher David Pearce promotes the idea that there exists a strong ethical imperative for humans to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. In his "Hedonistic Imperative" he outlines how genetic engineering, nanotechnology, pharmacology, and neurosurgery could potentially converge to eliminate all forms of unpleasant experience among human and non-human animals, replacing suffering with gradients of well-being, a project he refers to as “Paradise Engineering”. Pearce writes: "...there is nothing to stop intelligent agents from identifying the molecular signature of experience below hedonic zero and eliminating it altogether — even in insects… I tentatively predict that the world’s last unpleasant experience in our forward light-cone will be a precisely datable event - perhaps some micro-pain in an obscure marine invertebrate a few centuries hence." Video:: British Institute of Posthuman Studies - Introduction to Transhumanism
by Alex Vikoulov  "Virtual reality is the 'ultimate empathy machine.' These experiences are more than documentaries. They're opportunities to walk a mile in someone else's shoes." -Chris Milk The next major technological platform for creative expansion of the mind will be the Metaverse, a functional successor to today's 2D Internet, with virtual places instead of Webpages. The Internet and smartphones have enabled the rapid and cheap sharing of information, immersive Virtual Reality will be able to provide the same for experiences. That means that just as we can read, listen to, and watch videos of anything we want today, soon we’ll be able to experience stunning lifelike simulations in virtual reality indistinguishable from our physical world. We'll be walking and actively interacting in the Metaverse, not slavishly staring at the flat screens. On this new social platform, we would be able to "turn our minds inside out" and show our dreams to each other in this ecstadelic matrix of our own making. RELATED:  Only a decade ago, people online mostly shared text. Today, we share rich multimedia content such as photos, videos, articles. A decade from now, people will be sharing fully immersive VR experiences. In a couple of decades, people will be sharing multi-sensory VR experiences - just like in the movie "Being John Malkovich" - you could experience someone else's pallette of sensations just as real as your own. We'll epiphanize ourselves via intersubjective mutuality that would result in an unprecedented level of empathy, altruism, superfluidity of identiity, and the initial stages of the Syntellect Emergence. You can tattoo a dragon on your chest today, but tomorrow you can BE a living, breathing dragon in VR, if you’d like. You can “take for a spin” a cool car on your playstation VR today, but tomorrow you can drive a Lamborghini convertible along the Pacific coast on highway 1 with a gentle ocean breeze on your face in immersive multisensory VR. We all have so-called FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out, to a degree. But the good news is that once we have the fully operational Metaverse, it would be easy to relive your own cherished moments in multi-sensory VR - travel to your own past, so to speak - who said you can't come back in time? ..and even tweak something? (Just ask your AI assistant!) Other people's precious memories, should they want to share them, or recreated historical events, or fabricated phantasies could be accessible through the global library of millions of VR experiences to fill the gaps of parental love, exotic vacations, romantic encounters, professional achievements, athletic performances, or any other things in life missing from your arsenal of past sensations. One could easily envision that with exponential development of AI-powered multisensory immersive technologies, in 10-15 years most of us could immerse in "real virtualities" akin to lifestyles of today's billionaires. Give it another couple of decades, each of us might opt to create and run their own virtual universe with [simulated] physics indistinguishable from physics of our world. Or you can always "fine-tune" the rule set, or tweak historical scenarios at will. Video Credit: Etherial Exposition - Terence McKenna "Real Virtualities
by Alex Vikoulov  "If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization." - Terence McKenna We are currently birthing our Transcendent Other, the Syntellect, the Global Brain, or whatever name could be given to that entity - supposedly new living conscious superorganism, that will ultimately know us better than we know ourselves - and we are actually rebirthing ourselves in the process. Human condition will be transformed into higher state of being, consciousness and love. We will never lose our best qualities - only infinitely enhance them, we will only get rid of what holds us back like fear and other ego-based emotions. We'll live in an increasingly interconnected world, and real intimacy would mean inviting someone into your virtual world that may grow to the size of a galaxy. Just like today we try to "pack" every imaginable feature in our smartphones, looking few years ahead, our smartphones will be replaced with AI personal assistants "who" will be our "perfect" lifelike device-companions - holographic, virtual and robotic at will - even able to take multiple bodies at once (team sport, impromtu party, sex orgy, anyone?). Ultimately, you would be able to structure your own unique symbiotic relationship with this Transcendent Other interfacing via your AI assistant which will be, for a lack of a better word, the embodiment of Syntellect. "She" or "he" could be your mirror twin, or avatar-like creature, or anything, or anyone for that matter - your interface to the world, changing appearances, forms and environments that can follow you anywhere, be it the physical or virtual worlds, mixed or augmented reality - a device (or conscious entity?) that could take a shape of someone you just met across the globe, 100% programmable all-in-one device, the direct conduit to your higher self. Video: Ecstadelic Media - "AI, Direct Conduit to Higher Self"
by Alex Vikoulov  "The concept of Singularity envisages a technology-driven explosion in intelligence... the resulting superhuman intelligence will not be centralized in a single AI system but distributed across all people and artifacts, as connected via the Internet. This Global Brain will function to tackle all challenges confronting the “global superorganism”. Its capabilities will extend so far beyond our present abilities that they can perhaps best be conveyed as a pragmatic version of the “divine” attributes..." - Francis Heylighen, Global Brain Institute When Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth in April 1961, he carried generations of hopes and dreams into space with him. A growing number of thinkers now believe the "Overview Effect" heralds nothing less than the next “giant leap” of human evolution. As breathtaking space-down views of our world seep into our collective consciousness, people are waking up to the “Spaceship Earth” analogy that depicts our planet as a natural vessel that must be steered responsibly by its crew. To see our planet from this grander vantage point astonished space pioneers, and today, through IMAX or VR, prompts us to recontextualize humanity, who and what we are, to raise our cosmic awareness, and how one may individually fit into that big picture. Ever since I was a kid, I've had this vision that humanity would play a central role in the destiny of our planet, as the Global Brain, on the co-evolutionary trajectory to become a fully functional planetary superorganism. Any complex system composed of a variety of interacting subsystems, such as chemical networks, ecosystems, or societies, over time, tends to evolve towards more self-organization, coherence and interdependence, as its subsystems mutually adapt and lower overall system entropy. Realized through a network of internal feedback loops, such system may be considered “living” or "organismic" in the abstract sense. Also, tracing our evolution back two billion years, through mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and so on, we eventually wind up with one single cell that was the ancestor of all life on Earth. When this cell reproduced itself, and continued to do so for eons, mutating and evolving into new forms, it still continued to comprise but a single total organism. Literally, we are all "one". The blue whale and the redwood tree are not the largest living organisms on Earth, the entire planetary biosphere is. Decades from now, when looking at our home planet harboring our post-scarcity transcendent civilization, and from our newly acquired Syntellect-inspired perspective, who would even doubt that the Earth has matured into the Global Superorganism? Just like once life on Earth complexified from one-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms, we are becoming one Global Superorganism, at first rudimentary like today, but more and more integrated over time, with distinct features like the Global Brain, a neural network of billions of hyperconnected humans, superintelligent machines, and trillions of sensors around the planet. ... to continue reading the story:  Tags: self-transcendence, transcendence, neuroscience, collective intelligence, sentience, self-awareness, extended phenotype, artificial intelligence, Francis Heylighen, Yuri Gagarin, Syntellect Hypothesis, Extended Mind Hypothesis, wetware, mindware, ontological design, conscious experience, theogenesis, noosphere, superintelligence, singularity, mind uploading, postbiological superintelligence, posthuman superintelligence, the Syntellect emergence, overview effect, technological singularity, Inelligence explosion, dimensionality, spaceship Earth, Space Age, Global Brain, global superorganism, conscious agent, human evolution, human condition, cognitive enhancement, substrate-independent mind, digital mind, digital immortality, neural interface, Gaian Mind, Hedonistic Imperative, paradise engineering, experiential realism, philosophy of mind, science of mind, evolution of consciousness, phenomenology, mind uploading, quantum consciousness, It from Qubit, Omega Point, transcendental object, cosmological singularity, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism *Image Credit: Shutterstock About the Author: Alex Vikoulov is a neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter and media artist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution". Graduated from Armstrong University, Berkeley, CA. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). By Alex Vikoulov  "It matters that we recognize the very large extent to which individual human thought and reason are not activities that occur solely in the brain or even solely within the organismic skin-bag. This matters because it drives home the degree to which environmental engineering is also self-engineering. In building our physical and social worlds, we build (or rather, we massively reconfigure) our minds and our capacities of thought and reason." -Andy Clark The mind isn't locked in the brain, it extends far, far beyond. When we outsource our cognition to our technology, be it smartphone or notebook, our mental constructs entail patterns of thought and reasoning beyond our capacity to formulate them solely with our brains. In writing, for example, we are not simply recording our thinking but doing the thinking "on paper", so to speak. Every time we make a telephone or Skype call, we create a "techno-cultural wormhole" through space and time between two minds. Today, our "embodied mind" can roam Mars and even traverse intergalactic space outside our solar system. Philosophers of mind Andy Clark, who formulated the Extended Mind Hypothesis, together with David Chalmers, also known for the Hard Problem of Consciousness, propose that mental states, such as beliefs and memories, can also be located "externally", as extension of mind. Andy Clark defines humans as "natural-born cyborgs" - the human mind is already augmented by routinely incorporating all kinds of non-biological props and scaffoldings. Our "wetware", the human brain, even though processing information at the mind level, doesn't produce a conscious experience itself. We create our tools to extend our reach, to exercise our will, to build the scaffolding of our minds in our surroundings. By doing that, we are engaged in active ontological design - everything we design, designs us back. We need to transcend our "skin-bag bias" - our tools, our technology is a natural extension of us - just like spiderweb or anthill are extensions of those insect species. Our collective, technologically extended mind represents the noosphere, or global superorganism, consisting of the interconnected totality of all sentient beings, and a higher level of consciousness possessed by it. This mindspace insinuates a future where boxes, wires, keyboards, and crude mechanisms will disappear from sight while our technologies keep on minituarizing and blending with us and our aesthetically pleasing environments, when imagination instantly materializes, and a world is rendered at the speed of thought, when everything links with everything else, and matter becomes mind. ... to continue reading the story:  Tags: self-transcendence, transcendence, neuroscience, collective intelligence, sentience, extended phenotype, artificial intelligence, consciousness, exocortex, Andy Clark, David Chalmers, Extended Mind Hypothesis, Hard Problem of Consciousness, wetware, mindware, ontological design, conscious experience, noosphere, superintelligence, singularity, mind uploading, the Syntellect emergence, technological singularity, Intelligence Supernova,, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism *Image Credit: NASA, Shutterstock About the Author: Alex Vikoulov is a neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter and media artist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution". Graduated from Armstrong University, Berkeley, CA. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). |
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