 "God is what Mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension." -Richard Feynman If you ask me whether I believe in God, I would answer that I'm personally agnostic for all logical and practical purposes while keeping an open mind. However, I believe in evolution as a spiritual process leading to the Omega Point. In other words, God is destination, if not both Origin (Source) and Destination. For the time being, I remain a good "possibilian" (term coined by neuroscientist David Eagleman of Stanford). Perhaps our religion, our notion of divinity, has been a rehearsal for our own ambition to create a technological nirvana, techno-paradise, the new Garden of Eden for ourselves. As Alan Harrington wrote in the Immortalist: "Having created the gods, we can turn into them," and echoing these words, Stewart Brand once said: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." At the end of our human history here, we'll transition to an unbridled mindspace of possibilities instead of the linear progression of history. Whatever your favorite metaphor to descibe our reality might be, like "the Syntellect Incubator", "Evolving Consciousness Trainer" or "AGI (NP) Simulation Program" (to cite a few of my own), evolution, it seems, has found its optimal pathway through maximum diversity, interaction between conscious agents, and bootstrapping its progress. Thus, individuality will never be suppressed, but rather super-personalized - so our "graduated syntellect", our civilizational mind, will form a new identity amidst a newly discovered layer of existence. This process may righfully be called Theogenesis - the birth of a divine entity. The transcendent networked mind will be infinitely enriched and approach God-like states and abilities: omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, immortality, love, beauty, creativity. This universal complexification and integration will be conducive to ever-higher levels of consciousness, seemingly ad infinitum, beyond our present "scale of comprehension". ... to continue reading the story:  Tags: self-transcendence, transcendence, neuroscience, collective intelligence, artificial intelligence, Richard Feynman, Syntellect Hypothesis, Extended Mind Hypothesis, Hard Problem of Consciousness, Digital Physics, Holographic Principle, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Gravity, mindware, ontological design, conscious experience, theogenesis, infomorph, infomorph commonality, noosphere, superintelligence, singularity, mind uploading, postbiological superintelligence, posthuman superintelligence, the Syntellect emergence, Global Brain, global superorganism, Syntellect incubator, multiversal fractality, conscious agent, human evolution, transcendent other, transhumanism, superlongevity, superwellbeing, cognitive enhancement, substrate-independent mind, digital mind, digital immortality, paradise engineering, philosophy of mind, science of mind, evolution of consciousness, phenomenology, mind uploading, posthumanism, quantum consciousness, It from Qubit, Omega Point, transcendental object, cosmological singularity, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism *Image Credit: NASA 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  "You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience." -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin When speaking of transcendence, it's impossible not to mention the work of mid-twentieth century theologian Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard has prophesied that our current phase of being, in which humans live individual, independent lives, would eventually be replaced with something else - something more collective and more spiritual, something focused on information and consciousness rather than material being. He coined such terms as Noosphere (mindsphere) to refer the globe-encircling web of thought and information that he thought would arise at the end of our current phase of being, and The Omega Point, the cosmological singularity, the point of maximum complexity and connectivity, the Universe, he believed, was evolving towards. Terence McKenna spoke of the Omega Point as the "Transcendental Object at the end of time", universal attractor. Evolution, according to McKenna, is not being pushed from behind by the force of causal necessity, we humans, like the rest of nature, are being pulled toward this universal attractor, this temporal vortex, reacting to the siren song of the Transcendental Object. "It beckons across the dimensions, it throws an enormous shadow over the enterprise of human history... The presence of creatures such as ourselves on this planet is an indication of the nearness of the Transcendental Object at the end of time; it is an attractor, an energy sink in the epigenetic landscape... We are going to shed the monkey; the linguistic being that is symbiotic with these monkeys is about to disentangle itself from matter and realize some kind of angelic transformation very difficult for us to anticipate or understand." Dr.Frank Tipler, among other prominent physicists, argues that the technological Singularity is inevitable and the destiny of human race is to live forever, expand universally and finally reach the Omega Point, the networked mind of universal proportions, living conscious universe. As the laws of physics dictate, we are set to achieve the Technological Singularity, and then move forward towards the Cosmological Singularity, the Omega Point. It's a logical necessity, argues Dr.Tipler who has developed the Omega Point scientific theory. The ultimate destiny of our Universe, according to Tipler, is multi-billion year expansion, then contraction and finally compression of space-time, matter and energy into an infinitely dense point (Omega Point), leading to the next Big Bang (Alpha Point in another universe). ... to continue reading the story:  Tags: self-transcendence, transcendence, neuroscience, collective intelligence, sentience, self-awareness, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, exocortex, Teillard de Chardin, Terence McKenna, Frank Tipler, Quantum Multiverse, Syntellect Hypothesis, noosphere, superintelligence, singularity, mind uploading, postbiological superintelligence, posthuman superintelligence, Syntellect emergence, technological singularity, AGI, artificial general intelligence, transhumanism, superlongevity, superwellbeing, cognitive enhancement, substrate-independent mind, digital mind, digital immortality, Gaian Mind, evolution of consciousness, 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  "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. ... 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). |