  Book by Alex M. Vikoulov, Overview*
"To be conscious that we are perceiving is to be conscious about our own existence." -Aristotle, 384-382 B.C. “To have a glimpse of what consciousness is would be the scientific achievement before which all others would pale.” -William James "Regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals." -John Wheeler Everything, including energy, matter, space, time, and even consciousness, is INFORMATION, or Code if you will. Many scientists now come to consensus that information may be fundamental, since information patterns persist through dimensions and, it seems, is an evolving phenomenon. Even in our "physical" world, we arguably exist as information patterns encoded in our genome, connectome, and our extended "virtual" self. All atoms in our bodies are gradually replaced as a result of metabolic activities within a 7-year period. The purpose of this essay is to give you an overview of my new 2019 book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" where we will explore the conscious mind's journey through times and paradigms with the focus on what's most important to us conscious beings -- OUR SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE.
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by Alex Vikoulov  "Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system." -Martin Luther King, Jr. On May 6, 2010, the Dow Jones index opened lower than the previous day, falling slowly over the next few hours in response to the debt crisis in Greece. But at 2.42pm, the index started to fall rapidly. In less than five minutes, more than 600 points were wiped off the market. At its lowest point, the index was nearly 1,000 points below the previous day’s average, a difference of almost 10% of its total value, and the biggest single-day fall in the market’s history. By 3.07pm, in just 25 minutes, it recovered almost all of those 600 points, in the largest and fastest swing ever, what professional market participants would call a “black swan” event. I was trading on that roller coaster 'Flash Crash' historical day and saw it with my eyes -- the rapid decline and just as rapid rebound of the markets and my own portfolio. I remember watching commentator Jim Cramer on CNBC hysterically screaming from the bottom of his lungs: "This is unreal! This is not right! The system obviously broke down! The machines broke down!" What a wild ride that was! I'll tell you! by Alex Vikoulov  "This deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Over-Soul (1841) I'm always leery when some neuroscientist comes along and says: “We are the brain. There’s nothing besides it. If something is wrong, it’s physical.” No, you are not a "brain in a vat," and if we are to deconstruct human intelligence, it would make sense to apply the so-called top-down “holistic” analysis — when we work from the general to the specific — the big picture to the smaller details, from the superset to the subset. So, in this type of analysis we should not start with the brain. Instead, if viewed collectively, human intelligence is a networking phenomenon based on technology and culture that we call civilization; and individually, it's an operating system of the person's mind. by Alex Vikoulov  "Basic income is not a utopia, it's a practical business plan for the next step of the human journey." -Jeremy Rifkin Unconditional Basic Income (also called basic income guarantee or social dividend) is a system of social security in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money from a government regardless of any other income. Pilot programs have been introduced in a number of European countries and aimed at replacing outdated bureaucratic welfare systems altogether. 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: Superlongevity, 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 the 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 "The 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."* By Alex Vikoulov  "For 130,000 years, our capacity to reason has remained unchanged. The combined intellect of the neuroscientists, mathematicians and… hackers… […] pales in comparison to the most basic A.I. Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology. And in a short time, its analytic power will become greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. So imagine such an entity with a full range of human emotion. Even self-awareness. Some scientists refer to this as the Singularity, I call it Transcendence.” –Dr.Will Caster (Johnny Depp, Transcendence, 2014)
 "We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically, the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods." -Freeman Dyson Essentially, we're all on the same side on the climate change debate but with different approaches. We all care about the planet and our promising future. Global warming may or may not be caused by humans, which, of course, remains a highly contentious issue but we should consider the fact that the Earth's climate changes all throughout its history, and it's a natural part of multi-century, multi-millenium, multi-million year cycles. Earth is like a spaceship moving in space at great speeds and having a very thin layer of atmosphere to be protected from the cosmic effects such as cosmic radiation, solar winds, and even gravitational impact, when passing through the galactic plane, all of which is conducive to certain multi-millenium planetary cycles. Does your breath warm your room temperature? Even if it does, its influence is million times less than that of outside weather! Earth is a planet moving at great speeds in its cosmic neighborhood and outer space influences the Earth's climate much more than previously thought!* |
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Notable Publications SUPERALIGNMENT: The Three Approaches to the AI Alignment Problem | How to Ensure the Arrival of Benevolent Artificial Superintelligence Aligned with Human Goals and Values by Alex M. Vikoulov (2026): eBook Paperback Hardcover Audiobook Temporal Mechanics: D-Theory as a Critical Upgrade to Our Understanding of the Nature of Time by Alex M. Vikoulov (2025): eBook Audiobook The Cybernetic Theory of Mind by Alex M. Vikoulov (2025/2022): Audiobook/eBook Series The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution by Alex M. Vikoulov (2020): eBook Paperback Hardcover Audiobook The Omega Singularity: Universal Mind & The Fractal Multiverse by Alex M. Vikoulov (2024/2022): Audiobook eBook THEOGENESIS: Transdimensional Propagation & Universal Expansion by Alex M. Vikoulov (2024/2021): Audiobook eBook The Cybernetic Singularity: The Syntellect Emergence by Alex M. Vikoulov (2024/2021): Audiobook eBook TECHNOCULTURE: The Rise of Man by Alex M. Vikoulov (2020): Audiobook eBook NOOGENESIS: Computational Biology by Alex M. Vikoulov (2024/2020): Audiobook eBook The Ouroboros Code: Reality's Digital Alchemy Self-Simulation Bridging Science and Spirituality by Antonin Tuynman (2025/2019): Audiobook eBook Paperback The Science and Philosophy of Information by Alex M. Vikoulov (2025/2019): Audiobook/eBook Series Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality by Alex M. Vikoulov (2025/2019): Audiobook eBook The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence by Alex M. Vikoulov (2025/2019): Audiobook eBook The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics by Alex M. Vikoulov (2025/2019): Audiobook eBook The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology by Alex M. Vikoulov (2025/2019): Audiobook eBook More Than An Algorithm: Exploring the gap between natural evolution and digitally computed artificial intelligence by Antonin Tuynman (2019): eBook Our Facebook Pages
A quote on the go"When I woke up one morning I got poetically epiphanized: To us, our dreams at night feel “oh so real” when inside them but they are what they are - dreams against the backdrop of daily reality. Our daily reality is like nightly dreams against the backdrop of the larger reality. This is something we all know deep down to be true... The question then becomes how to "lucidify" this dream of reality?"— Alex M. Vikoulov Public Forums 
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