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Technology and Culture: Our Accelerating Epigenetic Factor Driven Evolution

10/27/2018

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.

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The Physics of Information: Quantum Potentiality to Classical Actuality of Your Experiential Reality

9/20/2018

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by Alex Vikoulov

“A quantum possibility is more real than a classical possibility, but less real than a classical reality.” -Boris Tsirelson

John Archibald Wheeler was one of the first prominent physicists to propose that reality might not be wholly physical, in some sense, our cosmos must be a “participatory” phenomenon requiring the act of conscious observation — and thus consciousness itself. Wheeler also drew attention to implicit connection between physics and information theory, which was invented in 1948 by mathematician Claude Shannon. Just as physics builds on elementary particles, the quanta, defined by measurement, so does information theory. Its “quantum” is the binary unit, or bit, which is a signal represented by one of two choices: yes or no, plus or minus, zero or one. Ironically, Wheeler’s 'it from bit' implies that a “theory of everything” will always be a work in progress, and that truth is something subjectively created rather than objectively apprehended. “I do take 100 percent seriously the idea that the world is a figment of the imagination,” Wheeler used to remark.

Twisting your mind to see reality from the quantum gravity viewpoint is no easy task. It might be quite a stretch to see the physical world made up of space-time-mass-energy as a formless fog of potentiality. Physicists face the same hard problem as neuroscientists do: the problem of bridging objective description and subjective experience. Physics has encountered consciousness. Quantum theory says an object remains in a superposition of possibilities until observed. We can consider a quantum state as being about our knowledge rather than a direct description of physical reality. The physics of information just may be that bridging of quantum-to-digital reality of subjective experience. We are now at the historic juncture when quantum computing could reveal quantum information processing underpinnings of subjectivity.

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The Omega Point Cosmo-Teleology: Our Forgotten Future

8/18/2018

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by Alex Vikoulov

"If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern." -William Blake

When we apprehend 'reality' as the entirety of everything that exists including all dimensionality, all events and entities in their respective pasts and futures, then by definition nothing exists outside of reality, not even "nothing." Once we apply the Principle of Sufficient Reason – the one that states that there’s a sufficient reason for any fact, including the fact that reality exists – it would lead us to conclude that the first cause for reality's existence must lie within reality itself, since there is nothing outside of it. This self-causation of reality is perhaps best understood in relation to the existence of your own mind. But what might be the purpose, or the teleology (Greek τέλος for 'purpose'), for the creation of a universe like ours? If the Universe serves a purpose, does that mean that there is an intelligent creator? So, what is the Omega Point Cosmo-Teleology?*

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Digital Presentism: D-Theory of Time

7/18/2018

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"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.” -Bill Keane

Temporal philosophy is a fascinating but eerily difficult topic. Correctly answering the philosophical questions and paradoxes of time paves the way to unlocking one of the last remaining mysteries of mind since our perception of time and consciousness, as you know, are simply inseparable. A new theory of time, Digital Presentism, comes from the triangulation of temporal physics, digital physics and experiential realism. This essay addresses the flaming questions in philosophy of time: "Is time fundamental or emergent?", "How does time exist, if at all?", "How can we update the current epistemic status of temporal ontology?" For starters, let’s recap what we’ve learned so far about physics of time. Here’s a quick summary: in Time Series essays, we dissected the nature of time through the prism of these 7 common misconceptions:

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The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence

6/27/2018

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“Two extremes of the Universe span a jaw-dropping 63 orders of magnitude. To be fair, though, this isn't an immutable constant of Nature. Turn the clock back more than 13 billion years and you'd be able to find a moment when this number was merely one. Over time, the expansion of the cosmos and the passage of light has unlocked all of those other scales, each one a new opportunity for novelty and complexity.” -Caleb Scharf

While speaking of the origins of us, most people usually envision origination in time, in linear time to be exact, notably in the deep past. In purely scientific terms, our origins can be traced back to the Big Bang, first prokaryotes, primordial mammals, first hominids, first humans, the first civilization, depending on a pertinent perspective one wants to take. In this essay, we'll discuss our origins based on today’s widely accepted scientific knowledge with a few novel interpretations of my own.*

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The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution | Book Synopsis

5/15/2018

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by Alex M. Vikoulov

Book by Alex M. Vikoulov, Synopsis*

"Regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals." -John A. Wheeler

Everything, including energy, matter, space, time, and consciousness, is INFORMATION, or Code if you will. Many scientists now come to a consensus that information may be fundamental, since information patterns persist through dimensions and, it seems, is an evolving phenomenon.

This is the synopsis of my new book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" where we will set to explore the conscious mind's journey through times and paradigms with the focus on what's most important to us as conscious beings -- OUR SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE. From Noogenesis to Apotheosis of the Universal Mind, this book will examine the five distinct evolutionary paradigms:

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Is God The Ultimate Computer? The Digital Pantheism Argument

7/31/2017

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by Alex Vikoulov

"All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.” -Max Planck

This is abridged part of my essay “Is God the ultimate computer?” where we formulate the Digital Pantheism Argument, our existence as the fractals of cognitive architecture of "God." The previous part of essay could be summarized and reformulated into these three basic premises for further discourse in order to articulate the Digital Pantheism Argument: (1) Universality of Computation; (2) Evolutionary Emergence; (3) Universal Causal Diamond. Let’s reiterate the three foundational axioms before proceeding further:

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