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Self-Transcendence beyond a Mere Human: Our Extended Mind

5/15/2020

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 a smartphone or a 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.

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Rethinking the Hard Problem of Consciousness from the Holistic Perspective of Digital Physics

11/16/2019

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by Alex Vikoulov

"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve."
-Max Planck

Listen to this article ↴

The following excerpt from my book Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality may be hard to swallow for some die-hard materialists. This is why I urge some of you to read it with an open mind and abstain from making hasty conclusions. Keep in mind that this excerpt is but a small sample of much larger discussion of the hard problem of consciousness covered quite extensively in my book with the "meta-analysis" of leading theories of consciousness, substantiated claims, certain proposed solutions in regards to phenomenology, future possibilities of mind-uploading and, as the title suggests, theological implications of Digital Physics.

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Consciousness: Our Subjective Experience | Video

8/3/2019

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by Alex Vikoulov

"The Real is ever-present, like the screen on which the cinematographic pictures move. While the picture appears on it, the screen remains invisible. Stop the picture, and the screen will become clear. All thoughts and events are merely pictures moving on the screen of Pure Consciousness, which alone is real."
-Ramana Maharshi

Feeling and thinking are ways we process information, but our emotional sensations are normally faster than a conscious thought. Your consciousness is optimized meta-algorithmic information-processing. Nothing is real for us until perceived.

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Mind-Uploading: The Impending Meta-System Transition of Humanity | Video

7/2/2019

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by Alex Vikoulov

“NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!' Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: 'Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!”
-Charles Stross, Accelerando

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More Than An Algorithm: A Palette of Intelligence Explored

6/21/2019

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by Alex Vikoulov | Foreword to "More Than An Algorithm" by Antonin Tuynman, PhD

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” -Albert Einstein

As a little kid I remember hearing from my father all kinds of stories sort of like this one: A father wanted to test the intelligence of his two sons. He assigned to each of them the task of looking after a cherry tree, and promised to reward the boy whose tree would yield the best berry when harvested.

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The Objectivity Myth: What We Call 'Objective Reality' Doesn't Actually Exist

6/3/2019

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by Alex Vikoulov

"It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of the consciousness is an ultimate reality." -Eugene Wigner

We can’t help but anthropomorphize the notion of objective reality. As I make my case in the new book, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution, objective reality does not exist, what exists instead is subjectivity, intersubjectivity (or “consensus” reality) and supersubjectivity (overmind, The Omega Hypermind in the book). This extraordinary claim apparently demands an explanation, so let’s get to it.

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The Physics of Time: How Intelligible is Time?

5/25/2019

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by Antonin Tuynman, PhD

“Time is a moving image of eternity.” -Plato

TIME, the reef upon which all our frail mystic ships are wrecked, has remained an elusive notion over the ages. Sages, philosophers and scientists have ventured a countless number of times into the dark arena of the hourglass in an attempt to tame the indomitable vortex of this indefinite stream.

Chronos, the most fearful of Gaia's and Ouranos' children, mightily wields his scythe as he reaps the memories that we have left behind during our ephemeral stay on the stage of continuous metamorphosis.

What is time? Does anyone really know? Is it a physical dimension? Is it merely a measure of recurrence? Is it a mental mechanism to be able to make sense out of everything happening simultaneously? Is it an artefact or collateral damage of consciousness trying to observe its inner workings?

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