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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by Alex Vikoulov “If we accept that the material universe as we know it is not a mechanical system but a virtual reality created by Absolute Consciousness through an infinitely complex orchestration of experiences, what are the practical consequences of this insight?” -Stanislav Grof Just like absolute idealism, solipsism certainly defies our common sense but the deeper layer of truth is not what first meets the eye. Here's what Richard Conn Henry and Stephen Palmquist write in their paper “An Experimental Test of Non-local Realism" (2007): "Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the illusion of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism." One can extend their line of reasoning by arriving at pantheistic solipsism as a likely revelation to ponder about.* 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.* By Alex Vikoulov "What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself." -Abraham Maslow Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs has served as the foundation for understanding human motivation since it was first published in 1943 as part of "A Theory of Human Motivation" in Psychological Review. The hierarchy, presented in pyramid form, is often given as an introduction to human psychology and widely accepted as a representation about what humans need from life, and in what order they need it. However, contrary to popular belief, Maslow's hierarchy is incomplete, asserts a transformative psychologist Nichol Bradford from San Francisco. Later in his life, after the hierarchy had been published, Maslow began work on a final stage of human motivation. Self-actualization was not the pinnacle of individual human achievement, but rather Self-Transcendence. Not an elevation of the self, but a subverting of it. This gives us the whole new perspective on human psychology itself. Achieving self-actualization means resting comfortably inside the boundaries of human psychology -- accomplishing what is knowable and testable -- while Self-Transcendence means pushing far beyond them, exceeding their totality, overflowing. When you become aware of not only your own potential, but you become aware of the potential of humanity at large, the unity of all things. Once you have a higher purpose in life, you can effortlessly tap into your "flow state," the state of peak experience and joy. Whether through deep meditation, psychedelic depersonalization, altruistic self-denial, or more recently through transformative technologies and technological mediation in general, expanding beyond self-fulfillment could well be the ultimate stage of human evolutionary development.* 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)
by Alex Vikoulov "The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of language. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish." -Terence McKenna
In his book Food of the Gods: the Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, Terence McKenna crafts his carefully thought out theory proposing that our pre-human primate ancestors consumed psilocybin mushrooms for thousands of years, and this is the primary reason humanity’s evolution rapidly accelerated — launching us forward in the animal kingdom. Terence McKenna’s Stoned Ape Theory is more plausible than it sounds — especially in context of the emergence of human mind and language development. As our distant ancestors left the forests for the grasslands and began moving throughout Africa after the last ice age, about 18,000 years ago, the species switched to a more omnivorous diet, which included psilocybin mushrooms. A variety of mushroom spores were found embedded in the dental remains of an 18,700 year old prehistoric woman. Researchers discovered microscopic evidence that the upper paleolithic woman had been nibbling “sponge capped, bolete mushrooms and gilled mushrooms from the Agaric group.” Thus, these ‘special’ mushrooms were definitively part of the stone-age diet. In McKenna’s theory, the consumption of hallucinogenic psilocybin was done predominantly in small doses, where the effect doesn’t quite reach the point of hallucination, but instead reaches the point of heightened senses, such as visual acuity. This enhancement of vision would have helped our ancestors hunt, gather food, and detect predators. At a medium dose, psilocybin acts as an aphrodisiac -- creates a sense of restlessness and sexual arousal. This would have increased instances of successful copulation, i.e. sexual reproduction which is the main game in evolution. At higher doses, according to McKenna, in glossolalia-induced states of mind members of the group were inspired and compelled to use vocal sounds to communicate images to their tribesmen. The Stoned Ape Theory suggests that experience on magic mushrooms was the major contributing factor to the fast development of language during that period.* by Alex Vikoulov "Time is what prevents everything from happening at once." -John A. Wheeler
What could be strange about something we're all so familiar with - TIME? We all have cognitive biases and some concepts in this essay may be kind of novel, or even bizarre to you, so I urge you to keep an open mind. While pondering about the ultimate nature of time, most people are used to think in linear terms and have these common misconceptions: Misconception #1: Time is Universal The biggest misconception of all is that a "Now" moment throughout our Universe must be the same. It turns out that time is paradoxical, flexible and relative, in other words, time is not what it appears to be. Albert Einstein in his Theory of General Relativity shed light on the relativistic nature of time. He has shown that speed and gravity influence time thus making a now for an observer on Earth different from a now for an observer on a planet in some distant galaxy depending how fast the two planets are moving in relation to each other across the vast distances as well as their mass differential. Interestingly enough, this could possibly explain the Fermi Paradox (where are all the aliens?) that we'll discuss further. Einstein came to another mind-blowing realization about non-locality of time stating that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously in the eternal NOW, as his quote "The distinction between the past, present and future is only an illusion, albeit a persistent one" became famous almost overnight. Thus, all events in the universe that happened in the past still exist, in fact, are even happening right now, in another conscious observer's reality. And all events that will happen in the future already exist, in fact, are even happening right now, in another conscious observer's reality. There's no special "Now" from the God's eye perspective but it's not what we experience, don't we?* |
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Recent Publications The Cybernetic Theory of Mind by Alex M. Vikoulov (2022): 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 (2022): eBook THEOGENESIS: Transdimensional Propagation & Universal Expansion by Alex M. Vikoulov (2021): eBook The Cybernetic Singularity: The Syntellect Emergence by Alex M. Vikoulov (2021): eBook TECHNOCULTURE: The Rise of Man by Alex M. Vikoulov (2020) eBook NOOGENESIS: Computational Biology by Alex M. Vikoulov (2020): eBook The Ouroboros Code: Reality's Digital Alchemy Self-Simulation Bridging Science and Spirituality by Antonin Tuynman (2019) eBook Paperback The Science and Philosophy of Information by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019): eBook Series Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019) eBook The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019) eBook The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019): eBook The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology by Alex M. Vikoulov (2019): 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 Our Custom GPTs
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