Top Stories @EcstadelicNET

The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence

6/27/2018

“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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Digital Pantheism: Philosophical Afterthoughts and Follow-up Questions to the Argument

3/17/2018

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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.*

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The Omega Singularity Cosmological Model: Is God The Ultimate Computer?

6/28/2017

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By Alex Vikoulov

"The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine." -James Jeans

My prolonged fascination with Digital Philosophy led me to my own breathtaking discovery of this worldview of creation and of the Universe that allows to so elegantly reconcile science and theology, philosophy and spirituality, physics and metaphysics. This is an exclusive abridged excerpt from my book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" where we’ll further discuss the notion of digitalism, ongoing battle of ideologies revolving around God's existence, our role in this multi-layered digital reality, and the Omega Point cosmology. Previously, we have established that:

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How to Pay for Universal Basic Income? Tax Wall Street and Industrial Robots

2/28/2017

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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.

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Neo-Transcendentalism: Humanity's Vanguard of Progressive Visionaries

1/16/2017

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by Alex Vikoulov

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Transcendentalism was an American literary, political, and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Theodore Parker.

Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions -- particularly organized religion and political parties -- ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. They had faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. It is only from such real individuals that true community could be formed. Even with this necessary individuality, the transcendentalists also believed that all people possessed a piece of the "Over-soul" (God). Because the Over-soul is one, this also unites all people as one supreme being.

Full definition of transcendentalism by Merriam-Webster:
1: a philosophy that emphasizes the a priori conditions of knowledge and experience or the unknowable character of ultimate reality or that emphasizes the transcendent as the fundamental reality;
2: a philosophy that asserts the primacy of the spiritual and transcendental over the material and empirical;
3: the quality or state of being transcendental; especially: visionary idealism.

As a precursor of the things to come, we see a new wave of transcendentalists, or rather Neo-Transcendentalists, luminaries of the transhumanist movement, singularitarians like Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil, Max More, Ben Goertzel, Peter Diamandis, Zoltan Istvan, David Pearce, Natasha Vita-More, Gray Scott, Michael Anissimov to name just a few, media artists, "digital shamans" of our day and age, such as "mindgasmic" Jason Silva.

The essence of transcendence is to become more than we are, transcend ourselves, our biology, our human condition, our human nature and then all other conceivable limitations. There's only one Universal Consciousness, each of us individually is part of, and knowing it through experience has been called transcendence, through the ages. As "cosmic revolutionaries," we dream of transcendence -- we dream of what we might become.

Self-Transcendence is a dynamic evolutionary process of proceeding through stages toward more complexity, higher consciousness, love and state of being. Imminent physicists and philosophers of mind argue that the evolution and the rise of complex observers may have been woven into the cosmic code from the beginning -- life and mind play a necessary participatory role in reality. Evolution of mind is a fundamental process of the Universe, an open-ended game with new unexpected turns, layers of truth and emerging patterns.

...to read the full story:

Tags: self-transcendence, transcendence, artificial intelligence, Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, Vernor Vinge, Ben Goertzel, David Pierce, Jason Silva, Max More, Natasha Vita-More, Gray Scott, Alan Harrington, Peter Diamandis, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, Theodore Parker, Syntellect Hypothesis, transcendental object, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism

*Image Credit: Ecstadelic Media

About the Author:
Alex Vikoulov is a futurist, evolutionary cyberneticst, philosopher of mind, founder of Ecstadelic Media Group, painter, essayist, media commentator, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution," "The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology," "The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics," "The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence," "Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality," "NOOGENESIS: Computational Biology." Self-described neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, transhumanist singularitarian. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). More Bio...

Author Website: www.alexvikoulov.com

e-mail: alexvikoulov@ecstadelic.net

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Self-Transcendence: Maslow's Hierarchy's Missing Apex

11/5/2016

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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.*

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