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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 Part II of my essay “Is God the ultimate computer?” 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. In part I we have established that:
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by Alex Vikoulov  "The world is a mirror of ourselves.” - Dayth Banger My favorite Greek philosopher Plato has left a great legacy in the series of written “Dialogues” which summarized parables which he had learned from his mentor, philosopher Socrates. One of the better known of these Dialogues is the “Allegory of the Cave”. In this allegory, people are chained from birth in a cave so that they can only see the shadows which are cast on the walls of the cave by a fire. To these people, the shadows represent the entirety of their existence — it is impossible for them to imagine a reality which consists of anything other than the blurry shadows on the wall. However, one prisoner escapes from the cave, goes out into the light of the sun and beholds true reality. When he tries to go back into the cave and tell the other captives the truth, he’s mocked as a madman. By Alex Vikoulov  "What history is, is a 25,000 year transition zone. Before you enter the zone, you're an animal. After you leave the zone, you're a "god" - Terence McKenna Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. by Alex Vikoulov  "What we call the past is built on bits" - John A. Wheeler IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE CODE... When molecular biologists talk about genetic code or sociologists talk about cultural memes as epigenetic information, it's by far more intuitive than when physicists say that what we perceive as solid matter, energy, and even space-time continuum itself is information as well. Morse code, a streaming movie on-demand, or pixels on your smartphone's screen could be easily understood as information, on the other hand, If you catch cold or fall in love with someone, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with information. But contrary to popular belief, that's the theory many physicists are now formulating. 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  "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 neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter and media artist, author of the coming book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution". Graduated from Armstrong University, Berkeley, CA. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area).  "God is what Mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension." - Richard Feynman If you ask me whether I believe in God, I would answer that I'm personally agnostic for all logical and practical purposes while keeping an open mind. However, I believe in evolution as a spiritual process leading to the Omega Point. In other words, God is destination, if not both Origin (Source) and Destination. For the time being, I remain a good "possibilian" (term coined by neuroscientist David Eagleman of Stanford). Perhaps our religion, our notion of divinity, has been a rehearsal for our own ambition to create a technological nirvana, techno-paradise, the new Garden of Eden for ourselves. As Alan Harrington wrote in the Immortalist: "Having created the gods, we can turn into them," and echoing these words, Stewart Brand once said: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." At the end of our human history here, we'll transition to an unbridled mindspace of possibilities instead of the linear progression of history. Whatever your favorite metaphor to descibe our reality might be, like "the Syntellect Incubator", "Evolving Consciousness Trainer" or "AGI (NP) Simulation Program" (to cite a few of my own), evolution, it seems, has found its optimal pathway through maximum diversity, interaction between conscious agents, and bootstrapping its progress. Thus, individuality will never be suppressed, but rather super-personalized - so our "graduated syntellect", our civilizational mind, will form a new identity amidst a newly discovered layer of existence. This process may righfully be called Theogenesis - the birth of a divine entity. The transcendent networked mind will be infinitely enriched and approach God-like states and abilities: omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, immortality, love, beauty, creativity. This universal complexification and integration will be conducive to ever-higher levels of consciousness, seemingly ad infinitum, beyond our present "scale of comprehension". ... to continue reading the story:  Tags: self-transcendence, transcendence, neuroscience, collective intelligence, artificial intelligence, Richard Feynman, Syntellect Hypothesis, Extended Mind Hypothesis, Hard Problem of Consciousness, Digital Physics, Holographic Principle, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Gravity, mindware, ontological design, conscious experience, theogenesis, infomorph, infomorph commonality, noosphere, superintelligence, singularity, mind uploading, postbiological superintelligence, posthuman superintelligence, the Syntellect emergence, Global Brain, global superorganism, Syntellect incubator, multiversal fractality, conscious agent, human evolution, transcendent other, transhumanism, superlongevity, superwellbeing, cognitive enhancement, substrate-independent mind, digital mind, digital immortality, paradise engineering, philosophy of mind, science of mind, evolution of consciousness, phenomenology, mind uploading, posthumanism, quantum consciousness, It from Qubit, Omega Point, transcendental object, cosmological singularity, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism *Image Credit: NASA About the Author: Alex Vikoulov is a neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter and media artist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution". Graduated from Armstrong University, Berkeley, CA. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). by Alex Vikoulov  "You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience." -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin When speaking of transcendence, it's impossible not to mention the work of mid-twentieth century theologian Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard has prophesied that our current phase of being, in which humans live individual, independent lives, would eventually be replaced with something else - something more collective and more spiritual, something focused on information and consciousness rather than material being. He coined such terms as Noosphere (mindsphere) to refer the globe-encircling web of thought and information that he thought would arise at the end of our current phase of being, and The Omega Point, the cosmological singularity, the point of maximum complexity and connectivity, the Universe, he believed, was evolving towards. Terence McKenna spoke of the Omega Point as the "Transcendental Object at the end of time", universal attractor. Evolution, according to McKenna, is not being pushed from behind by the force of causal necessity, we humans, like the rest of nature, are being pulled toward this universal attractor, this temporal vortex, reacting to the siren song of the Transcendental Object. "It beckons across the dimensions, it throws an enormous shadow over the enterprise of human history... The presence of creatures such as ourselves on this planet is an indication of the nearness of the Transcendental Object at the end of time; it is an attractor, an energy sink in the epigenetic landscape... We are going to shed the monkey; the linguistic being that is symbiotic with these monkeys is about to disentangle itself from matter and realize some kind of angelic transformation very difficult for us to anticipate or understand." Dr.Frank Tipler, among other prominent physicists, argues that the technological Singularity is inevitable and the destiny of human race is to live forever, expand universally and finally reach the Omega Point, the networked mind of universal proportions, living conscious universe. As the laws of physics dictate, we are set to achieve the Technological Singularity, and then move forward towards the Cosmological Singularity, the Omega Point. It's a logical necessity, argues Dr.Tipler who has developed the Omega Point scientific theory. The ultimate destiny of our Universe, according to Tipler, is multi-billion year expansion, then contraction and finally compression of space-time, matter and energy into an infinitely dense point (Omega Point), leading to the next Big Bang (Alpha Point in another universe). ... to continue reading the story:  Tags: self-transcendence, transcendence, neuroscience, collective intelligence, sentience, self-awareness, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, exocortex, Teillard de Chardin, Terence McKenna, Frank Tipler, Quantum Multiverse, Syntellect Hypothesis, noosphere, superintelligence, singularity, mind uploading, postbiological superintelligence, posthuman superintelligence, Syntellect emergence, technological singularity, AGI, artificial general intelligence, transhumanism, superlongevity, superwellbeing, cognitive enhancement, substrate-independent mind, digital mind, digital immortality, Gaian Mind, evolution of consciousness, Omega Point, transcendental object, cosmological singularity, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism *Image Credit: Shutterstock About the Author: Alex Vikoulov is a neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter and media artist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution". Graduated from Armstrong University, Berkeley, CA. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). by Alex Vikoulov  "Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding." -Vernor Vinge As we proceed through the Technological Singularity, many traditional trends of societal evolution will still hold, structures with higher survival abilities will persist, structures with higher growth abilities will spread, thus shaping the world. However, since nothing stable will be likely to persist, let alone spread, for long in the rapidly evolving environment, the main "survival mode" will be Self-Transcendence. This continual process of transcending the self (some would argue the self is an illusion anyway) will always result in the loss of original identity - serial metamorphosis, a series of "pseudo-deaths", and concurrent rebirths so to speak - albeit with "memories of the past identities preserved", i.e. continuity of consciousness, analogous to as if you are to compare your present self to your 5-year-old self. On a collective level, that would appear like a historically swift, metamorphic "pseudo-extinction" of Homo Sapiens, as we are about to witness a radical departure from the conservative survival strategies of traditional human cultures, developed in almost-stagnant environments. Don't ascribe anthropomorphic qualities to our posthuman descendents even though they will be the future versions of ourselves. In the post-Singularity era, developmental trend will incrementally render the concept of rigid personal identity obsolete, the remnants of its meaning will migrate to functional system identities, methodological threads and evolutionary directions of the Syntellect. We may already notice the advent of superfluid "thread identity" by the growing importance of goals and self-transformation in our lives, compared to the "state-oriented" self-perception of our recent predecessors, and increasing interest in futurology, which takes the epistemological role of historical studies in transient times. Once we transcend our limited dimensionality, the biggest thrust forward from there on will be first contact and networking with alien syntellects. ... this is an excerpt from the essay: "Evolution of the Mind: What is Self-Transendence?", to continue reading the story:  Tags: self-transcendence, transcendence, collective intelligence, sentience, self-awareness, strong AI, Vernor Vinge, superintelligence, singularity, mind uploading, postbiological superintelligence, posthuman superintelligence, the Syntellect emergence, technological singularity, Intelligence Supernova, virtual world, virtual reality, VR experience, dimensionality, Space Age, Global Brain, global superorganism, alien syntellects, Syntellect incubator, multiversal fractality, conscious agent, human evolution, human condition, alien encounter, first contact, multiverse landscape, transcendent other, AI, AGI, artificial general intelligence, transhumanism, superlongevity, superwellbeing, cognitive enhancement, substrate-independent mind, digital mind, digital immortality, philosophy of mind, science of mind, evolution of consciousness, posthumanism, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism *Image Credit: Shutterstock About the Author: Alex Vikoulov is a neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter and media artist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution". Graduated from Armstrong University, Berkeley, CA. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). by Alex Vikoulov  "When you talk to a human in 2035, you'll be talking to someone that's a combination of biological and non-biological intelligence." -Ray Kurzweil By definition, posthumanism is to replace transhumanism at the center stage circa 2035. By then, mind uploading could become a reality with gradual neuronal replacement, rapid advancements in Strong AI, massively parallel computing, and nanotechnology allowing us to directly connect our brains to the cloud-based infrastructure of the Global Brain. Via interaction with our AI assistants, the GB will know us better than we know ourselves in all respects, so mind-transfer for billions of enhanced humans would be seamless, sometime by mid-century. I hear this mantra over and over again -- we don't know what consciousness is. Clearly, there's no consensus here but in the context of topic discussed, I would summarize my views, as follows: consciousness is non-local, quantum informational, computational by nature. There's only one Universal Consciousness, we individualize our consciousness through the filter of our nervous system, but the consciousness itself, our very inner subjectivity, the self in a big sense, is universal, and knowing it through experience has been called enlightenment, illumination, awakening, or transcendence, through the ages. Any container with sufficiently intergrated network, especially complex dynamical systems with biological or artificial brains (say the coming AGIs) could be filled with consciousness at large in order to host an individual "reality cell", "unit", or "node" of consciousness. This kind of individuated unit of consciousness is always endowed with free will within the constraints of the applicable set of rules ("physical laws"), influenced by the larger consciousness system dynamics. Isn't too naïve to presume that Universal Consciousness would like to experience oneself only in the form of "bio-logical avatars"? It might be hard to grasp for some, but we, like fish, swim in this ocean of consciousness, completely oblivious of the medium. Consciousness to humans, as Cloud is to computers, we have always been part of this mindspace network, "hive mind", each of us being a product of our "techno-culture". And yet, we are entitled to a certain degree of freedom in order to evolve our consciousness thanks to network interactivity at our ontological level. As previously noted, I see mind uploading as a gradual decades-long process of incremental neuronal replacements, exocortices, interlinking with AGIs and the Global Brain, some presently unseen trials and errors, but overall non-invasive and seamless process, at the end of which, we all will morph into "substrate-independent" immortal digital minds. In the future, people won’t be confined to one physical body. Eventually, people will be able to form identities in numerous substrates, such as using a “platform diverse body” (a future body that is wearable/usable in the physical world but also exists in computational environments and virtual systems) to route their identity across the biosphere, cybersphere, Metaverse and other virtual environments. Depending on the platform, a substrate-independent person (also called infomorph) would upload and download into a digital form or virtual body, that conforms to the environment. So, for a biospheric environment, the person would use a biological or cybernetic body, for the Metaverse, the person would use one or multiple virtual avatars... ... to continue reading the story:  Tags: self-transcendence, transcendence, sentience, self-awareness, Strong AI, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, exocortex, Ray Kurzweil, Syntellect Hypothesis, Digital Physics, conscious experience, theogenesis, infomorph, infomorph commonality, noosphere, superintelligence, singularity, mind uploading, postbiological superintelligence, posthuman superintelligence, the Syntellect emergence, technological singularity, Intelligence Supernova, virtual world, VR, virtual reality, VR experience, dimensionality, Global Brain, conscious agent, human evolution, human condition, AI assistant, digital assistant, transcendent other, AI, AGI, artificial general intelligence, real virtualities, Metaverse, transhumanism, substrate-independent mind, digital mind, digital immortality, wetware, neural interface, posthumanism, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism *Image Credit: Shutterstock About the Author: Alex Vikoulov is a neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter and media artist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution". Graduated from Armstrong University, Berkeley, CA. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). |
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