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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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Evolution of the Mind: The Transcendent Planetary Superorganism

4/12/2020

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by Alex Vikoulov

"The concept of Singularity envisages a technology-driven explosion in intelligence... the resulting superhuman intelligence will not be centralized in a single AI system but distributed across all people and artifacts, as connected via the Internet. This Global Brain will function to tackle all challenges confronting the 'global superorganism.' Its capabilities will extend so far beyond our present abilities that they can perhaps best be conveyed as a pragmatic version of the 'divine' attributes..." -Francis Heylighen, The Global Brain Institute

When Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth on April 12th, 1961, he carried generations of hopes and dreams into space with him. A growing number of thinkers now believe the "Overview Effect" heralds nothing less than the next “giant leap” of human evolution. As breathtaking space-down views of our world seep into our collective consciousness, people are waking up to the “Spaceship Earth” analogy that depicts our planet as a natural vessel that must be steered responsibly by its crew.

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Nearing the Cybernetic Singularity: What is the Syntellect Emergence?

3/8/2020

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by Alex Vikoulov

"Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order... I believe that it's the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next." -Ray Kurzweil

"To understand is to perceive patterns." -Isaiah Berlin

About 542 million years ago, something weird and profoundly significant happened on Earth. Quite suddenly, life went insanely inventive, proliferating from simple, rudimentary single-celled organisms into myriad multi-cellular forms. Evolution discovered the idea of more sophisticated and specialized cells, and most of the basic body plans we know today. Biologists call it the Cambrian explosion.

Today, we are on the verge of yet another event of astronomical significance, akin to some kind of Intelligence Supernova, which I refer to as the Cybernetic Singularity, or the Syntellect Emergence. In the scientific community, this upcoming intelligence explosion is also known as the Technological Singularity. Surprisingly enough, most people are still simply oblivious of this rapidly approaching "galactic event" that so many of us are about to witness in our lifetimes.*

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Nearing the Simulation Singularity: What Would Immersive Computing Mean to the Human Mentality?

2/2/2020

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by Alex Vikoulov

"Our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts." -Terence McKenna

The next major technological platform for creative expansion of the mind will be cyberspace, or more specifically 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 computing 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. 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.

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Nearing the Economic Singularity: How Fast Are We Outgrowing Capitalism?

1/29/2020

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by Alex Vikoulov

"The social inefficiency of capitalism is going to clash at some point with the technological innovations capitalism engenders, and it is out of that contradiction that a more efficient way of organizing production and distribution and culture will emerge." -Yanis Varufakis

The current economic system distributes wealth in a very focused manner that prevents a vast majority of humans from being adequately rewarded by the technologically advanced civilization. These factors undoubtedly condemn today’s system of suboptimal economics to the realm of classical models of history as a result of impending obsolescence. In brief, the current faltering economic model is suboptimal, hinders economic growth, and is not sustainable going forward.*

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1/20/2020

The Ouroboros Code: Bridging Advanced Science and Transcendental Metaphysics

1/12/2020

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by Alex Vikoulov

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings immersed in the human experience." -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Everything is Code. The Ouroboros Code. Immersive self-simulacra. If you've read The Ouroboros Code: Reality's Digital Alchemy Self-Simulation Bridging Science and Spirituality by Dr. Antonin Tuynman, then you would surely find it a truly illuminating, awe-inspiring, and enthralling piece of writing and deep thought, just as I did.

Reminiscent of such recent classics as Erik Davis’ TechGnosis (1998) and Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), The Ouroboros Code should eventually find its way to the shelves of libraries owned by the fans of cybernetics, metaphysics and esoteric philosophies. What you might at first construe as a clear but flamboyant writing style, you should love by the end of the book. Let Antonin's poetic genius deliver to you some furiously complex concepts and abstract ideas so that you could enjoy this conceptual journey into the heart of digital alchemy, this coveted bridge between science and spirituality! At times over-technical in alternative style of narration – especially when discussing natural intelligence and A.I. – the philosopher will make you feel like you just downloaded some latest cognitive update onto your mindware. Neologisms such as Conscienergy and Pansentience, Webmind and Cosmosemiosis, Digital Akasha and Proto-Time, add a definite charm to this chef-d’oeuvre of digital theosophy.

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