Theogenesis: Engineering Our Own Godhood

"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."

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​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. Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area).