The Singularity and the Fifth Dimension

The concept of "The Singularity" is all the buzz amongst certain types of futurists. Mostly it fits in with transhumanist thinking. It is based on the observation that a lot of technological trends are accelerating, even faster and faster. And there are a number of them that in and of themselves have the potential for deeply transforming our collective lives. Take nano-technology, which ultimately might allow us complete control over physical matter, so that we can build any physical object we might desire, at essentially zero cost. Take artificial intelligence. What happens if a computer becomes smarter than you are? What happens if computers are a million times smarter than any of us? What would they do that we wouldn't even be able to comprehend? Or, take genetic engineering. What happens if we're able to understand and design genetics freely? If we can make bodies or new life forms with whatever attributes we want.

The Singularity is both a potentially wonderful, but also terribly scary idea. The "point" of the Singularity is essentially when all of these trends go out of control. They move beyond our event horizon, and we can no longer follow along in any linear manner. Technological change is instant. And what if the machines decide we are no longer relevant?

Now, if one is well versed in other metaphysical models than the materialist transhumanist ones, there are some striking similaries to find. The Singularity is potentially like a technological ascension. It is like the Rapture. Many adherents will even deal with it in a rather religious way, even if they would deny any such thing.

However, the connection I particularly wanted to call attention to is with the model of "dimensions" or "densities", which is found in various mystical traditions, and which is common in new age thinking and often occurs in channeling. If we de-mystify it a little bit, it is simply a chart of how things change when they accelerate, and what stages the world is likely to go through as the frequency of everything is increasing. The story is usually told in a person-centered way. I.e. the focus is on how the world changes for people. But, as a corrollary, how the world actually changes. And the model shows some of the potentially dangerous pitfalls in an accelerating world, as well as the necessary answers. And it gives some hope that this sort of meta-patterns have built-in safeguards that means that vastly increased power has to somewhat go hand in hand with mental development.

Just notice for a moment that a number of the technologies that are envisioned simply couldn't be released into the world today. The world would be destroyed very quickly, mostly because there would be some wackos who would push the wrong button. Imagine if the plans for a do-it-yourself hydrogen bomb were available on the Internet, and anybody who could use a screwdriver could build one out of $50 worth of parts from Home Depot. It would be a matter of days before some crazy guy would decide that it is a cool idea to nuke your city, just to see what would happen. Nano-tech can be like that too. One big mistake with self-replicating nano-machines and you turn the whole world into grey goo. Humanity at large is obviously not of a mental state to be able to handle that kind of power and responsibility.

OK, so now let's talk about the 3rd, 4th and 5th dimension. Calling it "dimension" is maybe confusing, as we're not necessarily talking about dimensions in the geometrical sense, even though that might be a sub-part of it. Think "Buckaroo Banzai in the 8th Dimension". It is more like a place or a world or a level where the rules are different. More down-to-earth, the world doesn't necessarily go anywhere - it is simply that the rules change, as things move at a faster click. Instead of "dimensions", some people say "density". I'm not sure that makes it better, except for that it implies that more stuff is packed into the same space as we count up in the numbers.

So, humanity starts off in the 3rd dimension. Which is the world as we know it, or rather, as we knew it. The best way I heard of making sense of it is that this is the way that you get things to happen in 3D:

    spirit -> thought -> emotion -> effort-> manifestation

I suppose you could replace "spirit" with something else if you don't believe in spirituality. "The sub-conscious" could fit somewhat, although not exactly. Regardless, the idea is that an urge or inspiration to make something happen forms at a deep, or high, non-verbal level. Then it gets formed into a thought. Then one gets into the right mood for doing it. Then one actually works on carrying it out. For some amount of time. And finally one gets the result. That might potentially have taken years.

For example, you might get the inspiration to make it big in the vacuum cleaner business. You then form the thought. I.e. you think about it, and you get clear on what your plan is. "Selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door - there's a huge market there!". And then you get excited about it. That's the emotion part. And it might include stubbornness, and various other kinds of emotions that support this project. Then you start working on it. You maybe start yourself, selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. You have failures and successes, and you learn. Maybe in a couple of years you're really good at it, and you make enough money to hire another person and have a bit of inventory. And over 20 years, maybe you built an empire, from hard work and dedication and 16 hour days. And you have 10,000 people working for you, and you can buy a yacht. And there's your manifestation: making it big in vacuum cleaners.

Duh, you might say. Or your parents might say. That's just how things are done. Work hard, and get a good education, get a solid job, and work hard some more, and maybe you'll make it to something someday. But it takes time.

So, to contrast it, let's move on to 4D, the 4th dimension, or 4th density. Here the sequence that leads to manifestation looks like this:

    spirit -> thought -> emotion -> manifestation

You'll notice right away that we took out the part about effort, hard work, and long time. So, the way it works there is:

An inspiration appears, to make something happen. You formulate the thought of what that is. And then, if you can get into the right mood about it - if you can feel it, taste it, smell it, and you're excited about it, and certain about it - what you're asking for might just happen rather quickly.

So, here we're talking about a world where things move faster and where everybody's exposed to a lot of information. Now, what something looks and feels like suddenly is more important than how many years it took to make it. If you look the part, you can have the role. Doesn't really matter you didn't go to acting school. If a new product or idea or person is exciting enough, inspiring enough, and makes us feel enough - they might spread like wildfire into the public mind, and make a lot of money. This is where a one year old company of hackers doing software might buy out a venerable fortune 500 company that produces really substantial products and has existed for 100 years. Doesn't really matter any longer.

From a personal perspective, the trick is that if you really feel it, in a positive way, you can have it. If you obviously feel right about it, there will be someone you can go see who can get you what you want, like tomorrow. But one of the pitfalls is that you need to agree with yourself. It is not necessarily enough to act excited about your "bright" idea. It is more important that you're in alignment, in congruence with yourself than that the idea is really bright. It is more important that your emotions are real. So, your hidden negative emotions will come up and bite your ass. If you're not really sincere, people are more likely to notice, and it is much less likely you get where you want to go.

OK, on to 5D, the 5th dimension. What happens there is:

    spirit -> thought -> manifestation

So, we cut out the emotion part. No longer necessary to get into the right mood, and broadcast the right vibes before you get things to happen. You just need to form the thought clearly enough, and, bing, there it is.

Well, that's kind of like the holodeck in Star Trek. "Computer! Give me ..." And, indeed, maybe technology is a way it will manifest.

One way or another, it means that the brakes have been removed. It doesn't take work to make things happen. It doesn't even take sincerity and dedication. You just have to form the thought.

You might realize, with the way most human minds work today, that it could quickly be a complete nightmare. Like, think about the humorous situation you have seen on film, where somebody's granted 3 wishes, and they screw them up, by lack of control over their thoughts or emotions. "I wish that hotdog was stuck on your nose", "I wish I was the pope". And you usually have to use the last wish to put everything back to normal, after which you're sort of relieved that you can't just go around wishing for things anymore.

So, imagine that you could. It suddenly becomes absolutely vital and essential that your thoughts are clear, and in alignment with what you really want. And that you don't let stray negative emotions suddenly decide what you think. One "I wish he was dead" can have fatal consequences that can't be undone.

This is where you again might imagine that anybody could build a nuclear bomb. "Computer! Give me a 50Megaton nuclear warhead!" ... and there it is in the matter compiler in your kitchen.

That would never ever work unless all humans are sane on a totally different level than today. Humankind would have to evolve and mature, mentally and emotionally, for that kind of world to be possible.

Even if we're not talking nuclear bombs, most humans of today would go insane rather quickly if whatever they were thinking or asking for continously would happen to them more-or-less instantly. You'd be bouncing against the walls, trying to undo the misplaced wish you did five minutes ago.

We could go on the same way to 6D:

    spirit -> manifestation

which in more materialistic terms would mean that the whole contents of your sub-conscious will just be manifested, without you particularly having to voice it. That would be wall-to-wall nightmare. Or it will be nirvana and paradise. The cold drink appears before you realize you could use one. If your sub-conscious mind is very mature, or we could say, if you're aligned with yourself on all levels, it would be marvelous. If you aren't, it would be even worse than 5D. Think about a nano-tech matter compiler/VR/Holodeck thing mapped directly into your brain and into your sub-conscious. The slightest under-the-surface hint of something would immediately be manifested in front of you. Uaaarrrgh.

7D would be that you no longer need the manifestation even. Pure spirit. Or, if you want to look at it materialistically, it could be if you had uploaded yourself to a computer, and you were perfectly happy with simulated experiences, rather than "real" ones. And anything you might ever want is instantly available to you. All at the same time, if you want. You can be anybody you want. So maybe you move on to a different kind of meta-perspective that no longer seeks human kinds of experiences.

As to where we are now .... A lot of people think that humanity has moved from 3D into 4D. I.e. it is no longer a world where hard work and time invested is the most likely thing to pay off. More important what things look and feel like. Media exposure is more important than the facts. What you radiate is more important than what experience you've actually had.

And, one way or another, one of the next steps will be what is described as the 5D. We can easily lay out how it will happen with technology alone. But it is much more than that. It is a total change in how the world works. And it requires some substantial evolutionary changes in humanity to be able to deal with it without short-circuiting and self-destructing.

Luckily there's a bit of an inherent training program built-into accelerating change. You'll have to continuously run a little faster, and there will continously be more stuff to deal with, in terms of information, thoughts, emotions, ideas, people. The only way of surviving and staying sane is to somehow keep up with it, processing it along the way, which means that you evolve, and you become much better at handling the faster action. You might not notice, and you might think you're way behind, but if we compare what you deal with every day with what people were required to deal with in their lives every day 20 years ago, there's just no comparison. You're vastly more able to deal with fast-moving complexity than you've been before. And that will keep going. Some people will crack along the way, but if you make it, you'll someday take for granted that we can all comfortably deal with capabilities that would have frightened us out of our skulls before.

And, somehow, it is all not happening faster than we can (barely) keep up. It is probably because the change is generated collectively by us, ourselves, here, and there are some feedback loops in place. So things tend to not happen before we're somewhat ready for them. We might not think we're ready for them, but there's something in our collective super- or sub-conscious evolutionary mind pattern that's smarter than any of us.

Bernal Spheres

Bernal Spheres are large spherical living spaces for space colonies. What follows here is the pictures and text from two posters published in 1977 by the L5 Society. The text was written by Dick Fredericksen based on an interview of Gerard O'Neill. You'll notice the optimistic prediction that constructions like this could be built in the 1990s. Well, they probably could. But they weren't.

First, here's the exterior:

"Built to accommodate some 10,000 people, this "Bernal Sphere" space colony would serve as the residential area of a space manufacturing complex. The inhabitants would conduct a variety of manufacturing activities in space – some located within the structure shown here, others in nearby reaches of space. For example, a major industry is expected to be the provision of clean, inexpensive power, generated at satellite solar power stations and transmitted by microwave to Earth.

It is thought that habitats of this type will be technically feasible towards the end of this century, possibly by the early 1990s. One calculation has indicated that with the level of industrial activity which is contemplated for space by that time, and with the means of transportation by then available, construction of such a habitat could proceed in about two months. Accumulation of the shield would take place over the ensuing two years."

And then, let's look at the interior:

"Towards the end of this century, possibly by the early 1990s, the workforce of a space manufacturing complex may well enjoy living quarters of the sort pictured here. By then, it is thought, manufacturing in outer space can be a substantial enterprise. Some major industries which are foreseen at this time are zero-gravity manufacturing and the provision of clean, inexpensive power. Power would be generated at satellite solar power stations and transmitted by microwave to Earth.

In the 1976 NASA Study on Space Manufacuring, habitats of this kind, efficient in their use of materials and structurally strong, are thought of as possible next steps beyond earlier, transitional structures of a more utilitarian design. The economics of space manufacturing appear to motivate the provision of attractive living areas of this kind relatively early in the program, rather than coming for short tours of duty at high cost for transportation."

It is probably worth looking at why we didn't build this, and why we aren't, and why it isn't on the program for the next 50 years or so. Our space stations are still little tin cans you squeeze around in, just bigger. Nothing remotely like "2001". It is not because we can't, or because we don't want to, or because it wouldn't be great fun. The answer is economical. The way our economic system is designed, there's no room for large, idealistic projects that don't produce a quick profit, that don't serve a popular political purpose, and that don't have military value. So, either we need to think about changing our economic system now, or we'll need to wait until self-replicating nano-tech and robot workers change it for us.

Anime Transportation

This is "Himiko" - a water bus that will start operations on the Sumida river in Tokyo at the end of March. 33 meters long, 114 tons. Here's a Flash presentation. It was designed by famous manga and anime artist Leiji Matsumoto. They wanted a "space ship motif", obviously. Certainly looks cool enough.

Speaking of futuristic cartoon-inspired design, how about this truck here on the right. Martin Roell saw one on the street in Karlsruhe yesterday. It was designed by Luigi Colani of Colani Design. It might even actually be quite practical.

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Regardless, there's something to say for design that succeeds in being art, freeing itself from how things are "supposed" to look, while still ending up being useful and not altogether silly.

Where's our leisure society?

When I was a kid I was very interested in the future. One thing that was pretty obvious, other than flying cars and space stations, would be that by now we'd really not have to work, per se. It was sort of self-evident, even when I was ten. Of course, if we keep being able to do things better and better, more and more efficiently, more and more bang for the buck, more and more automation - then there would be less and less of an actual need for work. It is a simple calculation. The stuff we need could be produced by a smaller and smaller percentage of the population. Which would allow us to spend our time being creative and having a good time.

The reason that didn't happen might be in the same category as why a brand new 3GHz PC isn't any faster than a 4.77MHz IBM PC from 20 years ago. In principle it should be a thousand times faster, and it is, technically speaking. But it doesn't do anything more. It takes longer to start up Word on it than to start WordStar on that ancient relic. And there are many more things that can go wrong, and more one needs to learn in order to use it.

Maybe the reason is in the same category as why my household budget looks about the same, no matter how much or how little I make. There's not quite enough for what I need, and I tend to pay things late. If somebody came along and gave me $10,000 extra per month, I would at first feel rich, and pay all my bills, and put some aside. But gradually I would come to think I needed a bigger version of everything, and I'd invest in some things I wouldn't otherwise have. And pretty soon I would have used it up, and have more regular expenses, and I'd again be a little behind. While still living essentially the same way. You know, in a house, eating food, driving vehicles, wearing clothes, breathing air.

You can probably draw a nice systems diagram of how there are several self-reinforcing loops involved in these scenarios. If there's capacity to make more stuff or do more things, they will be done, and they will create new needs and new ideas about new things that need to be done. The PC of today would indeed run WordStar like lightning, but I'd be missing the graphics, and would quickly look around for other things it ought to do. Voids will be filled. And there's the influence from all the other folks who have some new gadget or feature. If my neighbor has 3D displays on his walls, I'll feel a little left out, even if I was doing great with a monochrome screen at some other point in time.

So, what would it take for progress to actually add up to progress, rather than to staying in the same spot with some slightly different gear?

I think the main limiting factor is not the envy of my neighbor's stuff, but the economics of production. It doesn't have to be that way, but with the way business is currently structured economically, it is quite natural. Economic rewards flow to those who keep the wheels churning, rather than necessarily to those who solve the biggest problems in the most efficient way. There's no economic incentive to constructing the machinery that would give everybody in the world food to eat every day, without them having to work. Even though it would be fairly easy and comparatively cheap to do. But it wouldn't turn a profit. People who aren't working don't make money to buy stuff, so they aren't good consumers. People who aren't working is a problem in the current scheme of things. Something that requires the financing of unemployement payments, which requires that the wheels are churning faster somewhere else, creating profits that can be diverted for that purpose. It is all pretty insane of course.

If you can formulate an economic scheme that clearly measures the actual costs of various approaches, and the value people perceive in them, and which which allows easy financing of the permanent solving of big problems, and gives little value to wasteful and unnecessary work - then it can all change rather quickly. No, I'm not talking about communism. Rather about a free market with a good enough flow of high quality of information, using a different kind of currency. A currency that is built on quality of life, and which doesn't have a built-in accelerating corrosion that encourages fake productivity for its own sake. Rather, a system the encourages the optimization and maximization of free time and creativity.

It is not too late to arrive at the future we were promised.

Singularity Exo-Paleontology

The other day I decided to re-examine the idea of using the latest discoveries of science to determine when the earliest possible time our universe could give rise to the first technological singularity. What are the necessary preconditions for a singularity, and when is the earliest possible time such pre-conditions could have emerged?

Let’s examine the physical evidence and make some conjectures.

In order to determine the earliest theoretical timeframe, we need to know what the necessary precursors of a technological singularity are. Since the Earth and the emergence of our own civilization is the only example we have, we’ll assume that life and therefore technological civilization requires a planet as a necessary prerequisite for a technological singularity.

So when were the first planets formed? Since planets require heavy elements, the earliest possible time would be after a supernova explosion of a first-generation star. Since these first generation stars were composed entirely of hydrogen and helium, the heavier elements necessary for planetary formation were not available yet. However, thanks to nucleosynthesis in the core of these stars, these necessary heavier elements were created at a furious pace. These first generation stars first appeared 160 million years after the Big Bang. The most short-lived of these were the blue giants. After the first of these blue stars exploded, all of the material necessary for planetary formation was available to give birth to second generation stars with planetary bodies.

According to this story at the New York Times, the Hubble Space Telescope found tantalizing evidence that planets first appeared much earlier in cosmic history, around 1 billion years after the big bang, and therefore may be more abundant than previously suspected. Since we know both the earth and sun are each 4.5 billion years old, the earliest possible earth like planets could have appeared as early as 12.7 or 13.7 billion years ago, depending on who you ask. According to this article, the universe may be 1 billion years older than previously thought, moving the age of the universe from 13.7 to 14.7 billion years old.

So from here we need to examine Earth’s history to determine the next part of our equation. This is where a bit of guesswork is required.

There is observational evidence that archaebacteria, the first type of life, were around as early as 3.97 billion years ago. Then for the next 2.2 billion years, life on earth consisted of nothing more than anaerobic bacteria and archaeans. Then about 1.8 billion years ago eukaryotic cells appeared as fossils too. With the beginning of the Middle Proterozoic 1.8 billion years ago, comes the first evidence of oxygen build-up in the atmosphere. This global catastrophe spelled doom for many bacterial groups, but made possible the explosion of eukaryotic forms. These include multicellular algae, and toward the end of the Proterozoic, the first animals.

With the Cambrian Explosion soon after, all the major phyla of life we know today emerged. Between the Cambrian explosion 543 million years ago and today there have been 5 great extinctions, the last of which was 65 million years ago, when 90% of life, including all the Dinosaurs, were wiped out by a comet. From the lowly 10% that was left emerged almost all the complex life we see today.

The real question now is could this 3.97 billion year history of life have happened at an accelerated rate? We know the first 2.2 billion years of life consisted of nothing more than simple anaerobic bacteria and archae, and the next 1.2 billion years single-celled eukaryotic oxygen-breathing bacteria. So for the first 3.4 billion years the degree of evolutionary change was almost non-existent. There is no reason to suspect the emergence of eukaryotic cells couldn’t have happened sooner, perhaps as earlier as a few million years after the first bacteria. The mechanisms underlying these punctuated periods of evolution are still largely unknown, so it’s mostly conjecture. But lets take a crack at it anyway.

I think most of this period’s stagnation was the result bad luck, or perhaps a lack of good luck. A low probability of correct mutations necessary for the emergence of multi-cellular life may be the reason it took so long. We know that quadrillions of bacteria were spread out all over the earth, and only after 3.4 billion years relative stagnation did it eventually give rise to the first multi-cellular organisms. If this is the result of statistics rather than a slow necessary build up of a complex ecology, then life multi-cellular life could have emerged shortly after the first life appeared, maybe as little as a few millions of years, rather than 3.4 billion. Then again, mutli-cellular life could be so rare, that only 1 out of a million bacteria bearing planets give rise to multi-cellular life during the lifetime of its parent star.

It’s possible that multi-cellular creatures could have emerged as early as 3 billion years ago, giving rise to the equivalent of the Cambrian explosion 2.5 billion years earlier than it did. This leaves the last 543 million years after the Cambrian Explosion until now. Perhaps if we had a larger gas giant in a orbit closer than Jupiter’s, there would've been less asteroid and cometary impacts, further accelerating the right kinds of conditions for life to occur. In the scheme of things, this time frame is small enough that it doesn't matter much with a 13.7-14.7 billion year timeframe. So for the sake of this essay, I'll assume that 500 million years is the minimum time necessary for complex technological civilization to evolve from the first appearance of multi-cellular life.

Assuming my 2.5 billion year compression of the history of life is possible in a planetary system with the right conditions, this means technological civilization on the Earth could have occurred as early as 2 billion years after the formation of Earth itself.

Since we know that the first planets were forming as early as 13.7 billion years ago, and using earth’s history as our example, this means the first technological singularity could have occurred as early as 10.7 billion years ago, or just 3 billion years after the Big Bang. If we take out my conjectured time compression of evolution, we add an additional 2.5 billion years, giving us 5.5 billion years after the big bang.

This leaves us with a theoretical minimum of 8.2 – 11.7 billion years ago, that a technological singularity could have first occurred.

This means a civilization, having passed through the bottleneck of a technological singularity, could have emerged as early as 4 to 6 billion years before our Sun was even born, some 12 billion years more advanced than our own.

So, what are the odds that life exists elsewhere?

We now know from the Mars Opportunity Probe, that Mars once contained a salt-water sea. The importance of this finding cannot be overstated.

Until now, we have known for sure of only one planet on which liquid water has flowed -- and water is absolutely essential for supporting life as we know it. There are no chemical processes that will permit the formation of the long, complex organic molecules composing living organisms other than in the presence of water.

It is an extremely simple rule: No water, no life. As long as Earth was the only planetary body containing liquid water -- and, more particularly, seawater -- then it was the only place in the universe where life was possible.

Now, suddenly, there are two. And that’s just in our local planetary group. Now that there are two planets where water once flowed, there no longer is a reason to doubt that millions, perhaps billions of water bearing planets might exist right within our own Milky Way galaxy.

Further out, thanks to images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the observable universe appears to contain several hundred billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. This means there could be trillions of planets bearing water and possibly life.

Tying this in with the above pre-conditions for live and the probabilistic chances oof technological singularities occurring with some frequency as long as 8.2 to 11.7 billion year ago, the universe could likely have advanced civilizations who are as much as 12 billion years more advanced than us.

What would their technology be like? Is the reason we don’t see them, because they have evolved so far, that this dimension of existence, our four dimensional space-time continuum been completely transcended by them?

Perhaps they already spread through the universe, have recorded every last part of it, and we are now in one of their simulations.

It reminds me of Clarke’s Law (by science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke):

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magick.

Quoting from the book Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson,

Imagine a technology a hundred years beyond ours. A thousand years beyond ours. A million years beyond ours. And then remember that many stars, which might have planets and civilizations, are literally billions of years older than our sun. There might be intelligences in this galaxy advanced as much as 12 billion years beyond our technology.

Any sufficiently advanced parapsychology is indistinguishable from Magick.

Consider the slow advance of parapsychology, despite entrenched opposition, during the past 70 years. Project it forward another hundred years. A thousand years. A million. And imagine intelligences 12 billion years ahead of us in this area.

Extraterrestrials with advanced psionic knowledge may have been experimenting on us and/or aiding our evolution and/or playing ontology games with us for millions of years, projecting any form they desire from Mescalito to the Lord God Jehovah, without ever leaving their home planet.

Are UFO’s simply some part of their ontology game? Part of some gentle stimulus to keep us guessing, keep us evolving?

Jet Ski's for the Sky

Came across this over at Grow-a-Brain

The AirBike™ VTOL Personal Aircraft

The AirBike™ is the ultimate expression of the V.T.O.L. idea. Parked in your garage, launched from your driveway, the AirBike™ will be able to reach and land in areas not accessible by any other mode of transportation.

The AirBike™ is a VTOL, personal aircraft which uses vectored thrust, generated by a ducted fan, to achieve both vertical and level flight.

I have dreamed about flying something like this ever since I saw one in the movie Heavy Metal back in 1981. Here is a screen cap of a "bad guy" flying one during a chase in the movie:

Interactive Light Objects & Light Transmitting Concrete

Via Boing Boing

Loop.ph is a design group "exploring reactive luminous surfaces in the built environment." Products that respond to the activities of the human beings using them. Things that emit light, things worn or lived in. Here are a few:

Temporal Light

Proposal for a tiling system to illuminate public spaces. Each tile forms a pixel that responds to a moving shadow being cast upon it, mapping a physical pathway with an inverted| illuminating shadow. Light trails linger as you move through space providing localized and personal illumination.

Light Sleeper

A silent alarm clock, an illuminating, personalised alarm integrated into your bedding that gently wakes you in the most natural way. Ever since the beginning of time light has controlled our body clock telling us when to sleep and when to wake. As lifestyles are rapidly changing with increased travel and demands on our time, people's natural body clocks are out of sync. This pillow and duvet simulates a natural dawn that eases you into your day. Light Sleeper Bedding uses electroluminescent technology allowing traditional textile surfaces to become a reactive light source.

And then this via DRT News:

Light Transmitting Concrete

LiTraCon© is a "common" concrete stone-block that turns out to be light conducting through its embedded glassfibers. From one side to the other light passes the stone without any significant loss and illuminates the darker side of the stone. Shadows are transmitted and shown in precise shapes on the opposite surface.

Chaos Magick and the Multiverse

While perusing LVX23, I came across the premier issue of Silver Star: A Journal of New Magick featuring this article, Chaos Magick and the Multiverse.

This essay is a speculative romp through magick, quantum mechanics, cosmology and neurology. I don't pretend to be more than an educated lay reader in the last three fields. As for magick, expertise is a subjective assessment. Cosmology and neuroscience, in particular, are undergoing a revolution. The last five years have remade our understanding of the macrostructures of our universe and the microstructures of our brain. Quantum mechanics, almost a century old now, is so counter intuitive (but so conclusively proven by experimentation) that we're still trying to understand it. I've tried to make this essay relatively easy to understand, but without some grounding in these sciences, you might find it heavy going. Not as heavy, you'll be happy to know, as many scientists would find the theoretical bases of Chaos Magick.

Modern magick by it's definition embodies the scientific method through and through, providing a powerful set of tools for increasing intelligence and expanding ones personal ontology and perception of the universe. However, my chief concern with many practicitioners of magick is an unhealthy fixation with the darkside of the psyche with little or no skill in integrating it. In my opinion the ability to integrate strong emotions is a prerequisite for anyone practicing magick.

Agile Learning

By Erica Tesla

I went down to UNO this morning to get what is not the first (nor the last, I'm sure) form I'll have to fill out to get myself and my husband back on the Path of Higher Education. The paperwork required simply to gain permission to learn is astounding.

Now, I've heard it said that college isn't actually about learning at all--it's all about your threshold for dealing with bull and bureacracy. If that's true, so long as your tolerance for those things increases during your time in college, you have learned something.

But an increased tolerance for bureaucracy, though it may be a goal now, will probably not be an advantage in the future.

The heart of the singularity, in my understanding, is the point at which nothing stands still. Memes burn in the fire of change and those who are able move on; that's what it's about. The singularity is the point at which agility surpasses its status as an advantage and becomes a survival skill, a necessity. In a future that moves at the speed of light, who will have time for all of this paperwork?

What scares me about the current higher education process is actually the length of commitment, and the proactive nature of the learning process employed. Deciding to go to college typically means devoting yourself for at least four years to a field that more narrowly defines your knowledge base and skill set, while admittedly (hopefully) deepening both.

But the model in which specialization occurs proactively isn't of much use if you have no idea what you'll need to know to enjoy a productive life, or even to survive, tomorrow.

I think that the solution is a more agile form of learning. The most agile form of learning occurs when a person first attains a broad base of widely applicable knowledge and the skills with which to both attain new knowledge and to make the best use of that which they already have. After that initial learning--largely "learning how to learn"--they can take an adaptive, reactive approach to specialized knowledges and tasks. This is even more agile when paired with hands-on-experience--a person can be productive in the current learning field while learning about it.

I think that college, along with the rest of the current educational model, is neither the most efficient way to learn, nor the best--at best, for now, it may be a good route to a higher paycheck. But is that enough? Can the very slow process of learning through the current educational model survive a world that's speeding up?

Futuristic Chinese Construction

The current pace of construction in China is astounding! According to Metafilter:

In scale and pace, the building boom currently sweeping over China has no precedent in human history. China is spending about $375 billion each year on construction, nearly 16 percent its gross domestic product. In the process, it is using 54.7 percent of the world's production of concrete, 36.1 percent of the world's steel, and 30.4 percent of the world's coal.

The breadth and vision of some of these buildings is unprecedented. They are either already slated or under contruction. Some of these buildings are the most futuristic I have ever seen, even more than I've seen in most science fiction movies.

This entire building's surface will be video screens.

At this pace how much longer can the Chinese government keep a lid on dissent? How much longer will they be able to sustain such growth without going to renewable resources?

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In the news: China Plans to Pass the U.S. on Fuel Economy

For lots more pictures of Chinese construction go here.

Defending Psychic Experience

For the record,

1) I don't believe in any one model, map or metaphor to explain reality. I remain agnostic.

2) I think there is a high probability that most people claiming to be a psychic, specifically those attempting to gain a lot of publicity and make a lot of money, are probably charlatans or frauds.

Having said that, I'm going to defend psychic experience as something that should not automatically be discounted.

Lets start with this basic argument. Can you prove with absolute certainty to someone besides yourself that you have a waking, conscious inner experience? In other words, how do you prove to someone else that you are not a simulacra (zombie)? The point is you can't. The best you can do is convince people that since they experience an inner life of their own, and since you are much like them, that you too have an inner experience. For all intents and purposes, this is precisely how most of us assume that everyone we know has an inner experience. But it still lacks objective scientific proof. No amount of complexity research, neurological scanning and analysis, or neurocomputational cleverness can prove otherwise. All it can do is prove that all this complexity results in a system capable of complex behavior and reaction. It does not prove that the inner experience itself actually exists. We only know it does, because we have it! It's internally, subjectively verifiable by those of us with an inner life, but objectively unverifiable.

However, since objective reductionist science has served us so well, so unbelievable well, it's become an addiction we can't let go of when it fails. Rather than blame objectivity itself, we instead say that anything that cannot be objectively verified is false. Which is why it comes as no surprise that many leading thinkers in the fields of cognitive and neuro-science actually believe that inner experience is an illusionary falsity that doesn't exist!

This is where most often any further dialog on the subject comes to a grinding screeching halt. Because now they are resting on dogma. And once dogma enters the picture, there is no way to have a reasonable discussion going forward. The basic assumptions are so different (i.e those who say they have an inner experience versuse those saying it is doesn't exist), that further dialog becomes impossible. It's the same as if you were to argue about if God exists or not with a fundamentalist Christian. For those of you who've tried, you will understand what I mean by this.

But how can otherwise really intelligent people fall prey to dogma? That's a good question I'll leave for another thread.

Ok, so if you agree that you have an inner experience and that it is real in it's own right, then on to the next part of my argument.

Most people I have personally known that claimed to have psychic experiences were people describing the internal workings of their mind. They were describing what they experienced subjectively. Since this was something they experienced subjectively they have no way of proving to you that what they experienced is real, anymore than they can prove they are conscious and not walking zombies. You can either choose to believe them or not believe them. Like sharing an inner life, lends credence to other peoples claim of their own inner life, if you have also had a psychic experience it will probably help you lend some modicum of credence to another person’s similar claims. Like believing that other people have an inner experience, you can choose to believe this person to whatever degree suits you, but you still can't prove a damn thing about any of it.

And so it comes as no surprise that almost all people who are convinced that all psychic experience is delusionary hogwash have never had any experience themselves they could not explain scientifically. So the real divide is an experiential one, rather than an intellectual one.

I have no doubt that quite a bit of psychic experience could be explained away by science, things like deja-vu are getting some cognitive scientific explanations, as are some "intuitive" leaps that seem extra-sensory but are in fact subconscious sensory experiences.

But after filtering all of that out, there are still a large set of "psychic" experience that have not (yet) been explained by current scientific understanding. The problem remains that people, so addicted to the current framework of science are willing to discount all of these experience because of a current lack of explanatory power. This is just dogma in action. Scientist no matter how well trained or astute are capable of falling prey to these base emotions. Science is replete with case after case of dogma getting in the way of theoretical advancement. It was once joked (by Thomas Kuhn I think), that science only advances when the last generation of scientist die off, and the new generation without preconceptions is ready to embrace the new scientific framework. Even Einstein fell prey to this problem when he said, "God does not play dice with the universe".

Ok, so what am I getting at? All I'm getting at is that people have had genuine inner experiences that were so profound and compelling (myself included!), that have yet to be explained by science. I can say that the chance that my own experiences are just coincidence are a close approximation of zero.

The experiences I had, and I have now had several of these, is that I had the subjective experience of leaving my body, flying out of the building I was in and traveled far away from where I was, and in one case traveled over a mile away. In two of these instances, when I awoke I rushed to these places to see if anything I saw while "out of my body" could be verified. When I got to the scenes, there were at least a dozen intimate details which matched precisely what I saw in my dream, including the faces of people sitting on benches in the area, the makes and models of the cars in the parking lot nearby, the shape of the clouds in the sky, and even a piece of garbage in an ally way.

Coincidence? I choose to apply Occam's Razor, which aims to find the simplest explanation, and coincidence is definitely not the simplest. It's far easier to say that I had some kind of clairvoyance or OBE, perhaps explained within the quantum mechanical non-locality framework, or something else. But the odds of it being a coincidence are trillions to 1.

Sure, you could say I'm making all this up, and there isn't a darn thing I could do to repeat this event or prove it to you, so we are left right where we started.

I love reductionist science and empirical materialism, but I also know that the current framework of science cannot explain my experiences (yet). Until it can it will remain incomplete.

Related Links:

On Materialism as Science Dogma - Thanks sauceruney for the link.

Internal Astronaut and Web Zen

Below are some fun links. If you have some time to waste, and wasting time is not time wasted, then you should enjoy the following treats and games.

Samorost - This is an addicting game, and well worth trying to finish it.

Grow

boohbah - nice eye candy. Be sure to click all the different options.

Internal Astronaut

Mass Extinctions Not Inevitable

For those of you following the news lately, there was a recent study that concluded that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction. I read this with some dismay, even though I've been aware of it happening for years. This study was the most extensive ever done that confirmed it. However, Wired Magazine interviewed Stuart Pimm:, the author of the study, and he says it's not inevitable and would take very little to stop it. Here are some salient snippets from the interview:

WN: What can be done to slow the rate of species loss?

There are lots of big things that could be done right away to help keep the world a more enjoyable place. And that's the kind of world people want to live in.

Wow, only $5 Billion to stop tropical deforestation! I hope this isn't a smudged figure. With the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund moving trillions of dollars around, what's $5 billion? What I find more shocking than deforestation, is that it would take so little to stop it, yet it hasn't happened yet. Why hasn't the UN with it's billions upon billions of dollars in aid done anything about it? With only $5 billion to completly stop it, their inaction defies description. If this figure is right, then I hope enough people are moved enough to get the worlds politicians to take action. The Bill Gates Foundation alone has already spent some $25 billion on third-world causes.

Fun Intelligence

Fun is fantastic, joyful, and well.... FUN! Does fun have a survival advantage? I think it most definitely does. Even if it doesn't, it sure is fun anyway. So what do we have to loose? And if it does, we should all take our fun more seriously! Below is some excerpts from Bernie DeKoven over at Deep Fun, that are as timely as ever:

You know how they talk about all these "intelligences" - like the "creative intelligence" and the "emotional intelligence" and the "mathematical..."?

Intellectually, your FI helps you toy with problems that are simply too big to grasp, to keep yourself alive to the possibility of unanticipated solutions and resolutions. And when it comes to your body, your FI leads you to new sensations, new levels of engagement, new ways to experience the world. It takes you into the deserts and the mountains and beside the still waters. It restoreth the freakin' soul.

I don't know about you all, but spring is coming here on the Norther Hemisphere, and I plan on spending a lot of my time out having fun. I probably won't be doing anymore freestyle skydiving like I did in years past, but there are plenty of things to keep me busy this summer.

RFID's and Democratic Capitalism

This is fantastic news. I was thinking that this would take at least 5 or more years before we would see any substantial power shift of RFID's towards the customer, but according to this article, the power of RFID could soon become widely available to you and me, thanks to Phillips.

To understand why this is a very good thing for democracy and greater prosperity for the world generally, please read my posts over the last 18 months, specifically these:

Participatory Capitalism and The Coming Leisure Society.

From the story:

They aim to do this by putting an RFID reader in every mobile phone, so that users could look at the contents of a tag simply by holding their phone up against it.

The phone reads the tag and sends the code back to www.cheapskate.com, say, which runs a quick comparison search.

Back comes a message that the selfsame garments are on sale in BHS round the corner at half the price.

When I first heard of RFID's and their potential dark side I was a bit disturbed. A 'Minority Report' world is not what I want to be a part of. Of course there are lots of ways to subvert RFID's from tracking you, with something as simple as underground product swapping, or junkyard diving. There are however some major benefits to customers and to capitalism generally that RFID's would make possible.

The first of these, would be that every EPC # could be cross-indexed with decentralized online p2p databases that match each EPC# with a corruptions index. By having your own RFID reader in the form of a PDA or cell phone as Phillips is now proposing, we could match our purchasing habits to those companies who most adhere to our own ethical values. This could be made easy by constantly updated web-of-trust system that matches your values closest to those you trust.

RFID readers in the hands of the people will empower customer choice, creating a decentralized bottoms-up defined marketplace. I think such a transparent participatory market is long overdue, and I can't see how this would be possible without wide-scale use of RFID's.

Hypnotic Retinal Bliss

Just heard about these art exhibitions of Spot Draves.

Spot Draves of Spotworks is the author of the brilliant Electric Sheep screensaver -- this is a distributed rendering application that grabs its users' computers' idle cycles to create computationally expensive, vivid and beautiful animated fractals. Users vote for the animations they like best while the screensaver is running, and those fractals are then given precedence within the computational gene pool, spawning variations that are rendered out again, dancing for their human masters who have the power of life and death over them.

Spot Draves has released a bunch of Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature) as Creative-Commons-licensed, high-resolution scans in PNG format, with painstaking alpha transparency channels that allow you to easily composite them onto other images. Haeckel was the naturist who stated that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- that foetuses step through their evolutionary history in the womb. It turned out that he was kind of making that up and faking his evidence, but he sure drew pretty pictures, and the meme's got legs. Well, first it had a tail, then it had legs - Cory Doctorow.

Upcoming Entheogen Conferences

There are a several upcoming Entheogen Conferences. If you have an interest in the current state of psychedelic research I highly recommend you attend one of these.

How To Fake a UFO in Broad Daylight

Disclaimer: This is for educational purposes only. None of what I am about to tell you was ever performed by me or anyone else I know. If carried out it would likely break a whole bunch of city/state ordinances and land you in jail or worse. This description is merely to show you that a device could be constructed using 1980's technology that could duplicate many of the effects of a UFO encounter of the first and second kind.

Ok, I’m about to give away a secret I’ve held onto for 17 years. It's not a big secret mind you, only a way to fake a UFO that I have never seen anyone put forward before. Back in 1987 while living Tucson my friends and I used to engage in some guerilla ontology discussion, inspired by Robert Anton Wilson's book Cosmic Trigger. Ontology is the branch of philosophy that tries to understand what's real and what isn't, or what's the difference between real reality and mere appearance. Our idea of this back in 1987 was to devise an “event” that would absolutely stupefy anyone who sees it. To qualify it had to have elements of both magic and magick. Magic in that it really is just a clever magic trick, and magick, because it had the potential to change the minds of anyone witnessing it. Most magic has some degree of astonishment, but the catch is you always know that someone is performing it.

Our brand of magick was intended for large audiences without any idea they were witnessing a magic trick, but instead an event that was outside of their reality tunnel altogether. The desired result was to get people to go “Huh!? What the hell is that?!!!”

During that year (1987), we devised at least a dozen of these magickal pranks. Most of them would take a considerable amount of cash to pull off, so we could only imagine what would happen if we actually did them. Besides, most of these pranks would involve breaking numerous city, state and possibly federal ordinances. So those with the financial sway to pull them off would be operating outside of the law. Below is one I devised where you could duplicate a "UFO" with almost all of the effects out of a typical MUFON sighting report, but that could also be seen by thousands of people in broad day light. Almost every UFO hoax I'm aware of was either perpetrated at night, or was done with the only witnesses being someone with a shaky camera. Where as the method described below could work in broad day light with everyone seeing it in plain view.

The first thing you'd need is a craft capable of a Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL). Preferably this vehicle would have prop fans rather than jets. Again, if you had the money you could conceivable build something like this. The next thing is to attach hundreds of small actuators to the bottoms and sides of the craft. At the end of each actuator you would have a mirror with gimble. Each mirror would have the ability to rotate independently. The mirrors would be slightly convex to broaden their reflective effect. Each of these actuators would be controlled by a microprocessor control board that would be tied into a computer and laser gyroscope for accurate attitude feedback. The idea here is that the exact position of the sun would be known at all times. As the craft yaw, pitched and rolled, the mirrors would adjust in real-time so that the light hitting the craft would automatically be reflected down and out with maximum dispersion, creating the effect of a very bright light in the daytime sky. So bright, that you would not be able to look at it directly.

So now you have a craft that is capable of hovering and flying a bit like a UFO, albeit more sluggishly, and that is unidentifiable, other than appearing as a very bright object in the sky.

To add more realism to the trick, you would need some kind of low-frequency maser or EMP device. The idea is that as you flew over your flight path, lights, cars and other electrical devices would shut down, just like out of the movie Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

And finally, you could transmit a continuous radio signal at the exact same frequency used by radar tracking equipment. This would have the effect of either jamming the tracking device, or creating echo or ghost reflections off of a line-of-sight radio tower. So those attempting to track you would see multiple blips on the radar screen.

So now that you have this souped up “UFO”, you could take it out for a spin around town. For maximum effect and publicity you’d want to do it over a large group of people already outdoors, like at a rock concert or festival. Burning Man could be an ideal place to pull this off, as they are already in the mood to receive your magickal transmissions! As you fly over everyone, all they can see is a bright light, their cars shut down, and their radios and other electrical devices shut off. As you whisk over the audience, going as low as 500 feet, you could zip off to a distance, perhaps a nearby hilltop and land temporarily. If you really want to blow peoples minds, you would have two or three small people, in full-body latex costumes get out of the vehicle and walk far enough away that people could see them. Anyone attempting to take a photograph would probably fail to capture an image, as the mirrors would be creating a near-blinding light. But people would see small “creatures” walking about the craft, then getting back in, and the craft taking off again. Ideally, you would fly over a mountain range or something, and have a ground crew waiting to take you away, so that no one could track the origins of the craft.

Assuming you could pull off a stunt like this, you could create a huge ontological awakening in the people who saw it. It might even make the mainstream news, since it would be in broad daylight with thousands of witnesses.

So here is the next question, how many of these so-called UFO’s over the years were in reality faked by highly financed human beings? I’m not saying that all UFO landings are of this variety, only that using 1980’s technology you could fake a UFO in broad daylight. Creating a UFO at night is even easier. Obviously, many of these sightings involve craft that move at impossible speeds and angles. Even my father and I saw such a “craft” when I was about eight. So I remain happily agnostic about UFO’s in general. Besides I think the term UFO is inaccurate. How do we know these sightings are objects at all, and not some visual anomaly? For that reason, I stopped calling sightings UFO’s a long time ago, and prefer the term UVA, which stands for Unidentified Visual Anomaly. Or perhaps a UOO - Unidentified Ontological Observation. In either case, it pays to have an open and skeptical mind.

Post-Politics and The Culture

Below is Iain Banks own description of The Culture universe in which his novels take place. The Culture is arguably the most utopian universe ever created. He lays out a compelling case that finite speeds over great distances re-establishes a post-political frontier of complete freedom. If you don't like where you're at, you can simply move to another part of the galaxy, which as you may know is very large, 100,000 light years across, and containing over 400 Billion stars. Robin Hanson has examined some post-political, post-scarcity scenarios here, and here (PDF).

The Culture

The Culture is a group-civilisation formed from seven or eight humanoid species, space-living elements of which established a loose federation approximately nine thousand years ago. The ships and habitats which formed the original alliance required each others' support to pursue and maintain their independence from the political power structures - principally those of mature nation-states and autonomous commercial concerns - they had evolved from.

The galaxy (our galaxy) in the Culture stories is a place long lived-in, and scattered with a variety of life-forms. In its vast and complicated history it has seen waves of empires, federations, colonisations, die-backs, wars, species-specific dark ages, renaissances, periods of mega-structure building and destruction, and whole ages of benign indifference and malign neglect. At the time of the Culture stories, there are perhaps a few dozen major space-faring civilisations, hundreds of minor ones, tens of thousands of species who might develop space-travel, and an uncountable number who have been there, done that, and have either gone into locatable but insular retreats to contemplate who-knows-what, or disappeared from the normal universe altogether to cultivate lives even less comprehensible.

In this era, the Culture is one of the more energetic civilisations, and initially - after its formation, which was not without vicissitudes - by a chance of timing found a relatively quiet galaxy around it, in which there were various other fairly mature civilisations going about their business, traces and relics of the elder cultures scattered about the place, and - due to the fact nobody else had bothered to go wandering on a grand scale for a comparatively long time - lots of interesting 'undiscovered' star systems to explore...

The Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of the idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of civilisations which will thrive there.

The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane (that the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution, determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.

Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

To survive in space, ships/habitats must be self-sufficient, or very nearly so; the hold of the state (or the corporation) over them therefore becomes tenuous if the desires of the inhabitants conflict significantly with the requirements of the controlling body. On a planet, enclaves can be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or corporation - hereafter referred to as hegemonies - will tend to prevail. In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control, especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile habitats. The hostile nature of the vacuum and the technological complexity of life support mechanisms will make such systems vulnerable to outright attack, but that, of course, would risk the total destruction of the ship/habitat, so denying its future economic contribution to whatever entity was attempting to control it.

Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour encouragez les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but all the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind. Rebellion, then (once space-going and space-living become commonplace), becomes easier than it might be on the surface of a planet.

Even so, this is certainly the most vulnerable point in the time-line of the Culture's existence, the point at which it is easiest to argue for things turning out quite differently, as the extent and sophistication of the hegemony's control mechanisms - and its ability and will to repress - battles against the ingenuity, skill, solidarity and bravery of the rebellious ships and habitats, and indeed the assumption here is that this point has been reached before and the hegemony has won... but it is also assumed that - for the reasons given above - that point is bound to come round again, and while the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.

Concomitant with this is the argument that the nature of life in space - that vulnerability, as mentioned above - would mean that while ships and habitats might more easily become independent from each other and from their legally progenitative hegemonies, their crew - or inhabitants - would always be aware of their reliance on each other, and on the technology which allowed them to live in space. The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is - in the long run - independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.

Of course, there is a place for serendipity and chance in any sensibly envisaged plan, and the degree to which this would affect the higher functions of a democratically designed economy would be one of the most important parameters to be set... but just as the information we have stored in our libraries and institutions has undeniably outgrown (if not outweighed) that resident in our genes, and just as we may, within a century of the invention of electronics, duplicate - through machine sentience - a process which evolution took billions of years to achieve, so we shall one day abandon the grossly targeted vagaries of the market for the precision creation of the planned economy.

The Culture, of course, has gone beyond even that, to an economy so much a part of society it is hardly worthy of a separate definition, and which is limited only by imagination, philosophy (and manners), and the idea of minimally wasteful elegance; a kind of galactic ecological awareness allied to a desire to create beauty and goodness.

Whatever; in the end practice (as ever) will outshine theory.

As mentioned above, there is another force at work in the Culture aside from the nature of its human inhabitants and the limitations and opportunities presented by life in space, and that is Artificial Intelligence. This is taken for granted in the Culture stories, and - unlike FTL travel - is not only likely in the future of our own species, but probably inevitable (always assuming homo sapiens avoids destruction).

Certainly there are arguments against the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, but they tend to boil down to one of three assertions: one, that there is some vital field or other presently intangible influence exclusive to biological life - perhaps even carbon-based biological life - which may eventually fall within the remit of scientific understanding but which cannot be emulated in any other form (all of which is neither impossible nor likely); two, that self-awareness resides in a supernatural soul - presumably linked to a broad-based occult system involving gods or a god, reincarnation or whatever - and which one assumes can never be understood scientifically (equally improbable, though I do write as an atheist); and, three, that matter cannot become self-aware (or more precisely that it cannot support any informational formulation which might be said to be self-aware or taken together with its material substrate exhibit the signs of self-awareness). ...I leave all the more than nominally self-aware readers to spot the logical problem with that argument.

It is, of course, entirely possible that real AIs will refuse to have anything to do with their human creators (or rather, perhaps, the human creators of their non-human creators), but assuming that they do - and the design of their software may be amenable to optimization in this regard - I would argue that it is quite possible they would agree to help further the aims of their source civilisation (a contention we'll return to shortly). At this point, regardless of whatever alterations humanity might impose on itself through genetic manipulation, humanity would no longer be a one-sentience-type species. The future of our species would affect, be affected by and coexist with the future of the AI life-forms we create.

The Culture reached this phase at around the same time as it began to inhabit space. Its AIs cooperate with the humans of the civilisation; at first the struggle is simply to survive and thrive in space; later - when the technology required to do so has become mundane - the task becomes less physical, more metaphysical, and the aims of civilisation moral rather than material.

Briefly, nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited. It is essentially an automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes, with human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a hobby.

No machine is exploited, either; the idea here being that any job can be automated in such a way as to ensure that it can be done by a machine well below the level of potential consciousness; what to us would be a stunningly sophisticated computer running a factory (for example) would be looked on by the Culture's AIs as a glorified calculator, and no more exploited than an insect is exploited when it pollinates a fruit tree a human later eats a fruit from.

Where intelligent supervision of a manufacturing or maintenance operation is required, the intellectual challenge involved (and the relative lightness of the effort required) would make such supervision rewarding and enjoyable, whether for human or machine. The precise degree of supervision required can be adjusted to a level which satisfies the demand for it arising from the nature of the civilisation's members. People - and, I'd argue, the sort of conscious machines which would happily cooperate with them - hate to feel exploited, but they also hate to feel useless. One of the most important tasks in setting up and running a stable and internally content civilisation is finding an acceptable balance between the desire for freedom of choice in one's actions (and the freedom from mortal fear in one's life) and the need to feel that even in a society so self-correctingly Utopian one is still contributing something. Philosophy matters, here, and sound education.

Education in the Culture is something that never ends; it may be at its most intense in the first tenth or so of an individual's life, but it goes on until death (another subject we'll return to). To live in the Culture is to live in a fundamentally rational civilisation (this may preclude the human species from ever achieving something similar; our history is, arguably, not encouraging in this regard). The Culture is quite self-consciously rational, sceptical, and materialist. Everything matters, and nothing does. Vast though the Culture may be - thirty trillion people, scattered fairly evenly through the galaxy - it is thinly spread, exists for now solely in this one galaxy, and has only been around for an eyeblink, compared to the life of the universe. There is life, and enjoyment, but what of it? Most matter is not animate, most that is animate is not sentient, and the ferocity of evolution pre-sentience (and, too often, post-sentience) has filled uncountable lives with pain and suffering. And even universes die, eventually. (Though we'll come back to that, too.)

In the midst of this, the average Culture person - human or machine - knows that they are lucky to be where they are when they are. Part of their education, both initially and continually, comprises the understanding that beings less fortunate - though no less intellectually or morally worthy - than themselves have suffered and, elsewhere, are still suffering. For the Culture to continue without terminal decadence, the point needs to be made, regularly, that its easy hedonism is not some ground-state of nature, but something desirable, assiduously worked for in the past, not necessarily easily attained, and requiring appreciation and maintenance both in the present and the future.

An understanding of the place the Culture occupies in the history and development of life in the galaxy is what helps drive the civilisation's largely cooperative and - it would claim - fundamentally benign techno-cultural diplomatic policy, but the ideas behind it go deeper. Philosophically, the Culture accepts, generally, that questions such as 'What is the meaning of life?' are themselves meaningless. The question implies - indeed an answer to it would demand - a moral framework beyond the only moral framework we can comprehend without resorting to superstition (and thus abandoning the moral framework informing - and symbiotic with - language itself).

In summary, we make our own meanings, whether we like it or not.

The same self-generative belief-system applies to the Culture's AIs. They are designed (by other AIs, for virtually all of the Culture's history) within very broad parameters, but those parameters do exist; Culture AIs are designed to want to live, to want to experience, to desire to understand, and to find existence and their own thought-processes in some way rewarding, even enjoyable.

The humans of the Culture, having solved all the obvious problems of their shared pasts to be free from hunger, want, disease and the fear of natural disaster and attack, would find it a slightly empty existence only and merely enjoying themselves, and so need the good-works of the Contact section to let them feel vicariously useful. For the Culture's AIs, that need to feel useful is largely replaced by the desire to experience, but as a drive it is no less strong. The universe - or at least in this era, the galaxy - is waiting there, largely unexplored (by the Culture, anyway), its physical principles and laws quite comprehensively understood but the results of fifteen billion years of the chaotically formative application and interaction of those laws still far from fully mapped and evaluated.

By Goîdel out of Chaos, the galaxy is, in other words, an immensely, intrinsically, and inexhaustibly interesting place; an intellectual playground for machines that know everything except fear and what lies hidden within the next uncharted stellar system.

This is where I think one has to ask why any AI civilisation - and probably any sophisticated culture at all - would want to spread itself everywhere in the galaxy (or the universe, for that matter). It would be perfectly possible to build a Von Neumann machine that would build copies of itself and eventually, unless stopped, turn the universe into nothing but those self-copies, but the question does arise; why? What is the point? To put it in what we might still regard as frivolous terms but which the Culture would have the wisdom to take perfectly seriously, where is the fun in that?

Interest - the delight in experience, in understanding - comes from the unknown; understanding is a process as well as a state, denoting the shift from the unknown to the known, from the random to the ordered... a universe where everything is already understood perfectly and where uniformity has replaced diversity, would, I'd contend, be anathema to any self-respecting AI.

Probably only humans find the idea of Von Neumann machines frightening, because we half-understand - and even partially relate to - the obsessiveness of the ethos such constructs embody. An AI would think the idea mad, ludicrous and - perhaps most damning of all - boring.

This is not to say that the odd Von-Neumann-machine event doesn't crop up in the galaxy every now and again (probably by accident rather than design), but something so rampantly monomaniac is unlikely to last long pitched against beings possessed of a more rounded wit, and which really only want to alter the Von Neumann machine's software a bit and make friends...

One idea behind the Culture as it is depicted in the stories is that it has gone through cyclical stages during which there has been extensive human-machine interfacing, and other stages (sometimes coinciding with the human-machine eras) when extensive genetic alteration has been the norm. The era of the stories written so far - dating from about 1300 AD to 2100 AD - is one in which the people of the Culture have returned, probably temporarily, to something more 'classical' in terms of their relations with the machines and the potential of their own genes.

The Culture recognises, expects and incorporates fashions - albeit long-term fashions - in such matters. It can look back to times when people lived much of their lives in what we would now call cyberspace, and to eras when people chose to alter themselves or their children through genetic manipulation, producing a variety of morphological sub-species. Remnants of the various waves of such civilisational fashions can be found scattered throughout the Culture, and virtually everyone in the Culture carries the results of genetic manipulation in every cell of their body; it is arguably the most reliable signifier of Culture status.

Thanks to that genetic manipulation, the average Culture human will be born whole and healthy and of significantly (though not immensely) greater intelligence than their basic human genetic inheritance might imply. There are thousands of alterations to that human-basic inheritance - blister-free callusing and a clot-filter protecting the brain are two of the less important ones mentioned in the stories - but the major changes the standard Culture person would expect to be born with would include an optimized immune system and enhanced senses, freedom from inheritable diseases or defects, the ability to control their autonomic processes and nervous system (pain can, in effect, be switched off), and to survive and fully recover from wounds which wou