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In those subtle moments we sometimes drift into, when time slips away and life stands silent and majestic, words cease to spill from our mouths or even bubble up from that source within. The warming wholeness ensues at the sheer experience of it all: we marvel at the vast beautiful complexity of creation rolling around and within us. It's likely that every human has experienced this feeling at least once in some form. It almost seems hardwired, like a key back into the garden.
Yet humans in general spend far too much time looking for meaning in the roiling chaos of life. Everything must have context: what she said, what he did, political motivations, religious tendencies, creation, destruction, everything. Do you think bacteria want to know why they're being constantly attacked with antibiotics? Does the rock ponder the meaning of it's own demise through the grinding of nature? Are families of gazelle trying to comprehend why their child was eaten by a lion? No. It all just happens. It's all experienced openly and completely without superimposed abstractions, thanks in large part to a diminished forebrain.
Meaning gives us, well... meaning. It's a uniquely human creation evolved in the interface between self-awareness and language. Self-awareness establishes the fundamental awareness of the Other. There is me and she. Me and this computer. Me and the myriad of creation that I contend with. Animals may instinctively defend themselves and follow the rules of biosurvival, but self-preservation is not self-awareness. Language creates the representational overlay we apply to experience. It provides a shared code within which we can define the objects of our world, co-process and collaborate on various projects, theories and algorithms about the perceived patterns of nature, and by which we can share our experiences through the common syntax. The early childhood rites of language acquisition lay the foundation of our quest for personal meaning. What does "cat" or "biology" mean"? What about "Honesty"? "Love?" "Hate?" "Thermonuclear"? What does it mean when birds flock together at sunset over the water? Why did she say that? Why am I here?
Meaning is a complex expression of the perception of pattern - the perception of pattern mixed with emotional content. Meaning is almost always a form of emotion. Science functions best when it's removed from meaning. Just the facts of observation. Magick functions best when it's embedded deeply within the folds of meaning, of emotion. The clinical poles might be psychopath and schizophrenic, respectively. A life without meaning is empty and free of consequence. A life overwhelmed by meaning is one incapable of dealing with the diverse and immediate mechanisms of the competitive world.
For most of us, meaning arises from knowledge and experience. Observe the open flame and note it's brilliance. Touch the flame and feel the burn. Understand that touching the flame brings pain, and then devise ways to avoid touching flame in other situations. We perceive the pattern, understand it's immediate relationship to us, then go about running various relevant scenarios and predicting their outcome. Add emotion and meaning and then wonder "why would mother have allowed me to touch the flame? Doesn't she love me?". Experience, pattern, prediction, meaning. Touching fire is how my heart feels when I see her. Do you see the layers of abstraction from the initial experience? In some ways it's a richer, more complex experience of the thing being experienced. Who knew a simple sunset could evoke memories of childhood? Yet in other ways this relentless quest for meaning distracts us from the experience itself. We get caught up in the abstractions, lost in the maps. Strip away meaning and language and the heavenly kingdom begins to reveal itself to the phenomenal perceptual machine called the human brain.
Yeah, those subtle moments we sometimes drift into... Pure experience and overwhelming meaning. Impossible meaning. Meaning that exceeds the ability of our language to describe it in any truly approximate way. Such experiences often send one into wild theologizing, wanton philosophizing, or revolutionary mathematical incantations. Indeed, this is the gnostic foundation of inspiration. It's the ingression of godhead into the humble ways of humanity. Yet it's never as common or available as we'd like. The best paths to such hyper-perception will seek the obliteration of language and self-reference coupled with an aggressive will to experience the fullness of life. Meditation and extreme sports? Sure! Yoga and raving? You bet! Science and magick? Exactly.
Thanks to Esa, we now have two new Bucky Fuller books added to our Library:
Grunch of Giants and
Guinea Pig B
Thanks to Corwin for this little gem from First Avenue Machines:
From KRON:
SUPREME COURT The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that a small congregation in New Mexico can use hallucinogenic tea in its religious rituals.
It's the first religious freedom decision under Chief Justice John Roberts. In the ruling, Roberts wrote that federal drug agents should have been barred from confiscating the tea.
The tea contains an illegal drug known as D-M-T. But it's considered a sacred part of a four-hour ceremony conducted by the congregation twice a month. Members of the Brazil-based church believe they can understand God only by drinking the tea.
Roberts says the Bush administration failed to demonstrate how it could ban what he termed a "sincere religious practice."
Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Belief is an Omniverse Operator - it creates reality in life and death. In life, what you believe to be true is true. In death, what you believe to be true is true. It is the nature of the Bardo. Limiting beliefs are what keep you here, stuck in the cycle of life and death. Unlimiting your beliefs frees you into eternity, infinity, and beyond.
Belief can be your liberator, your way out, whether it be in this life or the one hereafter. The reason is simple - your consciousness, your soul is infinite. It is the source of all that it is, because it is the most fundamental part of existence. You are already, and have always been part of this infinite intelligence and eternal wisdom. You are already infinte and eternal. You have always been, and you will always be perfect joy.
You may not remember, because you don't believe it to be real, you don't trust your imagination. But your imagination is your true self, it is the very key to your reality. You are told to believe you are limited, that you are a sinner, or just human, a worker, common citizen, or consumer. You are way more than all of these things. You are infinite incarnate. Only by letting go and loving yourself can you allow this belief to become true. Believe it and it is yours to have.
Belief is your way to create something from nothing. Dreams, creativity, magick - imagination then will. You can create paradises beyond your wildest imaginings, because your imagination is your connection to the infinite.
"In the province of the mind, what the mind believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind there are no limits." - John C. Lilly
There are no limits, because you are beyond those limits. You are the godhead, the source of all that is.
You are co-creator of Infinite Omniverses. You can relax now, there is nothing to lose, except your limited sense of ego and self. You already are your higher self, all you have to do is let go and just be.
What is everyone think of this?
How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth.
In many ways it is the exact opposite of transhumanism. However, there are so many things said that are so correct and wise, that I can't really argue with it. What do you think?
I wrote something about this particular divide in 1998 called "Gaians vs Transhumans" Here is an excerpt:
Regarding Gaians vs Transhumans, there is really is no conflict and I consider myself to be both. I see no reason why we as children of Gaia shouldn't be able to survive, prosper and grow, while harmoniously restoring the biosphere to a pre-human paradise. If done right, nanotechnologies are the most environmentally friendly technology that could possibly exist. It is the perfect emulation of life in everyway, while also possessing an evolutionary unfoldment of ever- increasing intelligence. In no time at all, nanotechnology could reverse every "damaging" thing we've ever done, while simulataneously bootstrapping life and intelligence to the stars, which is by far holistically, cosmically and universally the most sustainable thing life could ever do. Life is about balance, beauty and harmony, but it is also about evolution, growth and awakening. Let a thousand worlds flourish!
Thanks Sunface for the link. :)
A friend of mine sent me this link to Greg Baden's video:
Into the Zero Point (right click to save)
Some topics: 2012, Transcendeing the Kali Yuga's Four Ages, Mayan & Eygptian Calenders, accelerating technology and why it exists, Magnetic Shifts, Global Climate Change, Changing Human Chemistries, Becoming and Demonstrating Love-Wisdom-Compassion, Acceleration of Intense Healing of the "Big Stuff" since all the easy stuff is past us, Why your feeling disenfranchised and hopeless, and how we can get past it.
Very interesting and intense food for thought on the coming changes.
I just discovered Alchemy for the Braindamaged which just posted an utterly brilliant piece on brain change. Most intelligent thing I've read on the subject in over a year. And it's only the most recent in a series of 16 posts on the subject. Here's a teaser:
This ability is a function of the frontal or conscious mind, as it deals with constructs of linear time. The subconscious mind cares nothing for time. To the subconscious mind only the present moment exists. Even when it draws experience from the past or future, that experience is considered to be in the present moment. It cannot distinguish between an image and the reality.
But anyway. It seems like this ability to project trends is growing in the human race, both as we develop greater skill in recognizing patterns and greater ability to abstract beyond the present moment and take in a bigger picture.
And here’s the funny thing: because we can use that ability to tap into wildly extrapolated future states, it provides the subconscious mind with an avenue for plausilby accessing experiences that we might otherwise not dare to do.
Technology not a sufficient cause for optimism? Extrapolate it forward twenty years and imagine yourself as a transhuman demigod exploring space. There’s a headrush for you, and because all you did was plug things that are really happening into your future conjuring algorithm, it must be true. your subconscious mind buys it.
Disenfranchised with the present? Track the rates of oil extraction, ecological destruction, and population growth into your curve generator and shudder in terror, or else gasp in ecstasy that the hated world that is, is on the way out.
Same function either way. You’re utilizing a hypnotic principle called time distortion. If you can trick a person into visualizing an outcome, then their subconscious mind treats it as it were already happening and they don’t resist it. All you did was provide the raw data and the timeframe. So if you carefully frame the data and the time frame you could make pretty much anyone accept pretty much anything.
With me so far? Now here’s the big whammy. If you’re really clever with this stuff you can generate what is known as a catastophic transition. You project some process so far into it’s future that it launches off the graph that use to measure it and into a completely unpredictable realm of behavior. The reason things like peak oil or the singularity pack such a punch is that they use mathematical trends to convince your brain that you’re going into a totally unpredictable transition state. You’ve been tricked into confounding your normal categories and definitions of things...
Later on it finishes with this"
You see how this works? First you have habits that involve no change, then habits that involve predictable positive change, then habits that predictably accelerate positive change, then habits that predictably accelerate the acceleration of positive changes, until the whole concept of time and change and scales of positive experience cease to bound your consciousness. Your personal singularity. Because, all due respect to Ray Kurzweil but we don’t need some fucking computer to jump the curve for us. We’ve got the equipment right now.
Wow, we are living in surreal times. Just in the last month we have now seen two quantum leaps in space propulsion. The first was a proposal for a hyperspace ship, and now an inertialess drive. Is this still 2006, or did somehow we jump ahead 50 years? Bizarre and simply amazing.
From Physical Review:
~~~
Felber's antigravity discovery solves the two greatest engineering challenges to space travel near the speed of light: identifying an energy source capable of producing the acceleration; and limiting stresses on humans and equipment during rapid acceleration.
"Dr. Felber's research will revolutionize space flight mechanics by offering an entirely new way to send spacecraft into flight," said Dr. Eric Davis, Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin and STAIF peer reviewer of Felber's work. "His rigorously tested and truly unique thinking has taken us a huge step forward in making near-speed-of-light space travel safe, possible, and much less costly."
The field equation of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity has never before been solved to calculate the gravitational field of a mass moving close to the speed of light. Felber's research shows that any mass moving faster than 57.7 percent of the speed of light will gravitationally repel other masses lying within a narrow 'antigravity beam' in front of it. The closer a mass gets to the speed of light, the stronger its 'antigravity beam' becomes.
Felber's calculations show how to use the repulsion of a body speeding through space to provide the enormous energy needed to accelerate massive payloads quickly with negligible stress. The new solution of Einstein's field equation shows that the payload would 'fall weightlessly' in an antigravity beam even as it was accelerated close to the speed of light.
Accelerating a 1-ton payload to 90 percent of the speed of light requires an energy of at least 30 billion tons of TNT. In the 'antigravity beam' of a speeding star, a payload would draw its energy from the antigravity force of the much more massive star. In effect, the payload would be hitching a ride on a star.
"Based on this research, I expect a mission to accelerate a massive payload to a 'good fraction of light speed' will be launched before the end of this century," said Dr. Felber. "These antigravity solutions of Einstein's theory can change our view of our ability to travel to the far reaches of our universe."
More immediately, Felber's new solution can be used to test Einstein's theory of gravity at low cost in a storage-ring laboratory facility by detecting antigravity in the unexplored regime of near-speed-of-light velocities.
When I was about 12, I read an astounding article by Robert Anton Wilson's called Next Step: Immortality in Future Magazine. I identified myself as an immortalist from that day on. This same magazine introduced me to all sorts of other new cutting edge ideas. Immortality appealed to me because all the wonders I read in Sci-fi and all the amazing futures I imagined myself living in would now come true, because I would live thousands of years to see them all. I would be alive when we first colonized the solar system. I would be alive when we set out for the stars and colonized other planets. I would be alive to become a space pioneer and experience alien cultures and super advanced extraterrestrial races. All of these visions then and still are much greater and fantastic than anything, save perhaps Star Wars, that I have ever seen depicted on film.
This desire has continued pretty much unchanged all the way through to the present. However, as I have gotten older, experienced more, seen the pressures the world now faces, and more deeply understood the implications of things like nanotechnology, this vision has been shaken. Even a year ago, I don't think I would have said that, but today, the foundations of my quest for immortality have come under greater scrutiny. Is my desire for immortality a genuine spiritual quest or based more around a fear of death? If so, do I really want to live in fear? Living in fear has got to be the worst way to live, since it precisely takes you away from living in your heart, your true center. From what I can see almost all immortalists are such because of their fear of death. They are immortalist more because of their fear of death, rather than their love of life. American culture in particular has a great fear of death, and it is one of the reasons so many American's are bamboozled into mind-numbing reality tunnels - from shop-until-you-drop consumerism to spiritually vacant dead-ends.
Fear can do weird things. I have seen many immortalists trade in many of their principles for the promise of longer life. If faced with their own death, I have seen them embody the worst of culture in a subconscious desire to blend in, not step out of line, or be noticed, especially now in a our climate of squashing dissent. For example, I haven't see any contemporary immortalist taking the moral high ground on any social cause that is sufficiently counter to the status quo, precisely because such an action could jeopardize their immortal quest. After all, look what happened to Martin Luther King, Jr. So the question becomes, at what point, if at all, would an immortalist be willing to die for a just cause over their own quest for physical immortality? Because lets face it, things could bad enough, that such a choice could soon face all of us.
And even putting the morality issue aside, things are changing so fast now, that for me at least; it’s becoming increasingly difficult to even identify what the "safest" path to future survival is. Can we say with any certainty what kind of world will be here in 20 years? For me it is almost impossible to imagine. We are at such a critical juncture that the slightest factors are now capable of reaping the most tumultuous change.
The truth that I have been avoiding, but is now staring me in the face, is that my personal ability to survive the next 20 is now almost completely out of my control.
I think the primary reason for this is that as the world has become more populated, explored, controlled and monitored, our ability to act freely within it has become increasingly constrained. For example, I would love to move to New Zealand, and get away from what I see is a rapidly disintegrating free country, and a rise in American despotism and retrograde conservatism. But if you, like me, have contemplated such an escape, it's much more daunting than it first appears, or should be! Unless you are already very wealthy, or happen to have a LOT of experience in one of their in-the-moment much needed skill shortages, your chance of immigrating there are almost zero. Pretty much goes for any other place you care to run to. Lets face it, the world is a lot smaller today, and countries have responded by making it much harder to move there. Frontiers are dead. That only leaves the space frontier.
However, in practical terms we are no closer to space colonization now than we were in the 1970's when Gerald K O'Neill trail blazed a compelling pathway towards its realization.
Nanotechnology for me has always held the key to liberating humanity from slavery. But nanotech is not here, and the mechanisms of elite control have become stronger. Our ability to travel and move freely has become harder, economic conditions more straining, resources more depleted, the environment more destabilized, and political welfare coming apart at the seams. Meanwhile the most powerful technologies are coming under greater control of the military. Sure, decentralized technologies are a powerful liberator, but they are not a sure thing. As powerful as they are, it still leaves those with the most physical power having the most tools of oppression at their disposal to wreck havoc anywhere they see fit. Cyberspace is great, but we still have meat bodies. So those who can control, maim or kill those meat bodies are the ones in charge. Again, it all comes back to our physical bodies, and any fear we have around death. As long as we fear death, those with the power to kill us, control us.
Sure, as they "tighten their grip, more star systems will slip through their fingers", but those "star systems" from what I can see represent a rapidly diminishing portion of the population. There was a time when I thought I could identify what specific characteristics that portion would have, and adapt myself accordingly, but the honest truth is I can't, and I'd be surprised if anyone did. Substantial wealth seems to be a prerequisite, but I'm not even sure about that anymore. Assuming it was and I did have sufficient wealth, what do I do then? Do I move to a small tropical island? What would I do to survive once I'm there? Is this even practical or desirable? Would I have to leave my family? And an even more important question, assuming I could do all these things and it was necessary, would it be worth it to survive in a world that was left? What specifically would that survival entail? What kind of world would life after such global chaos played itself out? Will it be a world I would even want to live in? Is survival in "hell" better than no physical survival at all? Well, if you are like most immortalists, the answer would still be yes, because death is the final oblivion... end of story. For quite a long time, I used to take this as the most logical belief. However, would I want to live within a hellish world that consists of some insane global fascist feudalist empire of insane, craven, infantile warlords, and ex-heads of state with their armies and weapons of death? Or how about a society which consists of a legion of nano-powered weapons of control? A society in which free thought has been eradicated via covert nanobots swimming through my brain and bloodstream? I don't know, imagine your own dystopia.
I know have echoed Bucky Fuller in the past, utopia or oblivion. Although such dystopias are probably self-negating, how do we know clearly when the final choice needs to be made between utopia and oblivion? At some point, quite likely, the only thing that could turn it away from oblivion is enough people at the right time, putting their fear of death aside, and taking a stand against the forces of evil. Is that time right now, next year, or already beyond us? I have no idea, which is why this dilemma is all the more pressing.
Interestingly, quite a few immortalists (ones I met on the Extropian List in the 1990's) having realized these grave possibilities, and fearing their possible extinction have adopted some crazy politics. Rather than side with what is the moral high ground they now position themselves with the side that has the best chance of winning, regardless of what happens to be the morally higher good. From their perspective, the best way to assure survival is make sure they are on the side of the guns, and not on the side having them pointed at you. Sensible enough, right? They have become true survival-of-the-fittest type individuals. Rather than become potential slaves to future feudal lords, they now work hard to make sure they are the feudal lords! When I realized this for the first time way back then, I was seriously depressed and disillusioned. I never gave up my immortal quest, but any illusions I had about immortalists all sharing the same heart-felt quest for a just utopia were shattered that day. Boy was I naive!
Now, lets shift gears.
Lets say, we do make it.. that we do survive the next 20 years as nanotechnology changes everything. Call it the Singularity, or the 2012 Eschaton, it doesn't matter. Well, assuming the Singularity does come and all of us here are alive when it does, what then? This to me is the biggest irony of all. We all might still die. When you think about it, what is the technological singularity anyway? As far as I can tell, and even under the most benign circumstances, it seems to me to portend an utter annihilation of all that we were. Some might say this is a good thing. Well, it would certainly seem to be a good thing in the evolutionary scheme of things. After all, we are talking about the final escape of intelligence past the extinction point out into the infinite cosmos. For life and intelligence, this would be the ultimate liberation - a time for celebration, and an overwhelming feeling of relief at finally having escaped any shackles towards utter freedom, joy, infinite intelligence and wisdom.
So why the irony? The irony, because it’s quite possible, even likely that you and I won't survive such a transition. The very nature of accelerating intelligence would be akin to the ultimate trip, your ego would be obliterated into a billion pieces. Except in this case, as all that was you is subsumed into the SI matrix, there wouldn't be any "you" left, save perhaps the "useful" parts for the SI's purpose. In other words, you die. From the perspective of "you", your dead, same as if you had physically died. So if you permanently die in this way, is this still physical immortality? What difference would there be between this death, and actual physical death? In both cases, "you" are gone. Now, this is where my thinking might be different than other psychonauts. During my NDE, I felt no sense of annihilation. "I" was still there, except this time, there was much, much more than "I". The feeling was I became merged with a much higher and more complete version of my "self". I still had memories of being me in this life, and I still could recall all the details of my life now. I still experienced my ego, but my ego had become totally transparent to this infinite all encompassing love of my more complete higher self. In other words, my ego was now more like my big toe compared to the rest of my more complete body. I can't even begin to tell you how liberating this was. This place that I now found myself was eternal. It was like the ultimate rest stop for the soul. It was a place of total rest, joy and contentment. It was the TOTAL absence of all suffering. And the most amazing part of the experience was that it was totally familiar. There was nothing alien about it all. It was as opposite of otherness as you could have, it was HOME. It was the place I have always known, and always would know. A place that has always existed and always will. It was total confirmation. I rejoiced! It was the most real and true experience I have ever had. To deny, reject, or doubt it would be the ultimate folly. If I were to doubt it, I might as well doubt that I am happy when I am happy. The experience just was. No matter what the ultimate nature of reality is, this experience was the deepest confirmation, the deepest, truest resonance with the very essence of my soul. I lost all fear of death, and it changed my life forever.
These investigations have taken me deeper into exploring techniques for Out of Body Travel, Astral Projection and so on. Based on my own experiences in these areas, as well as reading lots of other peoples, I now believe that there is no death. For many, reincarnation (i.e. rebirth) happens because they are not ready to believe there is something more. According to Robert Monroe, a pioneer in OBE work, people are not able to move beyond rebirth until their belief systems are completely cleared of all limiting beliefs. If we are, as many spiritual and psychonautic pioneers have said, co-creators of Universe, then the ultimate nature of reality is consciousness. Therefore, as conscious co-creators of universe, until we believe in a transcending reality beyond death, it will continue to occur for us in a repeating cycle of death and rebirth until we finally get it. This is exactly what Seth via Jane Roberts was always saying. Consciousness is the name, and infinity is the game. No matter what, we are all heading towards something beyond death, beyond the physical universe, beyond space and time.... not just eternity, but infinity.
So this brings me to my current beliefs. Although physical immortality could be lots of fun under the right circumstances, it is no longer the only game in town. I will continue to pursue my physical immortal quest for as long as I can, for a love of life, not a fear of death. It's win win situation!
Nature so faithfully reproduces it's best algorithms across the entire scale of creation.
While thought and ideation are often reduced to synaptic events arcing between neurons, it is perhaps more accurate to regard the realm of thought as a field arising from the summation of hundreds of billions of such events. To consider even a very localized region of neural activity - say, the right frontal cortex - is to regard the complex interaction of many millions of neurons each with countless axonal and dendritic projections reaching out to each other and themselves, all tangled up in a maddened, organic mess of gray spaghetti. Each neuron releases a swarm of neurotransmitters through every axonal projection and each neurotransmitter carries an electrochemical charge. As these neurotransmitters bond with enzymes embedded in the neuronal membrane, altering the ionic balance of the cell interior, the action potential of the receiving neuron is either excited or inhibited. When excited, it passes the signal onto the next neuron(s) in the chain by releasing more of it's own select group of neurotransmitters. Each such pulse along the chain induces it's own electromagnetic field.
One could imagine the cortex as a pulsing blob of neural tissue waxing and waning with the dynamic EM field generated by its neuronal activity. Since a single neuron ultimately only possesses the capability of sending a binary message - fire or not-fire - it would be odd to suggest that conscious thought would occur in this domain. The analogy is to binary code - 0 & 1 - where each switch represents a single bit. Eight such bits can be combined to create a byte, which is essentially equivalent to a word. So by analogy we could suggest that while a single neuron can only pass a simple off-on signal, a group of neurons might possess at least a basic amount of informational content equivalent to a word.
But words alone do not make speech, nor do bytes make a program. It's the complex aggregation of bytes into functions and the dynamic flow of data between these functions that creates a program. It is the emergent property of the entire system. Thus, our pre-frontal cortex is a regional function that generates a dynamic electric field from the summation of it's bytes, the neurons. And it's not isolated. It transmits to and receives input from other cortical regions, from the midbrain, the hindbrain, and the steady flow of data streaming in through the sensorium. The whole thing is bathed in blood and nutrients and gases, and awash in hormones pumped out by the hypothalamus And this avoids consideration entirely of exogenous compouonds we take in from the air, from food, drugs, cars, factories, each other, etc. Suffice it to say that from this rich, noodly broth, our unique sense of self arises. Mind manifests across the electromagnetic field of brain.
In short, the brain is exceedingly, ridiculously, incomprehensibly messy and complex. Just imagine the density. 100 billion neurons packed into a roughly 5lb mass of tissue. Consider the nervous system reaching out from the brain through the entire body, miles of nerves heading out to the perimeters and returning back in and up the spine without even so much as a split second of noticeable delay.
Beyond the simple physiological marvel is the fact the countless programs running in parallel keeping us alive and sentient and witty were not written but simply evolved. They evolved over generations in the species and they evolve through experience of the individual. The human brain and its sensoria are embedded in yet a higher level dynamic system: life. This field of life continuously stimulates and programs the learning mind, plying the endless plasticity of neronal tissue, stretching it out to make as many connections as possible with its neighbors, far and near. Indeed, neuroscience has shown us that it's not so much the number of neurons that affect one's degree of intelligence, but the number of connections. A single cell might be receiving inputs form a hundred others.
And as an artificial intelligence program doesn't need to know anything about it's code, the field of mind persists oblivious to the mess of tissue conspiring to express its substrate. Mind is meant for interacting with the kingdom - the world of our senses. As a clever adaptation and extension of our biosurvival resources, mind would be painfully, tragically distracted if it were constantly reading every letter of every word of it's neural code. Better to let the machine run and not think about it too much. Somehow it's done such a great job that we can take time to simply sit and think, totally distracted from threats of tigers and spears and so on ( at least many of us are much of the time). Mind has extruded such an armor of technology that it's become so much more free to simply watch and cogitate, contemplating the creation of better tools and techniques or challenging the mysteries perceived by the sensorium and plumbing the depth's of it's own inner world.
Mind has evolved to better discover itself. Witness the internet. Surely an extension and extrusion of thought the internet is perhaps the greatest tool yet for peering into the mysteries of creation. As neurons reach out and connect with each other to create functional bodies, and as mind arises off of the dynamic flow of information between these functional bodies, so too do individuals connect to form specialized groups that, in turn, summate to create the global mind. Yet while the hardware of the brain seems to have evolved first, giving rise to thought later, the internet is the physical scaffolding created to hold the network of mind that's been growing across this planet for millenia. It's the global brain built to weave together the intangible network of human thought and manifest the global mind.
The chaotic mess of cables and ports, routers and servers that span the globe in their data webs, and the emerging wireless lilly pads rippling out across their surface, present an easy reflection of our sloppy brains and their intangible minds. Imagine when hundreds of millions of people carry wireless devices that allow them to interact with data streams and servers on the web and also to communicate with each other immediately and non-locally. The field of mind that's been slowly spreading and connecting would seemingly be accelerated to an inconceivable degree.
Like those discarnate voices waking up in the brains of early humanity so very long ago, we may find ourselves once again haunted by abstracted intelligences, ghosts in the machine of our own making. Would psychic complexes arise across the data field? Might an ego emerge, or more simply, self identity? Could some industrious young hacker produce a digital hallucinogen to feed the global mind?
Maybe that's part of what the singularity is. The global mind becomes self-aware and enters a psychedelic state of sudden clarity and illumination. The psychic complexes of our species, once proud and tall in myth and legend, might arise as gods again striding across the digital landscape freed from our minds into the greater field of imagination. A new hyperlanguage might arise out of the data stew flowing through 6 or 7 billion minds wired into the megawebs of Terra. All jacked into media feeds and nanoassemblers, protein baths and nucleic vats, churning out a roiling bath of novelty washing across the planet and reaching out to the stars.
In the dreamworld all fantasies are true.