| Home Forums Library Media Gallery Glossary Links |
 |
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.
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.
Ever brilliant Dale Carrico wrote this piece recently that clearly articulates my own position as well as problems with the singularity idea.
Technophiles who drift uncomfortably in the direction of the megalomaniacal end of the temperamental spectrum often wax enthusiastic about the near term arrival of post-biological superintelligence. Undaunted by the relentless deferment of the "inevitable" arrival of even the modest artificial intelligence we've been promised interminably by enthusiasts for decades, they warn of and (let's be frank) pine for the near-term and inevitable arrival of greater-than-human artificial intelligence to this day in the same urgent, sometimes hushed, tones.Not to delve too deep into my skepticism about this way of thinking, I will simply suggest that these starry-eyed projections (1) tend to overestimate our theoretical grasp of intelligence in general, (2) tend to underestimate the extreme bumpiness we should expect along the developmental pathways from which the relevant technologies could arrive, (3) tend to assume that these technologies, upon arrival, would function more smoothly than technologies almost ever do, and (4) tend to exhibit a rather stark obliviousness about the extent to which what we call technological development is articulated in fact not just by the accumulation of technical accomplishments but by social, cultural, and political factors as well, in consequence of which they simply rarely take these adequately into account at all.
I have no doubt that technology will continue to accelerate. I also have no doubt that computers in general will get smarter. And finally I have no doubt that given time, future intelligence will vastly exceed current human levels. What I do doubt however is that this greater-than-human intelligence will be an AI.
My position has always been that greater-than-human intelligence will be us. The future of intelligence is much more likely to be IA (Intelligence Augmentation) - augmented humans, and soon afterward fully nanoengineered post-humans. Singularitarians are probably correct in their assumption that its much simpler, theoretically speaking, to create a super-intelligence from scratch without all the messy genetic inheritances and logical fallacies that have plagued human intelligence throughout history. But like Dale points out, they vastly overestimate the complexity of actually doing so. This is why my position has always fallen on the more difficult task of figuring out how we humans can use what we have to make ourselves better. This means that both a combination of inner transformational work, along with the outer work of technological development will be necessary to make the transition to a greater-than-human, kinder-than-human intelligence. I think a good start would be to acknowledge the vast human potential (unassisted by technology) that has yet to be tapped.
Combining this human potential along with the powerful tools of nanotechnology should bring about this greater-than-human intelligence we seek. Otherwise, if current events are any indicator, without this kind of inner 'spiritual' transformation these unleashed technologies will bring destruction rather than liberation.
Those in the AI camp have no faith that such an inner transformation can occur, which is why they have put all their faith in a aritifical superintelligence. Some of them have put their faith in one individual who claims to be the one person who has the one solution to making all this happen.
So who is the more foolhardy?
Ever since I was a small child I’ve had the most amazing dream life. Although I’ve also had my share of nightmares and even off periods, most of the time my dreams are always deeply satisfying and beautiful. Like most children I lacked the capacity to clearly distinguish between the dream world and reality. However, if you ask the Aborigini’s, such a distinction is meaningless anyway, with the dreamworld being the more "real" of the two. For me this is a belief I share with them and have carried into adulthood. My dreams have offered so many profound insights, and the lucidity of them has been so intense and real to the depths of my being, that to deny the veracity of these experiences would be to deny my very soul – the deepest meanings that guide my life. And it is here that people start to make value judgments that although the inner life of dreams might be significant, the external world is more important, because without it we die. In the West particularly this emphasis has been valued almost exclusively to the detriment to our inner lives. As Ghandi once said when asked what he thought of Western Civilization, he said, "I think it’s a good idea."
So what am I getting at? Quite simply, I have come to believe that dreams are actually quite real, more real the so-called “waking life” and that this waking life is simply part of what we must make authentic via this dream world. I can’t speak for others, but I am now quite certain (as certain as I can be about anything) that my dream life is trying desperately to become manifest here in the real world. This might sound too new agey for some people, but it all makes perfect sense to me. When things go right in my life, they have this unmistakable resonance with my dream life – the feelings, sensations, gestalts and so on. In my dream life all the answers are there, the solutions to our problems, to world peace, to sustainable society, to genuine happiness for everyone. It seems so obvious, so simple in my dream life, and yet so complicated here. I have speculated often about how I think there are “dark forces” that are conspiring in one way or another, perhaps merely out of greedy and banal self-interest to further their own ends, at the expense of everyone else. So as a result over the centuries we now have this overly complex, rigged system that benefits the rich and powerful at the expense of not only everyone else, but now the planet itself.
Bucky Fuller said way back in 1965 that right now we have the capability to feed, house and clothe everyone on the planet sufficiently that everyone would live like billionaires. So why hasn’t this happened? Because those at the top want remain the exlusive shareholders of such graces. To sacrifice their exclusivity would be to sacrifice power and control. Since fear ultimately rules these people, that fear will keep them stuck in this struggle for power. Unfortunately for them, their days of power and control are coming to an end. Despite the signs all around of us of increasing repression, surveillance and control, there is no way the system can sustain itself much longer. I have written about this lack of sustainability here and here.
I started thinking deeply again about all of this since I came back from Burning Man a few weeks ago. The evidence of a build-up towards some kind of cambrian explosion as Ming points out here is all around us. What amazes me these last few years is how much everything has changed from a 'potential' standpoint in terms of connectivity, collective intelligence, communications, smart mobs, internet, global network point of view, yet how much everything has remained the same.
How much longer can the old hierarchies, this old civilization keep hanging on amidst so much grass-roots intelligence burgeoning all around us? Burning Man is a good example of just how much energy and connectivity is there - so much that it was overwhelming... and until I went I had no idea! I could feel it everywhere, the social networks, the people all talking with each other, most of them all on this high vibratory wavelength. It's not a fluke, and it's not just because of Burning Man. It's already there. I compare it to the functioning of mushrooms, which are merely the sex organs of this vast underground mycellia network. This network grows, and grows, and it then reaches a critical point, where it then flowers. I see the same thing now in what I recently called Counter Culture 2.0. The connections are so thick and complex, that no manner of oppression can wipe it out now, except the end of life itself.
And since each day the technologies of connectivity continue to minuturize and grow smarter each day, there will come a point, soon I think, where this huge breakout will occur.
Those at the top are not stupid, they know this, sense this is coming, which is why I think they are so scared, and the global politic is getting so nasty and repressive, especially here in the states, where this connective freedom is greatest. That is no coincidence.
So rather than some smooth "controlled" evolutionary move upwards, its going to be a sudden out of control breakout. I suppose I was hoping for the former, but I'll settle for the latter over stagnation and death.
I'm more hopeful than ever.
I just arrived back from Burning Man fully transformed. I suspect it will take me several months to fully digest this most awesome experience... maybe just in time for next year. It was wonderful to finally give warm embraces to people I've known only online.
As the Official Burning Man Website says, this event is notoriously indescribable. When I was there it becomes quickly obvious that no amount of eloquent speech or series of pictures could ever do it justice. Quite simply, Burning Man has to be experienced. It is Utopia. One of the things that struck me about every 30 minutes or so as I wandered the playa is, "I can't believe this exists, it is beyond description". I would look out to the horizon in nearly every direction to find this immense amount of novelty. During the day, art installations of various kinds were scattered about - some within a few hundred yards, others some one or two miles away, as if a mirage. Certain structures like the Temple were over 100 feet tall and were noticeable from almost any distance. Nighttime was equally amazing, when many more art pieces come alive to join the spectacle. Nearly everywhere I went, looking in front of me and in every direction, there was some kind of dynamic activity. It's not the dense activity of an urban city with its rules and boundaries, but a vast unbounded playa stretching for miles in every direction, filled with light, fire plumes, neon floating caravans with distant yet pleasant volumes of lounge-techno music, and thousands of glow sticks representing and protecting people as they walked and rode their bikes across the playa. So imagine seeing thousands of these various colors randomly crisscrossing the desert, stretching for several square miles in every direction. The sense of freedom, joy, excitement and possibility filled my every cell. I danced and moved and rode my bike hither and thither for hours on end, stopping at different installations, spending time in distant planetarium, and then traveling further out into the playa, which this year represented the heavens. As I traveled further from the Esplanade (the main arced avenue), the further out into "outerspace" I was going. At about a mile and half beyond the Esplanade, I encountered an illuminated and pulsating star with alien creature blowing in the night winds. I took several photos of it, but my camera is very old and doesn't work well at night, so here is a day shot.
On a typical day I would spend some 14-15 hours wandering the interacting with the art and enjoying immensely the company of fellow burners, hanging out at center camp for some hot chai, dance for awhile at Solarhenge, and back to camp to hang out with friends at Prometheatrics. I was introduced to this wonderful bunch through Mark Pesce, who unfortunately was unable to attend this year.
I spent a couple of lazy afternoons hanging out at The Brane, home of the 2nd Annual Palenque Norte lectures. When I first came into the tent I met Carey Thompson whose Galactivation Art is so beautiful. About an hour later I ran into Dlight of Tribal Oasis, who spoke eloquently of creating this type of post-modern tribal community full time. His ideas are very compelling and he now has me convinced of their attainability. He went on to tell me that regardless of what we've been told, hierarchy has ended and we now need to get used to living without those rules. The technologies of liberation are expanding so fast, that hierarchy simply cannot survive, and so we as a species need to finish the job of deprogramming ourselves out of this primitive hangover. He also mentioned that the singularity is really just another form of misguided monotheism, another type of hierarchy. The future is not a singularity, but a Cambrian explosion of diversity and creativity heading out in every direction. Perhaps it was my own state of mind at the time (he he), but his words struck a deep chord, ringing true like few things do for me these days. His message was hopeful, positive and inspiring. LVX23's words ring true too when he says that out on the playa we are expanding the mythos or morphogenetic field of modern humanity. Burning Man is pioneering the cutting edge of possibility - not a counter to culture, but front-runners scouting out the frontier of what is possible. This might sound overly grandiose, but the feeling on the playa of genuine fast-forward evolution is palpable.
I feel like I could write a book on my experiences, like it's been every other year I've been. Burning Man is a super-condensified experience - a day can seem like weeks have passed. I never escaped the feeling that I had landed on some beuatiful alien planet filled with novel delights at every turn. This alien feeling was immediate and viceral and I didn't want it to end. No manner of sci-fi movie watching can prepare you for it. A cross between Barbarella, Mad Max and Tatooine might give you a hint, but that's all. I missed the last few years, and feel very sad now that the event has come to an end. I'm so looking forward to next year, and I'm just bursting at the seams with new creative ideas to make happen for next year’s event. With all the walking and riding bikes I did this year, and coming across so many wandering, tired people, we are planning on creating a playa taxi service for next year, which we're thinking of calling Trip N' Taxi. Great way to meet new people, and a lot easier to get around. It’s merely a single idea of many. Several members of Prometheatrics and I schemed a few more ideas, which will have to remain hush-hush for now. If you're interested in creating and collaborating on some art installation for next year, please get in touch with me at psiphius at yahoo.com
One last thing, LVX23 mentioned this year there was not enough deeply sublime art as last year. I found out today that a lot of regular artists skipped this year’s event because they're too involved politically with the coming election. From what I've heard the numbers are large enough that an impact on the playa art would be felt, and so it was. Having missed the last three years I didn't notice it and was instead just so grateful to be here again, and in turn was even more enthusiastically participatory and social this year, and even more inspired to make more art for next year.
Hope to see more of ya on the playa next year!
Stay tuned for more pics - I'm working on an entire section of photos.
This guy was towering over me and must have been 6'6.
*I was blown away by this tonight, so I felt like sharing it again. I hope you enjoy it.
~~
We've probably all heard about hyperspace, but what about hyper-time? Is there such a thing? Well, most likely. Each bubble universe by definition has its own space-time continuum, and so it would only make sense that other bubble universes have their own space-time continuums. Since they have their own self-contained space-times, why then would these timelines synchronize with ours? Logically, since they are separate, they wouldn't. Which means each timeline operates independently of our own. Although in a way it's a meaningless statement, while millions of years passed there, no time at all would pass here. The same could be true from their perspective. It's possible, as hard as it might be to imagine, universes with 3 time dimensions and 6 spatial ones. Better still, why not universes without space and time at all, but something altogether different and more extraordinary? Why not intelligences from realms where time and space would be completely alien to them, even restrictive from their perspective? It all seems arbitrary really, so why not an infinite number of other dimensions? I think this is closer to the true nature of things. We get something beautiful, perfect already a universe becoming more permeable all the time - higher dimensions, wormholes, baby universes, superspace, and continuing beyond all that we can possibly understand right now. A universe without end, infinitely beyond our comprehemsion for all eternity - the lasting mystery that propels us forward, upwards, outwards, always becoming more free eternally. Sounds like sweet blissful perfection to me. So it's all just semantics really what we call the universe. That's why I like Bucky's fuller Universe.
We exist and perceive Universe within certain boundary conditions. However, we have also noticed that if you change your hyperspective those boundary conditions are broken or transcended. For example Universe becomes much larger, more interesting, bigger, better. This change in perspective is because of your increased intelligence. Measuring the universe simply as a result of our physical technologies is just one part of a larger expansive process going on.
From a psychological perspective our experience of Universe has been equally if not more profoundly changed and expanded since our ancestors were struggling with fire. Imagine further the gulf between our ontological space and that of an insect or small microbe. Now imagine looking beyond our current technology and psychology, to the future of post-human intelligence vastly exceeding our own. Who is to say that these other dimensions of space described by string theory and quantum gravity will not open up to us? Who is to say that parallel universes (which apparently are right next to us - less than a micrometer, just in a parallel dimension out of our 3d space) will not become known and experienced by our future post-human selves?
If David Bohm is correct about the implicate order, then there are an infinite number of dimensions of space, time and everything else, within us and all around us. All we need is believe in them and open ourselves up to them. It doesn't require any fancy technology, only a willingness inside you to go there. You'll soon learn that our physical bodies, space and time, and all that other stuff doesn't matter very much. It's just this tiny place we happen to be in at the moment. But the next moment, the one right after now, can become the first moment you are living in infinity. Many people who have taken sufficient amounts of psychedelics to have experienced these hyperdimesnions. The best part is we don't need drugs anymore to go to these places. The helped show many of us the way, but the way out is past the drug experience. I know this view has given me some flack here on this 'psychedelic' site, but I believe ultimately that drugs are a dead end. It's kind of like an old tool that has served us well, but is now no longer necessary. We cling to it because it gave us fond memories, but it no longer serves us. We have outgrown it. We have become one with these higher spaces, we are going there in dreams, in OBE's and NDE's. Death is an illusion.
The holographic theory provides a great map to understand and integrate this beautifully simple and inclusive worldview.
According to the Holographic theory - everything is an interconnected continuum, on up thru the highest of dimensions - accessible to us right here, right now. The universe bubble we see through our eyes, telescopes and microscopes are merely the arbitrary boundary conditions defined by a combination of our physical space-time body-apparatus, technological augmentation and psychological development.
The conclusion we can draw is that given sufficient intelligence increase we can access all time vectors, continuities, discontinuities, realities, hyper-realities - the akashic record itself.
Imagine a point in which your intelligence, a vast network and continuum of information, knowledge and wisdom, begins mapping this holographic universe using hyper-intelligent "semantic", hyper-synaesthetic meta-data, to use contemporary metaphors. Is higher intelligence already doing this with our most intimate moments now? Is this higher intelligence ourselves in "the future" living vicariously through our "past selves", having not reflected yet that is in fact a hyper-intelligence capable of transcending all of it? Better still, are such distinctions between our so-called "lowly" selves and this higher self a false dichotomy? Perhaps that is what all the great sages have been trying to tell us - we are already gods, are already this higher intelligence!
As I have written before (see Sans-Ceiling Hypothesis), time being an arbitrary boundary condition, then in the super-set of all that is there is no before or after. There was no beginning, and no end. Everything and nothing both exists simultaneously as a standing wave in eternity - all of it is consciousness - iterating, enfolding and unfolding upon itself infinitely in every direction. We are already this infinite intelligence - always have been always will be blissing out on the miracle of our own existence.
Some might say that this brings an experience of an infinite number of hells. Although all these random/hellish states exist as part of a ground state of consciousness, they are not necessarily self-conscious. I think it is reflective self-consciousnes, self realization as a co-creator of the universe that creates the necessary bootstrap (quantum observer looking upon itself) for transcending these hellish states and rising up into the highest of heavens.
Some Related Articles:
Before the Beginning Was the Void
God as Consciousness-Without-An-Object
What is Reality?
Levels of Samadhi
Exotic Civilizations: Beyond Kardachev
Super Free Will
Via PuzzlePieces, an article from The Telegraph, about our highly selective vision. I.e. we see what we're looking for, and humans often have a shocking ability to overlook even large factors if we're not paying attention to them.
In one experiment, people who were walking across a college campus were asked by a stranger for directions. During the resulting chat, two men carrying a wooden door passed between the stranger and the subjects. After the door went by, the subjects were asked if they had noticed anything change.And then there's this one:Half of those tested failed to notice that, as the door passed by, the stranger had been substituted with a man who was of different height, of different build and who sounded different. He was also wearing different clothes.
Despite the fact that the subjects had talked to the stranger for 10-15 seconds before the swap, half of them did not detect that, after the passing of the door, they had ended up speaking to a different person. This phenomenon, called change blindness, highlights how we see much less than we think we do.
Working with Christopher Chabris at Harvard University, Simons came up with another demonstration that has now become a classic, based on a videotape of a handful of people playing basketball. They played the tape to subjects and asked them to count the passes made by one of the teams.Part of the problem is that most of us seem limited to paying attention to a small number of thngs at the same time. The number I've learned is that we can pay conscious attention to at the most 5-7 different items at the same time, and even that is a stretch. If we're exposed to more items, we'll start dropping some of them from our awareness. Naturally, if we've been asked to pay attention to a certain set of items, it is the other ones that we're likely to drop.Around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though this hairy interloper had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera and thump her chest.
However, if people were simply asked to view the tape, they noticed the gorilla easily. The effect is so striking that some of them refused to accept they were looking at the same tape and thought that it was a different version of the video, one edited to include the ape.
Prof Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire recently repeated this experiment before a live audience in London (as part of his Theatre of Science, performed with the author Dr Simon Singh) and found that only 10 per cent of the 400 or so people who saw the show managed to spot the gorilla.
Really, that is very important. Not just for stage magic and fun psychology experiments. It is a key factor in our frequent inability to understand the world and make good decisions, and the ease with which we can be mislead.
If a certain problem space involves more than a handful of simultaneous inter-connected factors, we're in trouble. Chances are that a majority of people will refer to some simplified political or religious ideology or belief system, containing less than a handful of key points, rather than dealing with the actual complexity in front of them.
That provides both significant manipulative advantages and potential problems for any group that can organize themselves so as to deal with complex factors. If you want to manipulate, you just make sure the truth is too complex to understand for normal people, and you might get away with even the most horrendous activites, as long as they split up into enough independent pieces. And if you're actually trying to solve a problem that needs solving, with the best of intentions, and you could use some public support, but you can't explain the whole thing in a two-minute soundbite format with at the most 2 or 3 interlinked factors - people probably won't get it, and you might not get any support.
It is rather critically important that we become smarter. I.e. more able to make meaningful decisions about complex situations. That either means better information tools, better organization, or better thinking methods. The better tools might be a good place to start.
Back in the mid-80's I got hip to the latest craze at the time with Brain Machines, later popularized a bit by Michael Hutchison. A lot of these came out of the research of the late 50's and 60's with biofeedback, pioneered by people like Elmer and Alyce Green at the Menninger Foundation's Psychophysiology Laboratory. They hooked up electrodes to the bodies and brains of Yogi's from India, confirming their prodound powers of neurophysiological control (Leary's circuit 5). Brain machines differ from traditional biofeedback, in that they act directly on our physiology either through sending subtle electrical currents into the brain, or through light and sound machines. Not much came out of this field, and it seemed to disappear, but the basic science behind it is sound. The key to these devices is the process called entrainment. The idea is that with regular application of certain frequencies of sound and/or light you can train your brain to go voluntarily into different states. Here is a quick summary:
| State | Frequency range | State of mind |
|---|---|---|
| Delta | 0.5Hz - 4Hz | Deep sleep |
| Theta | 4Hz - 8Hz | Drowsiness (also first stage of sleep) |
| Alpha | 8Hz - 14Hz | Relaxed but alert |
| Beta | 14Hz - 30Hz | Highly alert and focused |
Well, it turns out this stuff has gone a bit open source. There are several programs available for download that generate these binarual beats to help you get into these different states. The one I just discovered and downloaded last night is Brainwave Generator
Not only can you download the program, but for a one-time fee of $40 you can download hundreds of open-sourced presets with names like Power Sleep, Daydreamer, LSD Stimulation, and Sexual Stimulation. I can't attest to the effectiveness of any of these, but in my experience the power is more subtle than most any psychoactive drug, so I don't see any danger to playing around with the different presets.
I haven't paid the $40 yet, so I'm still trying out the default presets. Some pople are claiming only a couple of minutes of listening to Too Much Coffee has the same effect of drinking a couple of cups.
There is even software available to record these generated sounds and turn them into .wav or .mp3 files so you can listen to them on your iPod. I first heard about all this in an article called, Hack Your Brain with an iPod
Message from Galactic Coincidence Control Office
Tune in, Turn On, Blast Off!
We are timespace vehicles with probability drives.
The probability fields in which we exist in and perceive may be nothing more than arbitrary creations of higher intelligence. Probabilities only expanding as fast as we are ready to navigate them.. As we begin communicating with higher intelligence we can begin to reprogram more of our own probability fields, creating our own synchronicities, luck and destiny. Those who figure this out will take us to the stars and beyond.
As we begin to reprogram and metaprogram our probabilistic realities we can accept only what we want to and reprogram the rest - transforming ourselves into higher intelligence.
Everything that exists in "our current universe", our consciousness has chosen out of the infinite possibilities available. Keep in mind there may be other intelligence's (even terrestrial) who have programmed you and "your universe" This may even include what you perceive as life, gravity, matter, time, space... Consider the possibility that these phenomena our probabilistic realities you have been programmed to operate in, purely arbitrary and nothing more.
Other entities almost certainly conceive their realities in terms of logical models of which we have the least intimation. I cannot help but wonder if perhaps "they" are already here. If the cosmobiological continuities which we seek are already "known", perhaps are controlled by... someone... something... some hyper-cybernetic energy structure - some cosmic information warp.
Seeding space with our phallic vehicles, we ourselves perhaps have already been seeded, are already embryonically becoming that creature who will enter the labial stargate in apotheosis to conceive yet another being.
We are forcing ourselves continually to mutate and reprogram our conceptions of the cosmos - in spite of psychocultural forces, we are creating a radically in-process, holistic open-system cosmology.
Read history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and religion along with mythology, science fiction and fantasy. Create your own mythology or religion. Make it historic scientific in foundation and science fiction fantasy in style. Sign on your best friend for the journey (the buddy system is a safety net).
The details of your shamanistic starship are up to you. Think for yourself and do it everyday. Strive for comprehensiveness - specialization is for insects. Each shaman must find hir own way. With practice, patience and endurance you will end up with a shamanistic starship capable of reliably taking you to worlds of beauty and religious depth that have only been available so far to humanity's great geniuses, artists and mystics. The possible destinations of your starship are infinite!
Welcome to the neopaleolithic where we poor monkeys get back to the unfinished business of re-creating our selves and going to the stars.
I cannot attest to the validity of these methods, but Wen Werger says you can increase your IQ from 20-40 points over a 2 or 3 month period. That sounds like a lot. An intelligence increase of that magnitude would change my whole life utterly. I have longed believed that all of our worlds problems could be solved with a sufficient level of individual and collective intelligence. Raw increases in intelligence would be helpful, but perhaps not enough if their are genetic roots to certain reasoning errors in the human species. In either case an increase of this magnitude if widely adopted could be astounding.
One of the exercises involves holding your breath underwater as long as you can repeatedly. From my experiences with long duration underwater diving, I can say my ability to think seems enhanced after a lot of diving. When I was in high school this guy taught me how to hold my breath underwater for 3-4 minutes without strain. The trick is to oxygenate your blood and tissues by deep and rapid breathing right before you go in. The other trick is to move your mouth and jaw around a lot when you come towards what seems like the end of your oxygen supply. This movement release pockets of oxygen trapped in different corners of your mouth and throat.
From the website:
1. For accumulating 20 hours of held-breath underwater swimming within 3 weeks from start to finish-- 10 or more points I.Q. gain; better span of attention; better span of awareness; better awareness of the interrelatedness of things and of ideas and/or perceptions; finding yourself way better at winning arguments or disputes! (20 or so seconds to 3 minutes at a time underwater, stretching the time a little each dip but remaining well within the bounds of comfort and safety - be sure someone with you there is aware of what you are doing. By the procedure we describe herein, you must be truly underwater, not just dipping your face in or just holding your breath, because the brain-circulation enhancement induced by the marine diving response - common to all mammals - is unexpectedly powerful in this combination of effects.)
The other procedure--
2. Accumulate at least 30 hours, 5-20 minutes at a time, of true Image Streaming as directed herein, and you will gain at least 20 points "I.Q." Your language skills will jump noticeably, contributing to 100 points or greater gain overall in such standardized tests as the G.R.E. (assuming you aren't already close to the test's ceiling -- see below). Your gain in more numinous aspects will be even more striking. This must be - or rapidly become - true Image Streaming as described herein, using a tape recorder or a live person listening.
At this time we do not know whether the gains from following both procedures together would be merely additive, or whether they will be positively synergistic. Pending formal measurement studies, our expectation is the latter. At least we know that either program by itself will, by itself, provide the benefits cited for it, apparently permanently.
Of course we realize that the dollar-value refund on this booklet means little to you compared with the value of your time, effort and attention in pursuing either of these procedures. There is no way we could refund those greater values. Happily, no refund will be needed - instead, you will find yourself soon able to accomplish far more of what you've been doing, far better, faster and further. Your investment in time, effort and attention will be quickly repaid many times over and then go on as a "dividend income" for the rest of your life.
By Michael Anissimov from original article at Accelerating Future.
Step 1: Seeking Peak Experiences
Ever have a moment in your life that was just so great that you felt like jumping for joy, or crying in happiness? Many claim that these are the moments that make life worth living. The moment you finish writing a book, receiving a promotion, or sharing an intimate moment with someone special. How many "typical" days would you give for a single moment like that? Some might say 1, others 10, others even 100. Think about that - in a usual day, we're conscious for around 14 hours. Let's be conservative and suggest that the average John Doe would trade 5 typical days in exchange for a peak experience that lasts 5 minutes. The time ratio is about 1000:1, but many would still prefer the peak experience over the same old stuff.
This would imply that most people value life not only for the length of time they experience, but for the special moments that, as I mentioned earlier, "make life worth living". As the stereotypical quote goes, "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." Ethicists sometimes quantify such satisfaction as "utility" for the sake of thought experiments; we might say that each 5 minute peak experience is worth a thousand utility points, or "utiles". Correspondingly, each 5 days of typical activity would also count as roughly a thousand utiles, because one would trade one for the other. Although it may makesome of us uncomfortable to quantify utility, our brain is unconsciously performing computations accessing the potential utility of choices all the time,and the model is incredibly useful in the psychology of human decision makingand the field of ethics.
Following is an example of a typical human's lifelong utility trajectory. It plots utile-moments (u) against time (t). Let's say that the maximum u value reached is around 200 utiles/minute, or 1000 utiles for the 5 minute peak experience described above. For the sake of simplicitly, let's assume about 100 5-minute peak experiences per lifetime, and assume no other such experiences. Since peak experiences are so fun to have, much of the activity on "typical" days probably entails setting the groundwork for these experiences to happen; ensuring that one does not starve and so on.
The curve rises as the agent has a series of interesting new experiences, plateaus throughout most of adulthood, and subtly falls off in later years, until death is finally reached. It punctuates through peaks and valleys. Some might strongly associate utility with wealth or frequency of sexual activity, others might not.
Total utility: around 6,000,000 utiles, if we figure a lifespan of 80.
Step 2: Avoiding Premature Death
In life there is sometimes the danger of death. Death implies an immediate dropoff to the utility curve, a profoundly negative event. That's why people say stuff like "I'm too young to die!", or "I can't stop fighting, I have so much to live for". Humans despise death, because death is almost always a bad thing morally. People are willing to go out of their way to avoid it, and rightly so.
Let's introduce another aspect into the model. Say event X occuring at the
20-year mark has a probability 10% of eliminating all future experiences, which adds up to a risk of 4,000,000 utiles. In emotional terms, this would translate into arguments like those quoted above. There are some things that people would be willing to sacrifice those future experiences for. Just not too many of them. Death is a horrible thing if it stands in the way of living a fulfilling life. Therefore, it seems like a good idea to take actions to avoid event X if at all possible. Actions and thoughts leading to the avoidance of X have high utility; there are desirable in the same way that setting the groundwork for the occurrence of a peak experience is desirable. That's why we are so grateful when someone saves our life, and why we never drive under the influence after that one nearly fatal car accident.
The two possible trajectories after the decision instance are represented by red and blue lines. If we die, experienced utility drops to zero immediately. If we survive, it's business as usual. The purple line represents the curve before it splits.
Total utility of blue trajectory: same as above, around 6,000,000
utiles.
Total utility of red trajectory: around 2,000,000 utiles. Ouch!
I'm sure you can imagine the utility trajectories for events such as
rehabilitating illness, serious injury, and so on. These things really suck, so
people devote a lot of effort to avoiding them, which is clearly a good thing.
Step 3: Life Extension
It has been shown scientifically that regular cigarette smoking can lead to a shorter life, either due to an increased probability of contracting lung cancer or for some other reason. It has also been shown that good nutrition, good genes, or regular exercise all contribute to longer lifespan. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the average human lifespan was around 20, today it's four times longer; 80. Isn't that cool?
We're able to have a lot more interesting experiences per typical human life because our average lifespan has increased so greatly. This leads us to the notion that extending one's lifespan may be a worthy focus, a convenient path to increasing one's total experienced utility. We don't appreciate how lucky we are to live 80 years rather than a mere 20. Our entire culture has molded to the longer lifespans; it's now considered normal to live such long lives, so our default frame of reference tends to settle there. We should realize how spoiled we are relative to our ancestors, but also how transient and shallow our lives are from the perspective of a person with much longer life or more fulfilling experiences.
Say we want to add 5 years on to the end of our life by quitting cigarettes. This would imply that we value long life more than the short-term pleasure of a nicotine buzz. We may consider the added experiences and learning we could have as a result of this wise decision. We will have displayed the maturity to choose long-term benefits over short-term ones; some people might call this wisdom. I'm sure you can visualize the various utility trajectories and the desirability of choosing between them, but here is a picture anyway:
Here's where I start talking about potential sources of utility you might not
have heard of before.
Say that I have a few friends who offer to preserve the physical structure of my body in a deep freeze as soon as possible after my brain activity stops, and keep it that way until medical science advances to the point of being able to revive me safely. Let's say your friends happen to be employees of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, and they've been doing these cryonic suspensions for years. Their services are relatively cheap - life insurance pays for the suspension as long as you pay the bills while you are alive.
There are a series of risks - the cryonics company could go out of business, nuclear war might occur, your brain decay might be too severe to reverse, and so on. But there is potentially an immense benefit. If a civilization has the technology and desire to revive a freshly preserved frozen body, then this same civilization probably has a great degree of control over biological processes in general. Aging occurs in humans because ordinary biological processes produce byproducts that the body fails to remove completely. So they build up in the body, causing decay. Keep in mind that most byproducts are removed, only a small percentage of the total remains. But that is enough to cause aging. Stopping aging is a matter of amplifying the human ability to self-regenerate - that is all. There is no mysterious mechanism that forces all organisms to perish at a certain age in order to comply with some Cosmic Order. Ensure that the byproducts of our biology are contained and removed, or not produced in the first place, and you have cured aging.
So we are faced with the decision posed to us by our friends, "would you like to sign up for cryonics, or not?" Let's say we're being extremely conservative, and only estimate the likelihood of a successful future revival at 0.1%. Let's say furthermore that our estimate of successful elimination of aging after the initial revival is only 10%, remaining conservative. But if revival and the aging cure are both successful, then let's say we figure our lifespan could be as long as 10,000 years, at which point we expect some random cosmic accident or war will wipe us out. Even though the civilization we are talking about probably has extensive control over all biological processes and extremely advanced technology, let's say our quality of life doesn't go much further above that which we experienced during our prime - a steady fluctuation of peak experiences and typical days. We also assume that one doesn't get bored during those ten thousand years, which shouldn't be too hard if the civilization is developing technologically and has plenty of new stuff to do. Many sci-fi, anime, and fantasy characters have lifespans on this scale, and they seem to be doing fine, so how hard could it be, right?
Character: Washu
Occupation: mad scientist
Age: over 10,000
Conclusion: 10,000 years is not so bad. In the future, it will be normal. The main challenge is aging.
So, what kind of utility function might a successful cryonics patient have?
Maybe something like that shown below. The curve dips down to zero when the patient is frozen solid, and quickly jumps back up after revival. (The squiggy line on the time axis implies that a ten thousand years passes during that time.)
Total utility of complete trajectory: a whopping 750 million! Much
more impressive than a mere 6 million.
From the perspective of the pre-cryonics human being, experiencing the huge 10,000-year future lifespan is not certain. As we said; the estimation of successful revival is only 0.1%, and the estimation of an aging cure is 10%. Combine these, and we get an aggregated probability estimate of 0.01% that the whole thing will work at all. So we divide the expected utility of the outcome, 744 million utiles, by our probability estimate, 0.01%. The result is 74,400 utiles only. But what if paying our life insurance isn't that big of a dea to us, and the opportunity cost of the lost money only works out to 10,000 utiles or so? In that case, it would make sense to buy life insurance and sign up for cryonics - the expected utility exceeds the projected cost!
If the scenario matches that described above:
Total utility of "yes" answer: 6,074,000 utiles.
Total utility of "no" answer: 5,990,000 utiles.
Many people have made that decision. They tend to be well educated, successful, scientifically literate, and intelligent. Here is a short list by Ralph Merkle, plus a longer study of attitudes toward cryonics by W. Scott Badger. If our estimate of the probability of success goes up from 0.1%, the utility trajectories diverge even farther, and saying "yes" to cryonics seems to be an extremely compelling choice. The prospect of cryonics can contain a massive amount of expected positive utility.
Step 4: Extending Life for Everyone, Not Just Yourself
Stuff like cryonic suspension, regular exercise, good health, and so on, only apply to you. Other people don't benefit from these practices. Some of us care about humanity as a whole rather than just ourselves, our nation, or our clique, so we devote effort to technologies with the potential to grant more life to wide numbers of people. For example, respected Cambridge biogerontologist and co-founder of the Methuselah Mouse Prize, Aubrey de Grey, would like to extend the healthy human lifespan an order of magnitude or more beyond its current limits within the next twenty to fourty years. Yes, this is a serious strategy for workable anti-aging. He explains fully on his website, please feel free to read it thoroughly. From his proposed Institute outline, de Grey seems to be suggesting that a cure for human aging may come with a price tag of only $10-100m. Not so bad for the benefits, huh?
Let's say that you continue experiencing 1,000 utiles per 5 days of normal living, but also experience an additional 1 utile per 5 days for every 1,000 people whose lives are extended when they would have otherwise been snuffed out at the arbitrary age of 80 or whatever. "Added years" that people only get to experience as a result of this extreme life extension. If you feel that the success of de Grey's Institute will lead to an anti-aging therapy available to millions within the first decade of its release and billions within the third with a probability of, say, 25%, then contributing to this effort would be well worth the time and money. Since you care about each individual person that gets to experience the benefits of added life, it means a lot to you to raise the probability that the necessary anti-aging technology is widely available before they fall to the injustices of aging and premature death.
On his website, Aubrey mentions lifespans that exceed 5000 years. So, if the Institute is successful, then let's assume that translates into around five million people with five-millenia lifespans shortly after the technology is invented, around five hundred million people with lifespans of that length a decade after, and five billion people two decades after. Considering the fast global adoption of techologies such as the Internet and cell phones, this distribution pattern seems extremely conservative. People would surely be willing to focus on buying a drug that extends one's lifespan to 5000 healthy years or more. Possibly it could be a one-time thing, or "booster shots" might be required every few decades for negligible cost.
So, you find yourself with a million dollars. You can either buy a mansion or contribute the money to aging research. Your assumptons are roughly in line with those outlined above; you have examined Aubrey de Grey's arguments in detail and regard them as valid. The lives of other human beings are important to you and you feel satisfaction when their lives are extended. You want to compute the expected utility of both outcomes; how does the math work out?
So, the resulting utility graph is a bit more complicated:
Total expected utility of donation: massive; billions of utiles or more.
Total expected utility of a mansion: not nearly as much.
Utility goes up more and more as additional lives are saved. This graph assumes that one considers the lives of all those living after his or her life to be meaningless. In real life, people often feel otherwise. The fuzziness of to the right side of the graph represents our uncertainty about the long-term consequences - 5,000 years may turn out to be a ridiculously low estimate, and our real lifespans may lie in the realm of the millions or even billions - who knows! If there are no huge cosmic disasters, no war, and you can repair yourself or back up your memories at a whim, who's to say that your lifespan won't be as long as that of the universe?
You'll also notice that the utility axis has been expanded in the upward direction. That's because contributing to the extended life of millions or billions of people is (presumably) a bigger deal than only extending your own life. Engineering the human brain to better experience pleasure may be another may to increase total utility, or perhaps through enhancing our intelligence, empathy, creativity, and so on. These speculations are the province of transhumanism. Feel free to read up on the topic if you're interested in learning more. See also the question on our FAQ, "wouldn't it be boring to live forever in the perfect world?"
Step 5: The Greatest Threat to Life - Existential Risk
The value of contributing to Aubrey de Grey's anti-aging project assumes that there continues to be a world around for people's lives to be extended. But if we nuke ourselves out of existence in 2010, then what? The probability of human extinction is the gateway function through which all efforts toward life extension must inevitably pass, including cryonics, biogerontology, and nanomedicine. They are all useless if we blow ourselves up. At this point one observes that there are many working toward life extension, but few focused on explicitly preventing terminal global disaster. Such huge risks sound like fairy tales rather than real threats - because we have never seen them happen before, we underestimate the probability of their occurrence. An existential disaster has not yet occurred on this planet.
The risks worth worrying about are not pollution, asteroid impact, or alien invasion - the ones you see dramaticized in movies - these events are all either very gradual or improbable. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom warns us of existential risks, "...where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential." Bostrom continues, "Existential risks are distinct from global endurable risks. Examples of the latter kind include: threats to the biodiversity of Earth’s ecosphere, moderate global warming, global economic recessions (even major ones), and possibly stifling cultural or religious eras such as the “dark ages”, even if they encompass the whole global community, provided they are transitory." The four main risks we know about so far are summarized by the following, in ascending order of probability and severity over the course of the next 30 years:
Biological. More specifically, a genetically engineered supervirus. Bostrom writes, "With the fabulous advances in genetic technology currently taking place, it may become possible for a tyrant, terrorist, or lunatic to create a doomsday virus, an organism that combines long latency with high virulence and mortality." There are several factors necessary for a virus to be a risk. The first is the presence of biologists with the knowledge necessary to genetically engineer a new virus of any sort. The second is access to the expensive machinery required for synthesis. Third is specific knowledge of viral genetic engineering. Fourth is a weaponization strategy and a delivery mechanism. These are nontrivial barriers, thankfully.
Nuclear. A traditional nuclear war could still break out, although it would be unlikely to result in our ultimate demise, it could drastically curtail our potential and set us back thousands or even millions of years technologically and ethically. Bostrom mentions that the US and Russia still have huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Miniaturization technology, along with improve manufacturing technologies, could make it possible to mass produce nuclear weapons for easy delivery should an escalating arms race lead to that. As rogue nations begin to acquire the technology for nuclear strikes, powerful nations will feel increasingly edgy.
Nanotechnological. The Transhumanist FAQ reads, "Molecular nanotechnology is an anticipated manufacturing technology that will make it possible to build complex three-dimensional structures to atomic specification using chemical reactions directed by nonbiological machinery. "Because nanomachines could be self-replicating or at least auto-productive, the technology and its products could proliferate very rapidly. Because nanotechnology could theoretically be used to create any chemically stable object, the potential for abuse is massive. Nanotechnology could be used to manufacture large weapons or other oppressive apparatus in mere hours; the only limitations are raw materials, management, software, and heat dissipation."
Human-indifferent superintelligence. In the near future, humanity will gain the technological capability to create forms of intelligence radically different than our own. Artificial Intelligences could be implemented on superfast transistors instead of slow biological neurons, and eventually gain the intellectual ability to fabricate new hardware and reprogram their source code. Such an intelligence could engage in "recursive self-improvement" - improving its own intelligence, then directing that intelligence towards further intelligence improvements. Such a process could lead far beyond our current level of intelligence in a relatively short time. We would be helpless to fight against such an intelligence if it did not value our continuation.
So let's say I have another million dollars to spend. My last million dollars went to Aubrey de Grey's Methuselah Mouse Prize, for a grand total of billions of expected utiles. But wait - I forgot to factor in the probability that humanity will be destroyed before the positive effects of life extension are borne out. Even if my estimated probability of existential risk is very low, it is still rational to focus on addressing the risk because my whole enterprise would be ruined if disaster is not averted. If we value the prospect of all the future lives that could be enjoyed if we pass beyond the threshold of risk - possibly quadrillions or more, if we expand into the cosmos, then we will deeply value minimizing the probability of existential risk above all other considerations.
If my million dollars can avert the chance of existential disaster by, say, 0.0001%, then the expected utility of this action relative to the expected utility of life extension advocacy is shocking. That's 0.0001% of the utility of quadrillions or more humans, transhumans, and posthumans leading fulfilling lives. I'll spare the reader from working out the math and utility curves - I'm sure you can imagine them. So, why is it that people tend to devote more resources to life extension than risk prevention? The follow includes my guesses, feel free to tell
me if you disagree:
Those are my guesses. Immortalists with objections are free to send in their arguments, and I will post them here if they are especially strong. As far as I can tell however, the predicted utility of lowering the likelihood of existential risk outclasses any life extension effort I can imagine.
I cannot emphasize this enough. If a existential disaster occurs, not only will the possibilities of extreme life extension, sophisticated nanotechnology, intelligence enhancement, and space expansion never bear fruit, but everyone will be dead, never to come back. This would be awful. Because the we have so much to lose, existential risk is worth worrying about even if our estimated probability of occurrence is extremely low.
It is not the funding of life extension research projects that immortalists should be focusing on. It should be projects that decrease the risk of existential risk. By default, once the probability of existential risk is minimized, life extension technologies will be developed and applied. There are powerful economic and social imperatives in that direction, but few towards risk management. Existential risk creates a "loafer problem" - we always expect someone else to do it. I assert that this is a dangerous strategy and should be discarded in favor of making prevention of such risks a central focus.
Organizations explicitly working to prevent existential risk:
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
Advanced nanotechnology can build machines that are thousands of times more powerful—and hundreds of times cheaper—than today's devices. The humanitarian potential is enormous; so is the potential for misuse. The vision of CRN is a world in which nanotechnology is widely used for productive and beneficial purposes, and where malicious uses are limited by effective administration of the technology. An important organization doing genuinely valuable, positive work.
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is a nonprofit corporation dedicated solely to the technological creation of greater-than-human intelligence. The Singularity Institute sees no reason why we won't be able to eventually build such intelligences - it basically burns down to an engineering problem. If the first greater-than-human intelligence were a benevolent one, it could use its intelligence to further improve its own intelligence, the intelligence of human beings, and assist others in the pursuit of humanitarian causes.
Thank you for your attention!
Michael Anissimov
In a comment to a previoius post, Michael Anissimov mentioned a number of pervasive errors in reasoning that are common to practically all human beings. Well, I know about that kind of thinking fallacies, but I didn't know all the "official" terms. In psychological research, a number of these fallacies have been given names, and been studied in some depth.
Situations in which people assess the frequency of a class or the probability of an event by the ease with which instances or occurrences can be brought to mind.
People inadvertently assume that readily-available instances, examples or images represent unbiased estimates of statistical probabilities.
E.g. if you've mainly been around a certain type of people, you easily get to believe they represent a typical cross-section of the population. At least, your estimates of various characteristics and beliefs will be biased towards the profile of the people you know. "To a hammer, everything is a nail".
When two events can occur separately or together, the conjunction, where they overlap, cannot be more likely than the likelihood of either of the two individual events. However, people forget this and ascribe a higher likelihood to combination events, erroneously associating quantity of events with quantity of probability.
Here's an example:
Bill is 34 years old. He is intelligent, but unimaginative, compulsive and generally lifeless. In school, he was strong in mathematics but weak in social studies and humanities.
Which statement is more probable:
A. Bill is an accountant that plays jazz for a hobby, or
B. Bill plays jazz for a hobby?
92% of people in a survey answered A. Which is completely wrong. See answer
Research has shown that people find it very difficult to decide what information is necessary in order to test the truth of an abstract logical reasoning problem. The Wason Selection Task is often used to examine this issue.
A typical experiment using the Wason Selection Task will present some rule, and ask subjects to see if the rule is being violated. Consider the rule: If a card has a D on one side, it has a 3 on the other side. Subjects are aware that on the particular set of cards, each one has a letter on one side and a number on the other side. Four cards are shown, such as those below:
Very few people can correctly pick the two cards to turn over to verify the rule. The correct cards are D and 7; most likely, you picked D and 3. Seeing what is on the reverse of the 7 card can lead to falsifying the rule if a D shows up. Seeing what is on the reverse of the 3 card cannot falsify the rule. It can confirm the rule, but not falsify it.
Various theories based on Amos Tversky's research, also related to availability bias, representativeness bias and anchoring.
Support Theory has an empirical base of results showing that different descriptions of the same event often produce different subjective probability estimates. It explains these results in terms of subjective evaluations of supporting evidence. [...]
According to the ‘framing effect’ peoples’ understanding of a problem is profoundly influenced by how the problem is presented.
For example, support for an option seems to increases the more that the option is broken down into smaller components. And naturally, if an option is particularly highlighted (anchored), people would tend to choose that over others, whether it is logical or probable or not.
Another interesting tidbit:
"This framework questioned the assumption of "homo oeconomicus", that is, of human beings motivated by self interest and capable of rational decision making behavior."
Masses of people are so easy to mislead (advertising, politics, media) that there's certainly no guarantee that they'll make rational decisions, which assumption is the basis for our economic system.
People tend to judge the probability of an event by finding a ‘comparable known’ event and assuming that the probabilities will be similar.
As a part of creating meaning from what we experience, we need to classify things. If something does not fit exactly into a known category, we will approximate with the nearest class available.
Overall, the primary fallacy is in assuming that similarity in one aspect leads to similarity in other aspects.
The gambler’s fallacy, the belief in runs of good and bad luck can be explained by the representativeness heuristic.
People will also ‘force’ statistical arrangements to represent their beliefs about them, for example a set of random numbers will be carefully mixed up so no similar numbers are near one another.
Examples:
If I meet someone with a laid back attitude and long hair, I might assume they are Californian, whereas someone who is very polite but rigid may be assumed to be English.
People will often assume that a random sequence in a lottery is more likely than a arithmetic sequence of numbers.
If I meet three people from a company and they are all aggressive, I will assume that the company has an aggressive culture and that most other people from that firm will also be aggressive.
There are a lot more theories and terms and models, of course. See, for example, this list of psychological theories, explained in simple terms.
Obviously, the human mind isn't overly suited for making logical decisions, or for correctly estimating the probability of events. It might seem a bit surprising that we even manage to keep ourselves alive and accomplish complicated technological feats. It explains at least why we often make decisions that don't serve us, and why we easily elect the wrong people to lead us. Of course it helps greatly if we can stay conscious of the various ways we are likely to fool ourselves, so we can avoid them, as much as possible, when we're trying to make important decisions.
And, of course, since we can even study it and talk about it, of course we can also be conscious of it and overcome it to some degree. Is human thinking so unreliable that we would have to develop a Friendly AI who can take over and run things for us so we don't destroy ourselves? Then how on earth can we be trusted to get that done right? It can get a bit circular. What makes the difference is our consciousness, our ability to be aware, also of our own shortcomings.
Related:
Stephen's Guide to Logical Fallacies.
"The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." - Eden Philpotts.
Thanks Michael)
By Michael Anissimov of Accelerating Future.
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
- J. Krishnamurti, "Freedom from the Known"
Some philosophers have asserted that "altruism" does not truly exist, that kind people only help others because they enjoy doing it, so therefore they are ultimately doing it only for themselves. Others, such as myself, argue that this isn't how altruism should be interpreted; that having a decision process is not the same as a being having a self-centered decision process. This is called the "hedonism debate" and it has probably been argued since prehistoric times.
Gandhi got what he wanted, that is, helping others. The fact that he was working towards what he personally wanted does not mean that we should regard him as selfish. Thought experiment: should a being whose decision process approximated a democratic consensus be considered "selfish"? I'm talking about a being whose decisions are actually made based on the consensus vote of some group, not because the group is telling the being how to behave, but because the being is built to approximate democratic opinions. It has brainware that just does that. The simplest possible answer (think Occam's razor) to the question of "how is this creature behaving?" is not "selfishly, because it's brain is just channeling its own volitional urges", but "democratically, because this being was specifically created to approximate democratic actions". You can't look at an axe used to chop down trees every day and say "this axe is made out of wood and metal, and the use of metal and wood I'm most familiar with is pans and plates, so this axe must be used for cooking and eating". I mean, you can, but it's silly.
In recent times, the hedonism debate is being put in a new light. This comes from two factors. First is the potential for building new minds from scratch - AIs or new bio-beings, doesn't matter. Just as some god could theoretically have created the entire world a mere five minutes ago, simply implanting us with all our memories, some advanced alien race could have done the same, building us up, cell by cell, memories included. One day humanity will have the ability to create bodies and minds from raw materials. The second factor is the eventual possibility of the creation of minds that are smarter than humans, which does not seem to be avoidable in the long run. There is no law that states an intelligence can't build another intelligence smarter than itself, as long as it knows something about the fundamental principles underlying intelligence. Smarter-than-human intelligence could further upgrade itself and create still-smarter intelligence, opening up the possibility for a massive intelligence explosion. It could start with an "AI" (I use the quotes because the way that "AI" is always portrayed in fiction is laughably unrealistic) or with a human being that was cybernetically or neurologically enhanced.
These two new variables frame the hedonism debate in a whole new way. If high altruists really can't exist, then a smarter-than-human intelligence, who could turn its intelligence towards fooling humans or developing super-advanced technology, could easily murder all the humans on Earth; by accident, as part of a larger plan, or simply on a whim. Please do not visualize a noble rebel group of humans fighting back against a transhuman intelligence, a la The Matrix. In the real world, the AIs never would have needed humans as a power source to begin with. Even if they did, they could easily create the system in such a way that escape was totally, completely impossible. Even if that were not possible, any escapees could be crushed practically instantaneously; transhumans will be able to think and move at rates billions or trillions of times faster than us slow biological humans. Our bodies and minds move at a crawl in comparison to what is physically possible, a huge space of better designs. We just haven't had the intelligence or technology to reach out to that space just yet.
If high altruism is possible, then the creation of robustly altruistic transhuman intelligence could be considered a better event than you winning a trillion dollars. That's because transhuman intelligence would be genuinely smarter than us, and genuinely better at coming up with ways to eliminate poverty, suffering, disease, death, annoyance, and all other problems that intelligence can be applied to. It might be able to wipe these problems out entirely, it might not, but either way, it would be a huge event. If high altruism isn't possible, then we might expect the first transhuman intelligence to ignore us and/or kill us. Deliberate malice wouldn't be necessary for human extinction; transhumans could decide that atmospheric oxygen was getting in their way and move it somewhere else, or decide that they want to take apart the Earth to create a particle accelerator with the circumference of Mercury's orbit. And all of this might happen very quickly, considering that transhuman intelligences could be thinking with brain components billions of times faster than biological neurons, and acting with airborne nanotechnology, billions of times faster and stronger than human hands or weapons.
In anticipation of the emergence of smarter-than-human intelligence, and for other reasons, some of us have decided to advocate altruism to the fullest extent. If the starting conditions and moral philosophy of the first transhuman intelligence are at all relevant to the ultimate outcome of the "intelligence explosion", then the morals of the people that create or become the first transhuman intelligence(s) will be important. Since we want to see altruistic transhuman intelligence rather than the alternative, we are advocating positive morals.
In the longer term, what we need for mere humans to exist safely alongside transhuman intelligences is a sort of truce among all intelligence - especially the intelligences with the most power - otherwise death could be a threat forever. We don't want death to be a threat; we eventually want to lower the nonconsensual death rate to zero if possible. You can think of this as a sort of argument from one member of a council of say, 7 cybernetically enhanced humans, all with different ideas about morality, discussing how to approach the world after they realize they could probably have great influence over it if they wanted to. Would they be willing to make certain sacrifices, put aside their egos, in order to ensure that all the citizens of Earth could live in relative safety and peace for an indefinite length of time? If I were one of those special people, I sure would.
The point is that the creation of transhuman intelligence should be for the entire Earth, and thinking in terms of trying to bend the benefits towards yourself or your little group is the greatest possible example of unjust theft. Transhuman intelligence should not be viewed as a piece of meat we can just grab at. Disputes among transhuman intelligences could have the potential to turn into the worst humanitarian disasters the world could ever see, such as mass torture or extermination of quadrillions of unique sentiences. A single grain of sand could become a vessel of the worst imaginable tortures. This is because our current theories of intelligence seem to allow for "uploading" - that is, creating sentient beings as software programs in computers that actually have awareness, intelligence, and so on. If uploading is possible, then the amount of intelligence one could create would depend on how much computing power they could fit into a given unit of space. Even if uploading isn't possible, transhuman intelligence could still theoretically accomplish a lot of evil or a lot of good. The stakes are very high. The only morally acceptable option is to advocate that the benefits of the Singularity be distributed fairly among all sentients present. Otherwise you are stealing.
All the features of the world we find ourselves embedded in - human nature, terrestrial life, a reality made up of atoms, life, death, reproduction, etc - are roughly arbitrary. We don't know exactly why they're there and we didn't choose them. The situation was so confusing that for thousands of years we've had to pretend as if an unimaginably powerful old man created it all. (And many are still pretending.) People are designed (by evolution) to disturb and hurt each other simply by acting in their own best interests. That is a horrible system. We need to rearrange the system in such a way that people can act in their own best interests and nobody ever gets hurt or disturbed. Maybe we will do this by making compromises, treaties, physically revising our cognitive interpretations of disturbance or hurt, creating the perfect "guardian angel system", I'm not really sure. If I were smarter, I might have a better idea of which solution would benefit everyone the most. That's what smarter-than-human intelligence is all about.
Why do people read books, play video games, and live in their own mental worlds all the time? Because the mental worlds we imagine and create for each other are sometimes better than the actual physical world - we all know it. Why is this? Why weren't we born into worlds that were actually the best? Probably because we live in one of the most likely universes for observers to be born into, not necessarily the best. If it turns out that we can create baby universes, then I would want as many of them as possible to contain sentiences enjoying themselves, and not at each other's expense. I believe massive numbers of such universes are physically possible and more desirable than randomly generated universes, or universes containing people suffering. The creation of such "Heaven Universes" could have massive intrinsic value. We'd be like God, except we'd actually be benevolent. (The idea of anyone actually deserving eternal suffering, or any suffering at all except in the service of minimizing overall suffering, is appalling.)
We sometimes forget - there is more than enough matter in this universe for everyone to be maximally enjoying themselves all the time, for the rest of eternity, as long as we make the right decisions and never define "maximal enjoyment" as "having more than rival X". All we need to do is take that step, together, and we could very well become happy and satisfied forever. The "I need to have more than everybody else" mentality is a direct result from evolving in a zero-sum environment with scarce resources, where someone else succeeding often means you and your genes losing. Hopefully we will make a glorious transition from a largely "zero-sum" environment, the world of human intelligences, to a "positive-sum" environment, the world of transhuman and human intelligences coexisting, where everyone can do what they want, within certain consensus boundaries, forever and ever until the end of time. If any "competition" exists, it could be for the sake of fun or progress alone, and will never be coupled together with the negative emotions so typical of evolved creatures. We could literally engineer our brains so that we'd be happy and satisfied almost all the time, plus normal and sane too. (We don't require sadness to appreciate happiness anymore than we require slavery to appreciate freedom.)
In the past, sometimes, yes, victory over someone else or personal gain have often correlated with genuine progress, but progress doesn't need to work this way forever. The process of evolution has taken billions or trillions of casualties, (depending on whether you think primates, animals, etc. are sentient) and tortured the same number for very long durations of time. Biological evolution, basically, is evil. To carry the principles of evolution and selfishness with us over into a superintelligent society would be analogous to porting the minds of bacteria into an entire civilization of human beings, only to carry out bacterial goals and probably bite one another completely to death. Disgusting and horrible, neh? To assume that transhuman intelligences won't be capable of progressing and advancing without the use of dischord or fighting is to underestimate their potential capabilities.
Maybe our standards suggest that we're reaching for some sort of altruism that is physically impossible. We aren't - the best form of altruism possible within the constraints of physical law will have to do. I believe that when we can engineer minds with complete access to their own source code, with altruistic philosophies, then we will have created minds that are almost completely trustworthy. Whether such intelligences are physically possible is still not entirely certain, but there is evidence that they very well could be. If they are, then such intelligences wouldn't change their philosophies due to sudden events, as humans sometimes do; they could be willingly "stuck" as altruists forever. Our current understanding of intelligences suggests that such minds could be possible, although they would clearly be unhumanlike. They would be humane rather than human.
In evolution, molecules "just happened" to learn how to replicate themselves, and meta-arrangements of molecules "just happened" to begin to regulate their own temperatures, reproduce more rapidly, and mix genetic codes for more durable meta-arrangements, which "just happened" to take actions beneficial for one another, which, universe willing, will "just happen" to create a world where nonconsensual suffering, ignorance, and death are abolished. If this occurs, it will be largely thanks to high altruism, and high intelligence implementing that altruism.
The first person to introduce the concept of Future Shock was Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book, Future Shock. The main argument is that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change will leave them disconnected, suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" - future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of future shock.
A few years earlier, Gordon Moore in his now famous paper (PDF) introduced the idea that would eventually be called Moore’s Law, that states that the speed and density of microprocessor design will follow an exponential curve. This was at a time when computers had barely had any impact on society, nearly 20 years before PC’s made hardly a dent on the economic landscape. 30 years later we saw the explosion of the Internet into the world. Now 40 years later, microprocessors speed is doubling almost every year, and its effects are extraordinary. Not a day goes buy now when some scientific or technological advance isn’t hitting the front pages. As Ray Kurzweil suggest with his Law of Accelerating Returns, microprocessor are such an integrated part of our lives of economic progress, that now society too is caught up in this accelerating change, suggesting that we could see as much change in the next 25 years, as we saw in the last 10,000 years combined!
As one of the leading thinkers on the singularity, Eliezer Yudkowsky is someone accustomed to thinking about extremes of future technological change and advancement. After having many wide ranging discussions with futurists of all stripes, he noticed that certain technological implications can be too “far out” or shocking to some groups more than others. So he came up with what he calls Future Shock Levels or the level that different people find themselves in terms of their concept of the future, and what they are willing to consider, or which is too futuristic or even shocking for them.
Shock Level 0
Degree of Change: Flat.
Technologies: Same as today, maybe more TV channels, bigger cars or TV's.
The legendary average person is comfortable with modern technology - not so much the frontiers of modern technology, but the technology used in everyday life. Most people, TV anchors, journalists, politicians.
For people at this level, the future is seen as pretty much the same as it is today. If you could chart their concept of the future on a graph, you would see change reaching a plateau today and leveling off from here on out. Almost every economic and political paper about the future I’ve read falls into this category. When they discuss wide ranging implications of their policy decisions, there is hardly any mention of technological change at all, and only in the most mundane ways with concepts of Level 1 being described as something to be afraid of, with dangerous out-of-control implications. The current climate of fear over cloning and stem-cell therapy falls into this level.
Shock Level 1
Degree of Change: Logarithmic, then hitting a relative plateau in a decade or two.
Technologies: Virtual reality, living to a hundred, e-commerce, hydrogen economy, ubiquitous computing, stem-cell cloning, minor genetic improvements.
At this level you will find the majority of futurists and future oriented publications. Modern technological frontiers as depicted in Wired Magazine and books like Future Shock and Bill Gates, The Road Ahead. Included in this group are most scientists, novelty-seekers, early-adopters, programmers and technophiles.
Placed on a chart, future progress will continue upwards in a logarithmic fashion, with each year bringing the same amount of change as last year. Eventually this incremental change will lead to people living to a hundred, and optimistically in a society with clean energy, general economic prosperity, and conservative space exploration scenarios.
In my experience most of the people described above think about the future in relatively conservative terms. If you ever read a future oriented article by one of them they often say things like, “This probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but perhaps my children or grandchildren will live to see it”, If you ever read a quote like that you know you're reading someone at SL1. Almost every report that comes out of NASA is hopelessly stuck at SL1.
Shock Level 2
Degree of Change: Logarithmic to Exponential
Technologies: major genetic engineering, medical immortality, interstellar travel, and new "alien" cultures.
At this level you’ll find your typical SF Fan. Literary SF and cutting edge magazines like Mondo 2000, Omni or Future Magazine of days past were filled with Level 2 ideas. Ironically, I don’t know of a single popular SF movie or TV show that exists comfortably at this level. Not even Star Trek qualifies for SL2, as it barely considers life spans past 100, with immortality remaining the exclusive domain of “super-advanced aliens”.
Up and until the 1980’s there wasn’t much discussion of future change past level 2, except in the most limited sense. This is probably because the concept of radical accelerating change was still beyond the radar of almost every forward thinking person at the time. Enabling Level 3 technologies like molecular nanotechnology were not even considered then. The only exceptions I know of are Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary, who were completely at home with post-human evolution (SL3).
Shock Level 3
Degree of Change: Exponential
Technologies: Immortality, nanotechnology, human-equivalent AI, intelligence increase, uploading, total body revision, intergalactic exploration, megascale engineering.
Clearly identifiable people didn't exist at this level until the 1980’s when groups like the Extropians and transhumanists emerged. Writers like Robert Anton Wilson, and Timothy Leary with his SMI2LE concept were the first people to my knowledge who discussed this level in any depth. However, it wasn’t until Eric Drexler published his book Engines of Creation that finally set the stage for concrete, detailed technological speculation of SL3 possibilities.
Shock Level 4
Degree of Change: Exponential to Hyperbolic (Accelerating Acceleration)
Technologies: Singularity, Matrioska "Jupiter" Brains, Powers, complete mental revision, ultraintelligence, posthumanity, Alpha-Point computing, Apotheosis, the total evaporation of "life as we know it."
The only people I know who are comfortable discussing change at this level are Singularitarians, and some cutting edge psychedelic pioneers like Terrence McKenna and John Lilly. Olaf Stapledon in his book Star Maker waxed poetic about SL3 megascale engineering and SL4 ultra-intelligences, and John Lilly discussed multiple encounters with a SL4 intelligences, which he gave names like "ECCO" and "Solid State Entities". The first writer to bring this into concrete technological terms was Vernor Vinge in his 1993 paper . These ideas were soon picked up by Extropians and Transhumanists, but as far as I know it wasn’t until the Singularitarians that this level was embraced concretely and enthusiastically.
As Eli says, If there's a Shock Level Five, I'm not sure I want to know about it!
Eli goes on to say,
If somebody is still worried about virtual reality (low end of SL1), you can safely try explaining medical immortality (low-end SL2), but not nanotechnology (SL3) or uploading (high SL3). They might believe you, but they will be frightened - shocked.
That's not to say you can't do it. In fact, you can take advantage of the future shock to carry the idea. You just have to be careful.
By a similar token, a Singularitarian can shock a science-fiction fan, but not an Extropian - the Extropian will be interested, perhaps enthusiastic, but not shocked. (Of course, if the person was already enthusiastic about Transhumanism, they might be wildly enthusiastic about the Singularity.) An Extropian can shock your average Wired reader, but should be careful about trying this with the "person on the street" - they may be frightened. And so on. In general, one shock level gets you enthusiasm, two gets you a strong reaction - wild enthusiasm or disbelief, three gets you frightened - not necessarily hostile, but frightened, and four can get you burned at the stake.
Below are some cut-up quotes from Terrence Mckenna on tapping into the Natural Intelligences that Flemming dicsussed earlier.
"The planet is some kind of organized intelligence. It's very different from us. It's had over 4 billion years to create a slow moving mind which is made of oceans and rivers and rain forests and glaciers. It's becoming aware of us, as we are becoming aware of it, strangely enough. Two less likely members of a relationship can hardly be imagined - the technological apes and the dreaming planet. And yet, because the life of each depends on the other, there's a feeling towards this immense, strange, wise, old, neutral, weird thing, and it is trying to figure out why its dreams are so tormented and why everything is out of balance.
"The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind.
"The psychedelic experience is far more than instant psychotherapy or instant regression to infantile traumatic situations, far more than simply a kind of super-aphrodisiac, far more than simply an aid in formulating ideas or coming up with artistic concepts. What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy. It turns out, if we can trust the evidence of the psychedelic experience, that we are not the only intelligent life forms on this planet, that we share this planet with some kind of conscious mind - call it Gaia, call it Zeta Reticulians who came here a million years ago, call it God Almighty, it doesn't matter what you call it, the fact of the matter is that the claims of religion that there is some kind of higher power can be experientially verified through psychedelics. Now this is not, in Milton's wonderful phrase "The God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven" - it doesn't have to do with that, in my opinion - it isn't cosmic in scale, it's planetary in scale. There is some kind of disincarnate intelligence. It's in the water, it's in the ground, it's in the vegetation, it's in the atmosphere we breath, and our unhappiness, our discomfort, arises from the fact that we have fallen into history and history is a state of benighted ignorance concerning the real facts of how the world works.
"What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy.
"Now, why it is that when we dose ourselves with a human neurotransmitter like DMT, why we then encounter armies of elves teaching us a perfected form of communication, this is a very difficult question. When you go to traditional cultures, shamanistic cultures in the Amazon and put this question to them, they answer without hesitation when you ask about these small entities, they say "Oh, yes, those are the ancestors, those are the ancestor spirits with which we work all of our magic." This is worldwide and traditionally the answer that you would get from shamans if you were to ask them how they do their magic - it's through the intercession of the helping spirit who is a creature in another dimension. Well, we may have imagined many different scenarios, a future technological and social innovation, but I think very few of us have imagined the possibility that the real programme of shamanism would have to be taken seriously, and that shamans are actually people who have learned to penetrate into another dimension, a dimension where, for want of a better word, we would have to say the souls of the ancestors are somehow present. It isn't, you see, as though we penetrate into the realm of the dead, it's more as though we discover that this world is the realm of the dead and that there is a kind of higher-dimensional world with greater degrees of freedom, with a greater sense of spontaneity and a lesser dependency on the entropic world of matter, and that that other universe is attempting to impinge into our own, perhaps to rescue us from our historical dilemma, we don't know - perhaps shamans have always had commerce with these magical invisible worlds and it's only the sad fate of Western human beings to have lost touch and awareness with this domain to the point where it comes to us as a kind of a revelation. You see, I believe that the whole fall into history, the whole rise of male dominance and patriarchy really can be traced to a broken connection with the living world of the Gaian mind, and there's nothing airy-fairy about this notion; the living world of the Gaian mind is what shamans access through psychoactive plants, and without psychoactive plants that access comes as an unconfirmable rumour.
"The Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. It's an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set."
And quoting myself from 1997 on the site Gaia Logic, which sadly is no longer with us,
I see no contradiction between the Transhumanist and the Gaian positions. In fact, I would probably define my own philosophy in this regard as Eco-transhumanist; technology and gaianism being two complementary polarities, and technology is necessary if Gaia is to fulfill its potential and replicate biospheres through space (using trans-humankind as the brains cum genitals!)
Hence, I would suggest, Transhumanism and Gaianism actually need each other. That is, a non-transhumanist Gaianism would be limited to primitivism and resource scarcity, and unable to get off the surface of the planet. Eiether a man-made or a natural disaster could wipe out terragen life forever. And in any case eventually the sun will heat up and make life on Earth impossible. Conversely, a non-gaian transhumanism would be arid and sterile, mechanical or virtual without or with only the most superficial, sense of life. It is rather like Einstein's famous statement that "Religion without science is blind, science without religion is lame." If humanity and life is to survive and flourish in the future, this is the paradigm that is needed.
Thanks Deoxy, Omega Point Journal for the McKenna material.
The title I wanted to give this was, Why Consciouness is a Necessary Tool in Creating a Greater Than Human Intelligence.
This is a follow-up to Flemming's most excellent post, Artificial or Natural Intelligences, and my earlier post Turning on Higher Intelligence.
I think the time has come to acknowledge that consciousness itself, our minds, and our innate intelligence, all of it, is as much an instrument of science as any instrument ever invented. More so in fact. In historical terms, now that we are on the verge of being able to engineer greater-than-human levels of intelligence, this acknowledgement could not come soon enough.
Like using a telescope to explore outerspace, our consciousness is our tool, our instrument to explore inner space. I find it odd then that Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Intelligence Augmentation (IA) researchers are trying to improve upon an instrument (the mind/brain) without actually using that very instrument (subjective experience) to determine how it works. This idea of reducing our understanding of the brain from the outside, examining its parts, neurons, glia cells and neurotransmitter functioning, without actually using the instrument itself seems disconcertingly inadequate. It would be like a sports fan telling a pro athelete how to play the sport better based on reading a book at the library, but without ever having played the sport themselves.
Oh sure, those who are working on Self-Augmenting Intelligence (SAI) are very smart, but they are only using one type of intelligence - their analytical, reasoning, "left brained" intelligence, which Timothy Leary called 3rd circuit intelligence. But complex behaviors like super-benevolent morality requires a great deal more than intellectual understandng, it requires a rich variety of situational and nuanced experience that can only come from a life fully lived. That means deep benevolent morality emerges from a wide variety of different intelligences, physical, emotional, intellectual and social. Eastern yogis would go further and say that a deep understanding of the mind and body from years of meditative work are also required to gain a deeper appreciation of benevolent compassion (Baraka). So how could some smart computer guys in a lab hope to emulate something even close to that?
I would argue that in order to create a more comprehensive understanding of intelligence, especially a greater-than-human level of intelligence requires both modes of examination and study to effectively improve upon it, because examining its parts in a reductionist fashion, tells us little of the emergent intelligence we each experience subjectively. Therefore, a genuine IA or AI research program should include both an objective and subjective framework. To me this is so obvious, that I think it's the main reason so many people overlook it. Arguments about the limits of the human mind, its culpability to logical fallacies such as availability bias, conjunction fallacy, Wason selection task, support theory, representativeness heuristic, misperception of random sequences, expert judgement and uncertainty, are all very important, but only a small part of the overall equation. All instruments have their limitations, including the human mind, but the human mind also has vast potential we've barely begun to understand or tap into. So lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater. For starters, a good scientific approach to inner exploration might be a good start.
In my opinion, the one person who has done more to map the furthest regions of innerspace in a rigorously scientific fashion is John Lilly, MD, Ph.D. John Lilly once said that, "Science is the Yoga of the West, and Yoga is the Science of the East". For those of you wanting to gain a deeper understanding of how the mind works from an experiential software context, rather than just an exclusively hardware context, should read his book Programming and Metaprogamming in the Human Biocomputer. Another excellent couple of books would be Robert Anton Wilson's Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World, and Prometheus Rising.
It is through this internal form of study, that we can determine, discover and access modes of knowledge and understanding of how human minds work, and in turn extrapolate how minds-in-general work, that could never be ascertained by reductionist means alone.
This field is wide open, so take your pick. My personal favorites at the moment are research into the interelationships between lucid dreams, out-of-body (OBE) and near-death experiences (NDE). I have been lucky enough to have had all three experiences - countless lucid dreams, two objectively verifiable OBE's and one NDE. Most often in my lucid dreams, I'm flying around with or without a body, doing impossibly fantastic, very pleasurable maneuvers, from floating in any angle, to jetting around like a UFO. Sometimes I'm flying around at 40mph over houses, futuristic buildings, and sometimes I'm flying thousands of miles an hour. And each and ever time it feels completely real, actually more than real.
Recently, I've also been having moments of what I like to call "waking lucidity". This is happening with increasing frequency. It's very similar to the blissful feeling of having a lucid dream while being awake. It feels amazing. Last time was a few weeks ago while I was driving to the airport. I felt very much the same as if I was in this really lucid dream, it was more real than real, and everything seemed more crisp, alive and joyful. I knew I was awake, but I was simultaneously experiencing the feeling I get while having a pleasurable lucid dream.
In the OBE's I've had, I was flying over my hometown. On two of these occasions I woke up right after the OBE ended (from my regular afternoon naps), and I ran out, got in my car, and drove to the place I flew to, and in my shock and amazement, I actually saw the same thing as in my OBE's - make/model/color of cars, people's faces in the park that matched(!), details like a crate leaning against one of the buildings. I was stunned. Up until that moment, I was skeptical about OBE's, thinking they were highly imaginary fabrications of the mind, now I'm much more open and excited about the possibilities.
For example, is waking life just another type of dream? Or are dreams another type of waking life? In the grander scheme of things, does it matter? Perhaps lucid dreams, OBE's, NDE's, etc. is our consciousness slowly evolving, opening up to a much greater, multi-dimensional, even infinite reality, of which our so-called "waking" life is just one limited way of experiencing it. Shamans, Yogi's, and Psychonauts over the ages have been telling us that we need to wake up from "normal" consciousness, which in their eyes is sleeping. The physicist David Bohm discussed something very similar with his ideas about an implicate order. In either case, I think this idea that there is an objective, reductionist materialist universe seperate from the observer is nonsense. Quantum mechanics supports the necessity of an observer.
Besides when you think about it, everything you know and experience intersects within your head. That would seem to render objective/subjective differences illusions of a primitive either/or aristotlean mind. I believe such differences are transcended through increasing perspective. Neither objective or subjective, but transjective. Another well-known John Lilly quote,
Having said that I find it a bit dubious that the Singularity Institute is proposing to create an altogether "alien" mind that supercedes a human mind, and yet is supposed to have the human minds best interest at heart, while having no direct experiential knowledge of embodiment or the inner workings of our mind. Such knowledge as I have argued can only be ascertained by subjective exploration.
With the IA approach we are pursuing intelligence augmentation and self-fullment from within our own internally guided framework. We are in the best possible position to understand and direct it based on on our own inner knowledge, rather than being forceably programmed into something else by some alien intelligence thats germinated from scratch based on principles derived by AI scientists using a woefully lopsided reductionist model of the mind.
The remaining question is why does it have to be so alien? With a more comprehensive understanding of human contelligence (consciosuness + intelligence) that comes from deep and prolonged inner exploration and mastery - such as the super-benevolent yogi's, would come the answers to creating a super-benevolent SAI. What Greg Burch has called an Extrosattva. With the addition of a morality derived from a systemic embodied experience, such a being would possess a broad understanding of genuine compassion and benevolence, along with a deeb embodied understanding of humaness (necessary to help us), as well as not being prone to logical fallacies. In the light of all this, the idea of creating a competely de-anthropomorphized SAI is completely genocidal and fool hardy, as if we humans don't have anything worth contributing going forward in our evolution. I think the existence of super-benevolent yogis including the likes of people like Ghandi or the Dalai Lama prove otherwise.
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?
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..."?
Well, today I've been wondering if maybe "fun" is one of those "intelligences." Maybe our whole ability to perceive fun and create fun, the whole complex of rational and emotional and physical processes is part of an Intelligence.
So I'm thinking maybe there is this Fun Intelligence, and that those of us in particular who are particularly gifted with this Intelligence have in fact found it to be central to our survival: socially, emotionally, physically, spiritually, spatially, mathematically...
As with any Intelligence, I guess the first question in determining its value and relevance is to ask if it has any contribution to make to our survival.
Good question.
On a social level, the Fun Intelligence is frequently all that stands between you and getting beaten to death by a gang of bullies. If your FI (Fun Intelligence) isn't high enough, you tend to make fun OF just when you think you're making fun WITH. In the locker room or sports field, failure to perceive the fun intention of a slap on the ass becomes a slap in the face, which frequently leads to a punch in the nose.
On the inner playground your FI is often all that stands between you and catatonic schizophrenia. Your ability to laugh at yourself, to decide not to take things so seriously, to make light out of your darker suspicions...
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.
Below is Robert Anton Wilson's description of Timothy Leary's 8-circuit model of consciousness. One of the most common criticisims leveled at this model is that evolution if left to itself does not necessarily lead to greater intelligence... so talking about future circuits as if they are inevitable might be a bit overstated. On the other hand if we stick with the only empirical example we have - the earth, the history of life and intelligence on this planet has been an inexorable drive from lesser complexity towards greater complexity and intelligence... from entropy towards extropy. Stuart Kaufmann, a complexity theorist at the Sante Fe Institute, has written some compelling academic papers on auto-catalytic sets which demonstrate that life, given the right initial conditions will inevitably lead to greater and greater complexity over time. This trend is continuing to play itself out now in rapid fashion, as technological progress is accelerating even faster.
From Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati
Tunnel-Realities and Imprints
Let's try Dr. Leary's perspective on these mysteries.
To understand neurological space, Dr. Leary assumes that the nervous system consists of eight potential circuits, or "gears," or mini-brains. Four of these brains are in the usually active left lobe and are concerned with our terrestrial survival; four are extraterrestrial, reside in the "silent" or inactive right lobe, and are for use in our future evolution. This explains why the right lobe is usually inactive at this stage of our development, and why it becomes active when the person ingests psychedelics.
To read the rest of this article, click here.
"The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life.
"The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event."
"...our descendants, and in principle perhaps even our elderly selves, will have the chance to enjoy modes of experience we emotional primitives cruelly lack: sights more majestically beautiful, music more deeply soul-stirring, sex more exquisitely erotic, mystical epiphanies more awe-inspiring, and love more profoundly intense than anything we can now properly comprehend..."
"This manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life.... It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. Genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. Our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world."
"The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they served the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They can be replaced by a radically different sort of neural architecture. Life-long happiness of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable can become the genetically-preprogrammed norm of mental health. A sketch is offered of when, and why, this major evolutionary transition in the history of life is likely to occur. Possible objections, both practical and moral, are raised and then rebutted."
"Today's images of opiate-addled junkies, and the lever-pressing frenzies of intra-cranially self-stimulating rats, are deceptive. Such stereotypes stigmatise, and falsely discredit, the only remedy for the world's horrors and everyday discontents that is biologically realistic. For it is misleading to contrast social and intellectual development with perpetual happiness. There need be no such trade-off. States of "dopamine-overdrive" can actually enhance exploratory and goal-directed activity. Hyper-dopaminergic states can also increase the range and diversity of actions an organism finds rewarding. So our descendants may live in a civilisation of well-motivated "high-achievers", animated by gradients of bliss. Their productivity may far eclipse our own."
To read the rest of this manifesto by David Pearce please visit The Hedonistic Imperative.
by Paul Hughes
A central thesis of my unpublished book on transhumanism is how customized hypermediation made possible by the symbiotic merging of our wetware, software and hardware via nanotechnology will vastly expand our experience of reality. This mind-machine symbiosis, for those of us who decide to take this journey, is called uploading.
The Senses and Emotions Have A Future.
Once we have merged into this accelerating intelligence, will we still have any need for our senses? In wild difference to Hans Moravec, who says that the senses don’t have a future, existing in some kind of simulated “body” with it's accompanying sensory array will allow us to experience information constructs differently than existing as pure thought. It could also be demonstrated that sensory experience is just another form of thought - the minds interpretation of raw signals transmitted by our senses. In this view sensory experience, internally generated or not, acts as another way to expand our useful set of contexts, perspectives and gestalts in which to process and interpret complex information. If we ditch the senses we would be cutting ourselves off from another way to experience reality. Expanded intelligence is about expanding our experiences, not limiting them. The future of intelligence then, is more sensory experience... more complex and enriching than anything we can possibly imagine right now.
One of the primary inspirations behind this new site is that turning on higher intelligence is not only fun and joyous, it is absolutely necessary if we and our intelligent civilization are to survive the coming decades and expand out into the comsos. By higher intelligence I mean the whole enchilada, whatever that is - not just greater intellect, but greater everything, greater emotional sanity, more love, compassion, creativity, inspiration, and most especially the transcendent experience itself and it's infinite expanse so raved about by psychonauts, shamans and eastern/yogic practioners. As Dr John Lilly once said, "Science is the Yoga of the West, and Yoga is the Science of the East". The question then is this:
Is this higher intelligence (i.e. enlightement, satori, samadhi, zen) a product of our evolving brain opening new experiential neurological circuits, OR is there some kind of "objective" higher intelligence in the universe who we are starting to tune into, or both?
For the purposes of this site, it doesn't matter what the answer is. What matters is that these transcendent states are valid in themselves and what we do with them. Who cares whether such sublime experiences are arbitrary brain states produced by a flood of seratonin and endorphins or something else? As Hans Moravec has repeated often, simulated experience is for all philosophical purposes as real as non-simulated experience. And besides, how could we tell the difference? How do we know we are currently not in some kind of hyper-advanced "matrix" simulation or in the mind of a much greater entity?
My opinion is that the computational-nanotechnological metaphor presents us with a potentially huge increase in intelligence over the coming decades. It is becoming clear in the scientific community that the computational metaphor is the next big thing in science - a paradigm shift as Kuhn describes - a move from a strictly materialist point of view to a more computationalist perspective. Stephen Wolfram, a respected physicist and author of the program Mathematica and the new book A New Kind of Science is one of the spearheaders of this paradign shift. But it is still only a paradigm, a metaphor, the next metaphor, but certainly not the last. Science is slowly getting one step closer to hyper-intelligence, but hyper-intelligence as I have experienced it, transcensd this merely computational perspective, as it still does not acknowledge the transcendent experience itself. That's ok, as I think it's only a matter of time. Strict empiricists such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil have both written books (I Robot: Mere Machine to Trancendent Mind and The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence) that have clearly taken the computatational metaphor to its logical extremes, ending their books with hints of a trancendent "spiritual" reality. You could consider it enlightenment unplugged from dogma and religion. But they stop just short of clearly acknowledging that. What I am talking about has nothing to do with whether you are an atheist, agnostic or theist, since it's pure experience itself, whose ultimate reality continues to remain a mystery. Like Godel's Incompleteness Theorm, we may never know. It's possible we may discover these "spiritual" realities to be nothing more than brain chemistry. Even if that's the case, it does not make these expereinces any less valid. In the scheme of our evolution, of our planet, and our long-term survival, making such distinctions is irrelevant. The future of intelligence is an expansion into all of these states and beyond them. The future of intelligence is infinite.
Part of the purpose of this site is to bridge these gaps of understanding. That has been my underlying motivator behind my book, if I can get the damn thing finished. I'm not worried about the Leary-Wilson-Lilly visionary mysticals, they essentially get it, if lacking in sufficient scientific-computational rigor. No, the challenge is transmitting these hyper-dimensional "groove-love" spaces communicated to the hyper-computational transhumanists who haven't experience such things yet. I think communicating this message is paramount, because it is these hyper-computationalist’s who are taking over the reigns of science and technological progress as we approach greater-than-human intelligence and decentralizing bio/nanotechnology. Higher intelligence by definition expands the number of alternative pathways available to us in which to apply solutions to pressing problems, which are only going to get worse unless we wake up and embrace more positive contexts. The sooner this “higher intelligence” is grokked the better our chances of us reaching utopia over oblivion.
Concerning Uploading, and assuming that the overall model of brain complexity can be duplicated on non-biological and presumably more compact and faster substrates, then:
"Will we save ourselves, or will we even be allowed to?"
This is the most important question we can ask about uploading I think. First of all, will we be allowed to upload? And if so, if we are allowed, will we control the entirety of our upload, or will it be under the control of either a human agency, AI, or both? And if it us under the control of another agency, will they process a perfect copy, or will they modify “us” for their purposes rather than ours. Will our copy actually be a bastard child offspring totally re-configured and programmed to do their bidding?
Finally, if the answer is no to all of these questions, and we instead are given complete control over our own upload, the simplicity of it means that our upload would do our bidding because it would be us. This may differ for some people, but I highly suspect anyone willing to upload themselves would also have the strong goal of wanting their uploaded selves to figure out a way to upload their human copy too, so they can experience the upload paradise as well and not have to live out the rest of their lives trapped within biological limits. In either case, it would seem the compassionate thing to do. So assuming this scenario is the most likely, it would be wise to have enough compassion for yourself, BEFORE getting uploaded.
This ties in nicely with the Utopian or Oblivion concept, an idea that presupposes that all entities that even survive a singularity are all compassionate and loving, otherwise they never would have made it to the singularity in the first place. Of course at this point people really start to worry, that if that’s true, then humanity with all its hatred and violence is doomed. This could happen, if indeed we are living at the base reality of real biology, rather than as a simulation, which is infinitely more likely.
Interesting speculations, which of course I have thought about often in my thoughts since I proposed the sans-ceiling hypothesis on the extropian list 6 years ago. Nick Szabo has done a paper demonstrating that we are most probably running in a simulation. And it's my guess, that if that's true the chances are the entities running it are compassionate, and wouldn't simulate a conscious being with deep desires for immortality or an afterlife unless it planned on delivering. :-)
But the question still remains about the continuity of consciousness if we screw up. Do they re-boot the whole simulation or allow us to continue like we are? My guess is they will allow us to continue by not allowing us to blow ourselves up. If we blow ourselves up, the whole thing is wasted, and they/we have to start over again. By allowing us to continue with only the minimal amont of intervention necessary they eventually get new beings equal to themselves, but who evolved under very different circumstances.
Why would they do this, besides just being compassionate? Probably because they’re lonely, and they need someone to talk to. They look at us as novelty, and can’t wait for our own singularity birth to occur. We are their mind children. And they in a funny way are ours. In a very real sense they are ourselves in the future giving birth to us in their future.
The more I use social software like Orkut, the more I realize how its potential is only just begun. Before too long, a set of open-source p2p social software standards will emerge that bring all its participants increasingly closer together. Ming has a piece where he writes:
To imagine a world where we all had a high level of telepathy is an excellent starting point for a lot of revolutionary possibilities. Lies would no longer have any manipulative value if everybody could see right through them and know the truth without bias. You'd have to really do good things to be seen as doing something valuable. Duh. Same with hypocritical morals. You can't get away with applying different rules to others than what you live by. If you're a smuck, everybody will know it.
And then the point Bala is getting at. If you somehow could perceive directly and instantly what everybody in the world needed and wanted, and what resources were available, there'd of course be no reason to waste time and energy on all the stuff that doesn't fit and doesn't work. If you really KNEW, you'd of course do the things you most want to do, where they make the most difference, and with the people who're most suited and interested in doing it with you. No need to do useless activities in a job you don't like, for a company that produces some junk that people wouldn't really want if they knew what it was and what the alternatives were.
And you'd help others do what they want to do when it is easy for you to do so. If you happened to know your neighbor also needs a bag of sugar from the market and that he's currently busy, you can just bring it for him, instead of you both having to go. If you're done with that book you're reading, you can just toss it to a guy on the street who also want to read it, rather than taking it home and hide it in the garage.
This is where the power of the network is taking us despite attempts to curtail it. So the next question is, once we are so intimately connected, how profoundly would our sense of individuality be changed? Would it diminish it, expand it or transcend it altogether? Probably all three. I certainly know that my sense of self has expanded since joining social networks, as it has allowed me to feel an increased sense of connectness and intimacy with people all over the globe who share common ideals and goals. Just sensing that increased level of connection has inspired me to contribute more to the group, to the world, and in turn my sense of self has expanded to fill the task. So that seems to be the paradox, my sense of self has expanded the more I become intermeshed with others, but being part of a group also has deeper influence on myself as an individual than if I was alone.
The borg this is not. Suppressing the individual for the "greater good" harms that greater good, precisely because that individual's unique maximum potential contribution has been crushed. The promise of the decentralized p2p social network however is that it empowers the individual to connect with others who will maximize thier purpose and goals, while simulatenously connecteing others for the maximum benefit of themselves, which is by definition an optimized ad-hoc hive mind, all its member maximally acting in concert. Highly liquid and intimate social networks are synergetically more powerful than both an individualist libertarian paradise and a communal hive mind combined. The best of both structures is maintained without any of the apparent drawbacks.
~Work in Progress~
The idea is that as our brains become increasingly reconfigurable via nanotech-computer symbiosis our minds will increasingly experience the universe (inner/outer) hyperdimensionally. I imagine that our future nano-symbiotic selves will see hyperdimensional spaces as a baseline of experience. Perceptions of the outside universe will in turn be greatly enhanced, with the 3 dimensional view we currently have seen as a very low fidelity "flat" experience. Not to mention of course that our emotional states will be tuned into very high levels of ecstacy impossible for us to imagine in our current primitive state.
Here is Robert Anton Wilson's eight basic winner scripts for each circuit of Leary's 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness.
The Eight Basic Winner Scripts
I. The biosurvival winner:
"I will live forever, or die trying."
II. The emotional-territorial winner:
"I am free; you are free; we can have our separate trips or we can have the same trip."
III. The semantic winner:
"I am learning more about everything, including how to learn more."
IV. The sociosexual winner:
"Love, and do what thou wilt." (Anon. of Ibid)
V. The neurosomatic winner:
"How I feel depends on my neurological knowhow."
VI. The metaprogramming winner:
"I make my own coincidences, synchronities, luck, and Destiny."
VII. The neurogenetic winner:
"Future evolution depends on my decisions now."
VIII. The neuroatomic winner:
"In the province of the mind, what is believed true is true, or becomes true within limits to be learned by experience and experiment." (Dr. John Lilly)
