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I was introduced to the works of Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) many years ago. His words moved me like no other. Considered by many to be one of Greeks greatest prose writers and philosphers, Nikos Kazantzakis wrote a book called Saviors of God - Spiritual Exercises.
Thanks to Upwinger, there was a still a cached version of this book online. Long out of print and copyright expired I believe this book has now fallen into the public domain. Along with many other unique works in Future Hi's library, I've now added Saviors of God - Spiritual Exercises to the list.
Found a great article by scholar B. Allan Wallace called In Defense of The Universe in a Single Atom posted over at the Tricycle magazine web site:
In this Tricycle web exclusive, scholar B. Allan Wallace responds to George Johnson's New York Times review of the Dalai Lama's new book The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality.
I especially like Wallace's call for a more complete approach to consciousness studies that includes both first person introspective methods combined with third person methodologies, something I've advocated from the very beginning here, here, here and here. I've been meaning to pick up his book, The Taboo of Subjectivity: Towards a New Science of Consciousness , for a while...now might be a good time to check it out...
Allan takes a more "integral" route in defense of the tetrameshing nature of consciousness.
Scientists have established that specific neural processes are necessary for producing specific conscious mental processes in humans and some other animals. In this way, correlations have been identified between brain and mind processes. Brain processes are detected with the third-person methods of biology, but mental processes are directly observed only by means of the first-person perspectives of individuals introspectively monitoring their own states of consciousness. This evidence proves that certain neural processes are necessary for producing specific mental events in humans, but not that they are sufficient causes of consciousness, nor does this indicate that consciousness itself is a physical phenomenon. Moreover, while many scientists believe that mental phenomena are emergent properties of brain, no one has ever objectively measured any mental event emerging from the brain, so that, too, remains an untested hypothesis that can be taken for the time being only on faith.
I am a product of the West. Like most American's, I grew up in the public education system, and in a technologically savvy and saturated "MTV" culture. As a college student I went straight to the core of a Western scientific education by getting a degree in physics with two minors in philosophy and psychology. My primary interests at the time were astrophysics, cosmology, quantum physics and the nature of consciousness. I was determined to work at NASA and /or go into space one day. I loved science then and still do now.
When I was a freshman I postulated to one of my professors, that the language of computers (i.e. information) was far better suited describing the universe than current physical constructs. I thought I'd made a compelling and convincing case. He laughed me out of his office. Today, more than 20 years later, Seth Lloyd is making the rounds with the same idea. As he mentions in his wonderful book, Programming the Universe. He credits his recent acceptance and success to the widespread use of computer technology. Apparently, timing is everything.
In other words, acceptance of once radical ideas among scientists often hinges on the cultural, or in this case technological mileu in which they exist. As much as science prides itself on being objective, the actual science done everyday by real scientists is all too human. So is there really such a thing as truly objective science? As RAW once said, it's not really 'science' we're doing but neuro-science (i.e. science as a product of neurology).
According to Seth Lloyd the entire universe is a giant quantum computer. This is an elegant concept and it appeals to me for many reasons. I love computers and the metaphors they empower us with. But are computer metaphors the best way to look at things, or more accurately the most elegant way so far?
Looking at computers as metaphor, where did computer technology come from that gave these new more powerful ideas? Obviously it emerged out of ongoing historical technological trends. However, all of this progress is the result of scientific minds working on things. Whose minds were they, and what was inspiring them to work on the things they did? I think this is the more important question. When you examine the historical roots of the PC revolution you'll find that things like PC's and the World Wide Web came from a very particular group of people. As pointed out in What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, it was the insights gained from higher states of consciousness, specifically those unique to LSD, that gave rise to the PC revolution. As many people who have taken LSD, you experience your brain has a large set of programs, that you in turn can program, and better still, metaprogram "who" and "what" you want to become. Please read our online book by John Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer, for a pioneering work in this area. It's also no secret that the 60's is often equated with a turn to Eastern mysticism for guidance. There's was good reason for this embrace, as many very intelligent people felt current Western ideas on the nature of reality were woefully incomplete in describing, let alone assisting in integrating these sometimes powerful and overwhelming transpersonal experiences.
When I was 17 I experienced a profound and spontaneous (non drug) shift in consciousness myself. It lasted all of about 10 seconds. At the time I had no knowledge of eastern thought. I made every attempt to recapture the experience. Having read Gödel, Escher, Bach my sophomore year of high school, I often resorted to using Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem as a launching pad into understanding this transcendent state of consciousness. One night while trying, in a rather ridiculous and humorous way, to describe all of this to one my friends, I somehow "tricked" my brain back into this state. For the next hour I laughed my ass off at the cosmic joke of it all. I've tried unsuccessfully many times since to explain this state.
I believe my failure to adequate explain this state is rooted in our language and way of looking at the world, which itself is rooted in the Greek ideas of atomism, reductionism and materialism. This way of perceiving and understanding the universe eventually became what we now call science and forms the bedrock of Western philosophy. Barring the recent emergence of Eastern thought into this dialog, the only other alternative explanation of the universe are the beliefs of religious extremism of various stripes. (be it Christian, Islam or New Age). Scientists, being all too human that they are, seeing the believers at the gates, understandably defend their turf with as much zeal. However, this citadel of science as RAW liked to call it, similar to the Catholic Inquisition before it, believes, just like the religious extremism they oppose, that they, and they alone, have a monopoly on all knowledge. If it can't be objectively verified scientifically, then it doesn't really exist. Yet, ironically science has *created* just as many ephemeral concepts as any religion. Energyfor example is a fantastic and highly useful and utilitarian concept, but that's all it really is. The difference in this case, is western concepts like energy have "real-world" objectively verified effects. Understanding these effects and knowing how to predict and utilize them has tremendous power as evidenced by our current technological civilization.
Often times you'll hear scientists using Occams Razor as a way of defending their beliefs. Yet, when comparing Newton and Einstein’s view of gravity, whose is simpler? Obviously, Occams Razor is not as sharp as they'd like you to think. What does this tell us about science? As many have pointed out, "look how much progress and good has come from science!". Although many would have good reason to argue with some of that, I of all people agree with them. This is not about questioning what science is able to do, but about what it is not able to do. Science has yet to explain consciousness in any meaningful and satisfactory way. I believe the reason for this is the very nature of reality and consciousness itself. Although scientists have yet to admit the truth of this fundamental problem, Nasrudin, the famous Sufi Mystic understood it perfectly.
Nasrudin was rushing about town on his donkey, riding too and fro and in some desperation clearly looking for something he had lost. All of the towns people, who adored the wise Nasrudin, and wanting to help him in some way, asked if they could help, "Nasrudin, what are you looking for, maybe we can help you find it?". As he continued to ride around on his donkey he said, "I’m looking for my donkey, have you seen it?".
I've tried many times myself to explain this "eastern" concept of the self and nature of consciousness with little success. Objectivists insists that reality still exists when we are not there looking at it. But just what kind of reality is there when there is no observer? Everything that we know, everything that we have ever experienced are constructs of our mind. Can you dear reader think of anything that is not in your mind right now??
We travel to the moon, see clouds, you name it. But all of these things are constructs in our minds. What in actuality is "out there"? We might say there are things like electrical fields, waveforms, light, energy, dense matter, etc. But all of these are in turn constructs of human minds coming to grips in their minds with what they are perceiving. And why do we perceive what we do? Even with the best instruments we have expanding our perceptual field, are still constructs of human minds. The embodied experience of even being human at all and making things with our hands is a construct of consciousness.
Consciousness is everywhere and in everything. Everything is consciousness. And as much as we might want to objectify so-called "reality", all of reality is a construct of the human mind. Of course, then savvy thinkers will point out that there are commonalities between human minds. There is scientific and repeatable consensus. This might be true until we realize that so far everything we have called a law or physics turns out to be mutable. In other words the more WE examine things the more they change. The more we examine so-called hard-core "limits" we realize there are loopholes. Just to be clear I'm not saying nothing is real. No, all of this stuff is as real as the next. Obvious so-called "reality" is not a noun, but a verb. When you examine the present moment (i.e. reality) you realize everything is changing. There is no permanence of any kind. The conscious experience of realizing the impermanence of reality (i.e. maya or illusion) is part of the process of how the Buddha achieved enlightenment. Buddhists use words like Nirvana and Dharmakaya, describing this state as timeless, permanent, devoid of characteristics and free from duality.
Two of my favorite thinkers who have succeeding in explaining it better than I do are Peter Russell and Amit Goswami. Peter Russell's Reality and Consciousness: Turning the Superparadigm Inside Out does a good job of showing how the problem of consciousness is intrinsically unsolvable with objective science. Like a dog chasing its own tail, or Gödel's proving that math will never come full circle, or Von Neumann's Catostrophe of the infinite regress of studying the thing that is doing the studying (consciousness) will never be complete. And before the materialists trash me to pieces, I am not saying we can't study the nature of consciousness. Of course we can! We can tweak neurotransmitters, probe brain chemistry, augment, analyze and dissect brain structures and come to a much fuller understanding of how the human mind works, solves problems and perceives problems. All of these things are worth of objective scientific study. These though are all problems are within the purview of the Easy Problem of Consciousness. Actually understanding why there is a conscious experience in the first place is an entirely different beast.
This is where Eastern philosophies take an entirely different approach. They already understand that consciousness is the primary nature of reality. Amit Goswami's monistic idealism version of quantum mechanics is completely refreshing in this regard. Goswami has simply restated quantum mechanics with the supposition that consciousness is the primary component of reality rather than matter. And why not? It seems completely arbitrary that we should choose "out there" using the Greek ideas of atomism and reductionism as the one true way of knowing truth, rather than "in here". I think that in the end is the primary difference between East and West. West places the primacy of outer experience as absolute, and the East tends to favor inner experience as more true. But as Buddha said even this duality is transcended when one achieves Nirvana. There is no "out there" or "in here", no object or subject, objective or subjective, just transjective - the experience of the oneness of all things.
Here is the official definition from Dictionary.com:
1) For a closed thermodynamic system, a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work. 2) A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system. 3) A measure of the loss of information in a transmitted message. 4) The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity. 5) Inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society.
This definition is pure abstraction - entropy does not exist in the real world. If you notice, the first three definitions depend on this idea of a closed system. Closed systems do not exist except as abstractions on paper. I challenge anyone reading this to show any closed system that actually exists in the real world. All so-called 'closed systems', no matter how well maintained by natural or artificial means, eventually become open. Closed systems are not sustainable in an open universe. Some will argue that the universe itself is a closed system, but this is far from the case. As far as we can tell the universe is open, unbounded and infinite. Rather than the Big Crunch we've been expecting, it looks like the universe will continue to expand. And even if it didn't, and we end up with a Big Crunch, the resulting contraction brings us an infinite amount of computation (i.e extropy) in a finite amount of time. For more information on this idea see the Omega Point Theory.
Therefore the 4th definition is just an opinion that makes no sense.
As for the 5th definition, there has never been any sustaining evidence of any such societal decay. While old systems die, new, better and more robust systems take their place. The overall trend of the world and the history of life has always been towards greater complexity and extropy. Entropy is a fiction, a myth, whose time is almost up. The only end I see is that of entropy itself.
I for one am deeply bothered by the all-too common misperception of the highest degree of spiritual attainment -- most often labeled 'satori' or 'samadhi' -- as an encounter with the ‘blank nothingness’ or ‘emptiness’ of an ineffable Wholly Other.
I wont deny that limit experiences do indeed absolve the aspirant’s consciousness of the bric-a-brac clutter of ordinary waking life. But it seems to me that much of what is referred to as states of high trance or mystic realization is more akin to a mountaineer mounting to the peak of his or her chosen capstone -- and then (oddly enough) closing his or her eyes to the breathtaking expanse above, around, and below.
Hence the ‘nothingness,’ the ‘blank emptiness.’ Somehow in all the strenuous endeavor of clambering to the tip of the pyramid, the aspirant’s cognition, before alert and impeccable and intuitive to a fault, has in some unforeseen way atrophied. (One simply can’t see the forest for the trees!)
Now, I don’t mean to denigrate the pure astonishment which must invariably accompany our trek to the precipice of the Eternal. Far from it. -- Crashing through to what lies outside and above the microcosmic envelope of one’s waking consciousness almost always results in a temporary obliteration of one’s habitual pattern identity. The world becomes suffused with a blinding radiance, a Light almost suffocating in its intensity, rendering one’s usual conception of selfhood null and void.
It is perfectly understandable that many find themselves easily lost in this seemingly boundless, somehow affectionate glow. One has spent long hours diligently skating the ice that customarily limits our world of fluid matter from pushing up into the world of windy Spirit. Etching ever more intricate fractal outlines into the seemingly impenetrable periphery, searching for a fault into the Unknowable, a rupture into the Ineffable.
And then at last the glassy veneer gives way, the ice splintering into a dizzy maze of incandescent explosions. Heaven itself has been breached -- the once impermeable permafrost of the Beyond collapsing into a sun-drenched shower of millions of dazzling fireflies.
Its almost enough to stop the heart, this instantaneous annihilation of our consensual waking reality. For after the bewildering tumult attending our burglary into the Treasure-House of Consciousness has been stilled, after the thunder of fracturing ice has subsided, we are confronted with an uncanny stillness, an awful silence unlike any ever endured in waking life. This absolute calm is such a profound antithesis to the clamorous crashing that attended our final break with consensual reality that it initially appears as a blank nothingness -- an emptiness wholly Other and uniquely in contrast to our three-dimensional substantiality.
And it is here, at this critical impasse, that most aspirants lose awareness of the phenomenon entirely. Swallowed up all in all by its inviting phosphorescence, most surrender to the complete lack of self-identity that it encourages -- and so lapse into utter unconsciousness, acquiescing their finger-hold on the spiritual mountain-top, succumbing once more to the illusions and fallacies of our waterlogged waking consciousness.
The real trick, I believe, the secret technique, is to not abandon self-identity to the winds -- but to identify oneself instead with the Light that fills and surrounds you within and without. Declare your presence anew as a Being of imaginal brilliance. Shed the thorny shell of nihilism and be embraced by the ethereal glow of ‘Omnisism’ instead. Above all, remain conscious enough to realize that this effervescent illumination you now find yourself adrift in is not far apart and distantly removed from the world of waking life -- but is rather its most fundamental and informative strata.
It is not an ‘empty nothingness’ we are confronted with at the peak of spiritual attainment. That is simply a common misperception arising from the sudden lack of personal selfhood, from having our little personal pattern identity temporarily restitched into the seamless network of the world’s causal Hyperreality.
Its dangerously easy to lose one's lucidity when that 'lack' is felt so overwhelmingly. It usually takes several attempts (and perhaps several years) before the aspirant can master his or her own astonishment to the point that he or she is capable of remaining fully conscious even though the former boundaries of his or her pattern identity have been dissolved. Its very easy to feel overwhelmed, and very difficult to ride the crest of the upward momentum to its ultimate resolution. But it can be done.
Its akin to a single drop of water falling back into the ocean -- what is really happening is that you have returned to your true element. The boundaries where personal selfhood formerly ended and the rest of the universe began are relinquished -- and a ghostly 'lack' is felt at that moment. And this misperceived ‘nothingness’ of self is the last illusion to shatter, the final Rubicon to cross, a vaporous mirage at last dissolved by becoming fully identified with the all-subsuming Light in all of its splendid omnipresence.
It is only then that the final barrier between Man and God will fall. Not by mere tasting of the sublime ‘blankness’ -- but by transcending the nothingness of the little personal self in favor of the vivid tapestry of the Collective Divine.
* * *
In the above I hope I have demonstrated that the ‘blank nothingness’ or ‘emptiness’ commonly held to be the peak experience of the Absolute is in all actuality only the last vestige of the vanishing personal self.
Therefore, in contrast to the entrenched nihilism so popular today in discussions of spiritual practices, I propose an ‘Omnisism’ which instead restores the proper all-inclusiveness to the fully conscious experience of the Divine.
It's been a long while since I wrote anything for the site. I have an hour to spare, so I thought I'd share some of what's been on my mind. Synchronicity has been in the air this spring. Just as I've been rethinking the whole mind-body duality issue, along with materialism, "objective" science, subject-object duality, I get contacted by someone here in Reno twho tells me there is a local Institute of Noetic Sciences group. This couldn't have come at a better time, since they delve into the areas I'm specifically researching for my book. Just a few weeks ago I was speaking to a friend about what I call the 'Objectivity Bias'. And recently, Colin Macgee submitted an article about the philosophy of science and some of its seemingly inherent limitations. Unlike most scientists who believe that science must remain objective and materialist, I believe there can be a science of inner space. John Lilly managed to create a scientific framework in which to explore and map inner spaces. His book Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer is a groundbreaking work in this regard.
It was John Lilly who spoke this very simple yet profound insight, "Science is the Yoga of the west. Yoga is the Science of the East".
It was many years ago when I became tired of seeing things as either subjective or objective. Is there really such a thing as objective anyway? The answer would seem to be no. Everything we experience, that we know, understand, touch and feel, is the cumulative result of electrical impulses reaching the brain, from which the brain paints a picture we then call 'reality'. There is no way for us to experience any so-called REAL reality without it being, at the very least, heavily filtered by are very limited, and ultimately arbitrary genetic-neurological structures. Likewise, with subjectivity, we could say that many of our subjective thoughts are the result of what's happening "out there" in "reality". So where does subjectivity end, and objectivity start?
It was around that same time many years ago I coined my own term transjectivity - the transcension of the objective/subjective duality. And all this seems the obvious conclusion without having to refer to quantum mechanics at all. Take quantum theory into account and it gets even more blurred, mysterious and weird.
Whatever the case, I find that anyone who argues their point from an entirely objective-materialist point of view to be operating with an objectivity bias. There is nothing wrong with that as long as they recognizes that it is still a bias. Biases have all sorts of uses, and when used properly keep things in a contained and workable space. If it wasn't for "keeping things objective" we probably wouldn't have the scientific tools to land people on the moon, build computers and so on. Besided I love science and technology. It's one very important side of the coin. However, I think it's long overdue at this point that to acknoweldge the other side and embrace a more holistic transjective point of view - a new paradigm to take us forward.
Guest writer Colin Magee shares with us his thoughts on the nature of consciousness.
In his essay on life after death when he was discussing consciousness Paul asked if rocks could be conscious. I've always found this line of speculation fascinating.Hans Moravec in his book Robot-Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind has the following to say: "Given the right playbook,the thermal jostling of the atoms in a rock can be seen as the operation of a complex, self-aware mind.How strange. Common sense screams that people have minds and rocks don't. But interpretations are often ambiguous....We can see levers and springs in animal limbs, and beauty in the aurora: our "mind children" may be able to spot fully functioning intelligences in the complex chemical goings on of plants, the dynamics of interstellar clouds, or the reverberations of cosmic radiation. No particular interpretation is ruled out, but the space of all of them is exponentially larger than the size of individual ones, and we may never encounter more than an infinitesimal fraction. The rock-minds may be forever lost to us in the boggingly vast sea of chaotic rock-interpretations. Yet those rock minds make complete sense to themselves,and to them it is we who are lost in meaningless chaos. Our own nature, in fact, is defined by the tiny fraction of possible interpretations we can make, and the astronomical number we can't."
I'd like to go one further and propose the following-is it conceivable that inanimate objects could have some degree of consciousness? I remember reading in the book Space-Time and Beyond by Jack Sarfatti, Fred Wolf, and Bob Toben something to the effect that even a spoon is conscious. I don't recall the exact quote unfortunately. In the book To Seek out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek by Dr. Athena Andreadis she discusse shapeshifters that are able to impersonate inanimate objects. She mentioned a character from Deep Space Nine named Odo who impersonated a wine glass.In the essay she stated that it violated various laws of physics and biology and stated that shapeshifters are impossible. If I was a scientist I think I would be inclined to say something along these lines: "According to our current and limited understanding of the laws of physics and biology it would appear at this time that shapeshifters are improbable." This of course leaves open the possibility that as our knowledge expands the concept of shapeshifters could indeed be plausible. Is it conceivable that some advanced civilization using some advanced form of technology such as femtotechnology or picotechnology (or some other technology not yet conceived of by our current understanding of the laws of physics) could impersonate an inanimate object for cloaking purposes,for instance to avoid predators. There are certain insects for example that impersonate leaves to evade predators (of course I know that this is a form of camouflage and that they don't actually "turn into a leaf"). Still it is an interesting idea to consider.Ideas such as shapeshifters of course bring up all kinds of issues in epistemology,ontology,metaphysics, and philosophy of science particularly when it comes to the nature of "impossibility." For instance,when is something truly impossible? And how many different degrees/types of impossibility are there - i.e. logically impossible, physically impossible, metaphysically impossible, etc.?
In the Bible Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt as a form of punishment. If karmic law exists, is it then conceivable that a person could be reincarnated as an inanimate object as part of their karmic decisions? On the surface I suppose that most people would consider this theory ludicrous and would probably question the sanity of the person proposing it. I threw this out somewhat tongue-in-cheek yet somewhat seriously as a hypothesis to a good friend of mind and she felt that it was something that someone on acid might have thought up. Still as a firm believer in the "guerilla ontology" of Robert Anton Wilson I feel that no ideas should be taboo or off limits particularly in philosophy and science.
There are five quotes which I think are relevant when considering and evaluating "outlandish" hypotheses:
1.) "Reality is not only stranger than we imagine,but stranger than we can imagine" - J.B.S.Haldane
2.) "Your theory is crazy,but not crazy enough to be true" - Neils Bohr
3.) "When an elderly but distinguished scientist says something is possible he is very probably correct,when he says something is impossible he is very probably wrong"- Arthur C.Clarke
4.) "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
5.) "There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy Horatio" - Shakespeare
That being said when proposing theories and hypotheses which are considered "outlandish" what is the apropriate balance between freedom and discipline? Is this subjective or are there objective criteria? Does this depend on the area/discipline in which the speculations are being made? What does epistemology, metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy of science have to say regarding this? These are not easy questions to answer especially when dealing with issues that are considered fringe by the majority of scientists.
I guess until we have a firm definition of consciousness (if that's even possible-which may not be) we won't be able to answer what entities, objects, etc. are conscious or not. Furthermore, it seems to me that any definition of consciousness will be anthropomorphic. I think that we'd be like the scientists in Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris-anytime we try to gain insight into something truly extraterrestrial/alien are we really just projecting our own theories, preconceived ideas, etc. onto something we may never be in a position to know?
Are there many science fiction stories that deal with the idea I've been discussing? I understand that there are a lot of fantasy stories that deal with the concept of shapeshifters but was wondering how much this theme is explored in science fiction. I'm a firm believer that even so called outlandish ideas can stimulate thinking about old ideas in a new light and can also stimulate thinking in new and innovative directions. With that in mind I was wondering how many people have read the books The New Inquisition by Robert Anton Wilson and Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events by Michael A. Persinger and Gyslaine F.Lafreniere. I've found these books very interesting and mind expanding. Another book which I was curious about is called "The Secret Life of Inanimate Objects" by Lyall Watson. Do you know anything about this book. I'd be interested in any feedback positive or negative regarding this idea.
Why or why not?
I find this to be one of the most facinating questions, not because of any particular answer one might give, but all the lines of reasonsing one might muster to answer it. Even people who take the safe agnostic position have their own intricate line of reasoning about why to them this question is unanwerable. So what are the challenges or insights that help us tackle this problem? Can it ever be answered? Why or why can't we answer it, and what if anything could we ever know about the nature of consciousness? Is consciousness ultimately beyond the reach of objective science? Can science grow to include subjective experience in such a way that it still remains a valid scientific enterprise? Will the material paradigm have to give way to a more expanded scientific paradigm, in which consciousness itself is a tool in a scientist toolbox? Are out of body experiences (OBE's) just illusions created by the brain, or is consciousness ultimately not limited by a material container? Is consciousness a fundamental component of the universe, perhaps the only thing that really exists? Can rocks or tress be conscious? Is conciousness a strictly material thing, that cannot exist beyond a material container? Is consciousness only something humans have, and/or that requires a minimal amount of complexity to even exist? Is everything consciousness?
**Please go the forums to weigh in on your opinion.
These experiments are fun to try on family, friends and strangers. The implicit dualistic materialism is a feature, not a bug.
First hypothetical. Imagine two healthy individuals, A and B, swap brains. That is, A’s brain will be removed from A’s body and placed in B’s body, B’s brain will be placed in A’s body. Where is "A"? Virtually everyone will conclude that A is now in B’s body and vice versa. Where my brain goes, "I" go.
The interesting thing about this is that it demonstrates fairly convincingly that most people believe that they are not their bodies. In this scenario A survives in Bs body and vice versa. A variation might involve the creation of a cloned body, or transplanting the brain into a cybernetic body, or a brain in a jar. Most people would agree that even if the body were dispensed with entirely, as long as the brain is either intact or adequately simulated, "I" have survived. Although most people would have some trepidation, I suspect that the resistance to such a procedure would be largely the result of technical concerns, not ontological ones. This bodes well for cybernetics.
Second hypothetical, same as the first, except that in the brain transplant procedure, A will suffer complete and permanent retrograde amnesia, that is, all of A's memories up to that point will be totally and irretrievably wiped out. Is A in B’s body? Or someone else?
Now it starts getting interesting. I have found that most people are still fairly comfortable in their belief that A has survived in B's body. Another way of considering the same issue: would a person who completely lost their memory still be the same person? Most people conclude that the loss of memory, while difficult, would not fundamentally affect selfhood. In fact, I recall in one circumstance an acquaintance becoming quite agitated at the very suggestion that the loss of memory would impact selfhood.
Note however, that this feels quite a bit different from the first hypothetical. Something important about "me" has been lost - my history. The loss would be a painful one, emotionally significant, but I submit that most people would not consider it ontologically significant. It would appear, then, that most people seem to conclude that "I" am not my memory, in other words, I am not my past. If I lost every memory I had, I would still be here, the real me would still be present and continuing.
An interesting and important issue at this point is - what is it that remains? The remainder seems to me to consist largely of habits - habits of thought, likes and dislikes, emotional tendencies, and the like. One could imagine, for example, waking up one morning without any memory whatsoever (and assume no way to reconstruct the past), and trying to discovery who one was, what one was like. Am I introverted or extroverted? Do I like music? What types? What foods do I like? Am I rational? Emotional? Intuitive?
All of these aspects of ourselves seem to exist in some way independently of our memory, although perplexing questions immediately arise. What's my favorite song if I have no memory of every hearing it before? Would I even like it, or does its context in my past determine its appeal? What about beliefs? If I can’t remember ever hearing anything about UFO’s, do I believe in them? Perhaps I would have an inclination to believe in them, though no belief per se.
Consider that such a break from the past, though disturbing, would also be extremely liberating, allowing me to look with fresh eyes at myself and the world, allowing me to see with the “Beginners Mind” of Zen. Certain rituals and other metaprogramming techniques have as their goal, a variation on this precise theme, the abandonment, as it were, of one’s past. To be “born again” or to be initiated is to separate one from one’s past, affecting a kind of liberation. The “true self” is unaffected and in fact is liberated from the constrictive repression of the past.
In my experience, most people seem to accept as true the proposition that I am not my past.
Third hypothetical, A and B switch memories, everything else remains the same. A and B retain all of their habits, inclinations, likes and dislikes (for convenience I refer to this as “personality”). Which is A and which is B?
This is a tough one because it sets the sense of self derived from our memories in opposition to that derived from our mental habits. My experience is that most people conclude that memories tell us who we were, but “personality” tells us who we are, and that therefore A is in B's body.
This seems to me an interesting conclusion, because it signals a belief that my tendencies, my personality, is what is most associated with “me.” The sum total of my experiences may have made me who I am today, but if my memory of them is taken away, I am still the same person, and in this sense "I" am more closely identified with the collection of habits, propensities, aptitudes, dispositions and so on that exist even absent any memory of the past. In effect, as long as my future life is likely to proceed in a more or less contiguous fashion from past, that seems to be enough for me to identify my "self." In effect, if my future memories will be consistent with my past ones, I still consider myself to be continuous with the past self that I can no longer remember. It is a curious situation that most people seem willing to accept that the self is not memory, and yet our identity seems so constrained by what we have done in the past.
Fourth hypothetical; A’s memories are intact, but A’s “personality” is replaced by a random personality. Is A still A or someone else? What if A’s “personality” is replaced by a similar but somehow augmented or improved personality. The first is brainwashing, the second metaprogramming. Oversimplifying, one’s old habits are abandoned in favor of new ones. Many rituals of various kinds aim at this type of personality substitution.
The question “is A still A” seems more relevant in this situation than for the amnesia victim. I feel that if I lost my memory, I would still be me, however, if my personality changed, then would I really still be me? Has something fundamental about “me” been taken away? I believe most people will conclude that although I have different qualities, different mental habits, the essence of “me” has not been affected. For one thing, I feel that I am the same I that I was in childhood. However, my personality is totally different. Our personalities are slowly evolving day by day, year by year. The process is slow but inexorable. However, I consider myself the same I. My personality has changed, but my I am still me. Similarly, if I am brainwashed, the transformation is more rapid, but I am still me. Ontologically, I have not been affected. Most people, I have found, tend to reach similar conclusions.
Note that just as memory is fundamentally a identification of selfhood with the past, personality is essentially an identification with predictions about the future. Intuitions about the type of person I am translate into predictions about future experiences i am likely to have and how I will react to them at the time. If our memories are the wake that we leave behind us, our personality is the course we have charted.
In advanced metaprgrammatic activities, the “personality” may become malleable, and be dramatically transformed at will. But transformed by who’s will? Something essential seems to have survived, something continuous with my prior self, a more liberated, freer, higher self. If someone says “ever since you started doing meditation, you’ve changed” my response would be, my personality might have changed, but “I” haven’t changed. I’m still who I have always been, perhaps even more so. The metaprogrammer, in turn has a “personality”, core beliefs setting the parameters of the metaprogramming activities. See Super Free Will: Metaprogramming & The Quantum Observer These may be superceded in turn. Note that as Paul points out, at each level, the activities of the personality seem robotic and automatic to the meta-level. This is the problem that Descartes overlooked. “I think therefore I am” is all well and good until you see that “you” didn’t think, the thought happened to you, was programmed, but you assumed you were responsible for it. Descartes cogito therefore turns from a thinking thing into a perceiving thing.
The fact that my “self” can be understood as “having” a personality suggests that I believe that I am not identical with my personality. The personality is, in this respect, something that I have, the way same that I have a body, not something that I am. This is particularly strongly felt when we have actively participated in modifying our personality. It is my prediction that most people if pressed would conclude that “I” am not my personality. The initial conclusion may be that I am really some metapersonality, but that in turn gives way and ultimately there is no permanent (i.e. temporally enduring) hyper-metaprogram that persists and with which I can identify.
Now, finally, assume that A and B swap memories and personalities. Assume no intervening period of unconsciousness, the operations are instantaneous. Where is A and where is B? Some people will conclude that A and B have swapped bodies, just as in the brain swap. But if identity is not affected by the loss of memory, and identity is not affected by the loss of personality, and if there is no interruption of conscious awareness, it would seem to follow that A has received a new memory and A has received a new personality, but that A persists.
The interesting question is, if that is the conclusion, what is the “I” that persists; what self has remained continuous, the self that had A’s memory and personality but now has B’s memory and personality. I conclude that there is something that continues, something, in fact, quite fundamental. The observer, bare attention, consciousness without an object, pure consciousness, Big Mind.
And note what we have done: by taking away identification with memory and personality, we have stripped identification with the past and the future. We are left only with the present. Without a past or a future, who am I? The answer seems to be, I am bare attention, I am pure consciousness. The experiencer. Atman. Note that this “self” is itself unexperienceable.
Moreover, this identity is essentially impersonal. That is, it would be the same in A as in B. What I really am is the same as what you really are. Only the admixture of time in the form of personal history and future expectation distinguishes us from each other. Accordingly, it would be quite rational to conclude that in the final hypothetical A and B actually have switched bodies, despite the continuity of conscious awareness. If only something non-personal has persisted, something which is identical in both individuals, then the total personal identity has been in effect swapped and reconstituted. An impersonal bare awareness can’t really be “me” in any standard sense of the word. Thus, if I am not my past (memory), or my future (personality) or awareness, perhaps I am not anything.
Note that this hypothetical situation might also be created in the case of a person (1) abandoning identification with their past and (2) abandoning identification with any given set of mental habits or expectations. Try it and see what happens!
Warning, this line of reasoning may cause extreme agitation, use with caution.
Panexperietialism or Panpsychism is the belief that mind, or consciousness, is omnipresent throughout the universe and is a fundamental aspect of the universe. It is a position I have argued from here, here and here.
It represents one side of the long running mind-body problem. David Chalmers is probably the most well known and respected person who argues this position. He wrote a great book called The Conscious Mind. Daniel Dennett is the most well known and respected peson who takes the other position. Chalmers and Dennett have had many arguments over the years, and they represent the contemporary philosophical celebrities of this long-running debate. Interestingly, Chalmers and Dennett both believe in free-will.
What is also interesting is that regardless of what position you take in this argument (often called the hard problem of consciousness), either position is not necessarily incompatible with the whole notion of uploading.
To my delight, I came across several blogs today of people who hold the panpsychic point of view. Steve Esser's Guide to Reality (Ideas and Arguments Toward a New Worldview), Justin's Panexperientialism (Exploration of the Philosophical and Scientific implications of a Panexperientialist World View), and Doug Mackey's Qubikuity (Musings of a quantum module of perception embedded in the folds of an unfathomable cosmic superbeing). Doug wrote a science fiction book called Weird Scenes Inside The Godmind, published by Quantum Cosmos.
Steve Esser finished reading A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World (Philosophy of Mind Series) by Gregg Rosenberg. Steve has this to say:
Clearly, I’m a fan of this book. This is no doubt partly because I was already persuaded by the panexperientialist approach to solving the mind/body problem (and I have believed Quantum Mechanics provided evidence for panexperientialism as well). But Rosenberg has added important new strength and depth to panexperientialist ideas by addressing the metaphysical problems posed by causality and showing their connection to the existence of subjective experience in the world. In particular, his system puts forth a credible way to solve the combination problem in showing how experience might participate in causal structures across all levels of nature, including our own “middle” macroscopic level.
Gregg Rosenberg has an online thesis, A Place for Consciousness, exploring the problems of causation and consciousness, leading to a panexperientialist solution.
Another good more science related book is by Goswami called the The Self-Aware Universe.
A few months back I spoke with Dr. Edward Close whose book Transcendental Physics I read, and is a good rigorous scientific covering of panpsychism. Dr. Close uses G. Spencer Brown's calculus of distinctions, from Brown's book Laws of Form. John Lilly based a lot of his thinking around these laws of form. Saul Paul Sirag, who was mentioned in Robert Anton Wilson's book Cosmic Trigger, has a slideshow titled, G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form & John Lilly’s Take on It.
If you want to know more about panpsychism, Justin has listed many more good links on the subject:
Why I became a Panexperientialist by Charles Birch.
Panpsychism by William Seager (encyclopedia article).
Panpsychism by T.L.S. Sprigge (encyclopedia article)
Panexperientialist Physicalism and the Mind-Body problem by David Ray Griffin
Consciousness, Information and Panpsychism by William Seager
Whitehead's even more dangerous idea by Peter Fairleigh
Participation, Organization, and Mind: Toward a Participatory Worldview by David Skrbina. Interesting panpsychist theory based on ideas from chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics. Also contains an excellent history of panpsychism.
For a more mystical approach, I recommend Godspace.
I just became aware of this new Robert Anton Wilson site. It has some downloadable mp3's.
RAWilson Fans - A Time Binding Site
Courtesy Disinfo.
Just came across the Meaning of Life website, where Robert Wright interviews some of the biggest minds in science and philosophy to get their insights and opinions on the big questions. I was pleasantly surprised by some of their views:
Is mysticism an enemy of rationalism? Omid Safi, speaking from a Muslim point of view, says no. (If you're wondering how a Muslim got to be an authority on mysticism: Don't forget about the Muslims known as Sufis.) Is consciousness a mystery--so mysterious as to suggest some higher purpose in the universe? Yes and no, says psychologist Steven Pinker (who more definitively solves the mystery of his hair)
... Why are the world's religions sometimes at each other's throats? Huston Smith, who wrote the book on them, has an answer, and it's inspiring yet depressing ... Can science lead to religion? Well, says Templeton Prize winner Arthur Peacocke, consider the similarity between defining an electron and defining God ... Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, who doesn't (quite)believe in God, nonetheless has a way of taking the sting out of death ... Does mind pervade the universe? Do individual atoms make choices? Don't laugh, says Freeman Dyson; modern physics is full of such weird possibilities ... Not sure if you're living in the moment? Try observing yourself while listening to music, suggests Joseph Goldstein ... Some philosophers say they've explained onsciousness. Dream on, says Francis Fukuyama ... Ever have a religious experience? Andrew Newberg takes pictures of brains that are having them ... Do you have trouble meditating?Meditation expert Sharon Salzberg says that's a feature, not a bug ... The universe seems exquisitely compatible with life. Why? John Polkinghorne has a theory (hint: unlike most physicists, he's a priest) ... Why is biological evolution full of death and suffering? Well, says biologist Ursula Goodenough, if you're so smart, let's see you invent a better means of creating intelligent life. Biologist Robert Pollack has a different take on evil--it's just the toxic waste of free will ... The world's major religions seem pretty different--irreconcilably so, at times. Look closer, says Keith Ward. (Ward also has a few words for those who think science can answer all questions.) John Haught, meanwhile, sees the differences among the world's religions as a bit more stubborn ... Is faith bad for science? Au contraire, says Owen Gingerich ...
This is from Philip K. Dick's essay How To Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later
TV viewing is a kind of sleep-learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blank are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves.
(via BoingBoing)
Anthony Judge mentioned his article The Isdom of the Wisdom Society. Anthony is one of the smartest people I know of, and his enormous site and his articles are somewhat intimidating to approach. Certainly clear enough to read, but he covers so much ground that it takes your breath away a bit.
Many studies explore the importance of the distinctions in the sequence from "data", through "information", then on to "knowledge", and finally to "wisdom" [more]. At each stage there is a much-studied challenge of "management" (as in "information management" and "knowledge management"). Arguments are also made for the importance of a corresponding "information society" or of a "knowledge society" -- perhaps expressed as a "knowledge-based society". But clearly it is easiest to argue the case for an "information" focus, especially to hardware, software and information vendors -- hence the title of the UN World Summit on the Information Society. It is more challenging to make a case for a "knowledge society", especially since "knowledge management" is in process of being disparaged as a fad term lacking any real content -- notably in those corporate environments that claim to practice it. And yet it is precisely the transfer of knowledge, in the form of "know-how" that has been a preoccupation of the United Nations over many development decades.But knowledge is a troublesome thing to get a handle on. If I know one thing, and you know another, and a lot of knowledge is hidden in the library or on the net - what do we really know? Is it knowledge if we put it all in the same database? We so easily end up scattering both our information and our knowledge about, and apart from ourselves. Maybe splitting something apart that really isn't apart. Like ourselves.
The distinctions between data, information and knowledge are increasingly problematic as is to be seen in efforts to give content to "knowledge management". It is perhaps helpful to see the sequence as a progression from more objective to more subjective -- namely an increasing dependence on judgement, cognitive ability, experience and the capacity for synthesis (see Evaluating Synthesis Initiatives and their Sustaining Dialogues, 2000). Whilst software can be provided to manage information, those packages designed in support of "knowledge management" are far more dependent on the knowledgability of the user. Similarly, whilst data and information can be readily explained, this becomes more of a challenge in the case of knowledge. This is exemplified in the case of appropriately ordered information on a food recipe. Although the recipe may be followed, it is only in the light of the knowledge acquired through past learning and experience that there is any guarantee that the result will be tasty.OK, we need to understand wisdom better. Wisdom involves subjectivity, and it isn't easy to just break it down and explain it. It can't easily be transferred.
Paradoxically, as one might expect with respect to a "timeless" quality, its uniqueness derives from a way of "being in the present". This focus on the present is echoed in many sources of wisdom -- as the key to appropriate action in the more extended framework of space and time. Its proximity is for example stressed in various religions. Judaism and Islam recognize that the separation between Heaven and Hell is but a "hair's breadth" -- echoed by Zen in the acknowledgement that the separation between enlightenment and ignorance is again just one "hair's breadth".Well, that's very refreshing. The Zen of the moment. Again, hard to take apart, by its very nature, but it can be hinted at, maybe a bit poetically.
It is for this reason that -- playfully -- it is suggested here that the domain of wisdom might usefully be recognized as "Isdom". This might be seen as corresponding to terms such as "Kingdom", "Dukedom" or "Fiefdom" -- except that the focus is on the domain of "is-ness" in the present.
As the domain of the present moment -- the present instant -- Isdom is a place of being characterized by a quality of appreciating that moment, and sustaining that appreciation. It might be understood as the mode of expression and interaction in the instants before conventional exchanges occur. As such it resembles a kind of existential foreplay -- in part made of glances and understandings that are global in their quality -- an interplay of being. For example, one international event focused on The Butterfly Effect as the "coordinates of the moment before discovery". It is the sparkle on a pool -- or in a person's eyes (or those of any other animal).Well, I'm not going to go on and quote the whole thing, but Anthony goes on to explore how we might possibly "contain" the is-ness. It so easily gets spoiled and reverted into banal normalcy. So hard to hold on to. It is like the plasma needed to create nuclear fusion. The hardest part is to keep it together without it being messed up by the stuff that isn't it. How can the present be reified - made more real? How can we recognize and tap into FLOW? We might have to look for answers in quite different places than what we normally use to take things apart and analyze them. Indeed the addictive "normality" of our habitual world is exactly what keeps us from understanding the zen of the present moment, from tapping directly into the consciousness of wisdom and becoming more fully alive. The things we need to *get* easily border on craziness when seen through the eyes of our collective normalcy. The things we can neatly describe and categorize are not it. From the Tao Te Ching:
The moment may be imbued with a sense of incipient knowing or of intuitive re-membering -- of re-cognition. It may be understood through the anticipatory quality of "happening" -- a sense of in potentia -- as when encountering a significant other (perhaps for the first time). It is, for example, the instant before any process of falling in love -- "at first sight" -- namely before intentionality or action of any conventional kind.
The Tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao.To really BE in the present moment, and to be in touch with our inherent wisdom, we need to get beyond most of what we can think of putting a name to. Yet, the world is made of the stuff that is observed and named. Ah, delightful paradoxes.
The name that can be spoken is not the eternal Name.
The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of creation.
*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 Kevin Kellys Cool Tools.
The wisdom held in this brief book now informs most of what I do in life. Its key distinction--that there are two types of games, finite and infinite--resolves my uncertainties about what to do next. Easy: always choose infinite games. The message is appealing because it is deeply cybernetic, yet it's also genuinely mystical. I get an "aha" every time I return to it.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
*
Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.
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To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.
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The death of an infinite player is dramatic. It does not mean that the game comes to an end with death; on the contrary, infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. For that reason they do not play for their own life; they live for their own play.
*
I can be powerful only by not playing, by showing that the game is over.
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Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will play by initiating their own.
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Evil is the termination of infinite play.
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No one can play a game alone.
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There is but one infinite game.
Finite and Infinite Games
A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
James P. Carse
1986, 180 pages
$7
Ballantine Books
Amazon
Via Quotes of the Day:
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
- Philip K. Dick
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.
That would exclude, oh, how about governments and countries? If we don't believe in boundaries and in the power of certain groups of people to govern us, then there really isn't anything there. There are continents and land and people. But no borders and no power over us. No laws either. They aren't really real. People are real. What they do is real. Their thoughts and feelings and actions are real.
Goodbye to religions too. If you don't believe in them, there's really not much there. A lot of church buildings and some books. Good deeds are real.
Scientific laws and theories go away as well when we stop believing in them. Nature and life doesn't go away. The flowers keep blooming and the planets keep rotating around their stars. And there's a system to that, which keeps working. But it is the theoretical models of how we think that works that drop away.
There's a lot of things our theories say don't exist or can't exist. If we stop believing in those theories, those things will still be there. Extraterrestrials, other dimensions, paranormal perceptions, miraculous events. Except that they won't be miraculous or paranormal unless you have some kind of belief about how unlikely they're supposed to be.
Dreams exist whether you believe in them or not. You'll be zipping around in fantastic realities every day, at least when you sleep.
Failure and success, loyalty and betrayal, mistakes, lies, obligations, promises, "shoulds" - none of it means much if one stops believing. What matters is what is there, and what you actually do. Good constructive actions last longer than desctructive actions. They're more real. Good and bad feelings exist. The reasons for them do not.
Life exists. Consciousness exists. I exist. I'm probably more real the more I get over my beliefs about why and how.
"...all abstract knowledge is only a faded reality: this is because to understand the world knowledge is not enough, you must see it, touch it, live in its presence and drink the vital heat of existence in the very heart of reality..."
Hymn of the Universe by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Via Judith Meskill
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.
The concept of "The Singularity" is all the buzz amongst certain types of futurists. Mostly it fits in with transhumanist thinking. It is based on the observation that a lot of technological trends are accelerating, even faster and faster. And there are a number of them that in and of themselves have the potential for deeply transforming our collective lives. Take nano-technology, which ultimately might allow us complete control over physical matter, so that we can build any physical object we might desire, at essentially zero cost. Take artificial intelligence. What happens if a computer becomes smarter than you are? What happens if computers are a million times smarter than any of us? What would they do that we wouldn't even be able to comprehend? Or, take genetic engineering. What happens if we're able to understand and design genetics freely? If we can make bodies or new life forms with whatever attributes we want.
The Singularity is both a potentially wonderful, but also terribly scary idea. The "point" of the Singularity is essentially when all of these trends go out of control. They move beyond our event horizon, and we can no longer follow along in any linear manner. Technological change is instant. And what if the machines decide we are no longer relevant?
Now, if one is well versed in other metaphysical models than the materialist transhumanist ones, there are some striking similaries to find. The Singularity is potentially like a technological ascension. It is like the Rapture. Many adherents will even deal with it in a rather religious way, even if they would deny any such thing.
However, the connection I particularly wanted to call attention to is with the model of "dimensions" or "densities", which is found in various mystical traditions, and which is common in new age thinking and often occurs in channeling. If we de-mystify it a little bit, it is simply a chart of how things change when they accelerate, and what stages the world is likely to go through as the frequency of everything is increasing. The story is usually told in a person-centered way. I.e. the focus is on how the world changes for people. But, as a corrollary, how the world actually changes. And the model shows some of the potentially dangerous pitfalls in an accelerating world, as well as the necessary answers. And it gives some hope that this sort of meta-patterns have built-in safeguards that means that vastly increased power has to somewhat go hand in hand with mental development.
Just notice for a moment that a number of the technologies that are envisioned simply couldn't be released into the world today. The world would be destroyed very quickly, mostly because there would be some wackos who would push the wrong button. Imagine if the plans for a do-it-yourself hydrogen bomb were available on the Internet, and anybody who could use a screwdriver could build one out of $50 worth of parts from Home Depot. It would be a matter of days before some crazy guy would decide that it is a cool idea to nuke your city, just to see what would happen. Nano-tech can be like that too. One big mistake with self-replicating nano-machines and you turn the whole world into grey goo. Humanity at large is obviously not of a mental state to be able to handle that kind of power and responsibility.
OK, so now let's talk about the 3rd, 4th and 5th dimension. Calling it "dimension" is maybe confusing, as we're not necessarily talking about dimensions in the geometrical sense, even though that might be a sub-part of it. Think "Buckaroo Banzai in the 8th Dimension". It is more like a place or a world or a level where the rules are different. More down-to-earth, the world doesn't necessarily go anywhere - it is simply that the rules change, as things move at a faster click. Instead of "dimensions", some people say "density". I'm not sure that makes it better, except for that it implies that more stuff is packed into the same space as we count up in the numbers.
So, humanity starts off in the 3rd dimension. Which is the world as we know it, or rather, as we knew it. The best way I heard of making sense of it is that this is the way that you get things to happen in 3D:
spirit -> thought -> emotion -> effort-> manifestation
I suppose you could replace "spirit" with something else if you don't believe in spirituality. "The sub-conscious" could fit somewhat, although not exactly. Regardless, the idea is that an urge or inspiration to make something happen forms at a deep, or high, non-verbal level. Then it gets formed into a thought. Then one gets into the right mood for doing it. Then one actually works on carrying it out. For some amount of time. And finally one gets the result. That might potentially have taken years.
For example, you might get the inspiration to make it big in the vacuum cleaner business. You then form the thought. I.e. you think about it, and you get clear on what your plan is. "Selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door - there's a huge market there!". And then you get excited about it. That's the emotion part. And it might include stubbornness, and various other kinds of emotions that support this project. Then you start working on it. You maybe start yourself, selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. You have failures and successes, and you learn. Maybe in a couple of years you're really good at it, and you make enough money to hire another person and have a bit of inventory. And over 20 years, maybe you built an empire, from hard work and dedication and 16 hour days. And you have 10,000 people working for you, and you can buy a yacht. And there's your manifestation: making it big in vacuum cleaners.
Duh, you might say. Or your parents might say. That's just how things are done. Work hard, and get a good education, get a solid job, and work hard some more, and maybe you'll make it to something someday. But it takes time.
So, to contrast it, let's move on to 4D, the 4th dimension, or 4th density. Here the sequence that leads to manifestation looks like this:
spirit -> thought -> emotion -> manifestation
You'll notice right away that we took out the part about effort, hard work, and long time. So, the way it works there is:
An inspiration appears, to make something happen. You formulate the thought of what that is. And then, if you can get into the right mood about it - if you can feel it, taste it, smell it, and you're excited about it, and certain about it - what you're asking for might just happen rather quickly.
So, here we're talking about a world where things move faster and where everybody's exposed to a lot of information. Now, what something looks and feels like suddenly is more important than how many years it took to make it. If you look the part, you can have the role. Doesn't really matter you didn't go to acting school. If a new product or idea or person is exciting enough, inspiring enough, and makes us feel enough - they might spread like wildfire into the public mind, and make a lot of money. This is where a one year old company of hackers doing software might buy out a venerable fortune 500 company that produces really substantial products and has existed for 100 years. Doesn't really matter any longer.
From a personal perspective, the trick is that if you really feel it, in a positive way, you can have it. If you obviously feel right about it, there will be someone you can go see who can get you what you want, like tomorrow. But one of the pitfalls is that you need to agree with yourself. It is not necessarily enough to act excited about your "bright" idea. It is more important that you're in alignment, in congruence with yourself than that the idea is really bright. It is more important that your emotions are real. So, your hidden negative emotions will come up and bite your ass. If you're not really sincere, people are more likely to notice, and it is much less likely you get where you want to go.
OK, on to 5D, the 5th dimension. What happens there is:
spirit -> thought -> manifestation
So, we cut out the emotion part. No longer necessary to get into the right mood, and broadcast the right vibes before you get things to happen. You just need to form the thought clearly enough, and, bing, there it is.
Well, that's kind of like the holodeck in Star Trek. "Computer! Give me ..." And, indeed, maybe technology is a way it will manifest.
One way or another, it means that the brakes have been removed. It doesn't take work to make things happen. It doesn't even take sincerity and dedication. You just have to form the thought.
You might realize, with the way most human minds work today, that it could quickly be a complete nightmare. Like, think about the humorous situation you have seen on film, where somebody's granted 3 wishes, and they screw them up, by lack of control over their thoughts or emotions. "I wish that hotdog was stuck on your nose", "I wish I was the pope". And you usually have to use the last wish to put everything back to normal, after which you're sort of relieved that you can't just go around wishing for things anymore.
So, imagine that you could. It suddenly becomes absolutely vital and essential that your thoughts are clear, and in alignment with what you really want. And that you don't let stray negative emotions suddenly decide what you think. One "I wish he was dead" can have fatal consequences that can't be undone.
This is where you again might imagine that anybody could build a nuclear bomb. "Computer! Give me a 50Megaton nuclear warhead!" ... and there it is in the matter compiler in your kitchen.
That would never ever work unless all humans are sane on a totally different level than today. Humankind would have to evolve and mature, mentally and emotionally, for that kind of world to be possible.
Even if we're not talking nuclear bombs, most humans of today would go insane rather quickly if whatever they were thinking or asking for continously would happen to them more-or-less instantly. You'd be bouncing against the walls, trying to undo the misplaced wish you did five minutes ago.
We could go on the same way to 6D:
spirit -> manifestation
which in more materialistic terms would mean that the whole contents of your sub-conscious will just be manifested, without you particularly having to voice it. That would be wall-to-wall nightmare. Or it will be nirvana and paradise. The cold drink appears before you realize you could use one. If your sub-conscious mind is very mature, or we could say, if you're aligned with yourself on all levels, it would be marvelous. If you aren't, it would be even worse than 5D. Think about a nano-tech matter compiler/VR/Holodeck thing mapped directly into your brain and into your sub-conscious. The slightest under-the-surface hint of something would immediately be manifested in front of you. Uaaarrrgh.
7D would be that you no longer need the manifestation even. Pure spirit. Or, if you want to look at it materialistically, it could be if you had uploaded yourself to a computer, and you were perfectly happy with simulated experiences, rather than "real" ones. And anything you might ever want is instantly available to you. All at the same time, if you want. You can be anybody you want. So maybe you move on to a different kind of meta-perspective that no longer seeks human kinds of experiences.
As to where we are now .... A lot of people think that humanity has moved from 3D into 4D. I.e. it is no longer a world where hard work and time invested is the most likely thing to pay off. More important what things look and feel like. Media exposure is more important than the facts. What you radiate is more important than what experience you've actually had.
And, one way or another, one of the next steps will be what is described as the 5D. We can easily lay out how it will happen with technology alone. But it is much more than that. It is a total change in how the world works. And it requires some substantial evolutionary changes in humanity to be able to deal with it without short-circuiting and self-destructing.
Luckily there's a bit of an inherent training program built-into accelerating change. You'll have to continuously run a little faster, and there will continously be more stuff to deal with, in terms of information, thoughts, emotions, ideas, people. The only way of surviving and staying sane is to somehow keep up with it, processing it along the way, which means that you evolve, and you become much better at handling the faster action. You might not notice, and you might think you're way behind, but if we compare what you deal with every day with what people were required to deal with in their lives every day 20 years ago, there's just no comparison. You're vastly more able to deal with fast-moving complexity than you've been before. And that will keep going. Some people will crack along the way, but if you make it, you'll someday take for granted that we can all comfortably deal with capabilities that would have frightened us out of our skulls before.
And, somehow, it is all not happening faster than we can (barely) keep up. It is probably because the change is generated collectively by us, ourselves, here, and there are some feedback loops in place. So things tend to not happen before we're somewhat ready for them. We might not think we're ready for them, but there's something in our collective super- or sub-conscious evolutionary mind pattern that's smarter than any of us.
For the record,
1) I don't believe in any one model, map or metaphor to explain reality. I remain agnostic.
2) I think there is a high probability that most people claiming to be a psychic, specifically those attempting to gain a lot of publicity and make a lot of money, are probably charlatans or frauds.
Having said that, I'm going to defend psychic experience as something that should not automatically be discounted.
Lets start with this basic argument. Can you prove with absolute certainty to someone besides yourself that you have a waking, conscious inner experience? In other words, how do you prove to someone else that you are not a simulacra (zombie)? The point is you can't. The best you can do is convince people that since they experience an inner life of their own, and since you are much like them, that you too have an inner experience. For all intents and purposes, this is precisely how most of us assume that everyone we know has an inner experience. But it still lacks objective scientific proof. No amount of complexity research, neurological scanning and analysis, or neurocomputational cleverness can prove otherwise. All it can do is prove that all this complexity results in a system capable of complex behavior and reaction. It does not prove that the inner experience itself actually exists. We only know it does, because we have it! It's internally, subjectively verifiable by those of us with an inner life, but objectively unverifiable.
However, since objective reductionist science has served us so well, so unbelievable well, it's become an addiction we can't let go of when it fails. Rather than blame objectivity itself, we instead say that anything that cannot be objectively verified is false. Which is why it comes as no surprise that many leading thinkers in the fields of cognitive and neuro-science actually believe that inner experience is an illusionary falsity that doesn't exist!
This is where most often any further dialog on the subject comes to a grinding screeching halt. Because now they are resting on dogma. And once dogma enters the picture, there is no way to have a reasonable discussion going forward. The basic assumptions are so different (i.e those who say they have an inner experience versuse those saying it is doesn't exist), that further dialog becomes impossible. It's the same as if you were to argue about if God exists or not with a fundamentalist Christian. For those of you who've tried, you will understand what I mean by this.
But how can otherwise really intelligent people fall prey to dogma? That's a good question I'll leave for another thread.
Ok, so if you agree that you have an inner experience and that it is real in it's own right, then on to the next part of my argument.
Most people I have personally known that claimed to have psychic experiences were people describing the internal workings of their mind. They were describing what they experienced subjectively. Since this was something they experienced subjectively they have no way of proving to you that what they experienced is real, anymore than they can prove they are conscious and not walking zombies. You can either choose to believe them or not believe them. Like sharing an inner life, lends credence to other peoples claim of their own inner life, if you have also had a psychic experience it will probably help you lend some modicum of credence to another person’s similar claims. Like believing that other people have an inner experience, you can choose to believe this person to whatever degree suits you, but you still can't prove a damn thing about any of it.
And so it comes as no surprise that almost all people who are convinced that all psychic experience is delusionary hogwash have never had any experience themselves they could not explain scientifically. So the real divide is an experiential one, rather than an intellectual one.
I have no doubt that quite a bit of psychic experience could be explained away by science, things like deja-vu are getting some cognitive scientific explanations, as are some "intuitive" leaps that seem extra-sensory but are in fact subconscious sensory experiences.
But after filtering all of that out, there are still a large set of "psychic" experience that have not (yet) been explained by current scientific understanding. The problem remains that people, so addicted to the current framework of science are willing to discount all of these experience because of a current lack of explanatory power. This is just dogma in action. Scientist no matter how well trained or astute are capable of falling prey to these base emotions. Science is replete with case after case of dogma getting in the way of theoretical advancement. It was once joked (by Thomas Kuhn I think), that science only advances when the last generation of scientist die off, and the new generation without preconceptions is ready to embrace the new scientific framework. Even Einstein fell prey to this problem when he said, "God does not play dice with the universe".
Ok, so what am I getting at? All I'm getting at is that people have had genuine inner experiences that were so profound and compelling (myself included!), that have yet to be explained by science. I can say that the chance that my own experiences are just coincidence are a close approximation of zero.
The experiences I had, and I have now had several of these, is that I had the subjective experience of leaving my body, flying out of the building I was in and traveled far away from where I was, and in one case traveled over a mile away. In two of these instances, when I awoke I rushed to these places to see if anything I saw while "out of my body" could be verified. When I got to the scenes, there were at least a dozen intimate details which matched precisely what I saw in my dream, including the faces of people sitting on benches in the area, the makes and models of the cars in the parking lot nearby, the shape of the clouds in the sky, and even a piece of garbage in an ally way.
Coincidence? I choose to apply Occam's Razor, which aims to find the simplest explanation, and coincidence is definitely not the simplest. It's far easier to say that I had some kind of clairvoyance or OBE, perhaps explained within the quantum mechanical non-locality framework, or something else. But the odds of it being a coincidence are trillions to 1.
Sure, you could say I'm making all this up, and there isn't a darn thing I could do to repeat this event or prove it to you, so we are left right where we started.
I love reductionist science and empirical materialism, but I also know that the current framework of science cannot explain my experiences (yet). Until it can it will remain incomplete.
Related Links:
On Materialism as Science Dogma - Thanks sauceruney for the link.
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.
Bucky Fuller was apparently a man before his time. The following quotes were from his book Critical Path, published in 1982:
It is now possible to give every man, woman and child on Earth a standard of living comparable to that of a modern-day billionaire.
This is not an opinion or a hope -- it is an engineeringly demonstrable fact. This can be done using only the already proven technology and with the already mined, refined, and in-recirculating physical resources.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
This will be an inherently sustainable physical success for all humanity and all its generations to come. It can be accomplished not only within ten years but with the phasing out forever of all use of fossil fuels and atomic energy. Our technological strategy makes it incontrevertible that we can live luxuriously entirely on our daily Sun-radiation-and-gravity-produced income energy. The quantity of physical, cosmic energy wealth as radiation arriving aboard planet Earth each minute is greater than all the energy used annually by all humanity. World Game makes it eminently clear that we have four billion billionaires aboard our planet, as accounted by real wealth , which fact is obscured from public knowledge by the exclusively conceived and operated money game and its monopolized credit system accounting.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980s jobs in their cars and buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth-producing jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home.
If his words rang true then, they do even more now. So the prevailing question is, why hasn't humanity taken his advice, and is there hope that we ever will? I think the answer is yes. The biggest problem that continues to persist is exclusively conceived and operated money game and its monopolized credit system accounting. And that is where the rules of the game are slowly starting to shift.
The network-enabled emergence of participatory capitalism and the subsequent transparency of modern day accounting, motivated in part by Enron and Worldcom, and the increasing ease in which customers-investors will be able to move their money towards trusted (reputation-system powered) parties will turn the tide on this, and bring us closer to a leisure society.
By John Lilly
Before the beginning was the VOID.
Out of the void came the First Distinction, the Star Maker, the Creator, the Decision Maker.
Then came the idea of self, the consciousness without an object, the consciousness of itself without an object, the consciousness without consciousness, self.
From consciousness without an object came the object, the first object, space a space to vorticize, a space to whirl, a space to turn upon itself, a space to turn upon itself and then in addition turn upon itself in the other direction, opposite, expanding.
On the microlevel, the smallest vortex, the smallest quantum of space, the smallest of the smallest unit out of which all else would be built - the smallest vortex reproduced itself, reproduced in pairs, opposite, swinging oppositely, making sure to balance, so that the sum over all the integral of ALL was zero, as if not real. God created AS IF, the as if conscious as real, made hardware out of software, software out of hardware, creating nothing, casting ALL to destruction back in the VOID. Everywhere the VOID. Anything, everything, all of it can dump, at any moment, any instant, any eternity, any past, any future, into the VOID to zero out SAFE PLACE.
The integral of all the summed aspects of averaging through all the new creation, is all the little vortices and their dances to make larger vortices and their dances to make still larger vortices till finally a universe.
In the beginning was the point, the smallest possible point, the H nu, "h(v)," the quantum of action.
Also at the beginning was the quantum of love expanded, L star, L*, expanding becoming the idealized abstraction of universal love, filling the new universe, yet also filling the old consciousness without an object. The true prime abstract compassion working its own thing out there with nothing else to refer to. With NOTHING to refer to except ALL, which included it, itself, Lovestar, L*.
The random dance of E star, E*, entropic energy, totally random, having no point, no place, pure, pure energy, pure randomness, pure destruction burning all else into itself, becoming entropic, running down isothermally as high a temperature as it could achieve out of all the organization around it that it swallowed up.
N star, N*, negentropic energy, the big N, the Network, the intelligence, the organizer. That which comes, takes entropic, makes it straight, straight lines, points, planes, solids, cubes, crystals, computers, brains, life. The organizer. Building, building out of nothing everywhere, using entropic energy in its service, creating, creating straight lines, crooked lines, curves, surfaces, beautiful nonlinear spaces, Reimannian surfaces, pure mathematics.
Minus star [-]*, negative energy star. The pure negative energy, the destroyer of the creator. Negative opposite the positive energy.
Plus star, [+]*. Pure positive energy, the rejuvenator, the pusher, the creator, opposite of the destroyer [-]*.
Zero star, Z*, nothingness, the void, the absence of all, negative absence of the positive, the positive absence of the negative, the where with all, the opposite of all, from all, the zero place, the safe place, the nothingness from which all came and back to which all goes. Nothingness. Zero star, Z*.
[-+]* -> Z* -> [+-]*
All is nothing, nothing is all.
C* pure consciousness. The pure aspect of it, itself, before it thought of itself yet after it thought of itself. The distinguisher yet the non distinguisher. The pure high indifference HIND which is without the necessity of any of the others in this cosmic dance. The beginning, the end, the be all in C star, C*.
C*, [+]*, [-]*, L*, Z*, the five energies, the five sources. Opposite these from the left hand we go to the right hand. God starts with nothing, with zero, with Him before Him out of which He came, as well as everything else.
In his aspect as the Star Maker, N star, N*, the creator, that which created everything else including itself, N star, pure negentropic creativity. The organizer on the pure organization level. That which came and managed all else.
L star, L*, the lover. That which feels compassion is the L star trip for all the others, making sure that love permeates everywhere, keeping the atoms dancing and the vortices whirling, keeping space intact, not allowing zero to take over yet, yet compassionately reducing to zero that which is too much in the negative region.
Plus star, [+]*, pure positive energy seeking, always seeking, the positive, the orgiastic, the orgasm, the fucking of the universe fucking itself, always doing the fucking. The female fucker, the cunt, the cock, the male fucker. That which is so positive that it's unbearable. So anti-negative that it's euporhic, it's orgiastic and it's ananda, it is beyond comprehension in the positive realm. Pure positive abstraction.
Randomness, E star, E*, that which is totally unorganized, not allowing any organization to appear, destroying all organization that does appear. The shiva-shakti dichotomy to the nth power. Pure random organizer and anti-organizer that tears it all down, that destroys the whirlings, takes the vortices, converts them into pure electromagnetic energy by the collapse of anti-matter and matter into the energy space into the N* space and then reducing that itself. Pure randomness with photons no longer photons. With thermal photons no longer thermal photons and the isotropic eternal dance of nothing taking place in any direction with no space, no time, ten to the minus thirty-third centimeters, indeterminacy of space itself, of topology. Indeterminacy, the quantum of indeterminacy, raised everywhere supporting ten to the ninety-fifth grams per cubic centimeter of density, of apparent density and yet totally random.
Yet, God is beyond all this he is ALL, Allah, singing the praises of his creation, living through his creation, differentiating, unifying, diversifying, making further distinctions among ALL in order to differentiate, in order to start wars, in order to destroy in order to create, in order to be human, in order to make man, in order to make dolphins, to make animals, to make, to make, to make and unmake in turn ALL. Summing it all up including nothing. Nothing encompassing ALL. All encompassing nothing. That which became, that died and became ALL, then died again and become zero.
Table of Energies - Agents
Symbol Energy AgentC* Consciousness, High Indifference Creator
L* Love, Pure Abstract Involvement Binder
N* Negentropy, Pure Information Knower
[+]* Positive Plus Energy Increaser
[-]* Negative Minus Energy Decreaser
Z* Zero, Nothing Voider
E* Pure Entropy, noise, chaos Randomizer
A* ALL, Everything Includer
U* Unity Unifier
D* Diversity Diversifier