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I just got off the phone with Reverand Tom. I'm very glad to have met such a brilliant and passionate man who deeply cares about where we are going. He has put forward a tremendous body of work that I believe finally addresses so many of our planetary problems head on. I have yet been unable to find serious argument with any part of his proposal. It is both visionary, and should be taken as such, but also a deeply thought-out and rigorous plan for making concrete and meaningful, positive change in the world The best part of Tom's ideas is he embraces ALL, and leaves no one out. His plan does not require some fundamental force in our society to change - whether it be good or evil, great or small. Rather Tom, like an Aikido master, lovingly colloborates with these forces for the benefit of all. Whether they be the super rich elite or the poorest child.
What Reverend Tom is proposing is nothing short of pure unbounded love fueled by hyper-rationality and spiritual gusto.
So what's next? I believe Tom is right. We are on the verge of a total breakdown of everything we know. All of our old systems our on the verge of collapse. Everything will break down. But not in a bad way. This breakdown will merely be a reshuffling of the deck, an economic renewal towards something greater - a new holistic system of planetary stewardship and radical accelerating transhumanist hyper economics into the cosmic frontier. It benefits everyone. And the only way this is going to happen is through macroscale engineering projects which the super-rich will decide is what they want to do next. Why? Because they will have to if they want to survive, and because it will be exciting for them. It will allow them to go to the next frontier. All the automation in the world is not going to be enough for the super-rich to bootstrap themselves to the stars. Not even nanotechnology is going to save them. They are going to need as many people as they can all participating in the greatest projects of our generation, of any generation. They will produce enormous wealth for those at the top, and more wealth for all us that we have never seen before. It's a win-win situation for all of us. To get a good idea of some of these starter macro-scale engineering projects, please Tom's articles, Collective Empowerment (pdf) and New Section XVI.
Please be nice to Tom. He is a super nice guy. Disagree, debate, argue, but please be nice. Tom is not crazy, only a brilliant, sensitive and caring man wishing to help, and I believe he is just the one to do it. Let's give him a chance.
I told Tom that his ideas are a few steps ahead of most people, and probably at least a step or two ahead of even the most astute Future Hi reader. What he has presented in these preliminary documents are first drafts, raw manifestos to get the ball rolling. Let's see where we can go next.
I've been observing the optimism and "pronoia" espoused by upwinger and Chris in their posts, and the angst espoused by Ralph Metzner in his article, and in their own unique ways, by Paul and eventhorizon. I'd like to offer a perspective on how we can reconcile these divergent perspectives into a single worldview, and how we can "take charge of the situation" and proactively instigate the future of joy, ecstacy, freedom, and abundance that God has prearranged (but not preordained) via universal intelligence. I've been researching a "hyper-holism" that reconciles epistemological and ontological opposites — so that we can: a) see the world's political situation in its true context, and b) effectively reconcile religious and political opposites. What follows is the preface for a large paper/thesis that I am working on. Following the preface is a description of a special twenty-one page .pdf file that I have prepared, and a link to it. It is meant to offer a message of hope that is unbridled, yet grounded in the deepest Truth of our Reality. I can not think of a better forum in which to release this material, and hope you will find it to be both interesting and useful.
------------------------------ Beginning of Preface ------------------------------
Collective Empowerment and Entheogenic Freedom
This work is based on ten years of research at the point where science and the world's many religions come together without compromise. This research reveals a symmetry in the structure of human belief, as per the four cardinal paradigms of culture depicted below. As such, this paper draws insight with equal ease from: a) hard rational logic, b) the inspired appreciation of scripture, c) awakened subjectivity, and d) heartfelt ecological sensibility. This research also shows that the goals of collective empowerment and entheogenic freedom are closely related to each other, and to the securing of a unique destiny that is virtually unknown outside "psychedelic futurism." In particular, it shows why these twin goals can not be easily and fruitfully secured unless the quest to do so is made inseparable from a destiny characterized internally by communal, nanotech ecotopia, and externally, by a system of cosmic life that would eventually compare to this earth, in the same way that a towering oak compares to an acorn. It then maps out the way forward in detail.
Religious Monotheism
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...Mystical Pantheism --------.....-------- Scientific Materialism
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Paganism/Environmentalism
This paper cuts through mundane superstition to tackle the subject of time-symmetric causation head-on. The belief that cause always precedes effect is the most deeply ingrained superstition of the human race. Many are aware that time as we know it is an illusion. Few however, are aware that behind this illusion is a meta-reality in which objective forward in time processes, and subjective backward in time processes engage a holographic relationship of infinite depth. The paper introduces the nature of this relationship, and describes the primal challenge therein (and backs itself up with an appendix detailing the 12+ logical/philosophical arguments and 40+ pieces of empirical/observational evidence that overwhelmingly confirm the reality of time-symmetric causation). In this regard, it: a) presents the living destiny that has been prearranged, but not preordained, by the gestalt quantum-computational intelligence of Reality, i.e. God, and b) shows how the interaction of the real-numbered physical realm and the complex-numbered imaginal realm is rapidly bringing civilization toward an Eschaton characterized by a stark bifurcation of destiny.
This paper's goal is to give an overview of how we can help guide civilization through the lethal economic crisis that it will face circa 2010-2014 — while at the same time, securing freedom for entheogens in the context of specific group energy rituals. It is meant to offer a solid foundation for the challenge at hand. I hope it will be the starting-point for the wide-ranging discussions that will need to occur in these areas.
-------------------------------- End of Preface --------------------------------
Because this proposal touches on so many different aspects of culture, I have assembled bits and pieces of my work into the special twenty-one page file mentioned above. This file is designed to acquaint "psychedelic futurists" with the scope of my analysis, and the course of action that I am proposing. Because the new hyper-holism is so radical in its breadth, and the journey through and beyond the Eschaton even more radical, I have interspersed various charts with the text, and put everything in the order that I believe will be the easiest to follow. Included are the following:
1. A two-page chunk that contains the above preface and a high-level conceptual overview.
2. A two-page chunk that details the true role of the Divine Feminine vis a vis the Eschaton.
3. Two one-page charts that describe the four-fold symmetry of human culture in detail.
4. A detailed six-page introduction of how we may understand and navigate the Eschaton.
5. A two-page chart that describes "holographic libertarianism," an innovative political idea.
6. The three-page description of what life might be like in the "Millennium" and beyond.
7. A four-page list of experiments that should powerfully confirm time-symmetric causation.
This is obviously a work in progress, and some things may still be a bit rough (especially the list of experiments). Beyond that, the main six-page introduction contains a lot more information than would normally be there (to momentarily compensate for the unfinished paper per se). Please bear with it, for I feel that this research will prove to be accurate, and that the proposals based on it will ultimately be useful.
This file is intended to take people on a visionary journey. I hope Paul and the other people here experience it that way, and by this means, feel the living energy of an entheogenic future that is forever trying to get our attention. My suggestion would be to print out a copy, fasten your seat belt, and happy journeys!
http://home.earthlink.net/~thomaswinans/CollectiveEmpowerment.pdf
If people are interested in hearing more, I'll be happy to discuss the subject matter here, and/or post links to the various sections of the paper as I complete them. Please give me your feedback.
Sincerely,
Reverend Tom
A friend of mine sent me this link to Greg Baden's video:
Into the Zero Point (right click to save)
Some topics: 2012, Transcendeing the Kali Yuga's Four Ages, Mayan & Eygptian Calenders, accelerating technology and why it exists, Magnetic Shifts, Global Climate Change, Changing Human Chemistries, Becoming and Demonstrating Love-Wisdom-Compassion, Acceleration of Intense Healing of the "Big Stuff" since all the easy stuff is past us, Why your feeling disenfranchised and hopeless, and how we can get past it.
Very interesting and intense food for thought on the coming changes.
When I was about 12, I read an astounding article by Robert Anton Wilson's called Next Step: Immortality in Future Magazine. I identified myself as an immortalist from that day on. This same magazine introduced me to all sorts of other new cutting edge ideas. Immortality appealed to me because all the wonders I read in Sci-fi and all the amazing futures I imagined myself living in would now come true, because I would live thousands of years to see them all. I would be alive when we first colonized the solar system. I would be alive when we set out for the stars and colonized other planets. I would be alive to become a space pioneer and experience alien cultures and super advanced extraterrestrial races. All of these visions then and still are much greater and fantastic than anything, save perhaps Star Wars, that I have ever seen depicted on film.
This desire has continued pretty much unchanged all the way through to the present. However, as I have gotten older, experienced more, seen the pressures the world now faces, and more deeply understood the implications of things like nanotechnology, this vision has been shaken. Even a year ago, I don't think I would have said that, but today, the foundations of my quest for immortality have come under greater scrutiny. Is my desire for immortality a genuine spiritual quest or based more around a fear of death? If so, do I really want to live in fear? Living in fear has got to be the worst way to live, since it precisely takes you away from living in your heart, your true center. From what I can see almost all immortalists are such because of their fear of death. They are immortalist more because of their fear of death, rather than their love of life. American culture in particular has a great fear of death, and it is one of the reasons so many American's are bamboozled into mind-numbing reality tunnels - from shop-until-you-drop consumerism to spiritually vacant dead-ends.
Fear can do weird things. I have seen many immortalists trade in many of their principles for the promise of longer life. If faced with their own death, I have seen them embody the worst of culture in a subconscious desire to blend in, not step out of line, or be noticed, especially now in a our climate of squashing dissent. For example, I haven't see any contemporary immortalist taking the moral high ground on any social cause that is sufficiently counter to the status quo, precisely because such an action could jeopardize their immortal quest. After all, look what happened to Martin Luther King, Jr. So the question becomes, at what point, if at all, would an immortalist be willing to die for a just cause over their own quest for physical immortality? Because lets face it, things could bad enough, that such a choice could soon face all of us.
And even putting the morality issue aside, things are changing so fast now, that for me at least; it’s becoming increasingly difficult to even identify what the "safest" path to future survival is. Can we say with any certainty what kind of world will be here in 20 years? For me it is almost impossible to imagine. We are at such a critical juncture that the slightest factors are now capable of reaping the most tumultuous change.
The truth that I have been avoiding, but is now staring me in the face, is that my personal ability to survive the next 20 is now almost completely out of my control.
I think the primary reason for this is that as the world has become more populated, explored, controlled and monitored, our ability to act freely within it has become increasingly constrained. For example, I would love to move to New Zealand, and get away from what I see is a rapidly disintegrating free country, and a rise in American despotism and retrograde conservatism. But if you, like me, have contemplated such an escape, it's much more daunting than it first appears, or should be! Unless you are already very wealthy, or happen to have a LOT of experience in one of their in-the-moment much needed skill shortages, your chance of immigrating there are almost zero. Pretty much goes for any other place you care to run to. Lets face it, the world is a lot smaller today, and countries have responded by making it much harder to move there. Frontiers are dead. That only leaves the space frontier.
However, in practical terms we are no closer to space colonization now than we were in the 1970's when Gerald K O'Neill trail blazed a compelling pathway towards its realization.
Nanotechnology for me has always held the key to liberating humanity from slavery. But nanotech is not here, and the mechanisms of elite control have become stronger. Our ability to travel and move freely has become harder, economic conditions more straining, resources more depleted, the environment more destabilized, and political welfare coming apart at the seams. Meanwhile the most powerful technologies are coming under greater control of the military. Sure, decentralized technologies are a powerful liberator, but they are not a sure thing. As powerful as they are, it still leaves those with the most physical power having the most tools of oppression at their disposal to wreck havoc anywhere they see fit. Cyberspace is great, but we still have meat bodies. So those who can control, maim or kill those meat bodies are the ones in charge. Again, it all comes back to our physical bodies, and any fear we have around death. As long as we fear death, those with the power to kill us, control us.
Sure, as they "tighten their grip, more star systems will slip through their fingers", but those "star systems" from what I can see represent a rapidly diminishing portion of the population. There was a time when I thought I could identify what specific characteristics that portion would have, and adapt myself accordingly, but the honest truth is I can't, and I'd be surprised if anyone did. Substantial wealth seems to be a prerequisite, but I'm not even sure about that anymore. Assuming it was and I did have sufficient wealth, what do I do then? Do I move to a small tropical island? What would I do to survive once I'm there? Is this even practical or desirable? Would I have to leave my family? And an even more important question, assuming I could do all these things and it was necessary, would it be worth it to survive in a world that was left? What specifically would that survival entail? What kind of world would life after such global chaos played itself out? Will it be a world I would even want to live in? Is survival in "hell" better than no physical survival at all? Well, if you are like most immortalists, the answer would still be yes, because death is the final oblivion... end of story. For quite a long time, I used to take this as the most logical belief. However, would I want to live within a hellish world that consists of some insane global fascist feudalist empire of insane, craven, infantile warlords, and ex-heads of state with their armies and weapons of death? Or how about a society which consists of a legion of nano-powered weapons of control? A society in which free thought has been eradicated via covert nanobots swimming through my brain and bloodstream? I don't know, imagine your own dystopia.
I know have echoed Bucky Fuller in the past, utopia or oblivion. Although such dystopias are probably self-negating, how do we know clearly when the final choice needs to be made between utopia and oblivion? At some point, quite likely, the only thing that could turn it away from oblivion is enough people at the right time, putting their fear of death aside, and taking a stand against the forces of evil. Is that time right now, next year, or already beyond us? I have no idea, which is why this dilemma is all the more pressing.
Interestingly, quite a few immortalists (ones I met on the Extropian List in the 1990's) having realized these grave possibilities, and fearing their possible extinction have adopted some crazy politics. Rather than side with what is the moral high ground they now position themselves with the side that has the best chance of winning, regardless of what happens to be the morally higher good. From their perspective, the best way to assure survival is make sure they are on the side of the guns, and not on the side having them pointed at you. Sensible enough, right? They have become true survival-of-the-fittest type individuals. Rather than become potential slaves to future feudal lords, they now work hard to make sure they are the feudal lords! When I realized this for the first time way back then, I was seriously depressed and disillusioned. I never gave up my immortal quest, but any illusions I had about immortalists all sharing the same heart-felt quest for a just utopia were shattered that day. Boy was I naive!
Now, lets shift gears.
Lets say, we do make it.. that we do survive the next 20 years as nanotechnology changes everything. Call it the Singularity, or the 2012 Eschaton, it doesn't matter. Well, assuming the Singularity does come and all of us here are alive when it does, what then? This to me is the biggest irony of all. We all might still die. When you think about it, what is the technological singularity anyway? As far as I can tell, and even under the most benign circumstances, it seems to me to portend an utter annihilation of all that we were. Some might say this is a good thing. Well, it would certainly seem to be a good thing in the evolutionary scheme of things. After all, we are talking about the final escape of intelligence past the extinction point out into the infinite cosmos. For life and intelligence, this would be the ultimate liberation - a time for celebration, and an overwhelming feeling of relief at finally having escaped any shackles towards utter freedom, joy, infinite intelligence and wisdom.
So why the irony? The irony, because it’s quite possible, even likely that you and I won't survive such a transition. The very nature of accelerating intelligence would be akin to the ultimate trip, your ego would be obliterated into a billion pieces. Except in this case, as all that was you is subsumed into the SI matrix, there wouldn't be any "you" left, save perhaps the "useful" parts for the SI's purpose. In other words, you die. From the perspective of "you", your dead, same as if you had physically died. So if you permanently die in this way, is this still physical immortality? What difference would there be between this death, and actual physical death? In both cases, "you" are gone. Now, this is where my thinking might be different than other psychonauts. During my NDE, I felt no sense of annihilation. "I" was still there, except this time, there was much, much more than "I". The feeling was I became merged with a much higher and more complete version of my "self". I still had memories of being me in this life, and I still could recall all the details of my life now. I still experienced my ego, but my ego had become totally transparent to this infinite all encompassing love of my more complete higher self. In other words, my ego was now more like my big toe compared to the rest of my more complete body. I can't even begin to tell you how liberating this was. This place that I now found myself was eternal. It was like the ultimate rest stop for the soul. It was a place of total rest, joy and contentment. It was the TOTAL absence of all suffering. And the most amazing part of the experience was that it was totally familiar. There was nothing alien about it all. It was as opposite of otherness as you could have, it was HOME. It was the place I have always known, and always would know. A place that has always existed and always will. It was total confirmation. I rejoiced! It was the most real and true experience I have ever had. To deny, reject, or doubt it would be the ultimate folly. If I were to doubt it, I might as well doubt that I am happy when I am happy. The experience just was. No matter what the ultimate nature of reality is, this experience was the deepest confirmation, the deepest, truest resonance with the very essence of my soul. I lost all fear of death, and it changed my life forever.
These investigations have taken me deeper into exploring techniques for Out of Body Travel, Astral Projection and so on. Based on my own experiences in these areas, as well as reading lots of other peoples, I now believe that there is no death. For many, reincarnation (i.e. rebirth) happens because they are not ready to believe there is something more. According to Robert Monroe, a pioneer in OBE work, people are not able to move beyond rebirth until their belief systems are completely cleared of all limiting beliefs. If we are, as many spiritual and psychonautic pioneers have said, co-creators of Universe, then the ultimate nature of reality is consciousness. Therefore, as conscious co-creators of universe, until we believe in a transcending reality beyond death, it will continue to occur for us in a repeating cycle of death and rebirth until we finally get it. This is exactly what Seth via Jane Roberts was always saying. Consciousness is the name, and infinity is the game. No matter what, we are all heading towards something beyond death, beyond the physical universe, beyond space and time.... not just eternity, but infinity.
So this brings me to my current beliefs. Although physical immortality could be lots of fun under the right circumstances, it is no longer the only game in town. I will continue to pursue my physical immortal quest for as long as I can, for a love of life, not a fear of death. It's win win situation!
From Multipolarity Memes:
The probability of living in a simulation appears to depend on the ability of the world to produce lots of simulations of itself: so in our particular case you can see upon analysis that the evidence for living in a simulation is quite strong - we are after all living in the computer age and we are about to witness the birth of the realistic computer simulation. There is a self-reinforcing attractor effect here. Being in a world which demonstrates that creating simulations of itself is a causal norm increases the probability that this world is itself a simulation, so long as at least some of those simulations being created are extremely similiar to the original copy in the sense that they would have to preserve both the feeling that it is the original copy and its ability to copy itself. ... It would seem that our decisions on what types of simulations to create also effect the future decisions of our simulators in a transactional strange loop. So if we decide to create lots of 1st person solo-simulations for example, then this would have a significant "strange effect" on the individual. For instance it would organise substantial differences in the probability of one person being in a simulation compared to another person sharing the same topologically connected space. Furthermore this means that it is possible, with sufficiently enhanced mental reasoning, to reformulate the very nature of the simulation one is living in, without needing to directly access any substrate host worlds." -edit from my previous blog on what i called the "interestingness selection effect"Jerry Paffendorf's acc2005 talk "Brave New Virtual Worlds" is now online Link
See also:
Nick Bostrom's "Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?" Link
Marshall Brain's "The Day You Discard Your Body" Link
(To author of Multipolarity Memes blog - please contact me at psidoc at gmail.com)
Imagine you have running on your computer a small piece of code, even something as small as 1 kilobyte. Consider this small program a node. Imagine this node in turn generates output data that is based on two things - the first being determined by the specific algorithm its running and the second the data it receives at any one instant from hundreds or thousands of similar nodes elsewhere on the network (i.e. nodes running on other peoples computers). Imagine still further that all of these nodes, potentially hundreds of millions of them around the world, are all running and communicating with each other at light speed, and at increasingly faster speeds, based on available idle cpu time. At first you might compare such a scheme to SETI@home or other similar grid computing projects. The difference here though is that unlike grid computing projects, these nodes have no central controlling authority. This is important, just as the brain has no central controlling neuron or clusters of neurons.
The next question is what happens next? I'm not entirely sure, but the possibilities are both compelling and disturbing. First of all, it would depend on exactly how the seed node was created and instructed. What if it was given the simplest of rules, just like basic cellular automata that Stephen Wolfram describes? In this case, we would have no idea what evolve until it was released and ran through potentially quadrillions of massively interacting iterations. However, unlike basic cellular automata which occur on 2D or 3D grids, this p2p node system would, like the human brain, interact with tens of thousands of potential "neighbor" nodes. Further, these nodes would not just interact based on locality (latency times), but on semantic connections as well. The possibilities for experimentation here are endless, and even risky. Why risky? Because the level of complexity this p2p node network could achieve would be astounding, possibly exceeding the complexity of the human brain by orders of magnitude. It would represent a major advance over traditional neural networks (like the human brain) because connections would be made based on any definable means whatsoever, rather than on neurochemical convenience or traditional computer architectural constraint. The constraints would be more software than hardware based. And since computers are general computing platforms, such software constraints may not exist as we currently know them, since this type of informational exchange would exceed and surprise the person(s) who created the original seed node in the first place.
What this would essentially represent is a totally decentralized, out of control seed based cellular automata intelligence.
To me it seems the creation of such a thing would be totally reckless. Who is to say someone hasn't already done something like this? Who is to say that right now, running on your computer is some trojan node doing just such a thing?
Amazingly enough, what I have just describe would be one of the simplest possible implementations, and yet it is quite possible the end result of it running long enough could be some kind of super-intelligence. In other words, there might be a superintelligence running on the internet right now. One of many problems with this type of superintelligence is it emerged based on totally self-referential internal feedback. Nowhere in the scheme were humans, or the human world even taken into consideration. Quite possibly this type superintelligence, assuming it could evolve from the above scheme, would have no idea that humans even exist. It would by all definitions be an alien intelligence in every way that counts.
Ok, now lets start this experiment over, except this time we take a great deal more care about how its created and implemented, starting with the first node. What if we created a node that was general purpose enough, but with the specific goal reflected as much as possible the needs and wants of every participant on the network. A kind of avatar or virtual assistant that learned from everything you say and do. Obviously creating such an avatar would depend on the level of software advancements currently available. Lets assume we created this node today with the best minds in the world creating the best possible virtual avatar that we can. This though is only half the problem. The other half is how to these virtual avatars (smart nodes) interact with all the others. It seems that there would be a nearly endless number of semantic levels in which they could communicate. What if instead we created these avatars as basic "blanks" in which each human user defined them as they went along? More importantly they are open-sourced so that the best minds could continue to offer plug-in modules that enhanced these avatars in different ways. This way the marketplace of supply and demand of human needs would determine the courses, pathways and options these avatars took.
Meanwhile, why all these millions of avatars are running, even duplicating themselves, and intermingling at hyper-speeds all around the network, communicating with millions of other avatars, carrying on complex and subtle negotiations on your behalf, and in turn modifying themselves as they go along, what then do we get? Would we get a superintelligence from this as well? And if so, what kind of superintelligence would emerge? Interestingly such a superintelligence would likely be far more reflective of all of us. In a sense this new emergent superintelligence would be us. No longer would it simply be the amorphous global brain of all of us talking, but an actual instantiating global superintelligence that continually learns and improves upon itself based on constant human input.
One possibility of course is that someone or group of someone’s could modify their avatars to subvert the system towards less democratic means, in which their avatars, like agent Smith, takes over every one else’s. Who is to say what would happen then.
As you can see, I have no easy answers to how all of this could evolve, but the possibilities of p2p superintelligences seem to be much closer than I previously realized, for good or ill. One thing is for sure, the more open sourced it is the more resiliant it becomes to malicious tampering. The question then is what can we do to create the most friendly p2p SI possible? Eliezer Yodkowsky has his own ideas, and I'm pretty sure they are not p2p based. I would be very interested in getting comments from working members of the Singularity Institute on this.
Related:
Peer-to-Peer Games
Peer-to-Peer Virtual Culture
(Whitley's newest journal, from unknowncountry.com . This is exactly the kind of post I've been contemplating over the past two weeks, and Whitley here has done all my work for me, and has probably done it better than I would have. I urge anyone who stops by here to please take the time and read this all the way through. This is precisely the same message I myself have been trying to give to everyone. ... Thank you, Whitley.)
Just in the past two years, there have been two great earthquakes that have devastated populated areas and many other smaller ones that have also done great damage, the Amazon has virtually dried up, the Arctic has begun to melt, the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps have become unstable, and the weather has turned into a complex monster.
What is so interesting about this is that our planet is not the only one in the solar system that appears to be affected. There have been signs of unusual weather on Saturn, and Mars appears to be experiencing polar cap decline not dissimilar to our own.
Now a scientific paper has been published suggesting that increased solar activity over the past decade has resulted in the sun contributing anywhere from ten to thirty percent of the additional heat that's going into global warming.
In fact, it doesn't just suggest this, it goes a long way toward proving it. This will be taken by some people to mean that we needn't bother about global warming because it's the sun's fault. But, of course, it's not ALL the sun's fault and we can and must do something about the part that's our fault. The truth is that the added impact of solar heating makes the problem incredibly urgent. This planet's whole natural process is about to go into chaos, and when it does potentially billions of us are going to die, and the most vulnerable areas are the United States, Europe and China, so we Americans cannot expect to sit on the sidelines while the rest of the world suffers for our sins.
Anybody who doesn't burn to do something about the global warming problem is insane, and leaders who won't address it are in the process right now of committing the greatest crime against humanity that history has ever known.
When I worked on Superstorm, there were no models that factored in increased heating from the sun. But it's there all right, and therein lies the making of a catastrophe not unlike that prophesied as the end of the age, according to Jose Arguelles, by Pacal Votan, a Mayan ruler of the sixth century A.D.
I am beginning to see around me evidence that this man's prophecy was correct. Why that would be so is another matter entirely, and one that I cannot address except with speculation, but I can say that, if things keep deteriorating at the present rate, there are going to be environmental disasters of unprecedented ferocity in a few years, and I would not be surprised if they weren't upon us right around 2012.
There is no question at all that an age is coming to its end right now. In the past couple of years, the problems have become so obvious that they are very hard to ignore. The sun is more active than it has been in a thousand years. The magnetic pole is showing signs of a shift. Storms are becoming more frequent and catastrophic. Human pressure on the planet's natural functioning is rapidly overwhelming its ability to stay alive. Earth is dying.
And then there are the earthquakes and the subtle suggestions that great volcanic events might be impending. There are things nobody really understands, such as the hot spot east of Santa Barbara, California, and the signs of activity beneath some of the world's supervolcanoes.
The earthquakes are the strangest phenomenon. Why are they happening now? Are they in some way related to solar activity? If so, it's not something that our own science understands. We even have trouble understanding if there is a connection between earthquakes that take place in close time proximity but on unrelated faults.
There was a book published some years ago called Hamlet's Mill that suggested that much ancient symbolism was an attempt to warn the far future that earth every so often, perhaps on a regular cycle of about 12,500 years, went into a state of chaos.
Subsequent to the publication of this book, we have come to know that there was a complex series of cataclysms on this planet around 12,500 years ago, that led to the collapse of the world's then extensive glaciation and the beginning of the interglacial in which we have spent our entire recorded history.
There is all sort of evidence, commented upon by many authors, notably Rand and Rose Flem-Ath and Graham Hancock, to the effect that some sort of past civilization, advanced in ways that are hard for us to apprehend, was utterly destroyed during this time.
Sea levels rose fantastically during the glacial melt, and they rose fast, increasing hundreds of feet over just a few centuries. Nowadays, we live in what would have been the highlands of that period. Gigantic stretches of land that were present in those days now are gone. And there are suggestions, here and there, that there might be inundated cities and other structures, now far from land. But underwater archaeology is in its infancy, and geology has not produced more than a rough idea of where shorlines lay during the last glaciation. Add to that the probability that earthquakes have further altered landforms, and the chances of proveably detecting any unquestionable remains of even quite a large civilization become remote.
Nevertheless, in memory and in prophecy, we do have indications that this civilization was once there, and that it has tried to send warning forward.
We are living in the time it identified as the next age of chaos, and we would do well to acknowledge that fact as they did in their time, in order to do what they did, which is to project some remnant of what we have accomplished and what wisdom we have gained forward into the next human age.
It is fair to ask, then, what is to be done? I'm not a survivalist and I'm not going to recommend the purchase of flashlights and seeds. Time and chance will capture us all, and it will be a matter of luck and the moving finger on the wall who survives and who does not.
Best that we humbly acknowledge that, somehow, the past had possession of extremely potent knowledge. It's demonstrable: Mayan texts do identify 2012 as an epochal year; and the environment is disintegrating in ways that suggest that this prediction, made over a thousand years ago by a man who didn't even have use of the wheel, is perhaps the most potent human idea formed in all of our history. If he is correct, then it's not difficult to argue that his was the best mind that ever lived, at least during this particular cycle.
For nearly three million years, earth has been rocked by climactic instability. The periodic nature of ice ages suggests that the sun heats up over a vast cycle of thousands of years, causing the release of greenhouse gasses through natural means, resulting in a spike in air temperature that violently melts the ice and ushers in another interglacial when the sun suddenly changes and cools down again.
This gigantic solar cycle must exist now, but it has not always existed. Actually, the earth has spent huge, unimaginably long epochs in a condition of stability unlike anything we have known across the entire history of our development. During many of these periods, there were no polar caps, and life evolved slowly, impelled by the competition for living space into the myriad of forms and survival strategies that we see around us today.
For the past three million years, though, the opposite has been true. The continuous cycle of cooling and heating that the planet is now undergoing has wrought havoc in nature. The number of species has been in decline for that entire period, and has just now reached the peak of the bell curve. We will see a phenomenal dieoff in the next few years, a massive collapse in the number of life forms on the planet.
The extinction event that created us, in other words, is about to challenge our very existence.
It's not as if it hasn't happened before. In fact, every time there was a gigantic climate change, the primates reacted by adapting themselves anew to changed conditions. Were it not for the instability of the present situation, we would never have become an intelligent species.
Now, that intelligence must be called upon again, to get us through to the next period of relative calm. During this period, we will leave behind virtually everything we now understand as civilization. The consumer society will be the first to go, a victim of overpopulation and our failure to address the need to find new energy sources early enough. With it will go the United States as superpower. We are already in the last phases of that: like the British Empire in 1910, our country is overwhelmed with debt and beginning to treat the restless in its client states with extraordinary brutality. Next will be some cataclysm, perhaps the unexpected collapse of Saudi oil or the detonation of atomic bombs in our cites or a great plague--who knows what it will be--but on the other side of it, the world will no longer be dominated by a superpower.
At the same time and consequent to the fall of the superpower, will come a period of climate change so rapid that growing seasons worldwide will be disrupted at the same time that the large scale movement of food around the planet becomes problematic due to a lack of energy resources. This is likely to mean sickness and famine on a very broad scale, especially in areas that are not self sufficient in food.
It's not a pretty picture, and the failure of human leadership worldwide just at the time when creative innovation at the top was most essential has condemned us to vast suffering.
So, why don't I just go ahead and fall on my sword or put a gun to my head?
Because I am optimistic about the future, and I have good reason to be.
At the same time that all of these negative forces are gathering and arraying themselves against us like some kind of dark army of invincible soldiers with the monstrous weapons of the apocalypse, all aimed straight at our hearts, the mind of man is responding in ways that are so far beyond what we presently realize that they beggar description.
However, we are on a collision course with two destinies: the planet is about to throw us off like a horse switching its tail at a persisten dobson fly, while at the same time we are on the point of making a series of phenomenal scientific breakthroughs that may finally take the mind in the direction it has been trying to go ever since we looked up and saw the stars, which is outside of the body, into the surrounding world and universe, into total knowledge, total freedom and a future so fantastic that what we will be in fifty years will be so radically different from what we are now that we will be all but unrecognizable to ourselves.
If we live.
This has happened before. During the latter stages of the dinosaur age, the climate entered an unstable phase as well, which lasted about three million years before a the great cataclysm that delivered the coup de grace. During this time, the number of dinosaur species gradually declined, and highly intelligent--by dinosaur standards--new species such as Struthomimus--evolved. This fast, smart little beast came about as a response to a consistently challenging climate.
In modern (by geologic standards) times, the mammals responded to our own climate challenge by evolving another highly intelligent species--us. But we're a much better contender than Stuthomimus, and for a very specfic reason: we are intelligent enough and informed enough to induce further, even more rapid evolution in ourselves, and perhaps save ourselves and even our civilization, from the coming upheaval.
Indeed, I don't believe that a changing environment is actually our greatest enemy. Our greatest enemy is a part of nature that lies concealed within us. It is the death wish that arises out of excessive population pressure. This death wish began to be triggered a long time ago, in the middle of the eighteenth century, when a restlessness swept europe as cities grew in population, crowding and filthiness. By the middle of the nineteenth century, there had been two major revolutions, the French in the 1780s and the upheaval of the 1840s. In the United States in the 1860s, the first war of population destruction was fought. And then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the firing of a single bullet into the brain of an archduke in Bosnia turned on a killing machine that we had invented in the form of the European arms race that had unfolded from 1890 through 1914.
That killing machine, started by that single bullet, has never since been turned off. It is directly responsible for the rise of communism and Naziism and the massive avalanche of death that they brought to this world. Indeed, I could take you, event by event, from that bullet to the latest death in Iraq and show you just how direct and unbroken that chain really is.
I could take you, also, through the wicked hell of opposing ideologies that keep the machine running, and show you how a larger sense of enmity, expressed again and again as a desire to enter one utopian condition or another, has been threatening man from within even as the environment threatens us from without.
But this is not a history lesson. It is about what lies ahead, because the machinery of death might at last coming to pieces, and, if it does, then the human mind is going to spring free, and there will be wonders.
A confluence of scientific discoveries holds almost immeasurable promise for us. We are in the position, probably for the first time in any of the cycles we have lived through, of taking possession of our own evolution, and therefore also of the nature that now controls our lives with its dangers, its arbitrary cycles, and its indifferent casting of species after species down into death.
Biological and informational technologies are about to come together in ways that are beyond startling, that suggest that we may finally leap free of the bondage of the death wish and all the silly superstitions and ideologies that flow out of it, from the myth of the good communist to the myth of the superman to the myth of the free market, to leave it all behind, and along with it the religious and social superstitions that drive our ideologies on the ash-heap of failed ideas and false gods.
As our ability to create ever more dense information nodes is increasing exponentially, so also is our ability to deliver information to the brain, and to alter ourselves in ways that enable us to process it with greater efficiency.
And this is only one of many areas in which science is progressing toward the exact sort of post-apocalyptic human state that has been prophesied, that we will reach superconciousness even as the world falls apart around us.
It turns out that our approaching this state isn't connected with some sort of magic at all, any more than the spirit hole through which Pacal Votan said that he would speak was woven of an incomprehensible magic. Just as ordinary science is going to make the magic of the superconscious human being a reality, it was that hole that enabled archaeologists to discover Pacal Votan's tomb, and bring his existence back to light.
Magic, when you understand it, is no longer magic, and we are rapidly reaching the ideal human condition, which is one in which the average person is too smart to believe in the deadly superstitions and ideologies that claw at us like evil trolls trying to prevent us from fulfilling our destiny, which is to take flight and fill the universe with human mind, human spirit and human being.
If we live...
--Whitley Strieber 
I went to a talk by Joel Garreau who just published the book Radical Evolution. The subtitle of the book is "The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—And What It Means To Be Human." The talk and the book are about the radical changes to come amidst a world of limitless technology.
I normally avoid these talks because I have—so I've thought—internalized the interesting perspectives on where the Singularity will take us. Turns out I just only have two extremist views. There's Ray Kurzweil who, in The Age of Spiritual Machines, describes a "Heaven" scenario for mankind, wherein we upload our minds to machines and simulate a paradise of infinite beauty. Then there's Bill Joy who asks: In a world where a million people can make an atom bomb, how do we stop ourselves from self-annihilation? (cf: Why the future doesn't need us). We can call his the "Hell scenario."
Garreau introduces an alternative view titled the "Prevail Scenario," which he ascribes to Jaron Lanier.
The rest of this post is about the Prevail Scenario, pulling quotes from Chapter 6 of Garreau's book.
In both the Heaven and Hell Scenarios, the embedded assumption is that human destiny can be projected reliably if you apply enough logic, rationality and empiricism to the project.
This is referring to Moore's Law and its extrapolations which see chip speed and technological progress as following a smooth, exponential (accelerating incline) curve. It is practically an article of faith among technologists that the computing power of the brain will fit on a chip the size of a penny within a few decades. However, Kurzweil and Joy are obsessed with this prediction, according to Lanier.
In The Prevail Scenario, by contrast, the embedded assumption is that even if a smooth curve does describe the future of technology, it is not likely to describe the real world of human fortune. The analogy is to the utter failure of the straight-line projections of Malthusians, who believed industrial development would lead to starvation, when in fact the problem turned out to be obesity.
Another Singularity-like exponential curve seems fishy upon a modest glance of history. One could say that there has been an exponential curve in warfare technology, starting with the invention of the phalanx by the Ancient Greeks moving on to guns during the Napoleonic Wars. After World War I, it seemed that warfare would come close to world annihilation. And a couple decades later, with the atom bomb dropping, fatalists would think that it was only a matter of years before nuclear winter would destroy humans. Sixty years later, we have prevailed. So while there has been an exponential development in warfare, a Singularity of human annihilation hasn't happened as would have been predicted.
The Prevail Scenario is essentially driven by a faith in human cussedness. It is based on a hunch that you can count on humans to throw The Curve a curve.
The Prevail Scenario is actually not a single scenario, but a plurality of scenarios that see technology's impact on humanity not as an exponential curve that leads to a vertical line of progress, but rather as a spaghetti of outcomes that is as rich and unpredictable as human history has been.
Lanier espouses a particular instance of The Prevail Scenario which focuses on human connectedness. In this perspective, technology's best contribution is in bringing humans closer together. To him, it is "the quantity, quality, variety and complexity of ways in which humans can connect to each other" that constitute the relevant Curve.
Garreau also provides a list of "warning signs" why the Heaven and Hell Scenarios seem unlikely:
• Resistance to The Curves of change is actually having an effect worldwide.• Certain technologies that affect human development and enhancement are globally seen as worth slowing down or stopping, in the way that the use of nuclear weapons was effectively prevented for the second half of the 20th century.
• Technologies that were seen as inevitable turn out to take much longer to develop than anticipated. Predictions common in the early 21st century begin to sound as silly as those of the middle of the 20th century, such as the paperless office, hotels on Mars and self-cleaning houses.
• Researchers voluntarily stop working on topics they view as too dangerous.
• Researchers decline funding for certain topics that they view as too fraught with human peril, putting their ethics ahead of their promotions, tenure, graduate students and intellectual curiosity.
• Researchers decline funding from organizations they view as too laden with problems, such as corporations and the military.
• Computational power is no longer seen as achieving exponential growth because of the inability of software to keep up the pace of innovation.
• There is little correlation between any exponential change in technology and the development of human society.
To close, I'll end with a nice refutation of a nanotech "Hell Scenario:"
He [Lanier] completely believes that the moment nanobots are poised to eat humanity, for example, they will be felled by a Windows crash. “I’m serious about that—no joke,” he says.
A few notes about the talk itself:
The talk was held at the SAP forum in Palo Alto and put together by the Bay Area Future Salon. The audience was comprised of about fifty people, most above the age of thirty. The crowd was well-versed in futurism topics, such as Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns. My guess is that Garreau took the time to speak here because this small group contains lighting rods for his kind of message. Garreau's book came out last month, so perhaps this is also part of some book tour. While the talk was simple, it had cogent details and an engaging narrative.
(This article is a cross-posting from my blog Philosophistry)
The Singularity as Eschatological Archetype
(A Few Observations)
“Heaven is not a different realm, but this world after we have improved it and ourselves.”
(RCW Ettinger, Man into Superman)
1
Whether it is named the Singularity or the Spike, the Transcendental Object at the End of Time or the New Jerusalem, the vision of humankind’s mass transcension into a hyperdimensional state of being is a millennia-old archetype whose depths obstinately refuse to be fully plumbed. Like all abiding memes, it is a motif whose representations can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic archetypal pattern.
Today’s prophesized Singularity (as commonly publicized by Vinge, Drexler, and Kurzweil, among many others) is no different. Though first catalyzed by an unparalleled technological leap, this metahistorical Spike promises to comprehensively and irrevocably transmogrify every mode in which we relate to our selves, each other, and the phenomenal world at large. Our sphere of influence will vastly deepen -- not only outer space, but inner space as well will be laid bare to the penetrative stare of innumerable nanites and foglets. We shall at last see as we have been seen, and will then be, courtesy of superhumanly intelligent and benignly spiritual machines, summarily remolded in the image of our greatest and wildest expectations.
The only significant precedent to such a mind-bending warp in consensual reality would have to be the resultant Utopia often foreseen as the coda to the various ‘end-times’ scenarios of pious apocalypticists. Peering at length through the symphonic perversity of their feverish visions, we touch upon several key intimations regarding the ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of a post-historical planetary renovation -- visions which until recently have been either faithfully reverenced as gospel truth in spite of (or perhaps because of ) their seeming improbability, or alternatively scorned as hallucinogenic pipe-dreams. But when set alongside the forecasts of our contemporary futurists, these ancient allusions are sometimes startlingly similar to those foreseen today, and occasionally appear to describe the technologies of tomorrow in bold detail.
2
(Examples are plentiful and of varying extremes. The comparative overlap between these two seemingly disparate fields is remarkably large, should one choose to pursue it. I only wish here to outline a few of the more salient aspects.)
To sketch a brief example -- the ‘Spirit of Healing’ as foreseen in Zoroastrian traditions, which appeared to its forecasters as ‘a great stream of molten metal’ through which everyone will be made to pass, in order to be ‘purified’ for the transition to a new life in a paradisiacal ‘House of Song.’ This purgative has again been prophesized today, in the form of a nanotechnological ‘swarm’ that, once properly interfaced with the user, will eradicate biological impurities and augment his or her perceptions with neuromorphic stimulators, thus preparing and reprogramming the user for a life of longevity and transhuman magnificence. “Not only immortal, but eternally young,” reads the Zoroastrian text, a passage which finds a much amplified echo in the contemporary assurances of the cryonics movement. “Once more endowed with bodies,” we continue to read, “they will be able to experience the joys of the senses as well as those of the spirit.” Is this not a vision of a full-immersion Cyberspace -- a virtual theme-park of sensuality as well as a central repository of all the earth’s accumulated wisdom?
The Singularity, with all its attendant technological innovations in tow, also looms large in the chiliastic foresights of the Christian apocalypse. Its central motif, “the Holy City, New Jerusalem,” which descends from ‘Heaven” in plain view of the entire human race; a City of pure gold, “bright as clear glass,” adorned with jewels of every kind; a City that has “no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it,” but is lit instead by the “light" of a fully integrated Consciousness –- what is this if not the premature vision of a supercooled solid state Hypercube, the glittering golden mobilia prophesized by FM-2030, our future perfect hyperspatial home? A mystical model of sacred geometry covertly expressing the known proportions of the planet itself, the New Jerusalem represents a measuring-out of Heaven on Earth, the architecture of a macrocosmic temple into which all humankind enters to receive its final transformative quickening. Crossing this final threshold into the numinous Light of the great Beyond, the many millions of humankind will disassemble into a metamorphic Omegon unshackled from the outmoded mores of space and time.
Our modern prescriptions for the Singularity thus form a significant -- and far more rewarding and technologically correct -- revision of the older eschatological models. These newer prototypes have their template in the earlier visions, however surcharged they may be with the theoretical promises of the mid twenty-first century. But whether seen through the blinders of tribal theism or through the google-eyed wonder of open source technology, the End promised by both the visionaries of yesterday and the futurists of today are one and the same -- a New Heaven and a New Earth.
3
The fact that there is a Singularity of one type or another expected by every long-lived memetic structure in human history seems to indicate that humankind was hardwired with a ‘Singularity code’ from the start -- that it is an integral product of our forward evolution, an inescapable eventuality designed to fire at a crucial crossroads in the forward advance of our Collective Consciousness. In both ancient and contemporary reports of the looming Spike, the doom prophesized by the teleological transition instead gives place to the penultimate consummation of an age-long metamorphosis -- no ‘end’ at all, but rather a new beginning, a ‘making wonderful’, a second genesis. This ‘new beginning,’ the most crucial phase of the unfolding Singularity, is akin to a running process long obscured by an encryption scheme almost supernatural in its complexity -- soon to be unraveled and fully deciphered and downloaded by one and all as a sparkling new metahistorical operating system whose relative omniscience and omnipotence converge joyously upon the Divine.
The Singularity is thus the quotient that the alchemical algorithm of Conscious evolution has all these millennia been struggling to resolve –- which is, how best to explode base matter into a meta-dimensional bloom of fully conscious hyperspatial adventure?
Again, the much-expected and multi-faceted Singularity is the long-anticipated answer to life’s primary impulse -- it only remains for the technological and teleological prowess of the Gaian Mind’s leading prototype to unravel the remainder of the equation and, with these coordinates in hand, steer the Ark of Life to its transcendent destination in the sky.
4
The coming Singularity brings with it the promise of a new, more masterly emergence of Consciousness, one that promises to unify our fragmented selves into a tightly-woven telesphere of ubiquitously wetwired, mutually reflecting minds. The human psyche itself -- own personal node of the One (or Total) Consciousness of planetary humankind -- now unshackled from the pains and pleasures of its carbon-based interface, shall fuse with its silicon panacea and populate the very air we breath with the sentient sparkle of hyper-dimensional joie de vivre.
The New Heaven (as prophesized by the ancient apocalypticists) is the opening of this final frontier, the interstellar depths of the cosmos brought nearer to us by our needful willingness to venture out from our increasingly crowded home-world via the establishment of a meta-terrestrial Humankind, like so many branches spiraling out from a central seed. The New Earth is this very earth alchemically transmogrified into a crystalline Hub of hyperspatial Omni-Consciousness, the brute coal of our sun-kissed sphere at long last compressed into diamond clarity, now sought out by cosmic denizens near and far for the precious treasure we have become.
In the end, evolution on this planet will have been the growth of an immortal spark of Divinity from an invisible evolutionary lever to a hyperspatial Entity with complete mastery of space and time, having the ability to traverse any distance of interstellar space and deploy any number of men and women and children as ambassadors (or avatars) to other worlds.
We shall be both flashing neurons in the unchained Gaian Mind as well as first class passengers on the grandest interstellar starship.
You can sign me up. How about you?
--Upwinger
At the top of a pyramid, swarming with tourists, I slipped through time. We were there on holiday, drawn to the majesty and mystery of this ancient culture so unique and inspired. In the Gregorian moment of April 6th, 3:30 eastern standard time my wife and I swayed on the 356th step of the great pyramid of the feathered serpent, Kukulkan, dizzy and winded from the climb, mind's reeling at this point of contact. We'd finally made it to Chichen Itza. Among the many exemplary Mayan & Toltec ruins, the central timepiece of Kukulkan was the reason for our journey and the immediate point of our first visit. We each, in turn, approached the great base and laid hands on it's ancient stones, gazing up along it's ridges at the whisping cloudlets passing in the wind. Around to the other side and up the steep slope of 91 steps, calves burning moving past numerous apes, some too unfit to make the journey. Inertia doesn't stop up on the top in the temple, milling through the thickened crowd, looking, seeking, tuning...
But it's painfully frustratingly difficult to stop and silently open yourself to the intimacy and power of such a site when there are people everywhere around you. The ambience is just all wrong. And such wonders - power spots, vortices, monuments - really cry out to the sympathetic for an urgent communion. I tried not to think about the empty water bottles piling up under the capstone, then stepped through time.
Like straddling two rings of a spiral, I felt myself bifurcate gently between the present moment and a time some 2000 years ago, amidst the ancient Maya themselves. I felt the great celestial rites commanded from the temple, aligning with heavenly milestones - the solstice, the equinox, the rise of Venus. The vultures and falcons above had flown for millenia, and the lazy iguanas had been watching the stars since the birth of time. The buzzing hive around me blurred and thinned, semi-opaque, leaving me standing in the Isness of this timeplace, it's wordless moment coating me like amber honey. The information imparted was experiential, nonlinear, illogical. It was simply being in that place when it was far richer with meaning and intent and magick than the unwashed masses would now allow.
In 1935, Sylvanus Griswold Morley wrote:
When the material achievements of the ancient Maya in architecture, sculpture, ceramics, the lapidary arts, feather-work, cotton weaving and dyeing are added to the abstract intellectual achievements - invention of positional mathematics with its concomitant development of zero, construction of an elaborate chronology with a fixed starting point, use of a time-count as accurate as the Gregorian Calendar, knowledge of astronomy superior to that of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians - and the whole judged in the light of their known cultural limitations, which were on a par with the early Neolithic Age in the Old World, we may acclaim them, without fear of successful contradiction, the most brilliant aboriginal people on this planet.
While I've been unable to find a direct translation of the word "maya" in Mayan, it's always fascinated me that the same word in Sanskrit means "illusion". The enigmatic Maya of Mesoamerica often seem to shimmer and glimmer, beautiful and alluring like a mirage rising from hot sands, fleeting like a sudden glimpse of the Jaguar's spots receding back into thick jungles. Rising from early Olmec cultures in 300 b.c. the Maya grew to number among the millions with vast cities and religious complexes extending from Belize, Gautemala, and Honduras, up into the Yucatan peninsula in the north. Then around 900 a.d. the great southern lowland cities like Pelenque and Tikal were abandoned for reasons still unknown. Some suggest crop failure, others that a great volcano covered the region in ash. Or perhaps, as Arguelles and McKenna fancifully suggest, the great emperor Pacal Votan, having descended into the Underworld of Xibalba, gained access to the controls of time and swept his people away to the Galactic Center.
In Vedic philosophy maya is the illusion of a purely physical, phenomenal and mental reality, in which consciousness is completely entangled veiling the true spirit of existence, Brahman. God is reduced to law. Nature is no more than mechanism. The self is alone and ephemeral. Karma and ego consciousness are the binding forces of maya, trapping the individual in the ceaseless cycle of death and rebirth. The Hindu path of enlightenment entails an awakening to the illusion of physicality, separateness, and time itself to the ever-present timeless unity of true being.
The Mayan god of all gods, Hunab Ku, is said to exist in the center of each galaxy, radiating its intent out to life through each local star. It is in this galactic core that the motion of the galaxy is initiated and it's superstructure distributed out to it's components. Galactic time and it's dynamic web of gravitational effects entrains solar time which, in turn, entrains cellular time through the circadian rhythms of nature. The Maya were the emissaries of Hunab Ku tasked with tracking and calculating the movements of time as they relate to our planet and it's "harmonic relationship" with the galactic core.
It's interesting to relate the glyph of the Hunab Ku to the concept of a black hole, which we now suspect lies at the center of the Milky Way. Like the yin-yan, the Hunab Ku is a dynamic interplay of black and white. A black hole is an ultra-dense gravitational object so powerful that light itself cannot escape it's surface. While the galactic core keeps the dark firmament moving and hung with bright stars, their light is always being drawn into the darkness. The glyph of Hunab Ku is said to be a two-way street, allowing access to the core of any galaxy. Warping and bending with gravity, at the point of dissolution time ceases, space collapses, and infinity is revealed.
Mayan cosmology is intrinsically bound to time and the Tzolkien is their codification of a fractal, cyclical conception of motion radiating outward from the galactic center, through our star to Earth. The product of a 365 day solar/lunar calendar and a 260 day sacred calendar, the Tzolkien presents a great cycle of 5200 tun of 360 days each. This is roughly 5128 years for the current cycle, beginning at about 3113 B.C. Within this cycle of 5200 tun are 13 baktuns, or eras, of about 144,000 days each (Current 144?). The present baktun is the 13th and last, set to end on that fateful day in December of 2012.
The Bhagavata Purana tells that Lord Brahma asked his four sons to go and create progeny in the universe. When they refused Brahma grew angry and a crying child appeared from his forehead. The child, Rudra, becomes Shiva and was asked to go and populate creation. Shiva, though ultimately formless, is often pictured in a dance, as the delicate play of nature - creation and destruction - as it unfolds through time in the 5 energies: Shrishti (creation, evolution); Sthiti (preservation, support); Samhara (destruction, evolution); Tirobhava (illusion); and Anugraha (release, emancipation, grace). Shiva, in fact, is the Conqueror of Time and has always been regarded and worshiped as the greatest deity of the Hindu pantheon. Maya only exists through the efforts of Shiva, and it is Shiva's to destroy with the blink of an eye.
The Maya established the first and most complete understanding of time as it relates to our planet and solar system. While western science only stepped on the moon once in 1969, the Maya were thinking galactically before the birth of Christ. Within the complex codices of the Tzolkien, perhaps aided by the intricacies of the I-Ching, appears to rest a template for eternity. Time, like the flow of a river, appears linear on the surface, only to reveal complex dynamics - eddies and vortices and currents - whorling below. The human penchant for eschatology surely must be beyond apocalyptica. The end of time may be simply that: the sudden collective awareness of the illusion of history. Like standing on the top of Kukulkan, tourists to my left, Mayan priests to my right, all of time is everpresent, compartmentalized and portioned out only by the fragmented self struggling to make sense of the vast data of hyperspace. Like a tesseract, the structures within time remain, only rotating in a higher dimension, archaic but entirely new. Within the Hunab Ku, the black hole, the vortex, as above and below, the singularity of spacetime - galactic or personal - collapses temporality into the timeless moment of eternity. The serpent gains wings, flying feathered towards the sun, a blackened silhouette against a fiery white star.
Like the world-order system of the I-Ching, the system of Mayan science is one of holonomic resonance, as much of the future as it is of the past. Indeed, from the perspective of Mayan science the terms future and past are of little value as guages of superiority of progress. For the Maya, if time exists at all, it is a circuit from whose common source future and past flow equally, always meeting and being united in the present moment. - Jose Arguelles, The Mayan Factor
History repeats itself, as the old saying goes. But for how long?
A series of thoughts and images that I decided to put into words as best as I could :
As ideas are shared with increased communication, levels of inspiration rise, lifting energy levels higher and higher until the gaps between planes get thinner. The barriers between this plane and the others begin to disintegrate. The Archetypes, or Essences, being keys that unlock the doors to the unconscious, are found and absorbed into consciousness at an ever increasing rate.
In times gone by the Alchemists, Hermits, Adepts, Occultists, the Wise One's of yesterday would spend years, lifetimes, seeking out like minded people in order to learn what they could, collecting knowledge and wisdom of the hidden arts. Today the seeking is being done on a worldwide scale. Technology making the barriers between people, countries and continents obsolete, the knowledge and wisdom amassed throughout history is found, clarified and shared.
The Others, the manifestations of the unconscious, increasingly come to Earth (or go next door) and defy logic to prove that logic isn't the only thing there is, imagination is also a universe in itself.
The Adepts on the edge, pass over, having also learnt how to go next door, and greet the guides on the other side of the mirror. More skills of relaying information and teaching are learnt. More keys of wisdom are replicated, brought back, and learnt exponentially. Hypersites, faint, material mirrors of the other planes and the Akashic records, edging ever closer in the Astral light, list the maps, paths, techniques, spells, symbols and essences, send people on journeys of Magick, inspiration, and initiation, and open the ways to creativity.
Artistic skills increase as does clarity, perception and vision, and the places beyond this reality begin to have a better representation and bigger influence in minds the world over until the planes eventually begin to merge. New memes and paradigms burst through as the dam finally breaks.
History's boundaries are transcended, and as the evolutionary leap approaches, the information age passes with it. Humans progress from being In-formations, to being I(ntelligence)-Magi-nations.
From there, they do as they will.
The depths reached, the balance restored,
the lessons learned, the psyche healed.
Way back in 1981, one of sci-fi's greatest visionaries, A.A. Attansio, wrote a breathtaking book called Radix. I was lucky enough to discover it the same year. I took it home and read it from cover to cover without putting it down. I was spellbound by the story, and the extremely imaginative psychophysics of this world. Like Dune, there was a large glossary of far-out terms in the back. Here is just a sampling.
CIRCLE (Center of International Research for the Continuance of Life on Earth, 2009-2113): a self-sufficient scientific community on the southern Peruvian coast (kro), established to find ways to compensate for the massive morphological changes that began as the earth swung into Line; at the time of its causal collapse (2113), CIRCLE was the only technological community of any significance on earth.
Kro: the term designating the people who dominated the earth before the Line exerted its influence; protected by a magnetic field around the earth and a clement sun, they thrived on their self-absorption and paid only cursory attention to the cosmos that surrounded them.
Line: a hypertube; the timelike geodesies which connect the spacefree internal domain of a naked Kerr-singularity (a rotating black hole that is "open" to our universe); CIRCLE mantics first identified the ray of metafrequency energy jetstreaming from the massive black hole at the galactic hub as the Line; earth migrated into the flux of the Line fully in 2113 kro, though the transmuting effects of this atypical energy had been altering the planet for over a century. (See Linergy.)
Mantic: a human brain coupled to an ATP-pump; this mechanical means of extending intelligence was devised and utilized in CIRCLE; because of the mantic insistence on thinking in dialectical schema, they were obviated when the earth entered into the emergent, pluralistic reality of the multiverse.
Multiverse: the subquantal Field; the "internal" structure of the universe outside of time where all possible universes exist; this nth-dimensional domain is a reality at the core of all black holes; in some rotating, assymetrically collapsed black holes, this core is not shielded by an event horizon and "information" from the multi-verse enters the Einstein-space of our universe. (See Line.)
Psiberant: a substance which acts directly on the brain's third ventricle, the pineal gland, and the Fissure of Rolando; it dramatically increases empathic response in the user.
Radix: a mantic term for the root of existence, the void, or, if you prefer, the isostasis in which the infinite-dimensional space of the multiverse is imbedded; within this void, everything exists; the kro called it wu, ain soth, and sunyata.
Timeslip: collected Linergy, redirected to shape new, transient realities.
Tropiform: eo-crafted furniture which conforms to the shape of the user.
The story takes place in a future earth after it becomes transformed from a beam of energy/radiation that washes over the earth from a super-massive black hole in the galaxies core. The effect of this beam utterly transforms human consciousness into an entirely new plane of being. For 1981, this book was way ahead of it's time. You could say this book planted the seeds for my further initiation into the whole 2012 idea. Radix preceded Jose Arguelles book The Mayan Factor, which relied on a similar proposition that on December 21st, 2012 the Mayan Calendar will end, and humanity will enter into the Galactic Community. According to Arguelles this date represents when Earth will leave a denser vibrational energy and enter into a higher one via a beam of energy from a super-massive black hole at the Galaxies core. At this point humanity will become surfers of the Zuvaya - cosmic immortal beings joining the galactic community of light.
At the time scientists said that it was impossible for there to be black holes at the center of the galaxy. Then in the late 1990's they revised this position when indirect observations confirmed that Arguelles was at least right about there being large black holes there.
Now fast forward to a few days ago, and the latest image from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory orbiting the earth reveals that in addition to the very large super-massive spinning black hole, there are another 10,000 black holes and neutron stars at the center of our milky way galaxy. From the article:
In this Chandra image (shown below), four bright, variable X-ray sources were discovered within 3 light years of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). The variability suggests these are X-ray binary systems where a black hole or neutron star is pulling matter from a nearby companion star. Such a high concentration of X-ray binaries in this region is strong circumstantial evidence that a dense swarm of 10,000 or more stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars has formed around Sgr A*.
I find it interesting that three authors, Attanasio, McKenna and Arguelles, independent of each other all come to very similar conclusions about a future transformation of humanity. Even more curious is to find that what were once considered proposterous speculations on their parts regarding the galactic center have now been confirmed by the latest scientific evidence, contrary to expert opinion at the time their books were first published.
Ever brilliant Dale Carrico wrote this piece recently that clearly articulates my own position as well as problems with the singularity idea.
Technophiles who drift uncomfortably in the direction of the megalomaniacal end of the temperamental spectrum often wax enthusiastic about the near term arrival of post-biological superintelligence. Undaunted by the relentless deferment of the "inevitable" arrival of even the modest artificial intelligence we've been promised interminably by enthusiasts for decades, they warn of and (let's be frank) pine for the near-term and inevitable arrival of greater-than-human artificial intelligence to this day in the same urgent, sometimes hushed, tones.Not to delve too deep into my skepticism about this way of thinking, I will simply suggest that these starry-eyed projections (1) tend to overestimate our theoretical grasp of intelligence in general, (2) tend to underestimate the extreme bumpiness we should expect along the developmental pathways from which the relevant technologies could arrive, (3) tend to assume that these technologies, upon arrival, would function more smoothly than technologies almost ever do, and (4) tend to exhibit a rather stark obliviousness about the extent to which what we call technological development is articulated in fact not just by the accumulation of technical accomplishments but by social, cultural, and political factors as well, in consequence of which they simply rarely take these adequately into account at all.
I have no doubt that technology will continue to accelerate. I also have no doubt that computers in general will get smarter. And finally I have no doubt that given time, future intelligence will vastly exceed current human levels. What I do doubt however is that this greater-than-human intelligence will be an AI.
My position has always been that greater-than-human intelligence will be us. The future of intelligence is much more likely to be IA (Intelligence Augmentation) - augmented humans, and soon afterward fully nanoengineered post-humans. Singularitarians are probably correct in their assumption that its much simpler, theoretically speaking, to create a super-intelligence from scratch without all the messy genetic inheritances and logical fallacies that have plagued human intelligence throughout history. But like Dale points out, they vastly overestimate the complexity of actually doing so. This is why my position has always fallen on the more difficult task of figuring out how we humans can use what we have to make ourselves better. This means that both a combination of inner transformational work, along with the outer work of technological development will be necessary to make the transition to a greater-than-human, kinder-than-human intelligence. I think a good start would be to acknowledge the vast human potential (unassisted by technology) that has yet to be tapped.
Combining this human potential along with the powerful tools of nanotechnology should bring about this greater-than-human intelligence we seek. Otherwise, if current events are any indicator, without this kind of inner 'spiritual' transformation these unleashed technologies will bring destruction rather than liberation.
Those in the AI camp have no faith that such an inner transformation can occur, which is why they have put all their faith in a aritifical superintelligence. Some of them have put their faith in one individual who claims to be the one person who has the one solution to making all this happen.
So who is the more foolhardy?
Ray Kurzweil says that the biggest challenge for society as we approach the Singularity will be defining what it means to be human.
Heh, yeah right. I really doubt that the semantics of the word "human" will really bother anybody. Derrida and his gang of deconstructionist obfuscators have already shown how easy it is to skewer words and have nobody blink their eye.
People will treat humans as humans in a "I know it when I see it" kind of fashion. And the fact of the matter is, people have had a broad spectrum of what they treat as human for the longest time. Our American founding fathers treated people who were born south of the equator inbetween the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean who also happened to have an evolutionarily beneficial, but darker, pigmentation in their skin, as not human; i.e. slaves.
I think the questions that will come up is how humans, when granted enlightened thinking by machines, will be able to stand on the crutches of traditional human illusions.
For example, Nietzsche announced "God is dead." But I don't think everybody got the memo.
But, in the Singularity, once everybody is given the computing power of a billion Pentiums, they will be able to digest all of the human knowledge in the timespan of a hic-cup, and then get Nietzsche's news. Okay, perhaps this is not a problem because there are many atheists out there who are doing fine without God--or are they? Many studies show that religious faith is highly correleated with happiness.
But what about other illusions, like time, existence, love, purpose.
How will we react when we have a true understanding that time doesn't really exist, and that cause and effect is just a trick of perception, will we cease to treat things the way we treat them? Will we fear death like we used to? Will death even matter?
I guess the answer to those questions is, "it depends on how internalized the knowledge becomes." If we are able to process and deal w/ knowledge in a cold fashion, maybe it won't bother us like it doesn't bother intellectuals now--or does it? I read some of Consciousness Explained from Daniel Dennet, and I had to put it aside because I was seriously starting to lose my mind.
Or another problem in the Singularity is when we have absolute power to control our own emotions. Would we just shut off all pain? Maybe you would say, "but I'll always retain free will, and so I wouldn't choose to shut off all pain." But what if you could shut off your care of free will? "But I wouldn't shut it off." But you would be so smart to know that after you have shut off your care for free will, you wouldn't have any regret, and therefore it is a rational choice. In other words, what is to stop us from ending up in stable equilibrium of being a vegetable in bliss? Would there be safegaurds against it?
I still fantasize a bit about the Singularity and all the cool things I'll be able to do while in it, but to be realistic, I'd say that the Singularity may very well be just one big death. I'm not talking about a physical death, but a pandemic death on every human-laden concept. Even death will die. Life probably won't mean anything to us. Even the notion of "us" and "meaning" will dissolve.
My biggest worry in the Singularity is total dissolution. But then I temper that worry with the trust that even worriment itself will be dissolved. Yipes!
I just arrived back from Burning Man fully transformed. I suspect it will take me several months to fully digest this most awesome experience... maybe just in time for next year. It was wonderful to finally give warm embraces to people I've known only online.
As the Official Burning Man Website says, this event is notoriously indescribable. When I was there it becomes quickly obvious that no amount of eloquent speech or series of pictures could ever do it justice. Quite simply, Burning Man has to be experienced. It is Utopia. One of the things that struck me about every 30 minutes or so as I wandered the playa is, "I can't believe this exists, it is beyond description". I would look out to the horizon in nearly every direction to find this immense amount of novelty. During the day, art installations of various kinds were scattered about - some within a few hundred yards, others some one or two miles away, as if a mirage. Certain structures like the Temple were over 100 feet tall and were noticeable from almost any distance. Nighttime was equally amazing, when many more art pieces come alive to join the spectacle. Nearly everywhere I went, looking in front of me and in every direction, there was some kind of dynamic activity. It's not the dense activity of an urban city with its rules and boundaries, but a vast unbounded playa stretching for miles in every direction, filled with light, fire plumes, neon floating caravans with distant yet pleasant volumes of lounge-techno music, and thousands of glow sticks representing and protecting people as they walked and rode their bikes across the playa. So imagine seeing thousands of these various colors randomly crisscrossing the desert, stretching for several square miles in every direction. The sense of freedom, joy, excitement and possibility filled my every cell. I danced and moved and rode my bike hither and thither for hours on end, stopping at different installations, spending time in distant planetarium, and then traveling further out into the playa, which this year represented the heavens. As I traveled further from the Esplanade (the main arced avenue), the further out into "outerspace" I was going. At about a mile and half beyond the Esplanade, I encountered an illuminated and pulsating star with alien creature blowing in the night winds. I took several photos of it, but my camera is very old and doesn't work well at night, so here is a day shot.
On a typical day I would spend some 14-15 hours wandering the interacting with the art and enjoying immensely the company of fellow burners, hanging out at center camp for some hot chai, dance for awhile at Solarhenge, and back to camp to hang out with friends at Prometheatrics. I was introduced to this wonderful bunch through Mark Pesce, who unfortunately was unable to attend this year.
I spent a couple of lazy afternoons hanging out at The Brane, home of the 2nd Annual Palenque Norte lectures. When I first came into the tent I met Carey Thompson whose Galactivation Art is so beautiful. About an hour later I ran into Dlight of Tribal Oasis, who spoke eloquently of creating this type of post-modern tribal community full time. His ideas are very compelling and he now has me convinced of their attainability. He went on to tell me that regardless of what we've been told, hierarchy has ended and we now need to get used to living without those rules. The technologies of liberation are expanding so fast, that hierarchy simply cannot survive, and so we as a species need to finish the job of deprogramming ourselves out of this primitive hangover. He also mentioned that the singularity is really just another form of misguided monotheism, another type of hierarchy. The future is not a singularity, but a Cambrian explosion of diversity and creativity heading out in every direction. Perhaps it was my own state of mind at the time (he he), but his words struck a deep chord, ringing true like few things do for me these days. His message was hopeful, positive and inspiring. LVX23's words ring true too when he says that out on the playa we are expanding the mythos or morphogenetic field of modern humanity. Burning Man is pioneering the cutting edge of possibility - not a counter to culture, but front-runners scouting out the frontier of what is possible. This might sound overly grandiose, but the feeling on the playa of genuine fast-forward evolution is palpable.
I feel like I could write a book on my experiences, like it's been every other year I've been. Burning Man is a super-condensified experience - a day can seem like weeks have passed. I never escaped the feeling that I had landed on some beuatiful alien planet filled with novel delights at every turn. This alien feeling was immediate and viceral and I didn't want it to end. No manner of sci-fi movie watching can prepare you for it. A cross between Barbarella, Mad Max and Tatooine might give you a hint, but that's all. I missed the last few years, and feel very sad now that the event has come to an end. I'm so looking forward to next year, and I'm just bursting at the seams with new creative ideas to make happen for next year’s event. With all the walking and riding bikes I did this year, and coming across so many wandering, tired people, we are planning on creating a playa taxi service for next year, which we're thinking of calling Trip N' Taxi. Great way to meet new people, and a lot easier to get around. It’s merely a single idea of many. Several members of Prometheatrics and I schemed a few more ideas, which will have to remain hush-hush for now. If you're interested in creating and collaborating on some art installation for next year, please get in touch with me at psiphius at yahoo.com
One last thing, LVX23 mentioned this year there was not enough deeply sublime art as last year. I found out today that a lot of regular artists skipped this year’s event because they're too involved politically with the coming election. From what I've heard the numbers are large enough that an impact on the playa art would be felt, and so it was. Having missed the last three years I didn't notice it and was instead just so grateful to be here again, and in turn was even more enthusiastically participatory and social this year, and even more inspired to make more art for next year.
Hope to see more of ya on the playa next year!
Stay tuned for more pics - I'm working on an entire section of photos.
This guy was towering over me and must have been 6'6.
I had a vision last weekend concerning cultural/technological evolution and the concept of the Singularity (what follows is a rough outline of a larger paper I'm working on). The Singularity is alternatively imagined to be some apocalyptic transformation through fire which will purge the planet of the Old Ways and sweep the pure of heart into the next phase of existence, or it is a sudden shift in perception as technology is accelerating so quickly that life is indistinguishable from imagination. I tend to lean towards the latter, though I question how much of the Old Ways will disappear in the new paradigm.
But the vision I had was somewhat more mundane, acknowledging some of the current threads which will irrevocably necessitate a fundamental shift in the way we humans relate to each other and our world. Such a shift will undoubtedly call into question the entire edifice of western culture.
The first current is the shift from classical Newtonian Mechanics and Cartesian dualism which has laid the foundation of human logic for at least the past 400 years, producing the economic, industrial, and political theories which now rule the planet, to the emerging logic set informed by Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. This shift is already happening. Science is the new god and determines how we interpret ourselves and the world around us. Social relativism and quantum mechanical concepts such as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the Observer-Participant Paradox are eroding classical dualism and empiricism, replacing them with uncertainty and interconnectedness. Binary classification of nature is failing. Yes or No, right or wrong, black or white - these are increasingly becoming more and more fuzzy as the western mind grasps the gradients between such polarities. Dogma has only brought us ignorance, fear, and bloodshed. The separation and individuality that has typified the western mind is facing the realization that All is ultimately One, that certainty must yield to probabiity. In the Information Age - the Age of Light - the only functional ontology must be relativistic and subatomic.
Add to this the emergence of the global mind manifesting through the world wide web. Communication is faster and more dynamic than ever before. Information is being shared and iterated across the globe, accelerating technological innovation exponentially. Information feeds on itself. In a vast planetary network each mind is like a single neuron contributing to the processes of the digital brain. When information is so freely available the very foundations of society that have evolved under the guidance of elite priesthoods and governors - politics, religions, social castes, eductaion, economics - resolve clearly into outmoded traditions designed to keep the individual in a subservient role to the State.
Soon the advent of quantum computers will shift the binary substrate of the digital age into a fuzzy quaternary code infinitely more powerful and capable of crunching huge logic sets. Similarly, advancements in organic computing using proteins & DNA offer solutions to mathematical problems formerly impossible to solve. Imagine a global network of quantum DNA computers... Imagine how quickly scientific thought will be accelerated with such awesome computational power...
The currents of genetics and nanotechnology will perhaps have the greatest effect on the current paradigm. These two fields are tightly intertwined and their full realization will give humans the power to control nature on the atomic level. From engineering life to molecular manufacturing of resources, nanotech holds the possibility of endless resources available to anyone; of pinpoint medicine capable of treating any ailment or remedying any genetic error; of a post-industrial utopia where machiines run cleanly on less than a single volt of electricity. The utopia may be far off but the advancements of these fields and the integration of their products into society are already beginning to alter the landscape of reality. Hypermedia, virtual realities, genetic modification, mind-machine interfaces, life extension, and highly specialized and reactive nanomaterials are only a few of the technologies emerging that will challenge our perceptions and further erode the lines between imagination and reality.
As technology reconstructs the fabric of society, the society will be forced to upgrade its assumptions about every aspect of culture and governance. At some point in the not-too-distant future, the fundamental paradigm that has dominated western culture for the last 2000+ years will suddenly fail, to be replaced by the next paradigm. This event is gradually building but the powers that be - those invested in and trapped in the old ways - are actively fighting the challenges to their power base. The cost of evolution is often paid in blood. The momentum of history is building in such a way that the old ways will inevitably be sloughed off like dead skin; like the chrysalis from which the butterfly emerges, history as we know it may be left behind as an empty husk at the threshold of hyperspace.
As a prelude to an article I'm working on about The Singularity, here's a bit cross-posted from my blog:
CMC Magazine has a fascinating article by Rev. Philip J. Cunningham titled Tielhard de Chardin & the Noosphere. Chardin was a very forward-thinking Jesuit geologist and paleontologist born towards the end of the 19th century. After enduring the horrors of WW1 his ontology evolved into a highly spiritual conception of the human organism.
In the seeming myriad of entities around us, Teilhard perceives a unity: "My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him." Moreover, that unity reaches back in time and continues into the future: "If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness."His personal research led him to develop the concept of the Noosphere - "a human sphere, a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious souls" - and the notion that its coevolution with humanity would draw us all towards the inevitability of an Omega Point at the end of time.
"We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousnesses to a sort of superconciousness. The earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope, a single unanimous reflection." Yet such a unanimity of consciousness implies a condition that humans generally reject, depersonalization. Indeed, the conclusion seems inevitable: "So that at the world's Omega, as at its Alpha, lies the Impersonal." At this point, "Omega," the last letter in the Greek alphabet, simply refers to the final stage of evolution. At the end the noosphere become an "all" that absorbs all.In refining his description of "Omega" Teilhard seems to agree. "Because it contains and engenders consciousness, space-time is necessarily of a convergent nature [and] must somewhere in the future become involuted to a point which we might call Omega, which fuses and consumes them integrally in itself." Here "Omega" takes on its deeper meaning. Noogenesis, as it evolves, inevitably reaches a single focus.
Here's a bit from a Terence McKenna lecture in '93 which has been archived on Levity.org:
History is a kind of indicator of the nearby presence of a transcendental object. And as we approach the transcendental object, history will become more and more hallucinatory, more and more dreamlike, more and more surreal--does this sound familiar to you? It's the neighborhood, right? [laughter] That's because we are so close now to this transcendental object, that is the inspiration for religion and vision and revelation, that all you have to do to connect up to it is close your eyes, smoke a bomber, take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness, and the veil will be lifted, and you seen, then, the plan. You see what all these historical vectors have been pointing towards. You see the transcendental object at the end of time--a cross between your own soul and the flying saucer of cheap science fiction. I mean--the city of Revelations, hanging at the end of the Twentieth Century like a beacon. I really think that this is happening, and that what the-- It's as though we are boring through a mountain, towards someone else who is boring through that mountain, and there will be a handshake at a certain point in time. We are moving, literally, into the realm of the imagination. This is where the human future lies.
By Michael Anissimov from original article at Accelerating Future.
Step 1: Seeking Peak Experiences
Ever have a moment in your life that was just so great that you felt like jumping for joy, or crying in happiness? Many claim that these are the moments that make life worth living. The moment you finish writing a book, receiving a promotion, or sharing an intimate moment with someone special. How many "typical" days would you give for a single moment like that? Some might say 1, others 10, others even 100. Think about that - in a usual day, we're conscious for around 14 hours. Let's be conservative and suggest that the average John Doe would trade 5 typical days in exchange for a peak experience that lasts 5 minutes. The time ratio is about 1000:1, but many would still prefer the peak experience over the same old stuff.
This would imply that most people value life not only for the length of time they experience, but for the special moments that, as I mentioned earlier, "make life worth living". As the stereotypical quote goes, "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." Ethicists sometimes quantify such satisfaction as "utility" for the sake of thought experiments; we might say that each 5 minute peak experience is worth a thousand utility points, or "utiles". Correspondingly, each 5 days of typical activity would also count as roughly a thousand utiles, because one would trade one for the other. Although it may makesome of us uncomfortable to quantify utility, our brain is unconsciously performing computations accessing the potential utility of choices all the time,and the model is incredibly useful in the psychology of human decision makingand the field of ethics.
Following is an example of a typical human's lifelong utility trajectory. It plots utile-moments (u) against time (t). Let's say that the maximum u value reached is around 200 utiles/minute, or 1000 utiles for the 5 minute peak experience described above. For the sake of simplicitly, let's assume about 100 5-minute peak experiences per lifetime, and assume no other such experiences. Since peak experiences are so fun to have, much of the activity on "typical" days probably entails setting the groundwork for these experiences to happen; ensuring that one does not starve and so on.
The curve rises as the agent has a series of interesting new experiences, plateaus throughout most of adulthood, and subtly falls off in later years, until death is finally reached. It punctuates through peaks and valleys. Some might strongly associate utility with wealth or frequency of sexual activity, others might not.
Total utility: around 6,000,000 utiles, if we figure a lifespan of 80.
Step 2: Avoiding Premature Death
In life there is sometimes the danger of death. Death implies an immediate dropoff to the utility curve, a profoundly negative event. That's why people say stuff like "I'm too young to die!", or "I can't stop fighting, I have so much to live for". Humans despise death, because death is almost always a bad thing morally. People are willing to go out of their way to avoid it, and rightly so.
Let's introduce another aspect into the model. Say event X occuring at the
20-year mark has a probability 10% of eliminating all future experiences, which adds up to a risk of 4,000,000 utiles. In emotional terms, this would translate into arguments like those quoted above. There are some things that people would be willing to sacrifice those future experiences for. Just not too many of them. Death is a horrible thing if it stands in the way of living a fulfilling life. Therefore, it seems like a good idea to take actions to avoid event X if at all possible. Actions and thoughts leading to the avoidance of X have high utility; there are desirable in the same way that setting the groundwork for the occurrence of a peak experience is desirable. That's why we are so grateful when someone saves our life, and why we never drive under the influence after that one nearly fatal car accident.
The two possible trajectories after the decision instance are represented by red and blue lines. If we die, experienced utility drops to zero immediately. If we survive, it's business as usual. The purple line represents the curve before it splits.
Total utility of blue trajectory: same as above, around 6,000,000
utiles.
Total utility of red trajectory: around 2,000,000 utiles. Ouch!
I'm sure you can imagine the utility trajectories for events such as
rehabilitating illness, serious injury, and so on. These things really suck, so
people devote a lot of effort to avoiding them, which is clearly a good thing.
Step 3: Life Extension
It has been shown scientifically that regular cigarette smoking can lead to a shorter life, either due to an increased probability of contracting lung cancer or for some other reason. It has also been shown that good nutrition, good genes, or regular exercise all contribute to longer lifespan. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the average human lifespan was around 20, today it's four times longer; 80. Isn't that cool?
We're able to have a lot more interesting experiences per typical human life because our average lifespan has increased so greatly. This leads us to the notion that extending one's lifespan may be a worthy focus, a convenient path to increasing one's total experienced utility. We don't appreciate how lucky we are to live 80 years rather than a mere 20. Our entire culture has molded to the longer lifespans; it's now considered normal to live such long lives, so our default frame of reference tends to settle there. We should realize how spoiled we are relative to our ancestors, but also how transient and shallow our lives are from the perspective of a person with much longer life or more fulfilling experiences.
Say we want to add 5 years on to the end of our life by quitting cigarettes. This would imply that we value long life more than the short-term pleasure of a nicotine buzz. We may consider the added experiences and learning we could have as a result of this wise decision. We will have displayed the maturity to choose long-term benefits over short-term ones; some people might call this wisdom. I'm sure you can visualize the various utility trajectories and the desirability of choosing between them, but here is a picture anyway:
Here's where I start talking about potential sources of utility you might not
have heard of before.
Say that I have a few friends who offer to preserve the physical structure of my body in a deep freeze as soon as possible after my brain activity stops, and keep it that way until medical science advances to the point of being able to revive me safely. Let's say your friends happen to be employees of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, and they've been doing these cryonic suspensions for years. Their services are relatively cheap - life insurance pays for the suspension as long as you pay the bills while you are alive.
There are a series of risks - the cryonics company could go out of business, nuclear war might occur, your brain decay might be too severe to reverse, and so on. But there is potentially an immense benefit. If a civilization has the technology and desire to revive a freshly preserved frozen body, then this same civilization probably has a great degree of control over biological processes in general. Aging occurs in humans because ordinary biological processes produce byproducts that the body fails to remove completely. So they build up in the body, causing decay. Keep in mind that most byproducts are removed, only a small percentage of the total remains. But that is enough to cause aging. Stopping aging is a matter of amplifying the human ability to self-regenerate - that is all. There is no mysterious mechanism that forces all organisms to perish at a certain age in order to comply with some Cosmic Order. Ensure that the byproducts of our biology are contained and removed, or not produced in the first place, and you have cured aging.
So we are faced with the decision posed to us by our friends, "would you like to sign up for cryonics, or not?" Let's say we're being extremely conservative, and only estimate the likelihood of a successful future revival at 0.1%. Let's say furthermore that our estimate of successful elimination of aging after the initial revival is only 10%, remaining conservative. But if revival and the aging cure are both successful, then let's say we figure our lifespan could be as long as 10,000 years, at which point we expect some random cosmic accident or war will wipe us out. Even though the civilization we are talking about probably has extensive control over all biological processes and extremely advanced technology, let's say our quality of life doesn't go much further above that which we experienced during our prime - a steady fluctuation of peak experiences and typical days. We also assume that one doesn't get bored during those ten thousand years, which shouldn't be too hard if the civilization is developing technologically and has plenty of new stuff to do. Many sci-fi, anime, and fantasy characters have lifespans on this scale, and they seem to be doing fine, so how hard could it be, right?
Character: Washu
Occupation: mad scientist
Age: over 10,000
Conclusion: 10,000 years is not so bad. In the future, it will be normal. The main challenge is aging.
So, what kind of utility function might a successful cryonics patient have?
Maybe something like that shown below. The curve dips down to zero when the patient is frozen solid, and quickly jumps back up after revival. (The squiggy line on the time axis implies that a ten thousand years passes during that time.)
Total utility of complete trajectory: a whopping 750 million! Much
more impressive than a mere 6 million.
From the perspective of the pre-cryonics human being, experiencing the huge 10,000-year future lifespan is not certain. As we said; the estimation of successful revival is only 0.1%, and the estimation of an aging cure is 10%. Combine these, and we get an aggregated probability estimate of 0.01% that the whole thing will work at all. So we divide the expected utility of the outcome, 744 million utiles, by our probability estimate, 0.01%. The result is 74,400 utiles only. But what if paying our life insurance isn't that big of a dea to us, and the opportunity cost of the lost money only works out to 10,000 utiles or so? In that case, it would make sense to buy life insurance and sign up for cryonics - the expected utility exceeds the projected cost!
If the scenario matches that described above:
Total utility of "yes" answer: 6,074,000 utiles.
Total utility of "no" answer: 5,990,000 utiles.
Many people have made that decision. They tend to be well educated, successful, scientifically literate, and intelligent. Here is a short list by Ralph Merkle, plus a longer study of attitudes toward cryonics by W. Scott Badger. If our estimate of the probability of success goes up from 0.1%, the utility trajectories diverge even farther, and saying "yes" to cryonics seems to be an extremely compelling choice. The prospect of cryonics can contain a massive amount of expected positive utility.
Step 4: Extending Life for Everyone, Not Just Yourself
Stuff like cryonic suspension, regular exercise, good health, and so on, only apply to you. Other people don't benefit from these practices. Some of us care about humanity as a whole rather than just ourselves, our nation, or our clique, so we devote effort to technologies with the potential to grant more life to wide numbers of people. For example, respected Cambridge biogerontologist and co-founder of the Methuselah Mouse Prize, Aubrey de Grey, would like to extend the healthy human lifespan an order of magnitude or more beyond its current limits within the next twenty to fourty years. Yes, this is a serious strategy for workable anti-aging. He explains fully on his website, please feel free to read it thoroughly. From his proposed Institute outline, de Grey seems to be suggesting that a cure for human aging may come with a price tag of only $10-100m. Not so bad for the benefits, huh?
Let's say that you continue experiencing 1,000 utiles per 5 days of normal living, but also experience an additional 1 utile per 5 days for every 1,000 people whose lives are extended when they would have otherwise been snuffed out at the arbitrary age of 80 or whatever. "Added years" that people only get to experience as a result of this extreme life extension. If you feel that the success of de Grey's Institute will lead to an anti-aging therapy available to millions within the first decade of its release and billions within the third with a probability of, say, 25%, then contributing to this effort would be well worth the time and money. Since you care about each individual person that gets to experience the benefits of added life, it means a lot to you to raise the probability that the necessary anti-aging technology is widely available before they fall to the injustices of aging and premature death.
On his website, Aubrey mentions lifespans that exceed 5000 years. So, if the Institute is successful, then let's assume that translates into around five million people with five-millenia lifespans shortly after the technology is invented, around five hundred million people with lifespans of that length a decade after, and five billion people two decades after. Considering the fast global adoption of techologies such as the Internet and cell phones, this distribution pattern seems extremely conservative. People would surely be willing to focus on buying a drug that extends one's lifespan to 5000 healthy years or more. Possibly it could be a one-time thing, or "booster shots" might be required every few decades for negligible cost.
So, you find yourself with a million dollars. You can either buy a mansion or contribute the money to aging research. Your assumptons are roughly in line with those outlined above; you have examined Aubrey de Grey's arguments in detail and regard them as valid. The lives of other human beings are important to you and you feel satisfaction when their lives are extended. You want to compute the expected utility of both outcomes; how does the math work out?
So, the resulting utility graph is a bit more complicated:
Total expected utility of donation: massive; billions of utiles or more.
Total expected utility of a mansion: not nearly as much.
Utility goes up more and more as additional lives are saved. This graph assumes that one considers the lives of all those living after his or her life to be meaningless. In real life, people often feel otherwise. The fuzziness of to the right side of the graph represents our uncertainty about the long-term consequences - 5,000 years may turn out to be a ridiculously low estimate, and our real lifespans may lie in the realm of the millions or even billions - who knows! If there are no huge cosmic disasters, no war, and you can repair yourself or back up your memories at a whim, who's to say that your lifespan won't be as long as that of the universe?
You'll also notice that the utility axis has been expanded in the upward direction. That's because contributing to the extended life of millions or billions of people is (presumably) a bigger deal than only extending your own life. Engineering the human brain to better experience pleasure may be another may to increase total utility, or perhaps through enhancing our intelligence, empathy, creativity, and so on. These speculations are the province of transhumanism. Feel free to read up on the topic if you're interested in learning more. See also the question on our FAQ, "wouldn't it be boring to live forever in the perfect world?"
Step 5: The Greatest Threat to Life - Existential Risk
The value of contributing to Aubrey de Grey's anti-aging project assumes that there continues to be a world around for people's lives to be extended. But if we nuke ourselves out of existence in 2010, then what? The probability of human extinction is the gateway function through which all efforts toward life extension must inevitably pass, including cryonics, biogerontology, and nanomedicine. They are all useless if we blow ourselves up. At this point one observes that there are many working toward life extension, but few focused on explicitly preventing terminal global disaster. Such huge risks sound like fairy tales rather than real threats - because we have never seen them happen before, we underestimate the probability of their occurrence. An existential disaster has not yet occurred on this planet.
The risks worth worrying about are not pollution, asteroid impact, or alien invasion - the ones you see dramaticized in movies - these events are all either very gradual or improbable. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom warns us of existential risks, "...where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential." Bostrom continues, "Existential risks are distinct from global endurable risks. Examples of the latter kind include: threats to the biodiversity of Earth’s ecosphere, moderate global warming, global economic recessions (even major ones), and possibly stifling cultural or religious eras such as the “dark ages”, even if they encompass the whole global community, provided they are transitory." The four main risks we know about so far are summarized by the following, in ascending order of probability and severity over the course of the next 30 years:
Biological. More specifically, a genetically engineered supervirus. Bostrom writes, "With the fabulous advances in genetic technology currently taking place, it may become possible for a tyrant, terrorist, or lunatic to create a doomsday virus, an organism that combines long latency with high virulence and mortality." There are several factors necessary for a virus to be a risk. The first is the presence of biologists with the knowledge necessary to genetically engineer a new virus of any sort. The second is access to the expensive machinery required for synthesis. Third is specific knowledge of viral genetic engineering. Fourth is a weaponization strategy and a delivery mechanism. These are nontrivial barriers, thankfully.
Nuclear. A traditional nuclear war could still break out, although it would be unlikely to result in our ultimate demise, it could drastically curtail our potential and set us back thousands or even millions of years technologically and ethically. Bostrom mentions that the US and Russia still have huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Miniaturization technology, along with improve manufacturing technologies, could make it possible to mass produce nuclear weapons for easy delivery should an escalating arms race lead to that. As rogue nations begin to acquire the technology for nuclear strikes, powerful nations will feel increasingly edgy.
Nanotechnological. The Transhumanist FAQ reads, "Molecular nanotechnology is an anticipated manufacturing technology that will make it possible to build complex three-dimensional structures to atomic specification using chemical reactions directed by nonbiological machinery. "Because nanomachines could be self-replicating or at least auto-productive, the technology and its products could proliferate very rapidly. Because nanotechnology could theoretically be used to create any chemically stable object, the potential for abuse is massive. Nanotechnology could be used to manufacture large weapons or other oppressive apparatus in mere hours; the only limitations are raw materials, management, software, and heat dissipation."
Human-indifferent superintelligence. In the near future, humanity will gain the technological capability to create forms of intelligence radically different than our own. Artificial Intelligences could be implemented on superfast transistors instead of slow biological neurons, and eventually gain the intellectual ability to fabricate new hardware and reprogram their source code. Such an intelligence could engage in "recursive self-improvement" - improving its own intelligence, then directing that intelligence towards further intelligence improvements. Such a process could lead far beyond our current level of intelligence in a relatively short time. We would be helpless to fight against such an intelligence if it did not value our continuation.
So let's say I have another million dollars to spend. My last million dollars went to Aubrey de Grey's Methuselah Mouse Prize, for a grand total of billions of expected utiles. But wait - I forgot to factor in the probability that humanity will be destroyed before the positive effects of life extension are borne out. Even if my estimated probability of existential risk is very low, it is still rational to focus on addressing the risk because my whole enterprise would be ruined if disaster is not averted. If we value the prospect of all the future lives that could be enjoyed if we pass beyond the threshold of risk - possibly quadrillions or more, if we expand into the cosmos, then we will deeply value minimizing the probability of existential risk above all other considerations.
If my million dollars can avert the chance of existential disaster by, say, 0.0001%, then the expected utility of this action relative to the expected utility of life extension advocacy is shocking. That's 0.0001% of the utility of quadrillions or more humans, transhumans, and posthumans leading fulfilling lives. I'll spare the reader from working out the math and utility curves - I'm sure you can imagine them. So, why is it that people tend to devote more resources to life extension than risk prevention? The follow includes my guesses, feel free to tell
me if you disagree:
Those are my guesses. Immortalists with objections are free to send in their arguments, and I will post them here if they are especially strong. As far as I can tell however, the predicted utility of lowering the likelihood of existential risk outclasses any life extension effort I can imagine.
I cannot emphasize this enough. If a existential disaster occurs, not only will the possibilities of extreme life extension, sophisticated nanotechnology, intelligence enhancement, and space expansion never bear fruit, but everyone will be dead, never to come back. This would be awful. Because the we have so much to lose, existential risk is worth worrying about even if our estimated probability of occurrence is extremely low.
It is not the funding of life extension research projects that immortalists should be focusing on. It should be projects that decrease the risk of existential risk. By default, once the probability of existential risk is minimized, life extension technologies will be developed and applied. There are powerful economic and social imperatives in that direction, but few towards risk management. Existential risk creates a "loafer problem" - we always expect someone else to do it. I assert that this is a dangerous strategy and should be discarded in favor of making prevention of such risks a central focus.
Organizations explicitly working to prevent existential risk:
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
Advanced nanotechnology can build machines that are thousands of times more powerful—and hundreds of times cheaper—than today's devices. The humanitarian potential is enormous; so is the potential for misuse. The vision of CRN is a world in which nanotechnology is widely used for productive and beneficial purposes, and where malicious uses are limited by effective administration of the technology. An important organization doing genuinely valuable, positive work.
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is a nonprofit corporation dedicated solely to the technological creation of greater-than-human intelligence. The Singularity Institute sees no reason why we won't be able to eventually build such intelligences - it basically burns down to an engineering problem. If the first greater-than-human intelligence were a benevolent one, it could use its intelligence to further improve its own intelligence, the intelligence of human beings, and assist others in the pursuit of humanitarian causes.
Thank you for your attention!
Michael Anissimov
There's a new interview with comic mage Grant Morrison, author of The Invisibles, Doom Patrol, Arkham Asylum, and the current run of The X-Men. Here's an excerpt:
CXF: Last, but certainly not least. It's December 22, 2012. As humanity takes its last wistful look at the constraints of space-time and dives headlong into the Supercontext, where is Grant Morrison?[Thanks to New World Disorder for the link.]GM: Shagging like bloody Shiva, I hope. I think that if anything happens at all, it's most likely to come in the form of a mass consciousness change - possibly triggered by planetary electromagnetic field alterations predicted to occur around that time - so that basically everyone will start peaking on the acid trip that never ends. 'Individuality' will dissolve and your minds will start to merge into one mass mind, which is likely to seem quite frightening and overwhelming, especially for the sheltered minds, and time will seem to disappear as we identify with the mitochondria in our cells, instead of identifying with the physical individual carrier 'bodies' we use to expedite the shuffling around of DNA.
The world's current social structures should collapse quite rapidly when that happens and chances are, only people capable of handling the immense influx of new information will be those already familiar with heavily-altered states of consciousness. For everyone else, it will seem like the Second Coming, the arrival of the Space Brothers, the Rapture, Hell on Earth, the 32nd path of the Tree of Life or whatever they decide to see - everyone will get their own personal apocalyptic transfer into this new mode of being. Some poor souls will have to be guided out of hell, others will have to be coaxed down from sci-fi Ultraspheres but we'll all be living in a state of permanent psychedelic ecstasy and will have to restructure our entire existence to cope with the new consciousness. I have a feeling that psychedelic drugs provide a flashforward glimpse of this kind of consciousness and help prepare the human mind for when that mode of consciousness is permanent.
If something like this occurs at the end of 2012, and it's also possible that nothing of note will happen - we should see a lot of people freaking out when we re-enter what some Australian aboriginals call Aljira (a word English is not up to the task of translating, so it comes out as 'Dreamtime') and I call 'the Supercontext'. When we see in a new way and become new to ourselves, we'll also see lots of stuff that will probably scare people who didn't know it was there all along. People in delirium and on the brink of death see these crawling, replicating 'wilkie-swilkie men' all over everything and soon, I think, everyone will start to see them. They are 'the spaces between things, come to life…'
As for me, I hope I'll be screaming 'Yes!' like Molly Bloom as the universe rolls up into a silver paper ball for the quantum cats of Hell to play with.
There has been a several decades long debate about whether extra-terrestrial intelligence exists. As more data comes in about the nature of our universe, I think the odds are rapidly approaching 100% in the affirmative.
According to this recent story our universe is at least 78 billion light years radius or 156 billion light years across, minimum. The scientists are quick to point out this minimum size is based soley on a lack of instrument sensitivity, and a mild adjustment in instrument accuracy is likely to push this minimum to at least 192 billion light years across. They also point out the actual size of the universe is probably exponentially much larger.
Some people find these figures confusing since the age of our universe has been pinned down to 13.7 Billion years, or 14.7 Billion years according to this article. So they ask how could the universe expand to a size of at least 78 billion light years radius in only 13.7 billion years? The reason for this rapid early expansion is inflation. The speed of light wasn't violated, as it was the expansion of space itself that exceeded the speed of light.
So how big is our universe?
So huge in fact that I'm going to have to play around with scales so you can get a better idea.
According to the standard inflationary model of cosmology, the visible portion of our universe; the one mapped by our telescopes is an infinitesimally small speck in a much larger universe of at least a 1035 light-year across! I admit this number is really, really big, and almost impossible to imagine. So lets shrink everything down, WAY down, just so we can get a better grasp of it. Let's imagine that the entire universe that we have seen in all the world telescopes, all the galaxies, all trillion of them, extending out 13 billion light years in every direction is shrunk down to the size of a golf ball. Now you are holding the entire visible universe in the palm of your hand. So how big is the actualy 1035 lightyear universe in comparison? If we do a volume calculation, the actual universe contains 1060 of those golf balls! Wow, I guess we didn't shrink things down far enough, but this will have to do. So how big a volume would 1060 golf balls fill up? Try a sphere 850 light years across! So imagine a mass of golf balls that big, and each one of those golf balls contains all the stars and galaxies that we can see through our telescopes.
This is still almost beyond imagining, so lets take a slightly different approach. Imagine you are travelling so fast that you can go from on end of the galaxy to the other in just one second. That's a speed of 100,000 ly/sec. At this speed the entire galaxy would be in reach before you can say the word "go", and wam, you're there. At this speed, you could travel to the nearest galaxy Andromeda in 22 seconds. And you could cross from end of the visible universe to the other in 72 hours. Continuing on at this speed, it would take 115 days to travel a trillion light years, 315 years to travel a quadrillion, and 315,000 years to travel a quintillion or 1018 light years. And yet you have barely moved at all in comparison to the universe which is 1035 light years across. So, lets speed up our warp vehicals again, so that we can travel a quintllion light years every second. At such a speed we could cross the known universe 100 million times in one second. Ok, so now that we are travelling at a speed that might as well be infinite, how long would it take to cross from one side of the univese to the other?
Some physicists such as Max Tegmark believe the universe is actually infinite in size. If the galactic density of our own neighborhood is typical across this entire domain, and according to the data from the satellite COBE it is, then our bubble-universe should contain at least another 10100 galaxies. This is such a large figure, that it's difficult to explain it. So to give you an idea of how large a number this is, it's far larger the the number of atoms that compose every object in our own visible universe, which as you remember extends out 13.2 billion light years in every direction. This too is very difficult to conceptualize. So we'll have to scale down even further to a grain of sand. The number of atoms composing a gran of sand is about 1023 atoms, or 100 trillion trillion atoms for each grain of sand on a typical beach. And just think how many grains of sand are on your typical beach, let alone something the size of the Sahara. And that's just on the surface of the earth. All the sand in the world composes much less than 0.00001% of the mass of the earth. The number of atoms composing the Earth is about 1060. And the Earth in turn is one tiny planet around a small star in an ordinary galaxy, among hundreds of billions of galaxies in our very local neigborhood, which we call the visible universe. So 10100 is a very very big number of galaxies! Adding it all together and you get more galaxies in our universe than there are atoms composing every object in our visible universe.
Even if intelligent life is very, very rare, a number as large as 10100 is still likely to produce an abundance of life throughout the universe. A place where countless lifeforms evolve beyond their womb planets into highly advanced space-faring civilizations.
For arguments sake, lets imagine that primitive life happens once in the lifetime of a trillion galaxies, and out of those only one in a trillion ever evolves out of its womb planet into a space-faring civilization. In this example then we are still left with an astounding 1075 advanced societies - more alien cultures than the number of atoms composing planet Earth! Again, for some perspective on such a gargantuan number, there are more advanced civilizations partying it up around the galaxies than there are atoms in every single grain of sand on all the beaches and deserts in the world, and then some. That's more advanced alien civilizations than all the atoms composing our entire solar system!
Assuming life were this rare (and that's very unlikely, even with the Rare Earth Hypothesis), then our nearest star-hopping neighbors would probably be trillions of light-years away. If somehow the speed of light remains a barrier, then we might as well be alone, since we could never make contact with each other before the universe ended. However, I think such barriers will be smashed shortly after the singularity bottleneck. My guess is shortly after a civilization passes through their singularity, the entire universe will be in reach. Already scientists have found loopholes in this light speed barrier. According to Michael Alcubierre, we could hypersurf space-time using exotic matter, allowing the craft to exceed the speed of light by any desirable amount. Then there are traversible wormholes. For an enlightening discussion of some possible scenarios, see Michael C. Price's Some Implications of Traversible Wormholes.
So the problem won't be reaching any part of the universe, that will be childs play. The real challenge will be deciding which parts of the universe to go to. The divide between what is available, and what is conceivable would be enormous! According to Michael Price, the number of civilizations making contact with each other would exceed the ability of any civilization to fathom. According to Price, the implications of such 'Contact' would be staggering, the number of alien cultures would be so large, that it is unlikely anyone could ever catalog all of them, even if they did have computers the size of Jupiter. No historian could encompass the sweep of history, no biologist catalog the species. In a profound sense we'll have returned to a vast ancient world, surrounded by distant lands populated with mythical and fantastic creatures. Construction of a single universal map would be impossible.
The culture shock of trying to absorb such a vast amount of new data would take close to eternity... an eternity of never ending expansion, novelty and adventure.
Related Posts
Singularity Exo-Paleontology
Exotic Civilizations: Beyond Kardaschev
Sans-Ceiling Hypothesis
Listening to: Ozric Tentacles - Erpsongs - Tidal Otherness.
By Michael Anissimov of Accelerating Future.
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
- J. Krishnamurti, "Freedom from the Known"
Some philosophers have asserted that "altruism" does not truly exist, that kind people only help others because they enjoy doing it, so therefore they are ultimately doing it only for themselves. Others, such as myself, argue that this isn't how altruism should be interpreted; that having a decision process is not the same as a being having a self-centered decision process. This is called the "hedonism debate" and it has probably been argued since prehistoric times.
Gandhi got what he wanted, that is, helping others. The fact that he was working towards what he personally wanted does not mean that we should regard him as selfish. Thought experiment: should a being whose decision process approximated a democratic consensus be considered "selfish"? I'm talking about a being whose decisions are actually made based on the consensus vote of some group, not because the group is telling the being how to behave, but because the being is built to approximate democratic opinions. It has brainware that just does that. The simplest possible answer (think Occam's razor) to the question of "how is this creature behaving?" is not "selfishly, because it's brain is just channeling its own volitional urges", but "democratically, because this being was specifically created to approximate democratic actions". You can't look at an axe used to chop down trees every day and say "this axe is made out of wood and metal, and the use of metal and wood I'm most familiar with is pans and plates, so this axe must be used for cooking and eating". I mean, you can, but it's silly.
In recent times, the hedonism debate is being put in a new light. This comes from two factors. First is the potential for building new minds from scratch - AIs or new bio-beings, doesn't matter. Just as some god could theoretically have created the entire world a mere five minutes ago, simply implanting us with all our memories, some advanced alien race could have done the same, building us up, cell by cell, memories included. One day humanity will have the ability to create bodies and minds from raw materials. The second factor is the eventual possibility of the creation of minds that are smarter than humans, which does not seem to be avoidable in the long run. There is no law that states an intelligence can't build another intelligence smarter than itself, as long as it knows something about the fundamental principles underlying intelligence. Smarter-than-human intelligence could further upgrade itself and create still-smarter intelligence, opening up the possibility for a massive intelligence explosion. It could start with an "AI" (I use the quotes because the way that "AI" is always portrayed in fiction is laughably unrealistic) or with a human being that was cybernetically or neurologically enhanced.
These two new variables frame the hedonism debate in a whole new way. If high altruists really can't exist, then a smarter-than-human intelligence, who could turn its intelligence towards fooling humans or developing super-advanced technology, could easily murder all the humans on Earth; by accident, as part of a larger plan, or simply on a whim. Please do not visualize a noble rebel group of humans fighting back against a transhuman intelligence, a la The Matrix. In the real world, the AIs never would have needed humans as a power source to begin with. Even if they did, they could easily create the system in such a way that escape was totally, completely impossible. Even if that were not possible, any escapees could be crushed practically instantaneously; transhumans will be able to think and move at rates billions or trillions of times faster than us slow biological humans. Our bodies and minds move at a crawl in comparison to what is physically possible, a huge space of better designs. We just haven't had the intelligence or technology to reach out to that space just yet.
If high altruism is possible, then the creation of robustly altruistic transhuman intelligence could be considered a better event than you winning a trillion dollars. That's because transhuman intelligence would be genuinely smarter than us, and genuinely better at coming up with ways to eliminate poverty, suffering, disease, death, annoyance, and all other problems that intelligence can be applied to. It might be able to wipe these problems out entirely, it might not, but either way, it would be a huge event. If high altruism isn't possible, then we might expect the first transhuman intelligence to ignore us and/or kill us. Deliberate malice wouldn't be necessary for human extinction; transhumans could decide that atmospheric oxygen was getting in their way and move it somewhere else, or decide that they want to take apart the Earth to create a particle accelerator with the circumference of Mercury's orbit. And all of this might happen very quickly, considering that transhuman intelligences could be thinking with brain components billions of times faster than biological neurons, and acting with airborne nanotechnology, billions of times faster and stronger than human hands or weapons.
In anticipation of the emergence of smarter-than-human intelligence, and for other reasons, some of us have decided to advocate altruism to the fullest extent. If the starting conditions and moral philosophy of the first transhuman intelligence are at all relevant to the ultimate outcome of the "intelligence explosion", then the morals of the people that create or become the first transhuman intelligence(s) will be important. Since we want to see altruistic transhuman intelligence rather than the alternative, we are advocating positive morals.
In the longer term, what we need for mere humans to exist safely alongside transhuman intelligences is a sort of truce among all intelligence - especially the intelligences with the most power - otherwise death could be a threat forever. We don't want death to be a threat; we eventually want to lower the nonconsensual death rate to zero if possible. You can think of this as a sort of argument from one member of a council of say, 7 cybernetically enhanced humans, all with different ideas about morality, discussing how to approach the world after they realize they could probably have great influence over it if they wanted to. Would they be willing to make certain sacrifices, put aside their egos, in order to ensure that all the citizens of Earth could live in relative safety and peace for an indefinite length of time? If I were one of those special people, I sure would.
The point is that the creation of transhuman intelligence should be for the entire Earth, and thinking in terms of trying to bend the benefits towards yourself or your little group is the greatest possible example of unjust theft. Transhuman intelligence should not be viewed as a piece of meat we can just grab at. Disputes among transhuman intelligences could have the potential to turn into the worst humanitarian disasters the world could ever see, such as mass torture or extermination of quadrillions of unique sentiences. A single grain of sand could become a vessel of the worst imaginable tortures. This is because our current theories of intelligence seem to allow for "uploading" - that is, creating sentient beings as software programs in computers that actually have awareness, intelligence, and so on. If uploading is possible, then the amount of intelligence one could create would depend on how much computing power they could fit into a given unit of space. Even if uploading isn't possible, transhuman intelligence could still theoretically accomplish a lot of evil or a lot of good. The stakes are very high. The only morally acceptable option is to advocate that the benefits of the Singularity be distributed fairly among all sentients present. Otherwise you are stealing.
All the features of the world we find ourselves embedded in - human nature, terrestrial life, a reality made up of atoms, life, death, reproduction, etc - are roughly arbitrary. We don't know exactly why they're there and we didn't choose them. The situation was so confusing that for thousands of years we've had to pretend as if an unimaginably powerful old man created it all. (And many are still pretending.) People are designed (by evolution) to disturb and hurt each other simply by acting in their own best interests. That is a horrible system. We need to rearrange the system in such a way that people can act in their own best interests and nobody ever gets hurt or disturbed. Maybe we will do this by making compromises, treaties, physically revising our cognitive interpretations of disturbance or hurt, creating the perfect "guardian angel system", I'm not really sure. If I were smarter, I might have a better idea of which solution would benefit everyone the most. That's what smarter-than-human intelligence is all about.
Why do people read books, play video games, and live in their own mental worlds all the time? Because the mental worlds we imagine and create for each other are sometimes better than the actual physical world - we all know it. Why is this? Why weren't we born into worlds that were actually the best? Probably because we live in one of the most likely universes for observers to be born into, not necessarily the best. If it turns out that we can create baby universes, then I would want as many of them as possible to contain sentiences enjoying themselves, and not at each other's expense. I believe massive numbers of such universes are physically possible and more desirable than randomly generated universes, or universes containing people suffering. The creation of such "Heaven Universes" could have massive intrinsic value. We'd be like God, except we'd actually be benevolent. (The idea of anyone actually deserving eternal suffering, or any suffering at all except in the service of minimizing overall suffering, is appalling.)
We sometimes forget - there is more than enough matter in this universe for everyone to be maximally enjoying themselves all the time, for the rest of eternity, as long as we make the right decisions and never define "maximal enjoyment" as "having more than rival X". All we need to do is take that step, together, and we could very well become happy and satisfied forever. The "I need to have more than everybody else" mentality is a direct result from evolving in a zero-sum environment with scarce resources, where someone else succeeding often means you and your genes losing. Hopefully we will make a glorious transition from a largely "zero-sum" environment, the world of human intelligences, to a "positive-sum" environment, the world of transhuman and human intelligences coexisting, where everyone can do what they want, within certain consensus boundaries, forever and ever until the end of time. If any "competition" exists, it could be for the sake of fun or progress alone, and will never be coupled together with the negative emotions so typical of evolved creatures. We could literally engineer our brains so that we'd be happy and satisfied almost all the time, plus normal and sane too. (We don't require sadness to appreciate happiness anymore than we require slavery to appreciate freedom.)
In the past, sometimes, yes, victory over someone else or personal gain have often correlated with genuine progress, but progress doesn't need to work this way forever. The process of evolution has taken billions or trillions of casualties, (depending on whether you think primates, animals, etc. are sentient) and tortured the same number for very long durations of time. Biological evolution, basically, is evil. To carry the principles of evolution and selfishness with us over into a superintelligent society would be analogous to porting the minds of bacteria into an entire civilization of human beings, only to carry out bacterial goals and probably bite one another completely to death. Disgusting and horrible, neh? To assume that transhuman intelligences won't be capable of progressing and advancing without the use of dischord or fighting is to underestimate their potential capabilities.
Maybe our standards suggest that we're reaching for some sort of altruism that is physically impossible. We aren't - the best form of altruism possible within the constraints of physical law will have to do. I believe that when we can engineer minds with complete access to their own source code, with altruistic philosophies, then we will have created minds that are almost completely trustworthy. Whether such intelligences are physically possible is still not entirely certain, but there is evidence that they very well could be. If they are, then such intelligences wouldn't change their philosophies due to sudden events, as humans sometimes do; they could be willingly "stuck" as altruists forever. Our current understanding of intelligences suggests that such minds could be possible, although they would clearly be unhumanlike. They would be humane rather than human.
In evolution, molecules "just happened" to learn how to replicate themselves, and meta-arrangements of molecules "just happened" to begin to regulate their own temperatures, reproduce more rapidly, and mix genetic codes for more durable meta-arrangements, which "just happened" to take actions beneficial for one another, which, universe willing, will "just happen" to create a world where nonconsensual suffering, ignorance, and death are abolished. If this occurs, it will be largely thanks to high altruism, and high intelligence implementing that altruism.
Mike Deering, Executive Director of Singularity Awareness, joins us again to discuss his ideas about when the Singularity might happen. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, he makes some good arguments about how the nature of exponential change is likely to be sudden and disruptive, rather than gradual.
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With the current state of medical technology at your local hospital, factory automation where you work, entry level desktop PC technology that you can buy from Dell, things don't seen to be moving very fast. And we all know that we have a long way to go. Even if you look at the leading edge in: robotic technology, gene sequencing of viruses in a few hours, mass production of carbon nanotubes, stopping light particles in the lab, paper thin display monitors, sub-wavelength microscopy, MEMS, microfluidics, qubits, self-assembly, and nano-particles, you would see that we have just barely begun to get a handle on the enabling technologies for molecular super-computers, medical nanobots, and desktop nano-factories. The most frustrating thing about the Singularity is that it is an exponential process rather than a linear process. This means that we are not going to gradually and predictably move from where we are to God-like technologies. It's going to be a very sudden change.
The way technology has advanced in our experience is by degrees. We make electronic circuits a little smaller all the time. We go from vinyl albums to cassette tapes to CD's to DVD's to memory cards to story our music. Each advance has advantages and improved performance and new functionalities, but the changes are small and gradual. The Singularity is different. The Singularity is a technological phase change. When you can manufacture large products by placing every atom where you want it, rather than taking a large block of material with randomly positioned atoms and cutting away everything you don't want, or melting the material and pouring it into a mold to solidify into an object with randomly positioned atoms, this changes everything about the product. By controlling the position of every atom you can control the physical characteristics of the material. You can make materials fifty times stronger than steel, virtually indestructible. You can make products perfect down to the atomic scale. You can build new functionalities into the materials at the molecular level, paints that spread themselves on the wall, change colors on command, and never get dirty. When you have software with general reasoning capabilities, that changes everything. Suddenly all of your computers are doing exactly what you want them to, just by asking them, cars driving themselves, robots taking your job, finding exactly what you are looking for on the internet the first time, personal digital assistants that manage your money for you.
Either one of these two technological developments, molecular manufacturing, or artificial general intelligence, would almost instantly change every aspect of the way you live your life, but guess what? Both of these capabilities are going to occur simultaneously, along with gaining the complete knowledge of all biological processes at the molecular level. Nanotechnology will first be used to build computers millions of times more powerful than are available today at almost zero cost. This will result in the almost immediate development of super-human artificial general intelligence (SAGI). Just as there are many paths to nanotech, there are many paths to SAGI and all of them are greatly accelerated by more powerful computers. The combination of nanotech and SAGI will rapidly develop a complete knowledge base of molecular genetic and proteomic biological functions. At this point, whoever controls the technology can do whatever they want.
A.I. and nanotech are inextricably linked. They are advancing in lock-step because the one cannot advance without the other. This interdependence means that they will maintain the same level of progress toward the final goals of molecular machinery (MM) and AGI. It is understandable that you would think that AGI is at least a generation away if you are not following closely the developments in A.I. research. Just as you would think that MM is at least decades away if you only knew what you read on CNN. Here is some stuff you should know about AGI research:
---Biology is an existence proof of molecular machinery and computational intelligence.
---AGI's like nanobots will not be reverse engineered copies of their biological counterparts, but rather original engineered designs using some of the same concepts used by biology and some wholly new concepts.
---The design stage of development of AGI is at the same or more advanced level as the design of the assembler.
---Both the assembler and the AGI are very complex design challenges that some people believe are beyond our intellectual capability. They are wrong in both cases.
---Experts in both fields, Richard Smalley and Marvin Minsky, claim that they will not be developed for a long time if ever. They are both wrong.
AGI's do not have to be people. This is a very important point. There are many different cognitive architectures that can support intelligence, not all of them are conscious, self motivated, self serving entities. It is very possible to design a piece of software with general intelligence and problem solving ability without ego. This would significantly reduce the dangers of AGI. Even though this would remove the danger of the AGI taking over the world for its own purposes, it would not remove the danger of the person controlling the AGI taking over the world, or making a mistake in the use of the AGI if the AGI was significantly more intelligent than the user. If the AGI is significantly more intelligent than the user, the user might not understand all of the implications of the results produced by the AGI.
The combination of general purpose human-like reasoning ability and computer speed, complex accurate serial computation, data storage, and reprogramability will make human level AGI's automatically super-human level intelligences.
The leading contenders in the AGI race that I am aware of are Ben Goertzel's Novamente project and James Andrew Rogers secret AGI project. Both claim to be no more than twelve months away from a human-like reasoning working prototype.
What is the world going to look like a year before the Singularity? A month before? A day before? Well, pretty much like it does today. We are gradually moving toward having these capabilities, but before we have them, we can't do any of the amazing things we will be able to do after we have them. Technology is advancing faster and faster because of feedback, the better tools we have the faster we can build even better tools. This feedback function results in an exponential curve of technological advancement. The nature of exponential advancement is that almost all of the change occurs very near the end of the curve.
The Singularity is going to be a complete surprise to the vast majority of persons on this planet, even the vast majority of highly educated people. It's not going to make itself obvious until it is upon us. Anyone who makes "realistic" predictions of the timing of the Singularity will be laughed at, because conventional wisdom and the consensus of expert opinion will always be based on linear models of gradual change, whereas the Singularity is an exponential process of advancement with a phase change at the end. You don't get respect by telling people the truth about the Singularity. I realize that my prediction is outlandish and ridiculous by generally accepted standards. Nevertheless, I think that getting the truth out is more important than building my reputation. It is critical that people hear that the Singularity is coming much sooner than they think. We are one vital breakthrough from the Singularity.
I think this whole Singularity phenomenon is driven by miniaturization of electro-mechanical systems. All the Singularity technologies are based on it. Of all of Kurzweil's graphs, this one is the scariest :
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/images/chart18.jpg
Admittedly, there are not many data points, but it is clear that miniaturization is leading the charge to the Singularity. The most accessible way to see this is by watching the market with the greatest economic return on miniaturization, computers. And in the computer market, the slice with the most fiscal pressure (largest dollar total, largest number of units) is the entry level desktop computer. You may have noticed prices dropping while power increases.
Doubling time - the time it takes for the power of a computer to double for the same dollar.
example: suppose you purchased a computer on a certain date, and at a later date, you found another computer with double the power for the same price, or you found another computer with the same power at half the price, or some mathematical computation resulting in double the power per dollar.
The reason we would be interested in this doubling time value is that available computer power is an important factor in the timing of the Singularity.
For instance, Eliezer Yudkowsky writes in CFAI: 4.1.2.
"The intelligence required to create AI. Decreases with increasing computing power." Eliezer also writes in CFAI: 4.1.2. "The total processing power available to an average research project will increase faster than chip clock speeds (i.e., maximum parallel speeds increase faster than maximum serial speeds). The total networked processing power on the planet will increase even faster than that; a doubling time of nine months is probably an underestimate."
Ben Goertzel writes on 1/4/2003 [AGI],
"We are limited tremendously by CPU speed and RAM capacity. Either greater CPU speed or greater RAM capacity would be valuable, but the biggest boost would be both together. We could utilize essentially any amount of CPU speed or RAM capacity. No limit in sight. Having a CPU with (for example) 10x greater speed would have a HUGE positive impact on some of the work we're doing. If we had vastly better CPU's and vastly more RAM, the amount of time to get to a complete working implementation of a Novamente system might be reduced to 2/3 what it is right now."
I accept these experts opinions that the availability of more powerful computers would significantly push up the date of the Singularity.
So what is the doubling time? How do we calculate it? On the http://www.bjklein.com/sing/default.htm website it says, "Computer power is doubling at a slowly accelerating rate: every 18 months currently." This seems to be the general consensus based on a little google statistics:
google search -----------------------------------number of sites
For purposes of assessing the effects on the Singularity, we need to use the computer with the fastest doubling time out there. AGI will come out of the computer market with the best power to dollar ratio. This market is the entry level desktop. The April 2003 entry level desktop sells for $500 and has a 2 gig Celeron processor with 256 meg of ram and a 80 gig hard drive and other standard peripherals. As you can see from this graph the price of desktop computers has been dropping since 1990 and continues to drop:
While at the same time the power has been steadily increasing:
Based on available data, how are we to calculate the doubling time extrapolation into the future?
On 1/6/2003 [AGI] Stephen Reed writes:
"Progressing from -50 db HEC to 0 db HEC in 22 years is equivalent to Moore's Law doubling every 16 months. [ 2^16.61 = 100025, 22/16.61*12 = 15.9 ]"
A careful examination of this formula shows that Stephen is merely averaging the doubling time over the past 22 years and applying that constant to the next 22 to arrive at his crossover date of 2021. A constant extrapolation of an average doubling time is not the correct method to project an exponentially changing value. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get good historical data on the entry level computer market. I would welcome any assistance. This is my current extrapolation:
DATE ------ DOUBLING TIME ------ DROPPING RATE
Actually, April 28, 2005 (plus zero, minus 11 days)
Mike can be reached at deering9 at mchsi dot com
The first person to introduce the concept of Future Shock was Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book, Future Shock. The main argument is that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change will leave them disconnected, suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" - future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of future shock.
A few years earlier, Gordon Moore in his now famous paper (PDF) introduced the idea that would eventually be called Moore’s Law, that states that the speed and density of microprocessor design will follow an exponential curve. This was at a time when computers had barely had any impact on society, nearly 20 years before PC’s made hardly a dent on the economic landscape. 30 years later we saw the explosion of the Internet into the world. Now 40 years later, microprocessors speed is doubling almost every year, and its effects are extraordinary. Not a day goes buy now when some scientific or technological advance isn’t hitting the front pages. As Ray Kurzweil suggest with his Law of Accelerating Returns, microprocessor are such an integrated part of our lives of economic progress, that now society too is caught up in this accelerating change, suggesting that we could see as much change in the next 25 years, as we saw in the last 10,000 years combined!
As one of the leading thinkers on the singularity, Eliezer Yudkowsky is someone accustomed to thinking about extremes of future technological change and advancement. After having many wide ranging discussions with futurists of all stripes, he noticed that certain technological implications can be too “far out” or shocking to some groups more than others. So he came up with what he calls Future Shock Levels or the level that different people find themselves in terms of their concept of the future, and what they are willing to consider, or which is too futuristic or even shocking for them.
Shock Level 0
Degree of Change: Flat.
Technologies: Same as today, maybe more TV channels, bigger cars or TV's.
The legendary average person is comfortable with modern technology - not so much the frontiers of modern technology, but the technology used in everyday life. Most people, TV anchors, journalists, politicians.
For people at this level, the future is seen as pretty much the same as it is today. If you could chart their concept of the future on a graph, you would see change reaching a plateau today and leveling off from here on out. Almost every economic and political paper about the future I’ve read falls into this category. When they discuss wide ranging implications of their policy decisions, there is hardly any mention of technological change at all, and only in the most mundane ways with concepts of Level 1 being described as something to be afraid of, with dangerous out-of-control implications. The current climate of fear over cloning and stem-cell therapy falls into this level.
Shock Level 1
Degree of Change: Logarithmic, then hitting a relative plateau in a decade or two.
Technologies: Virtual reality, living to a hundred, e-commerce, hydrogen economy, ubiquitous computing, stem-cell cloning, minor genetic improvements.
At this level you will find the majority of futurists and future oriented publications. Modern technological frontiers as depicted in Wired Magazine and books like Future Shock and Bill Gates, The Road Ahead. Included in this group are most scientists, novelty-seekers, early-adopters, programmers and technophiles.
Placed on a chart, future progress will continue upwards in a logarithmic fashion, with each year bringing the same amount of change as last year. Eventually this incremental change will lead to people living to a hundred, and optimistically in a society with clean energy, general economic prosperity, and conservative space exploration scenarios.
In my experience most of the people described above think about the future in relatively conservative terms. If you ever read a future oriented article by one of them they often say things like, “This probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but perhaps my children or grandchildren will live to see it”, If you ever read a quote like that you know you're reading someone at SL1. Almost every report that comes out of NASA is hopelessly stuck at SL1.
Shock Level 2
Degree of Change: Logarithmic to Exponential
Technologies: major genetic engineering, medical immortality, interstellar travel, and new "alien" cultures.
At this level you’ll find your typical SF Fan. Literary SF and cutting edge magazines like Mondo 2000, Omni or Future Magazine of days past were filled with Level 2 ideas. Ironically, I don’t know of a single popular SF movie or TV show that exists comfortably at this level. Not even Star Trek qualifies for SL2, as it barely considers life spans past 100, with immortality remaining the exclusive domain of “super-advanced aliens”.
Up and until the 1980’s there wasn’t much discussion of future change past level 2, except in the most limited sense. This is probably because the concept of radical accelerating change was still beyond the radar of almost every forward thinking person at the time. Enabling Level 3 technologies like molecular nanotechnology were not even considered then. The only exceptions I know of are Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary, who were completely at home with post-human evolution (SL3).
Shock Level 3
Degree of Change: Exponential
Technologies: Immortality, nanotechnology, human-equivalent AI, intelligence increase, uploading, total body revision, intergalactic exploration, megascale engineering.
Clearly identifiable people didn't exist at this level until the 1980’s when groups like the Extropians and transhumanists emerged. Writers like Robert Anton Wilson, and Timothy Leary with his SMI2LE concept were the first people to my knowledge who discussed this level in any depth. However, it wasn’t until Eric Drexler published his book Engines of Creation that finally set the stage for concrete, detailed technological speculation of SL3 possibilities.
Shock Level 4
Degree of Change: Exponential to Hyperbolic (Accelerating Acceleration)
Technologies: Singularity, Matrioska "Jupiter" Brains, Powers, complete mental revision, ultraintelligence, posthumanity, Alpha-Point computing, Apotheosis, the total evaporation of "life as we know it."
The only people I know who are comfortable discussing change at this level are Singularitarians, and some cutting edge psychedelic pioneers like Terrence McKenna and John Lilly. Olaf Stapledon in his book Star Maker waxed poetic about SL3 megascale engineering and SL4 ultra-intelligences, and John Lilly discussed multiple encounters with a SL4 intelligences, which he gave names like "ECCO" and "Solid State Entities". The first writer to bring this into concrete technological terms was Vernor Vinge in his 1993 paper . These ideas were soon picked up by Extropians and Transhumanists, but as far as I know it wasn’t until the Singularitarians that this level was embraced concretely and enthusiastically.
As Eli says, If there's a Shock Level Five, I'm not sure I want to know about it!
Eli goes on to say,
If somebody is still worried about virtual reality (low end of SL1), you can safely try explaining medical immortality (low-end SL2), but not nanotechnology (SL3) or uploading (high SL3). They might believe you, but they will be frightened - shocked.
That's not to say you can't do it. In fact, you can take advantage of the future shock to carry the idea. You just have to be careful.
By a similar token, a Singularitarian can shock a science-fiction fan, but not an Extropian - the Extropian will be interested, perhaps enthusiastic, but not shocked. (Of course, if the person was already enthusiastic about Transhumanism, they might be wildly enthusiastic about the Singularity.) An Extropian can shock your average Wired reader, but should be careful about trying this with the "person on the street" - they may be frightened. And so on. In general, one shock level gets you enthusiasm, two gets you a strong reaction - wild enthusiasm or disbelief, three gets you frightened - not necessarily hostile, but frightened, and four can get you burned at the stake.
Below are some cut-up quotes from Terrence Mckenna on tapping into the Natural Intelligences that Flemming dicsussed earlier.
"The planet is some kind of organized intelligence. It's very different from us. It's had over 4 billion years to create a slow moving mind which is made of oceans and rivers and rain forests and glaciers. It's becoming aware of us, as we are becoming aware of it, strangely enough. Two less likely members of a relationship can hardly be imagined - the technological apes and the dreaming planet. And yet, because the life of each depends on the other, there's a feeling towards this immense, strange, wise, old, neutral, weird thing, and it is trying to figure out why its dreams are so tormented and why everything is out of balance.
"The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind.
"The psychedelic experience is far more than instant psychotherapy or instant regression to infantile traumatic situations, far more than simply a kind of super-aphrodisiac, far more than simply an aid in formulating ideas or coming up with artistic concepts. What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy. It turns out, if we can trust the evidence of the psychedelic experience, that we are not the only intelligent life forms on this planet, that we share this planet with some kind of conscious mind - call it Gaia, call it Zeta Reticulians who came here a million years ago, call it God Almighty, it doesn't matter what you call it, the fact of the matter is that the claims of religion that there is some kind of higher power can be experientially verified through psychedelics. Now this is not, in Milton's wonderful phrase "The God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven" - it doesn't have to do with that, in my opinion - it isn't cosmic in scale, it's planetary in scale. There is some kind of disincarnate intelligence. It's in the water, it's in the ground, it's in the vegetation, it's in the atmosphere we breath, and our unhappiness, our discomfort, arises from the fact that we have fallen into history and history is a state of benighted ignorance concerning the real facts of how the world works.
"What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy.
"Now, why it is that when we dose ourselves with a human neurotransmitter like DMT, why we then encounter armies of elves teaching us a perfected form of communication, this is a very difficult question. When you go to traditional cultures, shamanistic cultures in the Amazon and put this question to them, they answer without hesitation when you ask about these small entities, they say "Oh, yes, those are the ancestors, those are the ancestor spirits with which we work all of our magic." This is worldwide and traditionally the answer that you would get from shamans if you were to ask them how they do their magic - it's through the intercession of the helping spirit who is a creature in another dimension. Well, we may have imagined many different scenarios, a future technological and social innovation, but I think very few of us have imagined the possibility that the real programme of shamanism would have to be taken seriously, and that shamans are actually people who have learned to penetrate into another dimension, a dimension where, for want of a better word, we would have to say the souls of the ancestors are somehow present. It isn't, you see, as though we penetrate into the realm of the dead, it's more as though we discover that this world is the realm of the dead and that there is a kind of higher-dimensional world with greater degrees of freedom, with a greater sense of spontaneity and a lesser dependency on the entropic world of matter, and that that other universe is attempting to impinge into our own, perhaps to rescue us from our historical dilemma, we don't know - perhaps shamans have always had commerce with these magical invisible worlds and it's only the sad fate of Western human beings to have lost touch and awareness with this domain to the point where it comes to us as a kind of a revelation. You see, I believe that the whole fall into history, the whole rise of male dominance and patriarchy really can be traced to a broken connection with the living world of the Gaian mind, and there's nothing airy-fairy about this notion; the living world of the Gaian mind is what shamans access through psychoactive plants, and without psychoactive plants that access comes as an unconfirmable rumour.
"The Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. It's an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set."
And quoting myself from 1997 on the site Gaia Logic, which sadly is no longer with us,
I see no contradiction between the Transhumanist and the Gaian positions. In fact, I would probably define my own philosophy in this regard as Eco-transhumanist; technology and gaianism being two complementary polarities, and technology is necessary if Gaia is to fulfill its potential and replicate biospheres through space (using trans-humankind as the brains cum genitals!)
Hence, I would suggest, Transhumanism and Gaianism actually need each other. That is, a non-transhumanist Gaianism would be limited to primitivism and resource scarcity, and unable to get off the surface of the planet. Eiether a man-made or a natural disaster could wipe out terragen life forever. And in any case eventually the sun will heat up and make life on Earth impossible. Conversely, a non-gaian transhumanism would be arid and sterile, mechanical or virtual without or with only the most superficial, sense of life. It is rather like Einstein's famous statement that "Religion without science is blind, science without religion is lame." If humanity and life is to survive and flourish in the future, this is the paradigm that is needed.
Thanks Deoxy, Omega Point Journal for the McKenna material.
I wrote most of this in a comment previously, but it is important enough to put it up here. The core subject here is whether or not we can hope for human intelligence and consciousness to evolve as breathtakingly rapidly as would be necessary to keep up with the accelerating technical progress we're making, so that we'll make it in time to not destroy ourselves and the planet, or whether we have to accept that a benevolent Artificial Intelligence has to be constructed that will keep us from doing so. The latter is a very serious endeavor being pursued by some very smart people who believe it is our only hope.
First of all, it is quite clear that the human mind that most of us are sporting at this point is woefully inadequate when it comes to logical thinking. If it is up to us to figure out rationally to do the right thing, it isn't looking very good.
Michael Anissimov provided an excellent list of some of human logical fallacies that have been studied academically. A lot of relevant material can be found by looking up some of the following terms in Google: availability bias, conjunction fallacy, Wason selection task, support theory, representativeness heuristic, misperception of random sequences, expert judgement and uncertainty. Essentially they constitute a number of different ways that humans habitually let themselves be influenced by incidental irrelevant factors into making illogical conclusions. Our answers depend greatly on how the questions are framed, and are likely to contain traces of whatever random garbage we happen to have been fed just before. You know many of the more simple examples of that from simple party games, like: "Say 'top' ten times fast!!"......... "Now, quick, what do you do at a red light?" Most people will say "Stop". That's an easy one, but there are many more complex and insidious fallacies in logic, which quite easily can be domonstrated.
The human mind is having a major problem when it aspires to being logical and rational, or even sane, for that matter. The way even the most coherent of us are making decisions is, in the bigger picture of things, horribly sloppy. And it isn't even just that it is sloppy, but the faulty thinking is hardwired into the way that our minds work in the first place. And it is kind of scary to think that even our best scientists and world leaders are subject to the exact same fallacies, and there's no guarantee that they've learned to transcend most of them. A "consciousness of abstraction" a la General Semantics might include awareness of the faults into our thinking process, in order to consistently arrive at more sane results, but it still isn't quite enough.
Michael called the human mind "a pinhead-sized box in a galaxy-sized space of minds-in-general". And, yeah, compared with how smart one possibly could be, we aren't doing all that well.
But after saying that, let me emphasize that what I have confidence in, when it comes to human evolution, is not particularly an individual human ability to think oneself logically into acting in the sane and rational and responsible way that the control of our new technological capabillities would require. Rather, I postulate that there's something systemic going on, of a higher order, which possesses a much more coherent intelligence, of a different nature than that of the individual human.
I postulate that Nature effectively has evolved the equivalent of an AI way past a singularity point. Or maybe rather that it has had it all along. For that matter, I would tend to believe that life can't really happen without the presence of an intelligence that guides it.
I don't particularly mean that in the sense of some anthropomorphic God that sits and hands out arbitrary decisions. I don't believe in such an entity. I'd rather see it as an intelligent system. Not exactly an "overarching benevolent architect" although that doesn't sound as bad to me as it does to some. But I see it more as a built-in intelligence than as some external architect. Although there's always the question of how it came about in the first place, even if it is now self-sufficient.
Just like the ant doesn't exist without the anthill, I suspect that any individual life-form wouldn't really be alive unless it were the smaller unit of something a good deal smarter than itself. The Natural Intelligence that ensures the coherence and evolution of that species. Or an eco-system. Or something else I don't understand.
We humans have a tendency to suffer from hubris and think that one of us is somehow the very spearhead of evolution, the smartest thing that ever happened. And if that were true, it would really look rather grim for the future of the universe. For the kinds of reasons referenced above. If it suddenly were up to us alone to keep the show going on, we'd almost certainly screw it up.
Where the differing views are found, we see something a bit like a chicken-and-egg phenomenon. Some people think that we humans can and should construct an AI which then can take on a life of its own, become smarter than us, and guide our further evolution in a rational and benevolent way. I personally doubt that we're smart enough to do that right. But instead I believe that we already have such an AI, or rather an NI (Natural Intelligence), which has been active all along. Or many of them. And it is not so much a matter of inventing it, as of understanding it and accessing it.
I'd say that in the very big cosmological view, considering that time is just another dimension in a multi-dimensional universe, it ends up not mattering very much if it is one or the other. Is there a Bigger Intelligence that is hanging around from the beginning to ensure that things generally go in the right direction? Or do we invent such an entity and it exists from then on? Either way, it is there to find in the totality of the universe, and it is pretty inevitable that it will appear. Which to me means that, either way, it is an inherent property of the universe.
I am very skeptical of the view of evolution as only being random and blind selection. Natural selection is obviously part of it, but I'd rather lean in the direction of a larger definition of what is life. Autopoiesis, essentially. A galaxy or a planet can be "alive" in the sense that it maintains its boundaries and a certain equilibrium, even under changing conditions. Not all planets do that, but obviously some do.
To me, the expectation that humanity is likely to evolve a whole lot in a short period of time is based on the confidence that humans are part of bigger systems that are alive and which possess an inherent intelligence that is beyond us. Oh, the outcome might also be that humanity is decommissioned and a more useful intelligence emerges instead. Which might potentially be our computer AI. Or we might just go extinct and be replaced with some other natural species which is better suited. Either way, it appears that a higher level of manifest reflective intelligence is what is required next. Compared with animals who go about their business somewhat rationally, but who don't seem to have any abstract reflective thought about it.
What mostly seems to divide the people who think about these things into several camps is the fundamental assumptions about what consciousness is or isn't. I'll grant that intelligence is something that can be constructed with pattern matching and feedback loops of various kinds. But is it self-conscious? Some people say it doesn't matter, or that self-consciousness is just another pattern than can be constructed, or that self-conscious naturally emerges. I don't really believe that, and I think there's a factor that does make all the difference. Not that I can explain how that part (the (self-reflective) consciousness) is installed. I don't see any reason a machine shouldn't be able to have it, but I'm doubtful of the idea that it will just sort of happen if we just put together a complex program that does all the things we can observe intelligence doing.
Actually, I'd rather enjoy if we find out that there's a certain kind of equation that initiates consciousness. I just don't think we've been anywhere close to finding it. And I think that creating an AI without it would be a big mistake.
I think that human science at this point is suffering from a bit of a Sorceror's Apprentice syndrome. The hubris of thinking that because we've found a few magical formulas that can make things happen, we're big enough to be responsible for all the consequences. We can swap some DNA from one kind of cell out and pop in some DNA from some different cell, and after a large number of attempts like that, we come up with a carrot that insects don't like, and we think we've actually understood something very basic. Whereas we really still have no clue how to make life, or how it actually works, and the complexity is way beyond us at this point.
The same thing applies in many fields. We've found the traces of some wonderous things, and we've found that we can influence them, and we think we're just about ready to play God now.
The missing piece is the whole systems view. How a whole thing works in ways you can't fathom just from taking all the pieces apart and sorting them. And how it requires something quite more than just putting together all the ingredients to recreate and surpass some of the wonders that nature has excelled in for many billions of years.
It is like as if there's an ingredient X that is missing in almost all our technology. And that ingredient X is.... THE WHOLE THING, the full understanding of the systemic functioning and systemic effects of what we're creating.
We can mass-produce all sorts of wonderul technology, but we forget to figure out how to un-do much of it. We are terrible at creating sustainable technology. We can now create genetically engineered crops which have useful properties, but, oops, they got away and are creating havoc in the wild, because we didn't really understand how the natural cycles work. We can create nuclear bombs, but we forgot to invent the anti-dote, and, oops, suddenly some terrorist group has one of them. We follow the same stupid pattern over and over again. We invent a way of doing something, and it seems really useful at first, and we're really proud of ourselves, but we forgot to think through how it would really work within the eco-system of the world we live in, and we're incapable of cleaning up the mess.
What we've been excelling in so far are just smaller versions of the grey goo problem. So small that nature has mostly been able to keep up with the mess. But we're getting better at inventing more powerful, but still mindless and unsustainable technology. So it will not be for much longer than we can count on that we can get away with it relatively unscathed.
So there's a problem, a big problem. Some smart people think the answer to that problem is Creating a Friendly Artificial Intelligence. Making a super-powerful artificial intelligence program that by its design can't be anything but benevolent, and which, by using its superior intelligence and faultless logic, will keep us from destroying ourselves.
The trouble I see with that is that the people trying to construct it are using the same reductionist materialist thinking to create it that is bringing us deeper and deeper into an uncontrollable mess. And I'm afraid that what they're creating will be missing Ingredient X.
I have much greater confidence in Natural Intelligence. Not that I necessarily think that Nature will automatically and magically sort everything out for us. The playing fields are merging. Our human inventiveness is no longer separate from the rhytms of nature. Rather we seem to be becoming active evolutionary agents. What we are doing is in many ways the spearhead of evolution. Not a new better system to replace the slow random selection process. No, we are what nature has evolved. Now, what nature is evolving is to a large degree what we are evolving and developing and inventing. We have the option of being the conscious wavefront of evolution. Not just human evolution, but the evolution of life and matter on a much wider scale. We have the option, but no guarantee of success, if we misuse our newfound mental faculties.
A surefire way of screwing it all up is to ignore the wonderous brilliance of the plot so far, and arrogantly assume that whatever happened before was just stupid, random, blind stuff, and now we, as the first, will be doing something really clever. That's when the picture turns, and we come out as the ones who turn out stupid, random, blind technology. Carelessly letting cats out of a million bags that we have no idea how to get back. Just because we thought we emulated and greatly improved upon the half-assed workings of nature, when we didn't really get it at all.
Technology and artificial intelligence might very well be unavoidable components of our future evolution. But we have some catching up to do. We seem to be several orders of magnitude off from understanding the sustainable self-evolving design principles of nature. Principles that have brought forward the very consciousness and intelligence we're mis-using today. If we don't succeed in conjuring up the necessary wonder and humility and curiosity to discover how that actually came about, and how that already works, and how the WHOLE thing works - it is curtains for us, and probably for all life on this planet.
If we re-discover and re-connect with the inherent intelligence of whole systems, and get over our own pitiful self-importance, and we apply a much higher level of wisdom to our technological endeavors, then and only then might we succeed in manifesting the magical and amazing wonders that we suspect are just around the corner, and live to actually enjoy them, ... forever.
The other day I decided to re-examine the idea of using the latest discoveries of science to determine when the earliest possible time our universe could give rise to the first technological singularity. What are the necessary preconditions for a singularity, and when is the earliest possible time such pre-conditions could have emerged?
Let’s examine the physical evidence and make some conjectures.
In order to determine the earliest theoretical timeframe, we need to know what the necessary precursors of a technological singularity are. Since the Earth and the emergence of our own civilization is the only example we have, we’ll assume that life and therefore technological civilization requires a planet as a necessary prerequisite for a technological singularity.
So when were the first planets formed? Since planets require heavy elements, the earliest possible time would be after a supernova explosion of a first-generation star. Since these first generation stars were composed entirely of hydrogen and helium, the heavier elements necessary for planetary formation were not available yet. However, thanks to nucleosynthesis in the core of these stars, these necessary heavier elements were created at a furious pace. These first generation stars first appeared 160 million years after the Big Bang. The most short-lived of these were the blue giants. After the first of these blue stars exploded, all of the material necessary for planetary formation was available to give birth to second generation stars with planetary bodies.
According to this story at the New York Times, the Hubble Space Telescope found tantalizing evidence that planets first appeared much earlier in cosmic history, around 1 billion years after the big bang, and therefore may be more abundant than previously suspected. Since we know both the earth and sun are each 4.5 billion years old, the earliest possible earth like planets could have appeared as early as 12.7 or 13.7 billion years ago, depending on who you ask. According to this article, the universe may be 1 billion years older than previously thought, moving the age of the universe from 13.7 to 14.7 billion years old.
So from here we need to examine Earth’s history to determine the next part of our equation. This is where a bit of guesswork is required.
There is observational evidence that archaebacteria, the first type of life, were around as early as 3.97 billion years ago. Then for the next 2.2 billion years, life on earth consisted of nothing more than anaerobic bacteria and archaeans. Then about 1.8 billion years ago eukaryotic cells appeared as fossils too. With the beginning of the Middle Proterozoic 1.8 billion years ago, comes the first evidence of oxygen build-up in the atmosphere. This global catastrophe spelled doom for many bacterial groups, but made possible the explosion of eukaryotic forms. These include multicellular algae, and toward the end of the Proterozoic, the first animals.
With the Cambrian Explosion soon after, all the major phyla of life we know today emerged. Between the Cambrian explosion 543 million years ago and today there have been 5 great extinctions, the last of which was 65 million years ago, when 90% of life, including all the Dinosaurs, were wiped out by a comet. From the lowly 10% that was left emerged almost all the complex life we see today.
The real question now is could this 3.97 billion year history of life have happened at an accelerated rate? We know the first 2.2 billion years of life consisted of nothing more than simple anaerobic bacteria and archae, and the next 1.2 billion years single-celled eukaryotic oxygen-breathing bacteria. So for the first 3.4 billion years the degree of evolutionary change was almost non-existent. There is no reason to suspect the emergence of eukaryotic cells couldn’t have happened sooner, perhaps as earlier as a few million years after the first bacteria. The mechanisms underlying these punctuated periods of evolution are still largely unknown, so it’s mostly conjecture. But lets take a crack at it anyway.
I think most of this period’s stagnation was the result bad luck, or perhaps a lack of good luck. A low probability of correct mutations necessary for the emergence of multi-cellular life may be the reason it took so long. We know that quadrillions of bacteria were spread out all over the earth, and only after 3.4 billion years relative stagnation did it eventually give rise to the first multi-cellular organisms. If this is the result of statistics rather than a slow necessary build up of a complex ecology, then life multi-cellular life could have emerged shortly after the first life appeared, maybe as little as a few millions of years, rather than 3.4 billion. Then again, mutli-cellular life could be so rare, that only 1 out of a million bacteria bearing planets give rise to multi-cellular life during the lifetime of its parent star.
It’s possible that multi-cellular creatures could have emerged as early as 3 billion years ago, giving rise to the equivalent of the Cambrian explosion 2.5 billion years earlier than it did. This leaves the last 543 million years after the Cambrian Explosion until now. Perhaps if we had a larger gas giant in a orbit closer than Jupiter’s, there would've been less asteroid and cometary impacts, further accelerating the right kinds of conditions for life to occur. In the scheme of things, this time frame is small enough that it doesn't matter much with a 13.7-14.7 billion year timeframe. So for the sake of this essay, I'll assume that 500 million years is the minimum time necessary for complex technological civilization to evolve from the first appearance of multi-cellular life.
Assuming my 2.5 billion year compression of the history of life is possible in a planetary system with the right conditions, this means technological civilization on the Earth could have occurred as early as 2 billion years after the formation of Earth itself.
Since we know that the first planets were forming as early as 13.7 billion years ago, and using earth’s history as our example, this means the first technological singularity could have occurred as early as 10.7 billion years ago, or just 3 billion years after the Big Bang. If we take out my conjectured time compression of evolution, we add an additional 2.5 billion years, giving us 5.5 billion years after the big bang.
This leaves us with a theoretical minimum of 8.2 – 11.7 billion years ago, that a technological singularity could have first occurred.
This means a civilization, having passed through the bottleneck of a technological singularity, could have emerged as early as 4 to 6 billion years before our Sun was even born, some 12 billion years more advanced than our own.
So, what are the odds that life exists elsewhere?
We now know from the Mars Opportunity Probe, that Mars once contained a salt-water sea. The importance of this finding cannot be overstated.
Until now, we have known for sure of only one planet on which liquid water has flowed -- and water is absolutely essential for supporting life as we know it. There are no chemical processes that will permit the formation of the long, complex organic molecules composing living organisms other than in the presence of water.
It is an extremely simple rule: No water, no life. As long as Earth was the only planetary body containing liquid water -- and, more particularly, seawater -- then it was the only place in the universe where life was possible.
Now, suddenly, there are two. And that’s just in our local planetary group. Now that there are two planets where water once flowed, there no longer is a reason to doubt that millions, perhaps billions of water bearing planets might exist right within our own Milky Way galaxy.
Further out, thanks to images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the observable universe appears to contain several hundred billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. This means there could be trillions of planets bearing water and possibly life.
Tying this in with the above pre-conditions for live and the probabilistic chances oof technological singularities occurring with some frequency as long as 8.2 to 11.7 billion year ago, the universe could likely have advanced civilizations who are as much as 12 billion years more advanced than us.
What would their technology be like? Is the reason we don’t see them, because they have evolved so far, that this dimension of existence, our four dimensional space-time continuum been completely transcended by them?
Perhaps they already spread through the universe, have recorded every last part of it, and we are now in one of their simulations.
It reminds me of Clarke’s Law (by science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke):
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magick.
Quoting from the book Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson,
Imagine a technology a hundred years beyond ours. A thousand years beyond ours. A million years beyond ours. And then remember that many stars, which might have planets and civilizations, are literally billions of years older than our sun. There might be intelligences in this galaxy advanced as much as 12 billion years beyond our technology.
If Clarke is right, even on a materialistic level, the only answer to “How many advanced Civilizations are monitoring the events in this room?” must be “As many as want to”
Wilson’s Corollary to Clarke’s Law:
Any sufficiently advanced parapsychology is indistinguishable from Magick.
Consider the slow advance of parapsychology, despite entrenched opposition, during the past 70 years. Project it forward another hundred years. A thousand years. A million. And imagine intelligences 12 billion years ahead of us in this area.
Extraterrestrials with advanced psionic knowledge may have been experimenting on us and/or aiding our evolution and/or playing ontology games with us for millions of years, projecting any form they desire from Mescalito to the Lord God Jehovah, without ever leaving their home planet.
Are UFO’s simply some part of their ontology game? Part of some gentle stimulus to keep us guessing, keep us evolving?
By Erica Tesla
I went down to UNO this morning to get what is not the first (nor the last, I'm sure) form I'll have to fill out to get myself and my husband back on the Path of Higher Education. The paperwork required simply to gain permission to learn is astounding.
Now, I've heard it said that college isn't actually about learning at all--it's all about your threshold for dealing with bull and bureacracy. If that's true, so long as your tolerance for those things increases during your time in college, you have learned something.
But an increased tolerance for bureaucracy, though it may be a goal now, will probably not be an advantage in the future.
The heart of the singularity, in my understanding, is the point at which nothing stands still. Memes burn in the fire of change and those who are able move on; that's what it's about. The singularity is the point at which agility surpasses its status as an advantage and becomes a survival skill, a necessity. In a future that moves at the speed of light, who will have time for all of this paperwork?
What scares me about the current higher education process is actually the length of commitment, and the proactive nature of the learning process employed. Deciding to go to college typically means devoting yourself for at least four years to a field that more narrowly defines your knowledge base and skill set, while admittedly (hopefully) deepening both.
But the model in which specialization occurs proactively isn't of much use if you have no idea what you'll need to know to enjoy a productive life, or even to survive, tomorrow.
I think that the solution is a more agile form of learning. The most agile form of learning occurs when a person first attains a broad base of widely applicable knowledge and the skills with which to both attain new knowledge and to make the best use of that which they already have. After that initial learning--largely "learning how to learn"--they can take an adaptive, reactive approach to specialized knowledges and tasks. This is even more agile when paired with hands-on-experience--a person can be productive in the current learning field while learning about it.
I think that college, along with the rest of the current educational model, is neither the most efficient way to learn, nor the best--at best, for now, it may be a good route to a higher paycheck. But is that enough? Can the very slow process of learning through the current educational model survive a world that's speeding up?
A constant challenge I have when writing about the future, especially the singularity, is we are talking about something that by it's own definition is incomprehensible within our human linguistic framwork. I'm constantly searching for words, pictures, ideas, metaphors and models to better grasp whats coming.
According to Mark Pesce, creator of VRML and many other things, this appears to already have an historical precedent.
Things may look as though they’re going fast now, but this is nothing – literally, absolutely nothing – next to what’s about to happen, because (and now we have precedent for it) we’re about to see a technological acceleration on a similar order to the acceleration we saw when the logos separated from the bios. In this case, techne, our ability, is about to be freed from logos, our ability to describe it.
Below is the most interesting description (by Mark Pesce) that I have ever read about the singularity.
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The Dawn of Life
To have a discussion of the origins of life on planet Earth, I need to discuss two fundamental texts, books that I would encourage you to read.
The first of these is John McFadden’s Quantum Evolution, in which he takes a look at a hitherto unresearched field – how quantum mechanics influences molecular biology, and, in particular, the functioning of DNA.
DNA enters a superpositional state – that is, it enters as many as ten-to-the-500th universes, in order to find a situation where it can produce some situation where it will entangle itself in the physical world – in other words, can sustain itself.
The improbability of life thus comes to rest on a firm foundation of physics, the first time there’s been any hint that our understanding of the world can help us understand one of the great mysteries of the world – how life came to be.
The second book is the recently published A New Kind of Science, by Steven Wolfram. Wolfram may be the Issac Newton of our generation (people are still debating this point, and will for the next hundred years).
Wolfram defines something called the Law of Computational Equivalence. We think of physics as being composed of formula, such as e=mc2, or F=ma or pv=Nrt. While Wolfram doesn’t call the validity of these formulae into question, he does insist that they’re not enough to describe the reality of the physical world. In addition to these formulae, there are processes, outcomes which can not be predicted in a simple, mathematical fashion, but rather are more like computer programs which need to be executed before their results can be known.
The difference between the world before Wolfram and the world after is the difference between Newton and Darwin.
Newton saw the entire world as a giant clocklike work of machinery and gears, together working seamlessly to create the physical universe.
Darwin envisioned the world as a collection of processes, working through time, to create the nearly infinite variety of forms which populate the natural world. Without process, there is no model for evolution; organisms do not evolve according to formulas, but rather because of their continuous interactions within the environment.
In his book, Wolfram tells us that this is the new model for physical reality, and we need to apply this model as broadly as possible. Nearly all physical processes of consequence in our world take place not in isolation, but as a consequence of repeated interactions in their environments.
What does this mean about the history of Earth? What we know is this: just about as soon as the Earth had cooled enough to allow the formation of some relatively complex chemical structures, life began. The Earth still had an average temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit (!) when life began.
Why could life begin? The quantum evolution hypothesis states that these molecules could search the quantum multiverse of 10-to-the-500th power worlds to find a world where they could sustain their interactions, where they could continue to exist.
We’re talking about creating quantum computers today, which can employ these same properties to crack encryption codes or solve other sorts of mathematical puzzles far beyond us now, but it turns out that nature has probably been exploiting this trick all along! And the latest scientific tests show that these simple molecules can enter that weird quantum world, so, as far as it’s been possible to prove the underlying assumptions of quantum biology, they’ve held up.
Once life popped out of the multiverse, it became subject to the new laws unearthed by Steven Wolfram. Within the environment, organisms interacted in unpredictable ways, and every interaction of every organism on any other organism changed both organisms. Some organisms fought with each other, some combined with each other – for example, the mitochondria which provide the power for your body’s cellular processes are the by-product of such a fusion – and from a simple set of rules, endlessly repeated throughout time, we can actually see the grand sweep of evolution emerge out of the physical processes which undergird nature.
The next four billion years of life could be characterized as a continuous set of interactions between different organisms in the natural environment, and every interaction in every environment leaves an impression – an information transfer – between these organisms. Some or even most of these interactions are nearly insignificant, but some of them concern the life or death of an individual member of a species, and, in those rare instances, that species either becomes extinct or a change is made in the species, recorded in the natural memory of DNA.
DNA is the information – and it’s nothing but information – which is the ultimate arbiter of the forms of the natural world; it’s a form of very slow memory. In each one of you, in nearly every one of your cells, is a memory of all the interactions your ancestors have ever had, from the very first cell, down to the present moment – that present moment being a rather long one – about 150 thousand years.
The Dawn of Man
It’s believed that homo sapiens emerged in Southern Africa, just about 150,000 years ago, and although there are now some contradictions to the “out of Africa” argument about humanity’s origins, it seems that the humans that we are all came from this same place, at around this time, slowly diffusing northward across Africa, and reaching the Eurasian land bridge in the Middle East, and fanning out from there toward both Asia and Europe.
Now although we call these first ancestors homo sapiens – meaning they were genetically identical to ourselves – we don’t think of them as human in the same sense we think of ourselves as human. This is for one primary reason: we don’t see the hallmarks of human culture in these earliest human beings.
What do I mean by culture? Well, until last year, we had though that humanity as we know it began about 35,000 years ago, because we found the representative elements of a human culture. However, last year we found equally convincing proof that this actually extends back at least 75,000 years. It could be that, eventually, we’ll see that humanity-as-we-understand-it goes back as far as homo sapiens itself. Who can say?
We mean culture, in the sense of modern humans, because of the existence of cultural artifacts.
Homo Neandertalis, the Neanderthal who preceded the modern human, had a larger brain than ours, and was stronger and able to survive across a wider range of climates. However, the kinds of artifacts the Neanderthals left behind were extremely crude; very basic stone tools, which did not show any significant evolution over the lifespan of the species.
In other words, while the Neanderthals were completely situated within the natural environment, their adaptation to it happened just once, and then stopped.
So now we come to what makes us human: the history of homo sapiens begins, some 75,000 years ago, with some etchings on a piece of rock, nothing more than a series of wavy lines. This may not seem like much, but it’s the first example of decoration.
What is decoration? It’s something that serves no functional purpose – for example, a coat of paint doesn’t change the function of a house – but acts as a signifier of some reality that exists only in the mind of the beholder. In other words, a physical object has become a symbol, standing in for something other than itself.
The thing that separates us from the Neanderthal isn’t brain size, or brute strength, but a symbolic manipulation capability.
In order to have symbols, you need to have a consciousness capable of symbolic manipulation, that is to say a linguistic consciousness. While paleoanthropologists believe that the Neanderthal had some very basic linguistic capabilities, it is believed that these abilities were very limited – perhaps similar in nature to those of a year-old child, capable of identifying objects or actions, but little more.
What we see with homo sapiens is that this linguistic ability overflowed into the entirety of consciousness. The first benefit of this was the emergence of what we understand as language: nearly every human being has an innate capability to take a few symbols and manipulate them infinitely.
For example, although few of us ever use more than about 2000 English words, we can describe just about anything with those words, because we can instantaneously recombine them in any sensible order to create new forms of expression.
That’s what those 75,000 year-old squiggly lines on a piece of stone imply: that our internal linguistic capability, which gave us language, had overflowed onto the material world, and that the material world had been consumed by our linguistic capability.
This is an important point, perhaps the central point I’m trying to make today: everything you look out upon from your eyes, exists less as a physical reality than as a construction of linguistic form.
But there’s another point we need to understand about the consequences of our linguistic capability, because it’s set us on a path toward the Singularity.
Raymond Kurzweil says that his machine singularity is absolutely inevitable because machines can perform computations about 10 million times faster than human neurons can. That’s as may be, but once again I think Kurzweil missed the big story.
For 4 billion years, DNA was the recording mechanism of history, the memory of biology. As soon as we developed language, we no longer needed the slower form of DNA for memory; we could use the much faster form of language, which produced with it a deep sense of memory within the individual – since the linguistic symbols could be contained within the human mind.
Since we became a symbol-manipulating species, our forward evolution, in DNA terms, has come to a dead stop. (This has recently been proposed by reputable scientists.) However, our linguistic capabilities allow us to perform acts of memory much faster than DNA, probably at least 10 million times faster!
So, suddenly, homo sapiens is not just a biological entity working within the matrix of DNA and its slow historical recording, but now bursts through and starts processing its interactions within the environment 10 million times faster than ever before.
That’s a great thing. It’s made us the planetary force that we are today. But there’s a big price we paid for it, a price we’re not even vaguely aware of.
For all of evolutionary time, information had to travel the slow route through biology – through the bios - before it would be coded into our DNA. Now we had this additional process – which we call the logos, the Word – which was a completely new thing, and not something that the bios had any time prepare for.
Because of that, homo sapiens can be identified by one specific characteristic; we are controlled not by the dictates of the bios, but the are dictated by the logos.
From its first recognizable moment, humanity demonstrates an entirely new relationship between bios and logos. Information, freed from its need to be embedded in the slow, dense vehicle of our DNA, speeds up 10-million-fold.
This renegotiation of power, between the previously unchallenged bios and the brand-new logos was not something that the bios was prepared for.
Most likely immediately, the bios was overwhelmed by the logos. The natural environment of the first humans was entirely and utterly replaced by a symbol-driven environment.
The post-modern philosophers claim that this is a new thing, that the Disneyification of the world has overloaded the natural world with the mediasphere. But this isn’t a new thing, even if our recognition of it is; as long as shaman and storytellers have been spinning myths that tell us who and what we are, the world ceased to exist as nature, and became a linguistic element in the story of homo sapiens.
However – and this is the second most important point I want to make today – the logos has its own teleology, its own entelechy, its own drive to some final dwell-state.
We assume that we are masters of language, of word and world.
I disagree.
The situation is exactly reversed. We are not in control of words, they control us.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins got it entirely right when he invented the concept of “memes,” which can be thought of as the linguistic equivalent of genes. Rather than being part of the bios, memes are the carriers of the logos.
OK, so we’ve covered the emergence of the bios, some 4 billion years ago, and the emergence of the logos, perhaps as much as 150 thousand years ago. Now let’s bring ourselves forward into the world we can recognize.
The Dawn of Modern Culture
I set the beginning of the common era to about 500 BC, because of one particular cultural artifact; Lysistrata by Aristophanes, a Greek comedy about how the women of Athens stop a war by denying their husbands sexual favors. If you’ve ever read the play, you know that the attitudes (and dirty jokes) of these women are entirely modern – it’s as if all of the elements of the modern world are entirely present in the work.
We, as a species, have been driven by memes for the last hundred thousand years, and this has forced us further and further away from any direct connection with the natural world.
It’s not as though modern man has had any choice about his alienation from the natural world, and it’s a fallacy to presume that “primitive” cultures are any more closely connected to the natural world than we ourselves are. They too have completely overloaded the natural world with their linguistic natures – else how could the plants “talk” to them?
There may be many discrete forms of alienation from the natural, but they are, in essence, all the same. And they all point toward the same general trend:
We’re being hollowed-out by our memes. That is to say that our interiority, which is an artifact of the slow, quiet progression of the bios, is rapidly vanishing.
The modern conception of interiority is really a creation of the Enlightenment in Western Europe, and was only noted by philosophers as it was beginning to vanish utterly.
So here’s the central point of what I wanted to come to Jamaica to say: the singularity is absolutely inevitable, and absolutely meaningless. The closest analogy we could make would be the whine of feedback you get when you place a microphone too close to an amplifier. The screech drowns everything else out, just as what we are – as individuals and culture – are being replaced by a rising form of activity dedicated to a single goal: making a clear path for the transmission of the logos. We’re improving the fidelity of meme swapping until it asymptotically approaches its theoretical limits.
And the truth is, we’re so far down that path that we have only a little bit more to go.
There are three cycles that I’ve been able to identify for you over the course of this talk:
Let’s take these one at a time, and see how they’re convergent.
First, the emergence of life, 4 billion years ago, was propagated through the medium of DNA, which acts as the informational carrier for life. This medium was very gradual, but within the last twenty years, the medium of DNA has been translated into linguistic form.
Think of the human genome, and the images you may have seen of it, not in the twisting double-helix of the molecule, but in the endless series of A, T, G, and C which make up the base-pairs.
We have recently come to treat DNA as a code, a linguistic artifact, and, because of that, our ability to understand and manipulate DNA is now undergoing the same 10-million-times acceleration that happened when we became linguistic entities.
Second, the emergence of a linguistic species caused us to be taken out of nature entirely, and the world became a description of things, rather than things-as-they are.
Although language sped the pace of novelty substantially, it was still bounded by proximity, and the speed of sound. When, around 1840, the telegraph was developed, the speed of information transfer increased well over a million-fold.
Marshal McLuhan, the great Canadian media theorist, considered this made the entire human species the equivalent of a single nervous system, but even the nervous system is very slow when compared to electric communication.
The transmission of facts and ideas became instantaneous, and the speed of the development of novelty followed. When ideas move faster, there’s a greater capacity for them to interact, to produce concrescence.
The history of the 20th century could accurately be described as a series of advancements in communication, beginning with radio and ending with the Internet, each technology successively colonizing the world, and each more rapidly than the technology before it.
Third, the emergence of a technological species. Let’s take a good look at that.
Technological artifacts are concretized language; that is, any technology is a bit of language that has been turned into a physical object.
The first technology that was turned into a physical object was the linguistic technology itself. Writing is the first real technology of importance, because it freed linguistics from their oral substrate, and made the carrier medium much more durable. We have an idea of history from 3500 BCE forward because of the invention of writing, which has created a continuity in humanity.
All other technologies, are, each in their way, the descendants of writing. Writing was the exteriorization of our drive to communicate.
We’ve seen the linguistic acceleration of DNA as codes, and the linguistic acceleration of communication as telecommunication, but we’re only now on the threshold of the acceleration of technology.
Things may look as though they’re going fast now, but this is nothing – literally, absolutely nothing – next to what’s about to happen, because (and now we have precedent for it) we’re about to see a technological acceleration on a similar order to the acceleration we saw when the logos separated from the bios. In this case, techne, our ability, is about to be freed from logos, our ability to describe it.
What do I mean when I say this?
There’s an emerging science, known as nanotechnology, which will, before the next few years have passed by, give us a very fine-grained control over the material world.
With nanotechnology we should be able to precisely design molecules to order, for whatever purpose we might desire.
This is the coming linguistic revolution in technology, because, at this point, the entire fabric of the material world becomes linguistically pliable.
Anything you see, anywhere, animate, or inanimate, will have within it the capacity to be entirely transformed by a rearrangement of its atoms into another form, a form which obeys the dictates of linguistic intent.
It’s very hard for us to conceptualize such a world, and I have continuously been forced to draw on the metaphors of world of magic for any near analogies.
It will be as if we have acquired the ability to cast spells upon the material world to achieve particular effects. Quoting Terence McKenna:
“This downloading of language into objectified intentionality replaces the electrons that blindly run, and replaces it instead with a magical, literarily-controlled phase space of some sort, where wishes come true, curses work, fates unfold, and everything has the quality of drama, denying entropic mechanical existence.”
This isn’t to say that we’re about to acquire the omnipotence we normally ascribe to God, but that our abilities will be so far beyond anything we’re familiar with today that we have no language to conceptualize them. No language at all.
And that search for a language to describe the world we’re entering is, I think, the grand project of the present civilization. We know that something new is approaching.
So we have three waves, biological, linguistic, and technological, which are rapidly moving to concrescence, and on their way, as they interact, produce such a tsunami of novelty as has never before been experienced in the history of this planet.
by Paul Hughes
A central thesis of my unpublished book on transhumanism is how customized hypermediation made possible by the symbiotic merging of our wetware, software and hardware via nanotechnology will vastly expand our experience of reality. This mind-machine symbiosis, for those of us who decide to take this journey, is called uploading.
The Senses and Emotions Have A Future.
Once we have merged into this accelerating intelligence, will we still have any need for our senses? In wild difference to Hans Moravec, who says that the senses don’t have a future, existing in some kind of simulated “body” with it's accompanying sensory array will allow us to experience information constructs differently than existing as pure thought. It could also be demonstrated that sensory experience is just another form of thought - the minds interpretation of raw signals transmitted by our senses. In this view sensory experience, internally generated or not, acts as another way to expand our useful set of contexts, perspectives and gestalts in which to process and interpret complex information. If we ditch the senses we would be cutting ourselves off from another way to experience reality. Expanded intelligence is about expanding our experiences, not limiting them. The future of intelligence then, is more sensory experience... more complex and enriching than anything we can possibly imagine right now.
The Singularity holds out the possibility of winning the Grand Prize, the true Utopia, the best-of-all-possible-worlds - not just freedom from pain and stress or a sterile round of endless physical pleasures, but the prospect of endless growth for every human being - growth in mind, in intelligence, in strength of personality; life without bound, without end; experiencing everything we've dreamed of experiencing, becoming everything we've ever dreamed of being; not for a billion years, or ten-to-the-billionth years, but forever... or perhaps embarking together on some still greater adventure of which we cannot even conceive. That's the Apotheosis.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
