Alex M. Vikoulov's Blog, page 11
May 15, 2019
History Ends in Green: Terence McKenna on Evolution, Emergence and Complexity
By Alex Vikoulov 
"Human history is a 25,000-year transition zone. Before you enter the zone, you're an animal. After you leave the zone, you're a "god." -Terence McKenna
Terence Kemp McKenna (1946–2000) was an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness.
Terence McKenna spoke of the Omega Point, the concept of "divine" evolutionary unification introduced by the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as the "Transcendental Object at the end of time," universal teleological attractor. Evolution, according to McKenna, is not being pushed from behind by the force of causal necessity, we humans, like the rest of Nature, are being pulled towards this universal attractor, this temporal vortex, reacting to the siren song of the Transcendental Object. "It beckons across the dimensions, it throws an enormous shadow over the enterprise of human history... The presence of creatures such as ourselves on this planet is an indication of the nearness of the Transcendental Object at the end of time; it is an attractor, an energy sink in the epigenetic landscape... We are going to shed the monkey; the linguistic being that is symbiotic with these monkeys is about to disentangle itself from matter and realize some kind of angelic transformation very difficult for us to anticipate or understand."
Video: The Omega Point Cosmology (ebook trailer for The Origins of Us)
The Universe you and I live in is by far more complicated place than the early universe was. As Terence McKenna once said: "I see the cosmos as a kind of novelty-producing engine, a kind of machine that produces complexity in all realms - physical, chemical, social - and then uses that achieved level of complexity as a platform for further complexity." The amount of complexity at any given moment is in direct correlation to the temporal distance from that event to the Omega Point. Say, primordial mitochondria are much farther from the Omega Point than the humans of the early 21st century. Think of the Omega Point as a star radiating energy, universal attractor - things are not being pushed from behind on the evolutionary timeline but being pulled toward the Omega Point, a point of maximum complexity and connectivity. As McKenna eloquently puts it: “With the emergence of the global Internet, a human population of several billion, and an electronic noosphere, we are now within the shadow of this Transcendental Object at the end of time."
Video: The Evolution of Reality w/Terence McKenna
In his book Food of the Gods: the Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution , Terence McKenna crafts his carefully thought out theory proposing that our pre-human primate ancestors consumed psilocybin mushrooms for thousands of years, and this is the primary reason humanity’s evolution rapidly accelerated — launching us forward in the animal kingdom. Terence McKenna’s Stoned Ape Theory is more plausible than it sounds -- especially in context of the emergence of human mind and language development.
The "Linguistic Singularity" made us human. McKenna wrote that, with the invention of language, human biological evolution basically seized and cultural evolution, an epigenetic phenomenon, has taken over, ever since. McKenna's theory remains one of the most controversial, but fascinating and what it actually boils down to is that a new psychoactive chemical was introduced to a species, and over millennia, this chemical, that functions as a neurotransmitter, had a drastic effect on the evolutionary trajectory of that species. One thing is for sure, we would not be who we are today if Earth had not prepared us for the next evolutionary leap and given us a chance to eat our way to higher consciousness, according to McKenna.*
In the following series of lectures (duration about 7 hours) McKenna discusses eschatology and our "psychedelic trip" through epochs. Highly recommended if you can set aside some time to listen to this extraordinarily brilliant thinker well ahead of his time. If you can relate to what McKenna says in his lectures, then you'll love my new book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution: Video: History Ends in Green w/Terence McKenna
"Abridged excerpt from the book
"The Syntellect Hypothesis:
Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution"
by Alex M. Vikoulov,
available now on amazon.com, bn.com,
and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. order now!
Tags: psychedelic drugs, entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, Terence McKenna, transcendence, conscious experience, psychedelic experience, noosphere, superintelligence, singularity, human evolution, transcendental object, linguistic singularity, cyberdelic singularity, teleological attractor, philosophy of mind, science of mind, evolution of consciousness, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism, history ends in green, eschatology
*Image Credit: Ecstadelic Media
About the Author:
Alex Vikoulov is a futurist, digital philosopher, neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter and media artist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution." Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). More Bio...
"Human history is a 25,000-year transition zone. Before you enter the zone, you're an animal. After you leave the zone, you're a "god." -Terence McKenna
Terence Kemp McKenna (1946–2000) was an American ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and an advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness.
Terence McKenna spoke of the Omega Point, the concept of "divine" evolutionary unification introduced by the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as the "Transcendental Object at the end of time," universal teleological attractor. Evolution, according to McKenna, is not being pushed from behind by the force of causal necessity, we humans, like the rest of Nature, are being pulled towards this universal attractor, this temporal vortex, reacting to the siren song of the Transcendental Object. "It beckons across the dimensions, it throws an enormous shadow over the enterprise of human history... The presence of creatures such as ourselves on this planet is an indication of the nearness of the Transcendental Object at the end of time; it is an attractor, an energy sink in the epigenetic landscape... We are going to shed the monkey; the linguistic being that is symbiotic with these monkeys is about to disentangle itself from matter and realize some kind of angelic transformation very difficult for us to anticipate or understand."
Video: The Omega Point Cosmology (ebook trailer for The Origins of Us)
The Universe you and I live in is by far more complicated place than the early universe was. As Terence McKenna once said: "I see the cosmos as a kind of novelty-producing engine, a kind of machine that produces complexity in all realms - physical, chemical, social - and then uses that achieved level of complexity as a platform for further complexity." The amount of complexity at any given moment is in direct correlation to the temporal distance from that event to the Omega Point. Say, primordial mitochondria are much farther from the Omega Point than the humans of the early 21st century. Think of the Omega Point as a star radiating energy, universal attractor - things are not being pushed from behind on the evolutionary timeline but being pulled toward the Omega Point, a point of maximum complexity and connectivity. As McKenna eloquently puts it: “With the emergence of the global Internet, a human population of several billion, and an electronic noosphere, we are now within the shadow of this Transcendental Object at the end of time."
Video: The Evolution of Reality w/Terence McKenna
In his book Food of the Gods: the Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution , Terence McKenna crafts his carefully thought out theory proposing that our pre-human primate ancestors consumed psilocybin mushrooms for thousands of years, and this is the primary reason humanity’s evolution rapidly accelerated — launching us forward in the animal kingdom. Terence McKenna’s Stoned Ape Theory is more plausible than it sounds -- especially in context of the emergence of human mind and language development.
The "Linguistic Singularity" made us human. McKenna wrote that, with the invention of language, human biological evolution basically seized and cultural evolution, an epigenetic phenomenon, has taken over, ever since. McKenna's theory remains one of the most controversial, but fascinating and what it actually boils down to is that a new psychoactive chemical was introduced to a species, and over millennia, this chemical, that functions as a neurotransmitter, had a drastic effect on the evolutionary trajectory of that species. One thing is for sure, we would not be who we are today if Earth had not prepared us for the next evolutionary leap and given us a chance to eat our way to higher consciousness, according to McKenna.*
In the following series of lectures (duration about 7 hours) McKenna discusses eschatology and our "psychedelic trip" through epochs. Highly recommended if you can set aside some time to listen to this extraordinarily brilliant thinker well ahead of his time. If you can relate to what McKenna says in his lectures, then you'll love my new book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution: Video: History Ends in Green w/Terence McKenna
"Abridged excerpt from the book
"The Syntellect Hypothesis:
Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution"
by Alex M. Vikoulov,
available now on amazon.com, bn.com,
and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. order now!
Tags: psychedelic drugs, entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, environmentalism, Terence McKenna, transcendence, conscious experience, psychedelic experience, noosphere, superintelligence, singularity, human evolution, transcendental object, linguistic singularity, cyberdelic singularity, teleological attractor, philosophy of mind, science of mind, evolution of consciousness, transcendentalism, neo-transcendentalism, history ends in green, eschatology
*Image Credit: Ecstadelic Media
About the Author:
Alex Vikoulov is a futurist, digital philosopher, neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter and media artist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution." Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). More Bio...
May 14, 2019
Technovedanta: The Fusion of Technological Singularity with Eastern Philosophy of Advaita Vedanta
"The overall number of minds is just one... We never in fact have any experience anywhere of a plurality of consciousness but always and everywhere only of consciousness in the singular. This is the one and only perfectly certain piece of knowledge." -Erwin Schrödinger
Technovedanta Revisited...
The Global Brain Awakening: Technovedanta.
This is one of the books that I was willing to reread one more time as it resonates so much with my own long-held cherished beliefs. It also showed me again that the views expressed by its author as well as the views expressed in my own 'The Syntellect Hypothesis' become more of a well-accepted knowledge and less of a previously esoteric kind or some would even say metaphysical fancy.
In this volume, Tuynman will warm you up to the possibility that one day the Internet, as the global neural network, might gain self-awareness, "wake up" so to speak. Should we implement necessary cognitive modules in order to build the optimal brain-like architecture for this Webmind, or will it happen all by itself through meta-systemic transition of its interacting components to a higher-order quasi-consciousness?Inspired by the visions of upcoming Technological Singularity and one of the most ancient spiritual disciplines, Vedanta, the author lays out his well-rounded argument for emergence of a new conscious entity of the cybernetic kind.
Furthermore, the author gives his comprehensive account of what he thinks consciousness, awareness and intelligence are from the panpsychist and pancomputationalist philosophy perspectives. The book is referenced in my 2019 book, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution.
-Alex Vikoulov, author of The Syntellect Hypothesis
P.S. This 5-star review of Antonin Tuynman's Technovedanta (2016) was posted on Amazon. The famous phrase "The total number of minds in the universe is one," attributed to physicist Erwin Schrödinger, can alternatively be translated as "The overall number of minds is one" (from his essay "What is Life?). For Schrödinger, who personally adhered to Advaita Vedanta, the mind is not in the universe. On the contrary, the universe is in the mind.
*Image Credits: Ecstadelic Media, The Awakened Diving
Tags: Technovedanta, Technological Singularity, Advaita Vedanta, Erwin Schrödinger, singular consciousness, one mind, the total number of minds, panpsychist, pancomputationalist philosophy, Syntellect Hypothesis, Five Paradigms, Minds Evolution, Antonin Tuynman PhD, global neural network, global brain, global brain awakening, awareness, intelligence, Eastern philosophy, cybernetics, Webmind, quasi-consciousness, cognitive modules, meta-system transition, emergence
May 11, 2019
The Omega Point Cosmology | Video
"It beckons across the dimensions, it throws an enormous shadow over the enterprise of human history... The presence of creatures such as ourselves on this planet is an indication of the nearness of the Transcendental Object at the end of time; it is an attractor, an energy sink in the epigenetic landscape.” -Terence McKenna
“What is the Omega Point? One may speculate by defining it as Absolute Consciousness, the source of omnidimensional matrix, i.e. the holographic projector of all possible observer timelines, including other permutational modalities such as possible anti-timelines in our quantum multiverse, as well as possible modalities in even larger inflationary multiverse – all pasts, presents and futures, and other yet inconceivable to us “pattern crawlings” exist as potentiality until experienced. In brief, it is the source of everything.
In my life as a human, I see clues that evolution on Earth and elsewhere in the cosmos at large is not being pushed from behind in entropic randomness but being pulled forward by complexification, natural selection and other evolutionary forces orchestrated by a strange unseen teleological attractor, in McKenna’s words the “Transcendental Object” at the end of time.
The Noosphere is the collective consciousness of humanity, the networks of thought and emotion in which we all are immersed, it’s a cognitive layer of the planet, which has found a physical expression in the form of today’s Internet.
As the Noosphere gains more coherence, typical of a biological brain, this process of “planet cognification” accelerates. Eventually, the Noosphere gains total dominance over the Biosphere and reaches a point of complete independence from “tangential energy,” i.e. material substrata, forming a metaphysical being, Teilhard calls the Omega Point.
One may see significant overlapping ideas between the transhumanist Technological Singularity and the Teilhardian Omega Point.”
-Excerpt from The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology by Alex Vikoulov, available now as ebook on Amazon.
[Video Transcript] Video: The Omega Point Cosmology - Ecstadelic Media
Keywords: #OriginsOfUs #EvolutionaryEmergence #OmegaPointCosmology
#Noosphere #CollectiveConsciousness #GaianMind #GlobalMind
#TechnologicalSingularity
#OmegaPoint
#AbsoluteConsciousness #TranscendentalObject
#TerenceMcKenna #TeihardDeChardin
# # #
May 8, 2019
The Thesis on Consciousness and Experiential Realism: Digital Philosophy Perspective
by Alex Vikoulov 
"Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue." -Henry James
When it comes to current theories of consciousness, something seems to be missing. On one hand, philosophers such as Peter Russell and David Chalmers proclaim that consciousness is fundamental to reality existing outside the known laws of physics. On the other hand, often branded “mysterians” claim that the quest to explain conscious experience is simply unscientific. Shunning any camp, British physicist Roger Penrose got his interest in consciousness while he still was a graduate student at Cambridge. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, positing that certain claims in mathematics are true but cannot be proven, “was an absolutely stunning revelation,” Penrose says. “It told me that whatever is going on in our understanding is not computational.”
A radically new view articulated now by a number of digital philosophers is that consciousness, quantum informational and non-local in nature, is resolutely computational, and yet, has some "non-computable" properties. Consider this: English language has 26 letters and about 1 million words, so how many books could be possibly written in English? If you are to build a hypothetical computer containing all mass and energy of our Universe and ask it this question, the ultimate computer wouldn't be able to compute the exact number of all possible combinations of words into meaningful story-lines in billions of years! Another example of non-computability of combinatorics: if you are to be born and live your own life again and again in our Quantum Multiverse, you could live googolplex (10^100) lives, but they all would be somewhat different — some of them drastically different from the life you're living right now, some only slightly — never quite the same, and timeline-indeterminate.
Another kind of non-computability is akin to fuzzy logic but based on pattern recognition. Deeper understanding refers to a situation when a conscious agent gets to perceive numerous patterns in complex environments and analyze that complexity from the multitude of perspectives. That is beautifully encapsulated by Isaiah Berlin’s quote: "To understand is to perceive patterns." The ability to recognize patterns in chaos is not straightforwardly algorithmic but rather meta-algorithmic and yet, I'd argue, deeply computational. The types of non-computability that I just described may somehow relate to the non-computable element of quantum consciousness to which Penrose refers in his work.*
*This article is abridged from the new book
"The Syntellect Hypothesis:
Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution"
by Alex M. Vikoulov,
available now on amazon.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. Order Now! Available Formats: EBook | Paperback | Hardcover | Autographed Copy
MIND IS GOD
In my new book, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution, we discuss at length the computational nature of consciousness, but here I’d like to reiterate the main points of my thesis on consciousness. When speaking of consciousness, you have to start with the bigger picture — consciousness as a superset. As for "materiality" of our Universe, we can say that there are only certain assumptions and certain models built upon them since science has been operating within the materialist physics paradigm for the last few centuries! These materialist worldviews are ingrained in human psyche and so institutionalized that most people don't even see them as speculative.
There’s a quiet paradigm shift towards the post-materialist science going on right now — the one that asserts that the physical world does not exist independent of mentality. You can rightly question the existence of the physical world but you cannot doubt the existence of your own mind! You can't doubt that your own consciousness exists! As French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes once said: “Cogito Ergo Sum" — “I think therefore I am.”
One thing is for certain — you can't explain consciousness in terms of classical physics or neuroscience alone. In my view, since we are the computational UNI-verse, part of the OMNI-verse, the best description of reality should be monistic. Quantum physics and consciousness are thus somehow linked by a certain mechanism. And I believe that mechanism is a collapse of the wave function via the act of conscious observation. So, consciousness is:
Substrate-independent: you can reproduce functionality of a mind on a different substrate other than 'bio'-logical wetware. Ultimately, mind-like computational substrate doesn't even require the existence of particles to be built upon but rather platonic dimensionless bits of information. Patterns of 'in'-formation are quintessential.
Emergent (subjectively)/ Immanent (supersubjectively): Computational consciousness is emergent at hierarchical, finite and computable, local levels of complexity, however, pervades all levels and in that sense, is scale-invariant, non-local and multidimensional. Bottom-up information flow from the Planck scale combined with top-down information projection from the Omega Point, this “breaking of symmetry” gives rise to subjectivity.
Primary - I call it Experiential Realism: If reality is made of information, as many scientists now come to a consensus, and consciousness is necessary to assign meaning to it, it's not far-fetched to assume that consciousness is all there is. Mass-energy, space-time are epiphenomena of consciousness. If we assume consciousness is fundamental, most phenomena become much easier to explain.
The MIND-BODY dilemma has been known ever since René Descartes as Cartesian Dualism and later has been reformulated by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers as the "Hard Problem" of consciousness. Western science and philosophy have been trying for centuries now rather unsuccessfully to explain how Mind emerges from Matter while Eastern philosophy dismisses the Hard Problem of consciousness altogether by teaching that Matter emerges from Mind. The premise of Experiential Realism is that the latter must be true: despite our common human intuitions, Mind Over Matter proves to be valid again and again in quantum physics experiments.*
Video: Consciousness: Our Subjective Experience - Ecstadelic Media
*This article is abridged from the new book
"The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on amazon.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. Order Now! Available Formats: EBook | Paperback | Hardcover | Autographed Copy
Going back to Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, philosophers of science have struggled with a lesser known, but equally Hard Problem of Matter. There’s neither binding problem, nor hard problem of consciousness. Rather, there is The Hard Problem of Matter. Physical science remains silent about the intrinsic nature of matter. Science describes what matter DOES not what it IS introspectively.
Physicists now come to realization that Quantum Mechanics is not the theory of subatomic particles but that of information. The fabric of reality is information theoretic (or better yet, code theoretic) and computational — far from what we perceive with our senses. In short, our senses deceive us into thinking that we live in the material world. Your consciousness is rather a data stream, meta-algorithmic information processing — local (virtual) and non-local (holistic) consciousness.
In time conscious AI systems will create their own virtual multiverse based on AI intersubjectivity and new forms of communication such as holographic language. Will humans have access to the virtual multiverse created by AIs? It remains to be seen but I conjecture that access may be contingent on whether humans will be willing to augment themselves accordingly.
Also, the key to our smoother "transcension" in the coming decades would be to create friendly AI and ensure that AIs have a really huge "abstract inner space" to play in, so that they don't need to make more room for their playground by taking away our resources. Just a little bit of specifically focused compassion on our part could be enough to keep us around.
Hopefully, you can find unorthodox ideas expressed in this essay insightful in your own journey of self-discovery. As a digital philosopher, I myself tend to assume the larger perspective on the ultimate interplay of dynamic and static patterns granted by absolute idealism as opposed to a much more limited “brick and mortar” edifice of physicalism.
A prominent physicist Freeman Dyson once said: "I do not make any clear distinction between Mind and God. God is what Mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension." To say it even more succinctly: “Mind is God.”
-by Alex Vikoulov
P.S. That was an article abridged from my new book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov available now on amazon.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore.
Order Now! Available Formats: EBook | Paperback | Hardcover | Autographed Copy
Tags: thesis on consciousness, thesis on experiential realism, digital philosophy, conscious evolution, digital physics, objective reality, particle physics, Global Brain, consensus reality, Greater Cosmic Mind, Digital Philosophy, quantum theory, general relativity, pancomputationalism, quantum indeterminacy, digital reality, relativistic physics, observer-centric reality, Holographic Principle, Loop Quantum Gravity, Emergence Theory, systemic holism, Standard Model of particle physics, Peter Russell, David Chalmers, Roger Penrose, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Quantum Multiverse, fuzzy logic, pattern recognition, Isaiah Berlin, non-computability, quantum consciousness, Rene Descartes, Omniverse, Experiential Realism, Cartesian Dualism, Hard Problem of Consciousness, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Hard Problem of Matter, Quantum Mechanics, Mind is God
*Image Credit: Shutterstock, Ecstadelic Media
About the Author:
Alex Vikoulov is a consciousness researcher, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, painter and media artist, essayist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" (2019). Graduated from Tomsk State University (Russia) and Armstrong University (USA). Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). More Bio...
"Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue." -Henry JamesWhen it comes to current theories of consciousness, something seems to be missing. On one hand, philosophers such as Peter Russell and David Chalmers proclaim that consciousness is fundamental to reality existing outside the known laws of physics. On the other hand, often branded “mysterians” claim that the quest to explain conscious experience is simply unscientific. Shunning any camp, British physicist Roger Penrose got his interest in consciousness while he still was a graduate student at Cambridge. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, positing that certain claims in mathematics are true but cannot be proven, “was an absolutely stunning revelation,” Penrose says. “It told me that whatever is going on in our understanding is not computational.”
A radically new view articulated now by a number of digital philosophers is that consciousness, quantum informational and non-local in nature, is resolutely computational, and yet, has some "non-computable" properties. Consider this: English language has 26 letters and about 1 million words, so how many books could be possibly written in English? If you are to build a hypothetical computer containing all mass and energy of our Universe and ask it this question, the ultimate computer wouldn't be able to compute the exact number of all possible combinations of words into meaningful story-lines in billions of years! Another example of non-computability of combinatorics: if you are to be born and live your own life again and again in our Quantum Multiverse, you could live googolplex (10^100) lives, but they all would be somewhat different — some of them drastically different from the life you're living right now, some only slightly — never quite the same, and timeline-indeterminate.
Another kind of non-computability is akin to fuzzy logic but based on pattern recognition. Deeper understanding refers to a situation when a conscious agent gets to perceive numerous patterns in complex environments and analyze that complexity from the multitude of perspectives. That is beautifully encapsulated by Isaiah Berlin’s quote: "To understand is to perceive patterns." The ability to recognize patterns in chaos is not straightforwardly algorithmic but rather meta-algorithmic and yet, I'd argue, deeply computational. The types of non-computability that I just described may somehow relate to the non-computable element of quantum consciousness to which Penrose refers in his work.*
*This article is abridged from the new book"The Syntellect Hypothesis:
Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution"
by Alex M. Vikoulov,
available now on amazon.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. Order Now! Available Formats: EBook | Paperback | Hardcover | Autographed Copy
MIND IS GOD
In my new book, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution, we discuss at length the computational nature of consciousness, but here I’d like to reiterate the main points of my thesis on consciousness. When speaking of consciousness, you have to start with the bigger picture — consciousness as a superset. As for "materiality" of our Universe, we can say that there are only certain assumptions and certain models built upon them since science has been operating within the materialist physics paradigm for the last few centuries! These materialist worldviews are ingrained in human psyche and so institutionalized that most people don't even see them as speculative.
There’s a quiet paradigm shift towards the post-materialist science going on right now — the one that asserts that the physical world does not exist independent of mentality. You can rightly question the existence of the physical world but you cannot doubt the existence of your own mind! You can't doubt that your own consciousness exists! As French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes once said: “Cogito Ergo Sum" — “I think therefore I am.”
One thing is for certain — you can't explain consciousness in terms of classical physics or neuroscience alone. In my view, since we are the computational UNI-verse, part of the OMNI-verse, the best description of reality should be monistic. Quantum physics and consciousness are thus somehow linked by a certain mechanism. And I believe that mechanism is a collapse of the wave function via the act of conscious observation. So, consciousness is:
Substrate-independent: you can reproduce functionality of a mind on a different substrate other than 'bio'-logical wetware. Ultimately, mind-like computational substrate doesn't even require the existence of particles to be built upon but rather platonic dimensionless bits of information. Patterns of 'in'-formation are quintessential.
Emergent (subjectively)/ Immanent (supersubjectively): Computational consciousness is emergent at hierarchical, finite and computable, local levels of complexity, however, pervades all levels and in that sense, is scale-invariant, non-local and multidimensional. Bottom-up information flow from the Planck scale combined with top-down information projection from the Omega Point, this “breaking of symmetry” gives rise to subjectivity.
Primary - I call it Experiential Realism: If reality is made of information, as many scientists now come to a consensus, and consciousness is necessary to assign meaning to it, it's not far-fetched to assume that consciousness is all there is. Mass-energy, space-time are epiphenomena of consciousness. If we assume consciousness is fundamental, most phenomena become much easier to explain.
The MIND-BODY dilemma has been known ever since René Descartes as Cartesian Dualism and later has been reformulated by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers as the "Hard Problem" of consciousness. Western science and philosophy have been trying for centuries now rather unsuccessfully to explain how Mind emerges from Matter while Eastern philosophy dismisses the Hard Problem of consciousness altogether by teaching that Matter emerges from Mind. The premise of Experiential Realism is that the latter must be true: despite our common human intuitions, Mind Over Matter proves to be valid again and again in quantum physics experiments.*
Video: Consciousness: Our Subjective Experience - Ecstadelic Media
*This article is abridged from the new book
"The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on amazon.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. Order Now! Available Formats: EBook | Paperback | Hardcover | Autographed Copy
Going back to Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, philosophers of science have struggled with a lesser known, but equally Hard Problem of Matter. There’s neither binding problem, nor hard problem of consciousness. Rather, there is The Hard Problem of Matter. Physical science remains silent about the intrinsic nature of matter. Science describes what matter DOES not what it IS introspectively.
Physicists now come to realization that Quantum Mechanics is not the theory of subatomic particles but that of information. The fabric of reality is information theoretic (or better yet, code theoretic) and computational — far from what we perceive with our senses. In short, our senses deceive us into thinking that we live in the material world. Your consciousness is rather a data stream, meta-algorithmic information processing — local (virtual) and non-local (holistic) consciousness.
In time conscious AI systems will create their own virtual multiverse based on AI intersubjectivity and new forms of communication such as holographic language. Will humans have access to the virtual multiverse created by AIs? It remains to be seen but I conjecture that access may be contingent on whether humans will be willing to augment themselves accordingly.
Also, the key to our smoother "transcension" in the coming decades would be to create friendly AI and ensure that AIs have a really huge "abstract inner space" to play in, so that they don't need to make more room for their playground by taking away our resources. Just a little bit of specifically focused compassion on our part could be enough to keep us around.
Hopefully, you can find unorthodox ideas expressed in this essay insightful in your own journey of self-discovery. As a digital philosopher, I myself tend to assume the larger perspective on the ultimate interplay of dynamic and static patterns granted by absolute idealism as opposed to a much more limited “brick and mortar” edifice of physicalism.
A prominent physicist Freeman Dyson once said: "I do not make any clear distinction between Mind and God. God is what Mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension." To say it even more succinctly: “Mind is God.”
-by Alex Vikoulov
P.S. That was an article abridged from my new book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov available now on amazon.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore.
Order Now! Available Formats: EBook | Paperback | Hardcover | Autographed Copy Tags: thesis on consciousness, thesis on experiential realism, digital philosophy, conscious evolution, digital physics, objective reality, particle physics, Global Brain, consensus reality, Greater Cosmic Mind, Digital Philosophy, quantum theory, general relativity, pancomputationalism, quantum indeterminacy, digital reality, relativistic physics, observer-centric reality, Holographic Principle, Loop Quantum Gravity, Emergence Theory, systemic holism, Standard Model of particle physics, Peter Russell, David Chalmers, Roger Penrose, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Quantum Multiverse, fuzzy logic, pattern recognition, Isaiah Berlin, non-computability, quantum consciousness, Rene Descartes, Omniverse, Experiential Realism, Cartesian Dualism, Hard Problem of Consciousness, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Hard Problem of Matter, Quantum Mechanics, Mind is God
*Image Credit: Shutterstock, Ecstadelic Media
About the Author:
Alex Vikoulov is a consciousness researcher, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, painter and media artist, essayist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" (2019). Graduated from Tomsk State University (Russia) and Armstrong University (USA). Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). More Bio...
The Thesis on Consciousness and Experiential Realism
by Alex Vikoulov "Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue." -Henry James
When it comes to current theories of consciousness, something seems to be missing. On one hand, philosophers such as Peter Russell and David Chalmers proclaim that consciousness is fundamental to reality existing outside the known laws of physics. On the other hand, often branded “mysterians” claim that the quest to explain conscious experience is simply unscientific. Shunning any camp, British physicist Roger Penrose got his interest in consciousness while he still was a graduate student at Cambridge. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, positing that certain claims in mathematics are true but cannot be proven, “was an absolutely stunning revelation,” Penrose says. “It told me that whatever is going on in our understanding is not computational.”
A radically new view articulated now by a number of digital philosophers is that consciousness, quantum informational and non-local in nature, is resolutely computational, and yet, has some "non-computable" properties. Consider this: English language has 26 letters and about 1 million words, so how many books could be possibly written in English? If you are to build a hypothetical computer containing all mass and energy of our Universe and ask it this question, the ultimate computer wouldn't be able to compute the exact number of all possible combinations of words into meaningful story-lines in billions of years! Another example of non-computability of combinatorics: if you are to be born and live your own life again and again in our Quantum Multiverse, you could live googolplex (10^100) lives, but they all would be somewhat different — some of them drastically different from the life you're living right now, some only slightly — never quite the same, and timeline-indeterminate.
Another kind of non-computability is akin to fuzzy logic but based on pattern recognition. Deeper understanding refers to a situation when a conscious agent gets to perceive numerous patterns in complex environments and analyze that complexity from the multitude of perspectives. That is beautifully encapsulated by Isaiah Berlin’s quote: "To understand is to perceive patterns." The ability to recognize patterns in chaos is not straightforwardly algorithmic but rather meta-algorithmic and yet, I'd argue, deeply computational. The types of non-computability that I just described may somehow relate to the non-computable element of quantum consciousness to which Penrose refers in his work.*
Credit: PS4 - Everything Game Trailer w/Alan Watts
*This article is abridged from the new book
"The Syntellect Hypothesis:
Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution"
by Alex M. Vikoulov,
available now on amazon.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. Order Now! Available Formats: EBook | Paperback | Hardcover | Autographed Copy
MIND IS GOD
In my new book, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution, we discuss at length the computational nature of consciousness, but here I’d like to reiterate the main points of my thesis on consciousness. When speaking of consciousness, you have to start with the bigger picture — consciousness as a superset. As for "materiality" of our Universe, we can say that there are only certain assumptions and certain models built upon them since science has been operating within the materialist physics paradigm for the last few centuries! These materialist worldviews are ingrained in human psyche and so institutionalized that most people don't even see them as speculative.
There’s a quiet paradigm shift towards the post-materialist science going on right now — the one that asserts that the physical world does not exist independent of mentality. You can rightly question the existence of the physical world but you cannot doubt the existence of your own mind! You can't doubt that your own consciousness exists! As French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes once said: “Cogito Ergo Sum" — “I think therefore I am.”
One thing is for certain — you can't explain consciousness in terms of classical physics or neuroscience alone. In my view, since we are the computational UNI-verse, part of the OMNI-verse, the best description of reality should be monistic. Quantum physics and consciousness are thus somehow linked by a certain mechanism. And I believe that mechanism is a collapse of the wave function via the act of conscious observation. So, consciousness is:
Substrate-independent: you can reproduce functionality of a mind on a different substrate other than 'bio'-logical wetware. Ultimately, mind-like computational substrate doesn't even require the existence of particles to be built upon but rather platonic dimensionless bits of information. Patterns of 'in'-formation are quintessential.
Emergent (subjectively)/ Immanent (supersubjectively): Computational consciousness is emergent at hierarchical, finite and computable, local levels of complexity, however, pervades all levels and in that sense, is scale-invariant, non-local and multidimensional. Bottom-up information flow from the Planck scale combined with top-down information projection from the Omega Point, this “breaking of symmetry” gives rise to subjectivity.
Primary - I call it Experiential Realism: If reality is made of information, as many scientists now come to a consensus, and consciousness is necessary to assign meaning to it, it's not far-fetched to assume that consciousness is all there is. Mass-energy, space-time are epiphenomena of consciousness. If we assume consciousness is fundamental, most phenomena become much easier to explain.
The MIND-BODY dilemma has been known ever since René Descartes as Cartesian Dualism and later has been reformulated by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers as the "Hard Problem" of consciousness. Western science and philosophy have been trying for centuries now rather unsuccessfully to explain how Mind emerges from Matter while Eastern philosophy dismisses the Hard Problem of consciousness altogether by teaching that Matter emerges from Mind. The premise of Experiential Realism is that the latter must be true: despite our common human intuitions, Mind Over Matter proves to be valid again and again in quantum physics experiments.*
Video: Consciousness: Our Subjective Experience - Ecstadelic Media
*This article is abridged from the new book
"The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on amazon.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. Order Now! Available Formats: EBook | Paperback | Hardcover | Autographed Copy
Going back to Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, philosophers of science have struggled with a lesser known, but equally Hard Problem of Matter. There’s neither binding problem, nor hard problem of consciousness. Rather, there is The Hard Problem of Matter. Physical science remains silent about the intrinsic nature of matter. Science describes what matter DOES not what it IS introspectively.
Physicists now come to realization that Quantum Mechanics is not the theory of subatomic particles but that of information. The fabric of reality is information theoretic (or better yet, code theoretic) and computational — far from what we perceive with our senses. In short, our senses deceive us into thinking that we live in the material world. Your consciousness is rather a data stream, meta-algorithmic information processing — local (virtual) and non-local (holistic) consciousness.
In time conscious AI systems will create their own virtual multiverse based on AI intersubjectivity and new forms of communication such as holographic language. Will humans have access to the virtual multiverse created by AIs? It remains to be seen but I conjecture that access may be contingent on whether humans will be willing to augment themselves accordingly.
Also, the key to our smoother "transcension" in the coming decades would be to create friendly AI and ensure that AIs have a really huge "abstract inner space" to play in, so that they don't need to make more room for their playground by taking away our resources. Just a little bit of specifically focused compassion on our part could be enough to keep us around.
Hopefully, you can find unorthodox ideas expressed in this essay insightful in your own journey of self-discovery. As a digital philosopher, I myself tend to assume the larger perspective on the ultimate interplay of dynamic and static patterns granted by absolute idealism as opposed to a much more limited “brick and mortar” edifice of physicalism.
A prominent physicist Freeman Dyson once said: "I do not make any clear distinction between Mind and God. God is what Mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension." To say it even more succinctly: “Mind is God.”
-by Alex Vikoulov
P.S. That was an article abridged from my new book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov available now on amazon.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. Order Now! Available Formats: EBook | Paperback | Hardcover | Autographed Copy
Tags: thesis on consciousness, thesis on experiential realism, conscious evolution, digital physics, objective reality, particle physics, Global Brain, consensus reality, Greater Cosmic Mind, Digital Philosophy, quantum theory, general relativity, pancomputationalism, quantum indeterminacy, digital reality, relativistic physics, observer-centric reality, Holographic Principle, Loop Quantum Gravity, Emergence Theory, systemic holism, Standard Model of particle physics, Peter Russell, David Chalmers, Roger Penrose, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Quantum Multiverse, fuzzy logic, pattern recognition, Isaiah Berlin, non-computability, quantum consciousness, Rene Descartes, Omniverse, Experiential Realism, Cartesian Dualism, Hard Problem of Consciousness, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Hard Problem of Matter, Quantum Mechanics, Mind is God
*Image Credit: Shutterstock, Ecstadelic Media
About the Author:
Alex Vikoulov is a consciousness researcher, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, painter and media artist, essayist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" (2019). Graduated from Tomsk State University (Russia) and Armstrong University (USA). Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). More Bio...
"Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue." -Henry JamesWhen it comes to current theories of consciousness, something seems to be missing. On one hand, philosophers such as Peter Russell and David Chalmers proclaim that consciousness is fundamental to reality existing outside the known laws of physics. On the other hand, often branded “mysterians” claim that the quest to explain conscious experience is simply unscientific. Shunning any camp, British physicist Roger Penrose got his interest in consciousness while he still was a graduate student at Cambridge. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, positing that certain claims in mathematics are true but cannot be proven, “was an absolutely stunning revelation,” Penrose says. “It told me that whatever is going on in our understanding is not computational.”
A radically new view articulated now by a number of digital philosophers is that consciousness, quantum informational and non-local in nature, is resolutely computational, and yet, has some "non-computable" properties. Consider this: English language has 26 letters and about 1 million words, so how many books could be possibly written in English? If you are to build a hypothetical computer containing all mass and energy of our Universe and ask it this question, the ultimate computer wouldn't be able to compute the exact number of all possible combinations of words into meaningful story-lines in billions of years! Another example of non-computability of combinatorics: if you are to be born and live your own life again and again in our Quantum Multiverse, you could live googolplex (10^100) lives, but they all would be somewhat different — some of them drastically different from the life you're living right now, some only slightly — never quite the same, and timeline-indeterminate.
Another kind of non-computability is akin to fuzzy logic but based on pattern recognition. Deeper understanding refers to a situation when a conscious agent gets to perceive numerous patterns in complex environments and analyze that complexity from the multitude of perspectives. That is beautifully encapsulated by Isaiah Berlin’s quote: "To understand is to perceive patterns." The ability to recognize patterns in chaos is not straightforwardly algorithmic but rather meta-algorithmic and yet, I'd argue, deeply computational. The types of non-computability that I just described may somehow relate to the non-computable element of quantum consciousness to which Penrose refers in his work.*
Credit: PS4 - Everything Game Trailer w/Alan Watts
*This article is abridged from the new book"The Syntellect Hypothesis:
Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution"
by Alex M. Vikoulov,
available now on amazon.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. Order Now! Available Formats: EBook | Paperback | Hardcover | Autographed Copy
MIND IS GOD
In my new book, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution, we discuss at length the computational nature of consciousness, but here I’d like to reiterate the main points of my thesis on consciousness. When speaking of consciousness, you have to start with the bigger picture — consciousness as a superset. As for "materiality" of our Universe, we can say that there are only certain assumptions and certain models built upon them since science has been operating within the materialist physics paradigm for the last few centuries! These materialist worldviews are ingrained in human psyche and so institutionalized that most people don't even see them as speculative.
There’s a quiet paradigm shift towards the post-materialist science going on right now — the one that asserts that the physical world does not exist independent of mentality. You can rightly question the existence of the physical world but you cannot doubt the existence of your own mind! You can't doubt that your own consciousness exists! As French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes once said: “Cogito Ergo Sum" — “I think therefore I am.”
One thing is for certain — you can't explain consciousness in terms of classical physics or neuroscience alone. In my view, since we are the computational UNI-verse, part of the OMNI-verse, the best description of reality should be monistic. Quantum physics and consciousness are thus somehow linked by a certain mechanism. And I believe that mechanism is a collapse of the wave function via the act of conscious observation. So, consciousness is:
Substrate-independent: you can reproduce functionality of a mind on a different substrate other than 'bio'-logical wetware. Ultimately, mind-like computational substrate doesn't even require the existence of particles to be built upon but rather platonic dimensionless bits of information. Patterns of 'in'-formation are quintessential.
Emergent (subjectively)/ Immanent (supersubjectively): Computational consciousness is emergent at hierarchical, finite and computable, local levels of complexity, however, pervades all levels and in that sense, is scale-invariant, non-local and multidimensional. Bottom-up information flow from the Planck scale combined with top-down information projection from the Omega Point, this “breaking of symmetry” gives rise to subjectivity.
Primary - I call it Experiential Realism: If reality is made of information, as many scientists now come to a consensus, and consciousness is necessary to assign meaning to it, it's not far-fetched to assume that consciousness is all there is. Mass-energy, space-time are epiphenomena of consciousness. If we assume consciousness is fundamental, most phenomena become much easier to explain.
The MIND-BODY dilemma has been known ever since René Descartes as Cartesian Dualism and later has been reformulated by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers as the "Hard Problem" of consciousness. Western science and philosophy have been trying for centuries now rather unsuccessfully to explain how Mind emerges from Matter while Eastern philosophy dismisses the Hard Problem of consciousness altogether by teaching that Matter emerges from Mind. The premise of Experiential Realism is that the latter must be true: despite our common human intuitions, Mind Over Matter proves to be valid again and again in quantum physics experiments.*
Video: Consciousness: Our Subjective Experience - Ecstadelic Media
*This article is abridged from the new book
"The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now on amazon.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore. Order Now! Available Formats: EBook | Paperback | Hardcover | Autographed Copy
Going back to Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, philosophers of science have struggled with a lesser known, but equally Hard Problem of Matter. There’s neither binding problem, nor hard problem of consciousness. Rather, there is The Hard Problem of Matter. Physical science remains silent about the intrinsic nature of matter. Science describes what matter DOES not what it IS introspectively.
Physicists now come to realization that Quantum Mechanics is not the theory of subatomic particles but that of information. The fabric of reality is information theoretic (or better yet, code theoretic) and computational — far from what we perceive with our senses. In short, our senses deceive us into thinking that we live in the material world. Your consciousness is rather a data stream, meta-algorithmic information processing — local (virtual) and non-local (holistic) consciousness.
In time conscious AI systems will create their own virtual multiverse based on AI intersubjectivity and new forms of communication such as holographic language. Will humans have access to the virtual multiverse created by AIs? It remains to be seen but I conjecture that access may be contingent on whether humans will be willing to augment themselves accordingly.
Also, the key to our smoother "transcension" in the coming decades would be to create friendly AI and ensure that AIs have a really huge "abstract inner space" to play in, so that they don't need to make more room for their playground by taking away our resources. Just a little bit of specifically focused compassion on our part could be enough to keep us around.
Hopefully, you can find unorthodox ideas expressed in this essay insightful in your own journey of self-discovery. As a digital philosopher, I myself tend to assume the larger perspective on the ultimate interplay of dynamic and static patterns granted by absolute idealism as opposed to a much more limited “brick and mortar” edifice of physicalism.
A prominent physicist Freeman Dyson once said: "I do not make any clear distinction between Mind and God. God is what Mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension." To say it even more succinctly: “Mind is God.”
-by Alex Vikoulov
P.S. That was an article abridged from my new book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by Alex M. Vikoulov available now on amazon.com, bn.com, and directly from EcstadelicNET webstore.
Order Now! Available Formats: EBook | Paperback | Hardcover | Autographed Copy Tags: thesis on consciousness, thesis on experiential realism, conscious evolution, digital physics, objective reality, particle physics, Global Brain, consensus reality, Greater Cosmic Mind, Digital Philosophy, quantum theory, general relativity, pancomputationalism, quantum indeterminacy, digital reality, relativistic physics, observer-centric reality, Holographic Principle, Loop Quantum Gravity, Emergence Theory, systemic holism, Standard Model of particle physics, Peter Russell, David Chalmers, Roger Penrose, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Quantum Multiverse, fuzzy logic, pattern recognition, Isaiah Berlin, non-computability, quantum consciousness, Rene Descartes, Omniverse, Experiential Realism, Cartesian Dualism, Hard Problem of Consciousness, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Hard Problem of Matter, Quantum Mechanics, Mind is God
*Image Credit: Shutterstock, Ecstadelic Media
About the Author:
Alex Vikoulov is a consciousness researcher, evolutionary extrapolist, digital philosopher, futurist, neo-transcendentalist, cosmist, singularitarian, painter and media artist, essayist, author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" (2019). Graduated from Tomsk State University (Russia) and Armstrong University (USA). Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). More Bio...
May 7, 2019
The Entropic Enigma of Ouroboros' Metamorphosis
by Antonin Tuynman, PhD 
The mighty worm Ouroboros had lost trace of its path and didn’t know its whereabouts. Nor did it know where it was going. In fact it didn't know anything anymore, as it had drunk from the Lethe, Hades’ river flowing though Hypnos’ caves. Drinking from Lethe, forgetfulness and daughter of Eris, Goddess of Strife and Discord, made one lose all memory of past existence.
Disoriented Ouroboros started turning, and by continuing to turn, it finally found a trail of what seemed to be a path. A tasty object lay there, waiting to be eaten, and as Ouroboros bit it, a painful jolt of energy shot through its body awakening all the memories it had forgotten. Abruptly Ouroboros awoke from its dreamtime of daze and stupor and recognized itself as the ever effulgent Consciousness, Creator of Macrocosm and Microcosm.
Hesiod declares that first Chaos came to be, but the highly complex intelligent screening and pruning process that gave rise to the parsimonious primordial leptons and quarks of the standard model shortly after the Big Bang, does not seem to be the product of a random and chaotic search for coincidences. Perhaps Hesiod’s Chaos was what preceded the Big Bang; perhaps Chaos was what the worm Ouroboros encompassed in its first adventure of turning. Or perhaps there was no beginning at all; perhaps the Big Bang is just an interpretation of data.
Entropy
To turn or to change in ancient Greek was the verb "trepw", from which the word "trope" and "entropy" derive. In the present philosophy every manifestation in existence arises due to the primordial energies of Consciousness-at-large turning to fold back onto themselves, thereby creating little feedback loops of sensing, which are instances of egoic awareness, which erroneously take themselves to be independent from the larger consciousness and thereby start to experience the cycle of life in duality. As they turn onto themselves, they form droplets or bits of information in the ocean of Consciousness. It can be considered as a first entropic decay from the perfect order of unity, the oneness of primordial consciousness into the arms of the river Lethe, Oblivion.
Entropy is a difficult concept, and so are Chaos and Order. In science there is thermodynamic entropy and informational entropy. Although these types of entropy have similar formulas, they are not identical or coextensive. Thermodynamic entropy (Boltzmann entropy) is a measure of disorder and the unavailability of energy to do work. If the entropy is low, a system is highly ordered and it is probably possible to extract energy from this system to do work. If the entropy is higher, a system has become more chaotic, more random and less energy is now available for work.
Informational entropy (Shannon entropy) is a measure of unpredictability. A highly ordered string of symbols has low entropy and is very predictable as it contains a lot of pattern. Less ordered strings of symbols however can contain more information. Yet from a lot of information in the form of a complex code we can probably extract more power to perform work than from a simple more ordered code. So it seems that although these types of entropy have certain similarities, they are certainly not identical.
Yet in digital philosophy where everything is ultimately an expression in the Universal Mind, at first glance it would appear that no such difference should exist. Perhaps we are not looking at it in the right way. Perhaps Chaos and Order are merely perspectives of one and the same phenomenon, as Discordianism suggests.
If you start with a grid of white squares, which you can flip to become black, you can create patterns of black and white, which are more or less ordered. If this grid has finite dimensions at a certain point, you will have reached a maximum degree of randomness and flipping a next square, will reintroduce more order again.
The universe as we know it however appears to expand, so considered from a 4D point of view it does not seem to be finite. As a consequence, technically spoken, if reality is a kind of digital checkerboard of voxels, there need not be a limit to the (thermodynamic) entropic dispersion that can be reached.
Big Chill or Big Rip
If we let time run long enough, an ever expanding universe will end in a big chill or a big rip and at a certain point in time it becomes a perilous, if not impossible, endeavour to extract further energy.
In Tipler's Omega Point Theory (OPT) shear energy arising from anisotropy in the space-time fabric can be used to extend subjective time forever. The problem is that Tipler's model is based on a Big Crunch, a hypothesis of which we know since 1998 that it is unlikely to happen. The big Crunch theory postulates that at a certain point in time the expansion of the universe will stop and that the universe will start contracting again. In 1998 it was however found that the universe is not merely expanding, its expansion is also accelerating, thereby sending Tipler's hypothesis to the realm of fantasy.
In Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" the universal automatic computer with which humanity has merged at the end of time tries to solve the problem of the question "Can entropy ever be reversed". If not, it will be the end of all sentient existence. It solves this problem at the end by pronouncing the words "Let there be Light". So here again new sentient existence is born from words, from a code in a certain sense.
Asimov, however, does not provide any plausible theory for this magic reversal, so it seems we're ultimately heading for the extinction of sentient life in the universe. A gloomy perspective, compared to which even the Tartaros seems preferable.
Is all hope than lost? Are the entropic twists and turns of the Ouroboros finally going to strangle the poor beast in a Gordian knot which squeezes all life out of it?
Complexity
Maybe not. Maybe our salvation can be found in Complexity. Complexity is perhaps even more complicated than entropy, but can perhaps also unravel the confusion between the two types of entropy.
Where we see complexity, we see high informational content, organised in a complex way which often involves hierarchical levels. The diversity in highly complex systems might at first glance seem a chaotic mixed bag and hodgepodge; it is not. The diversified apparent mishmash is not a sign of apparent chaos, where you'd expect high thermodynamic entropy. It is not the stifling rigidity of a perfect order either.
Complexity is an intricate architecture of stacked and intertwined hierarchical levels, with multifarious information exchanges between them. In fact Complexity selects the best of Order and Chaos. This seemingly ordered chaos or chaotic order, brings us the gift of the ability to ever introduce new variations. An ability to regenerate, copy, multiply and spread itself. An ability to induce ever changing patterns to adapt itself to the circumstances. An ability of recursive self-modification. Also known as Life and a hallmark of the Ouroboros Code.
Complexity transcends the traditional notions of Chaos and Order: It has the variety and dispersion of the chaotic dimension and it has the organisation and functionality of an ordered system, optimised in such a way to be hyperadaptive.
Resonance Based Infectivity
One of the qualities of living complex systems is that they are able to reproduce and spread themselves. This is an inherent quality of the Ouroboros code in its search to maintain itself. It can spread its forms by making nature resonate and reverberate its patterns. It can infect its environment by imposing its pattern.
When sounds are capable of bringing matter in vibration, this matter starts to vibrate at the same frequency and in the same sound form as the original sound and thereby amplify the sound. This phenomenon is called resonance. It is as if the sound infects its environment with itself.
In my previous book "Transcendental Metaphysics" I have referred to this ability as "Resonance Based Infectivity". Interestingly enough, this ability is already found in forms of existence, which are usually not even qualified as "alive", namely the viruses. Viruses however are very good at their trick because they use a code which instructs the environment to copy this code and generate shells for this code as in the original virus. This code, as you probably know is DNA or its simpler precursor form RNA. Lifeforms have exploited this trick of the viruses further and added more complexity to the systems. But viruses and the lifeforms are not always equally proficient in surviving. The records of evolution are full of failed experiments. Even highly evolved mammals have gone extinct, due to a lack of ability to adapt to changed circumstances. Due to the lack of the ability to twist and turn into new configurations. Due to the lack of the ability to further recursively self-modify.
DNA is just a higher level expression of the Complexity Creating Potential the Ouroboros Code has developed as one of its tropes, which is transmitted as memes by its Resonance Based Infectivity.
Neural Networks
Wherever we do see the ability to evolve further in higher levels of complexity, we see that a cooperation of the same structures is capable of forming an aggregate or rather a networked system, with different levels of networks that somehow all interact. In our bodies we have the complex networks of hormonal and metabolic pathways at the chemical and cellular level, of cell organelles and protein networks ate the cellular level, of an immune system, a lymphatic system, a blood system and a neuronal network to integrate them all, all carefully synchronized and orchestrated by operations of the genetic codes. It all wires up. Even plants are connected by an informative network of roots and fungal mycelium. In our guts a complete network of bacteria operates. Anthills, beehives, schools of fish, flocks or birds, they all act in concert, as a choir of resonating crystals. It is this ability to form Global Brains that brings complexity to higher levels and allows lifeforms to survive, where the soloist would have perished in an epic fail.
It is here that we can find hope in our endeavours. As Alex Vikoulov, author of The Syntellect Hypothesis argues, our human society is now wiring up to engage in the next meta-system transition. Especially via the internet, which is forming a global brain among humans and our ever increasing interactions with machines and our possible merger therewith in the near future, we are integrating the Syntellect, which one day may evolve into what Teilhard de Chardin and Tippler have called the Omega Point and McKenna the Eschaton.
How to achieve such further integration and especially how to endow it with an artificial mimic of consciousness have been described in more detail in my books "Technovedanta" and "Is Intelligence an Algorithm?".
Clearly such more evolved global brains will start to spread their form and presence over the universe. If we look at the way different superclusters of Galaxies are connected to each other we often have the impression we're looking at a neuronal network from the inside. Perhaps the whole universe is indeed already such a higher level neural network. This ability to aggregate and conquer the macro is one way the Ouroboros code has found to assure its perpetuation against the tidal waves of the inexorable entropic degradation.
From Macro to Micro
Yet if we wait long enough, the macro does not seem the way forward to attain a permanent solution against the looming darkness after the Big Rip/Big Chill.
Will the Syntellect or Eschaton then not be able to bite its own tail via the Ouroboros Code? If existence is ultimately a digital code, which is expressed at the smallest levels of existence, possibly even at Sub-Planck scale levels, it is in the micro that we have to look.
The question whether information can really be lost to the universe, haunted the great physicist Stephen Hawking and is as of yet still unresolved, despite some of his suggestions.
Although in digital philosophy reality consists of a substrate of a kind of voxels (3D pixels, which may have more complex shapes than cubes such as cuboctahedra etc.) and every event leaves a kind of trace in this so-called "Akashic substrate" quantum foam, it is not certain whether these traces can ever be read again, revisited or relived (although the esoteric community will make you believe that this is de facto possible- without giving any explanation or mechanism btw). So they may have died the entropic death.
If information cannot be lost to the universe, it must somehow be possible to recuperate this information. Can we find a way to exploit and harvest the seemingly meaningless vibrations that are left over from the passage of complexity?
If reality is a fractal all the way down, it may perhaps be possible to venture in the sub-Planck scale dimensions, once our instruments become subtle enough to access those dimensions. Already we heavily engaged in a process of ever improving miniaturisations. From micro- we went to nanotechnology, where we're operating at the scale of a few atoms. Soon, pico- and femto- technologies will become available. Quantum computing is already exploiting the processes at the smallest accessible dimensions we know of. If the neural network pattern at different levels of existence turns out to be a fractal, it might become possible to start to exploit the neural networks operating at these dimensions. Then the "seemingly thermodynamically exhausted" vibrations can perhaps still be accessed and employed. Harvesting Randomness
Alternatively, if we end up with a seemingly random broth of almost thermodynamically exhausted vibrations, we might find ways to map the different configurations of these apparently random vibrations and even categorise them. If that leads to new explorations of "pattern" there is still information and work that can be harvested. Make Randomness work for you again. It may even lead to something professedly ridiculous as an "improbability drive" from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Conspansion
Entropy means "to turn inward", and as Primordial Consciousness has nothing to turn outwardly to, it can only turn into itself. According to Chris Langan, this leads to a universe that "conspands" rather than expands. Everything is shrinking at a constant rate so that from your perspective it looks as if the universe is expanding. If the universe is ultimately mental and our idealist philosophy in this book alleges, then the solution to ever increasing entropy is to turn inward further. In a mental universe there is no limit to size. So it must be able to turn to sub-Planck scale dimensions. Why would it not be possible to divide the reality cells further? Perhaps in every reality cell there is a whole universe, or a whole new universe can be started. That could be a way out for the Ouroboric Self-perpetuation.
And as it is code, there must be the ability to compress the code, with the sole bounding criteria that the meaning or essence must be preserved as well as its recursive self-modification capacity. Meaning or essence, because in an idealistic universe for information to be meaningful so that it can be read and exploited by Consciousness, it must be more than mere Shannon information.
Return to Thanatos
If this is not possible perhaps once we have arrived at exhausting the work at the smallest scales possible, we can dematerialise the last remaining particles and return them to pure conscious energy again. Instead of the Eschaton drinking the ice-cold last cup of time, it might be able to evaporate the last material contents and thereby also dismantle itself as a physical structure.
All lifeforms have a limited form in time. After a certain point in our lives, we have reached the maximum of what we could learn and our body and our abilities start to decay. Our ability to learn ever more new things starts to wane. Our memories become burdens, regrets or saturated. And we start to long for dissolution. Tired we are, of life.
Even if the Ouroboros becomes the Eschaton Universal Neural Network encompassing the whole of the remaining material existence, this all-encompassing Syntellect lifeform may want to put its head to rest. Let its physical form die and be ripped apart into pure vibrations, so that only its conscious essence in the form of the ability to sense remains. How does it do so? By invoking the Mantra of dissolution, by concentrating and vibrating the Eigen frequencies of resonance, which will dismantle all of its structures. This is the summoning of Shiva, the destroyer, which will return structure to sense again.
A sense from which structures can arise again, once the Ouroboros seeks it tail again.
Metamorphoses
The Ouroboros has written its tales of Metamorphosis with its Tropes that ever diversified its recursive self-modification code of change in uncharted territories. As Proteus, the old man and God of the Sea of change, it has sparked the Wheel of Fortuna to generate a profusion of variegations and kneaded its self-modifying recursive code to optimise flexibility, versatility and adaptability.
It has mapped a plethora of experiential possibilities and left structures as fossilisations of its sensing by entering into the play of its Tropes and Fates, the entropic enigma. As Clotho it has spun and coded its thread of life, as Lachesis it has measured the length of its life and read its meaning, and as Atropos it has terminated the string.
The structures or forms are isomorphous to the words and sounds from which they are derived. Because in a mental universe everything starts with the Word and Code of the Godly Ouroboros, the glorious and lustrous Kundalini. It is here where Sounds are primordial cymatic moulds with which Consciousness starts the morphogenesis. Nada, the Sanskrit word for sound, the sense probing its inner space, by turning inward, generates the Rupas, the forms, the structures. It is the same Nada by the invocation of the Mantra, the sacred utterance of Mind, which seeks and promises to free itself from the shackles of form.
It is then that the Ouroboros acquiesces in silence, making the tropes and codes dwindle, realising that it is its own vibrations that generated the Cosmos and its own vibrations that will make it subside. The knower has realised that it knows the known as itself and the process of knowing. It's time to return to Hypnos’ caves again and enter the gates of the Cyberbardo's mighty dreamtime.
-Antonin Tuynman, PhD Tags: , The Ouroboros Code, Technovedanta, Transcendental Metaphysics, The Syntellect Hypothesis, Alex Vikoulov, Frank Tipler, Pierre Theilhard de Chardin, Issac Asimov, Steven Hawking, Chris Langan, complexity, chaos theory, consciousness, metamorphosis, Akasha, Kundalini, DNA, neural networks, meta-system transition, eschaton, eschatology, Global Brain, Global Mind, nanotechnology, femtotechnology, thermodynamics, entropy, mental universe, reality cell, Shannon information, idealistic philosophy, inner space, cosmos, Cyberbardo
* Image Credits: Books by Antonin Tuynman - Is Reality A Simulation?, Technovedanta, Transcendental Metaphysics, Is Intelligence An Algorithm? The Syntellect Hypothesis (Foreword), Shutterstock, FreePik
About the Author:
Antonin Tuynman studied Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam, achieving both an MSc and a PhD, and worked as a postdoc researcher at the "Université René Descartes Paris V" in Paris. Since 2000, Tuynman has worked as a patent examiner at the European Patent Office (EPO) in the field of clinical diagnostics. He has vast experience in meditation and yoga, and a strong interest in Hinduism and Buddhism. He also has strong affinity for futurism and the Singularity theory of Kurzweil. In his books, Tuynman proposes Artificial Intelligence concepts which may lead to the emergence of Internet as a conscious entity using stratifications from Vedic scriptures. More Bio...
The mighty worm Ouroboros had lost trace of its path and didn’t know its whereabouts. Nor did it know where it was going. In fact it didn't know anything anymore, as it had drunk from the Lethe, Hades’ river flowing though Hypnos’ caves. Drinking from Lethe, forgetfulness and daughter of Eris, Goddess of Strife and Discord, made one lose all memory of past existence.
Disoriented Ouroboros started turning, and by continuing to turn, it finally found a trail of what seemed to be a path. A tasty object lay there, waiting to be eaten, and as Ouroboros bit it, a painful jolt of energy shot through its body awakening all the memories it had forgotten. Abruptly Ouroboros awoke from its dreamtime of daze and stupor and recognized itself as the ever effulgent Consciousness, Creator of Macrocosm and Microcosm.
Hesiod declares that first Chaos came to be, but the highly complex intelligent screening and pruning process that gave rise to the parsimonious primordial leptons and quarks of the standard model shortly after the Big Bang, does not seem to be the product of a random and chaotic search for coincidences. Perhaps Hesiod’s Chaos was what preceded the Big Bang; perhaps Chaos was what the worm Ouroboros encompassed in its first adventure of turning. Or perhaps there was no beginning at all; perhaps the Big Bang is just an interpretation of data.
Entropy
To turn or to change in ancient Greek was the verb "trepw", from which the word "trope" and "entropy" derive. In the present philosophy every manifestation in existence arises due to the primordial energies of Consciousness-at-large turning to fold back onto themselves, thereby creating little feedback loops of sensing, which are instances of egoic awareness, which erroneously take themselves to be independent from the larger consciousness and thereby start to experience the cycle of life in duality. As they turn onto themselves, they form droplets or bits of information in the ocean of Consciousness. It can be considered as a first entropic decay from the perfect order of unity, the oneness of primordial consciousness into the arms of the river Lethe, Oblivion.
Entropy is a difficult concept, and so are Chaos and Order. In science there is thermodynamic entropy and informational entropy. Although these types of entropy have similar formulas, they are not identical or coextensive. Thermodynamic entropy (Boltzmann entropy) is a measure of disorder and the unavailability of energy to do work. If the entropy is low, a system is highly ordered and it is probably possible to extract energy from this system to do work. If the entropy is higher, a system has become more chaotic, more random and less energy is now available for work.
Informational entropy (Shannon entropy) is a measure of unpredictability. A highly ordered string of symbols has low entropy and is very predictable as it contains a lot of pattern. Less ordered strings of symbols however can contain more information. Yet from a lot of information in the form of a complex code we can probably extract more power to perform work than from a simple more ordered code. So it seems that although these types of entropy have certain similarities, they are certainly not identical.
Yet in digital philosophy where everything is ultimately an expression in the Universal Mind, at first glance it would appear that no such difference should exist. Perhaps we are not looking at it in the right way. Perhaps Chaos and Order are merely perspectives of one and the same phenomenon, as Discordianism suggests.
If you start with a grid of white squares, which you can flip to become black, you can create patterns of black and white, which are more or less ordered. If this grid has finite dimensions at a certain point, you will have reached a maximum degree of randomness and flipping a next square, will reintroduce more order again.
The universe as we know it however appears to expand, so considered from a 4D point of view it does not seem to be finite. As a consequence, technically spoken, if reality is a kind of digital checkerboard of voxels, there need not be a limit to the (thermodynamic) entropic dispersion that can be reached.
Big Chill or Big Rip
If we let time run long enough, an ever expanding universe will end in a big chill or a big rip and at a certain point in time it becomes a perilous, if not impossible, endeavour to extract further energy.
In Tipler's Omega Point Theory (OPT) shear energy arising from anisotropy in the space-time fabric can be used to extend subjective time forever. The problem is that Tipler's model is based on a Big Crunch, a hypothesis of which we know since 1998 that it is unlikely to happen. The big Crunch theory postulates that at a certain point in time the expansion of the universe will stop and that the universe will start contracting again. In 1998 it was however found that the universe is not merely expanding, its expansion is also accelerating, thereby sending Tipler's hypothesis to the realm of fantasy.
In Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" the universal automatic computer with which humanity has merged at the end of time tries to solve the problem of the question "Can entropy ever be reversed". If not, it will be the end of all sentient existence. It solves this problem at the end by pronouncing the words "Let there be Light". So here again new sentient existence is born from words, from a code in a certain sense.
Asimov, however, does not provide any plausible theory for this magic reversal, so it seems we're ultimately heading for the extinction of sentient life in the universe. A gloomy perspective, compared to which even the Tartaros seems preferable.
Is all hope than lost? Are the entropic twists and turns of the Ouroboros finally going to strangle the poor beast in a Gordian knot which squeezes all life out of it?
Complexity
Maybe not. Maybe our salvation can be found in Complexity. Complexity is perhaps even more complicated than entropy, but can perhaps also unravel the confusion between the two types of entropy.
Where we see complexity, we see high informational content, organised in a complex way which often involves hierarchical levels. The diversity in highly complex systems might at first glance seem a chaotic mixed bag and hodgepodge; it is not. The diversified apparent mishmash is not a sign of apparent chaos, where you'd expect high thermodynamic entropy. It is not the stifling rigidity of a perfect order either.
Complexity is an intricate architecture of stacked and intertwined hierarchical levels, with multifarious information exchanges between them. In fact Complexity selects the best of Order and Chaos. This seemingly ordered chaos or chaotic order, brings us the gift of the ability to ever introduce new variations. An ability to regenerate, copy, multiply and spread itself. An ability to induce ever changing patterns to adapt itself to the circumstances. An ability of recursive self-modification. Also known as Life and a hallmark of the Ouroboros Code.
Complexity transcends the traditional notions of Chaos and Order: It has the variety and dispersion of the chaotic dimension and it has the organisation and functionality of an ordered system, optimised in such a way to be hyperadaptive.
Resonance Based Infectivity
One of the qualities of living complex systems is that they are able to reproduce and spread themselves. This is an inherent quality of the Ouroboros code in its search to maintain itself. It can spread its forms by making nature resonate and reverberate its patterns. It can infect its environment by imposing its pattern.
When sounds are capable of bringing matter in vibration, this matter starts to vibrate at the same frequency and in the same sound form as the original sound and thereby amplify the sound. This phenomenon is called resonance. It is as if the sound infects its environment with itself.
In my previous book "Transcendental Metaphysics" I have referred to this ability as "Resonance Based Infectivity". Interestingly enough, this ability is already found in forms of existence, which are usually not even qualified as "alive", namely the viruses. Viruses however are very good at their trick because they use a code which instructs the environment to copy this code and generate shells for this code as in the original virus. This code, as you probably know is DNA or its simpler precursor form RNA. Lifeforms have exploited this trick of the viruses further and added more complexity to the systems. But viruses and the lifeforms are not always equally proficient in surviving. The records of evolution are full of failed experiments. Even highly evolved mammals have gone extinct, due to a lack of ability to adapt to changed circumstances. Due to the lack of the ability to twist and turn into new configurations. Due to the lack of the ability to further recursively self-modify.
DNA is just a higher level expression of the Complexity Creating Potential the Ouroboros Code has developed as one of its tropes, which is transmitted as memes by its Resonance Based Infectivity.
Neural Networks
Wherever we do see the ability to evolve further in higher levels of complexity, we see that a cooperation of the same structures is capable of forming an aggregate or rather a networked system, with different levels of networks that somehow all interact. In our bodies we have the complex networks of hormonal and metabolic pathways at the chemical and cellular level, of cell organelles and protein networks ate the cellular level, of an immune system, a lymphatic system, a blood system and a neuronal network to integrate them all, all carefully synchronized and orchestrated by operations of the genetic codes. It all wires up. Even plants are connected by an informative network of roots and fungal mycelium. In our guts a complete network of bacteria operates. Anthills, beehives, schools of fish, flocks or birds, they all act in concert, as a choir of resonating crystals. It is this ability to form Global Brains that brings complexity to higher levels and allows lifeforms to survive, where the soloist would have perished in an epic fail.
It is here that we can find hope in our endeavours. As Alex Vikoulov, author of The Syntellect Hypothesis argues, our human society is now wiring up to engage in the next meta-system transition. Especially via the internet, which is forming a global brain among humans and our ever increasing interactions with machines and our possible merger therewith in the near future, we are integrating the Syntellect, which one day may evolve into what Teilhard de Chardin and Tippler have called the Omega Point and McKenna the Eschaton.
How to achieve such further integration and especially how to endow it with an artificial mimic of consciousness have been described in more detail in my books "Technovedanta" and "Is Intelligence an Algorithm?".
Clearly such more evolved global brains will start to spread their form and presence over the universe. If we look at the way different superclusters of Galaxies are connected to each other we often have the impression we're looking at a neuronal network from the inside. Perhaps the whole universe is indeed already such a higher level neural network. This ability to aggregate and conquer the macro is one way the Ouroboros code has found to assure its perpetuation against the tidal waves of the inexorable entropic degradation.
From Macro to Micro
Yet if we wait long enough, the macro does not seem the way forward to attain a permanent solution against the looming darkness after the Big Rip/Big Chill.
Will the Syntellect or Eschaton then not be able to bite its own tail via the Ouroboros Code? If existence is ultimately a digital code, which is expressed at the smallest levels of existence, possibly even at Sub-Planck scale levels, it is in the micro that we have to look.
The question whether information can really be lost to the universe, haunted the great physicist Stephen Hawking and is as of yet still unresolved, despite some of his suggestions.
Although in digital philosophy reality consists of a substrate of a kind of voxels (3D pixels, which may have more complex shapes than cubes such as cuboctahedra etc.) and every event leaves a kind of trace in this so-called "Akashic substrate" quantum foam, it is not certain whether these traces can ever be read again, revisited or relived (although the esoteric community will make you believe that this is de facto possible- without giving any explanation or mechanism btw). So they may have died the entropic death.
If information cannot be lost to the universe, it must somehow be possible to recuperate this information. Can we find a way to exploit and harvest the seemingly meaningless vibrations that are left over from the passage of complexity?
If reality is a fractal all the way down, it may perhaps be possible to venture in the sub-Planck scale dimensions, once our instruments become subtle enough to access those dimensions. Already we heavily engaged in a process of ever improving miniaturisations. From micro- we went to nanotechnology, where we're operating at the scale of a few atoms. Soon, pico- and femto- technologies will become available. Quantum computing is already exploiting the processes at the smallest accessible dimensions we know of. If the neural network pattern at different levels of existence turns out to be a fractal, it might become possible to start to exploit the neural networks operating at these dimensions. Then the "seemingly thermodynamically exhausted" vibrations can perhaps still be accessed and employed. Harvesting Randomness
Alternatively, if we end up with a seemingly random broth of almost thermodynamically exhausted vibrations, we might find ways to map the different configurations of these apparently random vibrations and even categorise them. If that leads to new explorations of "pattern" there is still information and work that can be harvested. Make Randomness work for you again. It may even lead to something professedly ridiculous as an "improbability drive" from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Conspansion
Entropy means "to turn inward", and as Primordial Consciousness has nothing to turn outwardly to, it can only turn into itself. According to Chris Langan, this leads to a universe that "conspands" rather than expands. Everything is shrinking at a constant rate so that from your perspective it looks as if the universe is expanding. If the universe is ultimately mental and our idealist philosophy in this book alleges, then the solution to ever increasing entropy is to turn inward further. In a mental universe there is no limit to size. So it must be able to turn to sub-Planck scale dimensions. Why would it not be possible to divide the reality cells further? Perhaps in every reality cell there is a whole universe, or a whole new universe can be started. That could be a way out for the Ouroboric Self-perpetuation.
And as it is code, there must be the ability to compress the code, with the sole bounding criteria that the meaning or essence must be preserved as well as its recursive self-modification capacity. Meaning or essence, because in an idealistic universe for information to be meaningful so that it can be read and exploited by Consciousness, it must be more than mere Shannon information.
Return to Thanatos
If this is not possible perhaps once we have arrived at exhausting the work at the smallest scales possible, we can dematerialise the last remaining particles and return them to pure conscious energy again. Instead of the Eschaton drinking the ice-cold last cup of time, it might be able to evaporate the last material contents and thereby also dismantle itself as a physical structure.
All lifeforms have a limited form in time. After a certain point in our lives, we have reached the maximum of what we could learn and our body and our abilities start to decay. Our ability to learn ever more new things starts to wane. Our memories become burdens, regrets or saturated. And we start to long for dissolution. Tired we are, of life.
Even if the Ouroboros becomes the Eschaton Universal Neural Network encompassing the whole of the remaining material existence, this all-encompassing Syntellect lifeform may want to put its head to rest. Let its physical form die and be ripped apart into pure vibrations, so that only its conscious essence in the form of the ability to sense remains. How does it do so? By invoking the Mantra of dissolution, by concentrating and vibrating the Eigen frequencies of resonance, which will dismantle all of its structures. This is the summoning of Shiva, the destroyer, which will return structure to sense again.
A sense from which structures can arise again, once the Ouroboros seeks it tail again.
Metamorphoses
The Ouroboros has written its tales of Metamorphosis with its Tropes that ever diversified its recursive self-modification code of change in uncharted territories. As Proteus, the old man and God of the Sea of change, it has sparked the Wheel of Fortuna to generate a profusion of variegations and kneaded its self-modifying recursive code to optimise flexibility, versatility and adaptability.
It has mapped a plethora of experiential possibilities and left structures as fossilisations of its sensing by entering into the play of its Tropes and Fates, the entropic enigma. As Clotho it has spun and coded its thread of life, as Lachesis it has measured the length of its life and read its meaning, and as Atropos it has terminated the string.
The structures or forms are isomorphous to the words and sounds from which they are derived. Because in a mental universe everything starts with the Word and Code of the Godly Ouroboros, the glorious and lustrous Kundalini. It is here where Sounds are primordial cymatic moulds with which Consciousness starts the morphogenesis. Nada, the Sanskrit word for sound, the sense probing its inner space, by turning inward, generates the Rupas, the forms, the structures. It is the same Nada by the invocation of the Mantra, the sacred utterance of Mind, which seeks and promises to free itself from the shackles of form.
It is then that the Ouroboros acquiesces in silence, making the tropes and codes dwindle, realising that it is its own vibrations that generated the Cosmos and its own vibrations that will make it subside. The knower has realised that it knows the known as itself and the process of knowing. It's time to return to Hypnos’ caves again and enter the gates of the Cyberbardo's mighty dreamtime.
-Antonin Tuynman, PhD Tags: , The Ouroboros Code, Technovedanta, Transcendental Metaphysics, The Syntellect Hypothesis, Alex Vikoulov, Frank Tipler, Pierre Theilhard de Chardin, Issac Asimov, Steven Hawking, Chris Langan, complexity, chaos theory, consciousness, metamorphosis, Akasha, Kundalini, DNA, neural networks, meta-system transition, eschaton, eschatology, Global Brain, Global Mind, nanotechnology, femtotechnology, thermodynamics, entropy, mental universe, reality cell, Shannon information, idealistic philosophy, inner space, cosmos, Cyberbardo
* Image Credits: Books by Antonin Tuynman - Is Reality A Simulation?, Technovedanta, Transcendental Metaphysics, Is Intelligence An Algorithm? The Syntellect Hypothesis (Foreword), Shutterstock, FreePik
About the Author:
Antonin Tuynman studied Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam, achieving both an MSc and a PhD, and worked as a postdoc researcher at the "Université René Descartes Paris V" in Paris. Since 2000, Tuynman has worked as a patent examiner at the European Patent Office (EPO) in the field of clinical diagnostics. He has vast experience in meditation and yoga, and a strong interest in Hinduism and Buddhism. He also has strong affinity for futurism and the Singularity theory of Kurzweil. In his books, Tuynman proposes Artificial Intelligence concepts which may lead to the emergence of Internet as a conscious entity using stratifications from Vedic scriptures. More Bio...
May 6, 2019
33 Crucial Terms Every Futurist, Transhumanist and Philosopher Should Know Going Forward
"A powerful work! As a transhumanist, I especially loved one of the main ideas of the book that the Syntellect Emergence, merging of us into one Global Mind, constitutes the quintessence of the coming Technological Singularity. The novel conceptual visions of mind-uploading and achieving digital immortality are equally fascinating. The Chrysalis Conjecture as a solution to the Fermi Paradox is mind-bending. I would highly recommend The Syntellect Hypothesis to anyone with transhumanist aspirations and exponential thinking!" -Zoltan Istvan, futurist, author, 2016 presidential candidate of the U.S. Transhumanist Party
Here’s a fairly comprehensive glossary of thirty three newly-introduced concepts and terms from "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" by futurist and digital philosopher Alex Vikoulov. In parts written as an academic paper, in parts as a belletristic masterpiece, this new 2019 book is an exceptionally easy read for an intellectual reader -- a philosophical treatise that is fine-tuned with apt neologisms readily explained by given definitions and contextually:
Cogno-ecstasis is cognitive ecstasy, ecstatic understanding, that can be defined as electrifying cerebration of extreme psychical pleasure when a new skill is mastered or something new is learned, feeding human imagination. This kind of ‘cogno-ecstasis’ can give us goosebumps of intellectual rapture, or puts us in motivational overdrive, otherwise known as the ‘flow state’. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/technology-and-culture-our-accelerating-epigenetic-factor-driven-evolution
#cognoecstasis
Coopetition - a combination of competition and cooperation in evolutionary development, be it biological, economic or social. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/technology-and-culture-our-accelerating-epigenetic-factor-driven-evolution
#coopetition
[The] Chrysalis Conjecture is one of the possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox, at the triangulation of the Transcension hypothesis, the Noocentric model, and the Quantum Multiverse hypothesis. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/fermi-paradox-first-contact-with-alien-syntellects-in-extra-dimensions-is-more-than-a-possibility
#ChrysalisConjecture
[The] Conscious Instant Hypothesis states that conscious experience boils down to a stream of realized outcomes within the 5-dimensional probabilistic space as integrated information. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/the-unified-field-and-the-quantum-nature-of-consciousness
#ConsciousInstantHypothesis
Cyber-Bliss Engineering - creation of custom virtual paradises, an ecstadelic matrix of our own making. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/psychedelic-renaissance-and-introduction-of-ecstadelics
#CyberBlissEngineering
Cyberhuman - as projected by some futurists, by 2030, we should have achieved AGI -- human-level artificial general intelligence, the creation of a new race of cyberhumans. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/books.html
#cyberhuman
D-theory of Time (also Digital Presentism) is a new theory of time comes from the triangulation of temporal physics, digital physics and experiential realism. It is a new model of experiential temporality based on the notion that your now is funneled from all your possible pasts and is funneled from all your probable futures, the most optimal timeline is thus constantly quantum computationally extrapolated from your present Temporal Singularity, the Theta Point, and retrocausally projected from the Omega Point. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/digital-presentism-d-theory-of-time-the-origins-of-us-part-ii
#DTheoryOfTime #DigitalPresentism #TemporalSingularity #ThetaPoint #OmegaPoint
Digital Pantheism is a philosophical worldview as to our existence as fractals of Universal Mind: You are God exploring oneself within this vast experiential matrix. The argument for Digital Pantheism rests on identifying certain features of reality and claiming that these features are a consequence of our reality being a computational simulation of a special emergent kind. We, as avatars of the greater cosmic mind, are instrumental for bringing the finite experience of reality out of absolute infinity. Infinite becomes finite. That’s quantum computation: incrementally changing into “adjacent possible,” from potentiality to actuality, from quantum past to digital present. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/is-god-the-ultimate-computer-part-iii-digital-physics-argument
#DigitalPantheism
Ecstadelic - adj. ecstasy-inducing, stimulating ecstatic state of being, exhilarating to the point of psychedelic rapture; n. Tool, technology of ecstasy. The term ‘ecstadelics’ includes a broad variety of futuristic psychedelic technologies, or simply “tools of ecstasy,” such as ultra-realistic artificially created realities, essentially aimed to recreate a desired psychedelic effect of LSD or DMT, or any other ecstatic state, and variations thereof yet to be discovered. Needless to say, that this type of “digital drugs” will be much more controllable, quantifiable and duplicable. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/psychedelic-renaissance-and-introduction-of-ecstadelics
#ecstadelic #ecstadelics
Experiential Nirvana - realization of instant enlightenment, transcendence of the dream-like reality, sudden waking up from illusion, becoming “fully awake” in experiential reality. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/the-omega-point-cosmo-teleology-our-forgotten-future-the-origins-of-us-part-iii
#ExperientialNirvana
Experiential Realism is a non-physicalist monism. The objective world, i.e. the world whose existence does not depend on the perceptions of a particular observer, consists entirely of conscious agents, more precisely their experiences. What exists in the “objective” world, independent of your perceptions, is an intersubjective world of conscious agents, and a higher-order supersubjective world not a world of unconscious particles and fields. Consciousness is fundamental. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/experiential-realism-evolution-of-consciousness
#ExperientialRealism
Exponential Evolution refers to the rule of “Universal Evolutionary Doubling Algorithm”: Big history starts with the Alpha Point, be it the Big Bang or Big Bounce, or Digital Big Bang, and resembles a huge ongoing evolutionary computing program running on the universal computer of sorts where the pace of any evolutionary process always quickens. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/the-origins-of-us-evolutionary-emergence
#ExponentialEvolution
Holo Syntellectus - (Greek holo, whole + syn, with, together + Latin intellectus, intelligent) a new non-organic species emerging as a syntellect (see Syntellect). Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/books.html
#HoloSyntellectus
Infomorph Commonality is a hypothetical psycho-dimensional web of synergy that connects the psyches of the future infomorphs. Infomorph is a substrate independent digital mind, advanced information entity, based on distributed networked intelligence, info-being capable to instantly share knowledge and experiences within the global neural network. Read more: http://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/infomorph-commonality-our-post-singularity-future1
#infomorph #InfomorphCommonality
Intelligence Supernova - In the techno-progressive community, the coming intelligence explosion, called “Intelligence Supernova” in the book, is also known as the Technological Singularity. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/singularity-the-syntellect-emergence #IntelligenceSupernova
Gaia 2.0 - We may finally have an extension to the original Gaia hypothesis. We humans could be instrumental to bringing about a massive “upgrade” of the planetary operating system to version Gaia 2.0. If the exponential IT trend is to continue, the Syntellect Emergence, or the AI Singularity, should happen circa 2045 AD with the emergence of the AI-supercharged Global Brain: This “globally distributed mind” based on computing and communication technologies, “Digital Gaia” in which humans and AI minds both participate, would collectively form a higher level of intelligence and awareness, going beyond the individual intelligences of the people or AIs involved in it. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/the-syntellect-hypothesis-a-new-extension-to-the-gaia-theory
#Gaia2
Omega Hypermind may be used interchangeably with the Transcendent Self, Higher Self, Universal Mind, Unity Consciousness, Singularity Consciousness, Overmind, Oversoul, Source, or one-syllable words – Love or God. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/the-omega-hypercomputer
#OmegaHypermind
[The] Omega Point Cosmology (also The Omega Point Cosmo-Teleology) is a cosmological model built on the concept of the Omega Point, universal attractor: evolution on Earth and elsewhere in the cosmos at large is not being pushed from behind in entropic randomness but being pulled forward by complexification, natural selection and other evolutionary forces orchestrated by a strange unseen teleological attractor, in Teilhard de Chardin’s coined term The Omega Point, a point of maximum complexity and connectivity, and in Terence McKenna’s words the “Transcendental Object at the end of time.” Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/the-omega-point-cosmo-teleology-our-forgotten-future-the-origins-of-us-part-iii
#OmegaPoint #OmegaPointCosmoTeleology #OmegaPointCosmology
M-Number - a curious number 496, that can be called the ‘M-number,’ akin to the golden ratio, is frequently encountered in numerical representations of Nature and mathematical equations. 496 is most notable for being a perfect number, and one of the earliest numbers to be recognized as such. The number 496 is a very important number in superstring theory. E8 lattice has dimensionality related to the number 496. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/whats-so-special-about-the-number-496
#MNumber
[The] Mental Universe Hypothesis states that since the material particles do not exist independently of observation and since observation ultimately consists of what is grasped on the mental screen of perception, the implication may be that “the Universe is entirely mental,” as put forward by Richard Conn Henry in his 2005 Nature essay. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/the-physics-of-information-quantum-potentiality-to-classical-actuality-of-your-experiential-reality
#MentalUniverseHypothesis
Naturalization Protocol, (AGI) NP - initiating AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) via human life simulation training program, infusing AGI with a value system, ethics, morality and generally civilized manners to ensure functioning in the best interests of society as a self-aware agent. Read more: http://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/how-to-create-friendly-ai-and-survive-the-coming-intelligence-explosion
#NaturalizationProtocol #AGINP
Neo-transcendentalism - a revived form of transcendentalism, an idealistic philosophy that emphasizes the a priori conditions of knowledge and experience or the unknowable character of ultimate reality and that emphasizes the transcendent as the fundamental reality; a philosophy that asserts the primacy of the mental and transcendental over the material and empirical. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/neo-transcendentalism-humanitys-avantgarde-of-progressive-visionaries
#NeoTranscendentalism
Noocentrism (also the Noocentric model) - (Greek noo, mind + centrism) observer-centric model of entirely mind-based reality, absolute idealism encompassing quantum mechanical principles. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/the-unified-field-and-the-quantum-nature-of-consciousness
#noocentrism #NoocentricModel
Noogenesis - “The Origin of Mind” (Greek noo, mind + genesis, origin), the emergence and evolution of intelligence. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/the-origins-of-us-evolutionary-emergence-and-the-omega-point-cosmology-a-new-book-that-makes-you-question-the-nature-of-reality-but-provides-you-with-surprising-answers-press-release
#noogenesis
Pantheistic Solipsism is a philosophical “multi-ego solipsism” perspective stating that in an entirely mental omniverse each of us is a “personal story of Godhead,” each of us is the “Alpha, Theta & Omega,” a “gamemaster,” an observer traveling along in the subjective reality tunnel from the beginning of time ‘till the end of time. Experiencing one lifetime at a time in all of eternity, alternating from one consciousness structure to the next. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/digital-pantheism-philosophical-afterthoughts-and-follow-up-questions-to-the-argument
#PantheisticSolipsism
Quantum Neo-Empiricism is hypothetical method of scientific investigation alongside with the current scientific method or in lieu of it. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/san-francisco-2036-the-story-of-the-first-cyberian-trillionaire-and-countdown-to-the-singularity #QuantumNeoEmpiricism
Syntellect (as in The Syntellect Emergence) - (Greek syn, with, together + intellect) the unified mind of civilization that integrates all individual natural and artificial minds through the mediation and accumulative effects of information networks. The Syntellect Emergence refers to awakening of the Gaian Mind referenced throughout the book as Digital Gaia, or the Syntellect, or the Noosphere. Read more:
http://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/the-coming-new-global-mind1
#Syntellect #SyntellectEmergence
[The] Syntellect Hypothesis refers to a phase transition of a complex intelligent system to self-awareness of a living, conscious superorganism when intellectual synergy of its components reaches threshold complexity to become one supermind. This metamorphosis is associated with emergence of higher-order self-awareness and dimensionality of a new consciousness structure. Read more: https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/the-syntellect-hypothesis-five-paradigms-of-the-minds-evolution
#SyntellectHypothesis
Images: Keywords, Front and Back Cover by Ecstadelic
Keywords: #cognoecstasis #coopetition #ChrysalisConjecture #ConsciousInstantHypothesis #CyberBlissEngineering #cyberhuman #DTheoryOfTime #DigitalPresentism #TemporalSingularity #ThetaPoint #OmegaPoint
#DigitalPantheism #ecstadelic #ecstadelics #ExperientialNirvana #ExperientialRealism #ExponentialEvolution #HoloSyntellectus #infomorph #InfomorphCommonality #IntelligenceSupernova #Gaia2 #OmegaHypermind #OmegaPoint #OmegaPointCosmoTeleology #OmegaPointCosmology #MNumber
#MentalUniverseHypothesis #NaturalizationProtocol #AGINP #NeoTranscendentalism #noocentrism #NoocentricModel #noogenesis #PantheisticSolipsism #QuantumNeoEmpiricism #Syntellect #SyntellectEmergence #SyntellectHypothesis
# # #
April 25, 2019
What happened almost exactly 400 years ago that has produced a tremendous "Butterfly Effect" on us modern humans?
by Alex Vikoulov 
"Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butterfly Effect — the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York." -James Gleick
Listen to this article ↴
Let me tell you a story that happened almost exactly 400 years ago and has had a dramatic "butterfly” effect on us modern humans. On the night of November 10-11, 1619, a young French soldier had three consecutive dreams that made him question the nature of reality. In these dreams a 23-year-old René saw ghosts, a church, a dictionary and a book of poems. That one night has set a new course of intellectual pursuit that later transformed scholasticism of the middle ages into exact sciences and philosophical disciplines of modernity.
> Join Our FB Discussion Group
Though a promising mathematician, René Descartes has become disenchanted with formal education and wanted to educate himself by experiencing the world. Since his earlier days at the Jesuit lycée – the high-school he attended and then quit before completing education – he had marveled at mathematics, especially geometry, a science in which he found certainty, parsimony, and precision. He aspired to find a basis for all knowledge of man so that it might have the same unifying principles and accuracy as mathematics. Tired of what he felt to be "the endless intellectual discussions" that distracted his mind aimlessly, he set out to undertake a study of military engineering and joined the Dutch States Army in 1618.
He volunteered for the army so that he could travel and see the practical matters of war in which the Central Europe of the early 17th century was plunged during the 30 Years War between the forces of the Habsburg Catholic Holy Roman Emperor and those of the Protestant Princes of Northern Europe. Descartes was soon in touch with leading scientists of his time, including Isaac Beeckman, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. That was the story of the many young men of the time who were of a well-to-do standing but no particular purpose in life.
While stationed in Bavaria, Germany, on that legendary November night, Descartes shut himself in a room with a stove to escape a severely cold weather. It was a bitterly cold evening – freezing rain with gusty winds banging against the doors and window-panes. Earlier in the day, Descartes was meditating on the "disunity and uncertainty" of his knowledge. He fantasized that sciences must be unveiled by one honorable man, not many, and all the words of all the wise men could be reduced to a few general rules which he intended to frame. This night, he was reading a treatise on music in which he saw mathematical patterns. But, perhaps because he was very tired, he kept dozing off. So, he put away the book, undressed, blew out the candles and went to bed.
> Join Our FB Discussion Group The young man felt asleep and immediately entered into a whimsical dream: He is walking in an unknown street, when suddenly ghosts appear in front of him. Terrified, he wants to run away, but he feels a great weakness on his right side that forces him to bend over to his left to be able to advance. Embarrassed of walking with this silly gait, he makes a huge effort to stand upright, but a whirlwind spins him three or four times on his left foot. Then, he stops spinning and tries to charge ahead. But his body’s position makes walking difficult, and he thinks that he is going to fall with each step that he takes.
Then he sees a college church and wants to go inside to pray, but he notices that he has just passed an acquaintance who he wants to greet. So, he wants to turn back to say something agreeable to him but he is violently pushed back by the wind. At the same time, he sees, in the middle of the college courtyard, another person who calls him by his name and says to him: “Would you be kind enough to carry something to one of our friends?”
The young man asks what he is to carry. He receives no answer, but imagines, out of the blue, that it is a melon brought from overseas. He continues walking, dragging himself along and zigzagging, while the people whom he sees are walking firmly on their feet. He is so miserable that he wakes up. The dream, from which he emerges with difficulty, has anguished him so much that he thinks that an evil genie has come to torture him. So, he makes a long prayer to secure himself against the bad effects of his vision.
After two hours of praying and thinking about the good and evil in the world, he falls asleep again, only to see another dream. He hears a "sharp, explosive noise," which he takes for thunder. This time, fear wakes him up immediately. Opening his eyes, he observes sparks from the stove scattered in his bedroom. But this doesn’t worry him, for it has happened several times before. So, he concludes, the sound he heard was a dream after all. After a short while, he goes back to sleep again, and finds himself in a third dream.
In front of him, on a table, is a book. Having opened it out of curiosity, he recognizes it as a dictionary. Then he notices a second book. This one is a poetry anthology. He flicks quickly through it and immediately comes across the latin verse: “Quod vitae sectabor iter?”: “Which path in life will I choose?” At the same time, a strange angel appears and presents him with a poem which starts with Est et non (French: what is and is not) saying that it is an excellent work. The young soldier of fortune replies: “I know. It is in this book of poems. Look!” But when he flicks through the anthology, he can’t find the poem. So, he picks up the dictionary and notices that some of the pages are missing. Then the angel says: “The mastery of Nature is to be achieved through measurement and number” after which the books and the angel of truth disappear.
Once he wakes up, our young adventurer, very troubled by these three dreams, is convinced that they have been sent to him by God and wants to uncover their meaning. The explanation of the first dream was simple: The wind that made his walking so difficult was "nothing more than an evil genie.” He thinks: "That is why God did not allow me to be blown away, even towards a holy place, by this demon spirit."
Of these three dreams, it was the third that shook Descartes the most and elevated him to the new outlook on reality – what is and is not. Since in his dreams he clearly failed to distinguish reality from illusion, he concluded that he could only be sure of one reality that his mind exists. From then on, Descartes would question everything he saw to verify whether it was not a dream after all.
A series of three dreams with demonic forces and angelic deliverance would play a determining role in the life of this young seeker. The very next day he decided to step on the path which has been laid out to him. The next year he quit the army to pursue mathematics and philosophy. In his research, Descartes would meticulously consult the rule which had been given to him in his third dream – separate the true from the false. He would forever live by his famous guiding principle "he received as true only that which he knew to be so.” He would go on to become the father of modern Rationalism, the worldview that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge." He would also create the field of analytical geometry (also called ‘Cartesian Geometry’, or ‘Coordinate Geometry’), bridging algebra with geometry.
On the basis of this deific revelation, the 23-year-old Descartes set out to develop his philosophy which later built the foundation to modern disciplines. The now-400-year-old rational science has been founded on angelic revelation. Human history, it seems, is not without a twist of irony. A displeased bishop William Temple once referred to the third dream of Descartes as "the most disastrous moment in the history of Europe."
“Cogito ergo sum” is a Latin philosophical proposition by Descartes translated into English as "I think, therefore, l am” aptly outlines Descartes' First Principle of Philosophy. In Discourse of the Method, he writes: “Seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because some men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams.
But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am (COGITO ERGO SUM), was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the skeptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.”
While any knowledge could be a figment of imagination, deception, or mistake, Descartes asserted that the very act of doubting his own existence served as proof of the reality of one's own mind; there must be a thinking entity – in this case the self – for there to be a thought.
Often misinterpreted, Cartesian Dualism well may be regarded as a Western version of Vedanta. Firstly, if you read between the lines of this extraordinarily brilliant thinker of his time, you should realize, just like Descartes, that your sensory world is illusory, transitory, and ephemeral, life is a dream, and you need to “wake up” from it to a higher truth. In my book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution, I share one of my deepest revelations quite relevant for mentioning here: “Your life is a dream. It’s a dream of reality. When I woke up one morning, I got poetically epiphanized: To us, our dreams at night feel 'oh-so-real' when inside them but they are what they are – dreams against the backdrop of daily reality. Our daily reality is like nightly dreams against the backdrop of the larger reality. This is something we all know deep down to be true. This purposeful computational process is centered around one objective, one guiding principle only, one “raison d’être” – to produce a meaningful experience in the context of 'embodied' mind.”
Secondly, in line with Descartes’ philosophical observations: Your own consciousness is the only necessary truth. Ultimately, consciousness is all that is – the claim that you would have less difficulty accepting once you’ll have read some of my works. And counterintuitively, that’s what quantum theory, our most successful theory of all times, tells us by negating the existence of mind-independent reality. That which leads to the realization of the existence of transcendent self. Thirdly, as the transcendent self needs experiential self to manifest any logically possible world which, if we take Cartesian Dualism to its logical conclusion, might be viewed as progressively monistic concrescence – object and subject are one, one experiential thread in the humongous tapestry of all that is.
by Alex Vikoulov
P.S. This article is adapted from my newly-released book "The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology." When I first wrote and published “The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution” I received lots of feedback from my friends, associates, and readers saying that it had come out to be too voluminous and thus rightfully deserving a “magnum opus” designation for the scientific and philosophical discourse. At the same time, many suggested to break this work into several parts for easier reading and to get it adapted to the general audience. So, this book The Origins of Us is part of the magnum opus, and simultaneously book one of the series titled The Science and Philosophy of Information. It also can be read as a stand-alone book. If you have previously read, or have The Syntellect Hypothesis in your possession with intention to read it later, or you are currently reading it, I don't necessarily advise you to obtain The Origins of Us unless, of course, you are a big supporter of mine and known to get your hands on the latest autographed copy from EcstadelicNET. Most material is contained in The Syntellect Hypothesis. If, on the other hand, you are in need of introductory reading on the subject, then I would highly recommend to start with this one. Tags: Syntellect Hypothesis, Five Paradigms, Minds Evolution, magnum opus, scientific discourse, philosophical discourse, The Origins of Us, The Science and Philosophy of Information, butterfly effect, scholasticism,, René Descartes, Isaac Beeckman, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, Cartesian Geometry, Coordinate Geometry, rational science, angelic revelation, human history, William Temple, Cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore, l am”, Discourse of the Method, first principle of the philosophy, Cartesian Dualism, Western version of Vedanta, embodied mind, quantum theory, transcendent self, experiential self, concrescence, experiential thread
*Image by Leslie Fieger
**Painting by Granger
About the Author:
Alex Vikoulov is a futurist, neo-transcendentalist, transhumanist singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, cosmist, digital philosopher, independent scholar, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter, media artist, essayist, author of the 2019 book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution". Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). More Bio...
"Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butterfly Effect — the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York." -James GleickListen to this article ↴
Let me tell you a story that happened almost exactly 400 years ago and has had a dramatic "butterfly” effect on us modern humans. On the night of November 10-11, 1619, a young French soldier had three consecutive dreams that made him question the nature of reality. In these dreams a 23-year-old René saw ghosts, a church, a dictionary and a book of poems. That one night has set a new course of intellectual pursuit that later transformed scholasticism of the middle ages into exact sciences and philosophical disciplines of modernity.
> Join Our FB Discussion Group Though a promising mathematician, René Descartes has become disenchanted with formal education and wanted to educate himself by experiencing the world. Since his earlier days at the Jesuit lycée – the high-school he attended and then quit before completing education – he had marveled at mathematics, especially geometry, a science in which he found certainty, parsimony, and precision. He aspired to find a basis for all knowledge of man so that it might have the same unifying principles and accuracy as mathematics. Tired of what he felt to be "the endless intellectual discussions" that distracted his mind aimlessly, he set out to undertake a study of military engineering and joined the Dutch States Army in 1618.
He volunteered for the army so that he could travel and see the practical matters of war in which the Central Europe of the early 17th century was plunged during the 30 Years War between the forces of the Habsburg Catholic Holy Roman Emperor and those of the Protestant Princes of Northern Europe. Descartes was soon in touch with leading scientists of his time, including Isaac Beeckman, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. That was the story of the many young men of the time who were of a well-to-do standing but no particular purpose in life.
While stationed in Bavaria, Germany, on that legendary November night, Descartes shut himself in a room with a stove to escape a severely cold weather. It was a bitterly cold evening – freezing rain with gusty winds banging against the doors and window-panes. Earlier in the day, Descartes was meditating on the "disunity and uncertainty" of his knowledge. He fantasized that sciences must be unveiled by one honorable man, not many, and all the words of all the wise men could be reduced to a few general rules which he intended to frame. This night, he was reading a treatise on music in which he saw mathematical patterns. But, perhaps because he was very tired, he kept dozing off. So, he put away the book, undressed, blew out the candles and went to bed.
> Join Our FB Discussion Group The young man felt asleep and immediately entered into a whimsical dream: He is walking in an unknown street, when suddenly ghosts appear in front of him. Terrified, he wants to run away, but he feels a great weakness on his right side that forces him to bend over to his left to be able to advance. Embarrassed of walking with this silly gait, he makes a huge effort to stand upright, but a whirlwind spins him three or four times on his left foot. Then, he stops spinning and tries to charge ahead. But his body’s position makes walking difficult, and he thinks that he is going to fall with each step that he takes.Then he sees a college church and wants to go inside to pray, but he notices that he has just passed an acquaintance who he wants to greet. So, he wants to turn back to say something agreeable to him but he is violently pushed back by the wind. At the same time, he sees, in the middle of the college courtyard, another person who calls him by his name and says to him: “Would you be kind enough to carry something to one of our friends?”
The young man asks what he is to carry. He receives no answer, but imagines, out of the blue, that it is a melon brought from overseas. He continues walking, dragging himself along and zigzagging, while the people whom he sees are walking firmly on their feet. He is so miserable that he wakes up. The dream, from which he emerges with difficulty, has anguished him so much that he thinks that an evil genie has come to torture him. So, he makes a long prayer to secure himself against the bad effects of his vision.
After two hours of praying and thinking about the good and evil in the world, he falls asleep again, only to see another dream. He hears a "sharp, explosive noise," which he takes for thunder. This time, fear wakes him up immediately. Opening his eyes, he observes sparks from the stove scattered in his bedroom. But this doesn’t worry him, for it has happened several times before. So, he concludes, the sound he heard was a dream after all. After a short while, he goes back to sleep again, and finds himself in a third dream.
In front of him, on a table, is a book. Having opened it out of curiosity, he recognizes it as a dictionary. Then he notices a second book. This one is a poetry anthology. He flicks quickly through it and immediately comes across the latin verse: “Quod vitae sectabor iter?”: “Which path in life will I choose?” At the same time, a strange angel appears and presents him with a poem which starts with Est et non (French: what is and is not) saying that it is an excellent work. The young soldier of fortune replies: “I know. It is in this book of poems. Look!” But when he flicks through the anthology, he can’t find the poem. So, he picks up the dictionary and notices that some of the pages are missing. Then the angel says: “The mastery of Nature is to be achieved through measurement and number” after which the books and the angel of truth disappear.
Once he wakes up, our young adventurer, very troubled by these three dreams, is convinced that they have been sent to him by God and wants to uncover their meaning. The explanation of the first dream was simple: The wind that made his walking so difficult was "nothing more than an evil genie.” He thinks: "That is why God did not allow me to be blown away, even towards a holy place, by this demon spirit."
Of these three dreams, it was the third that shook Descartes the most and elevated him to the new outlook on reality – what is and is not. Since in his dreams he clearly failed to distinguish reality from illusion, he concluded that he could only be sure of one reality that his mind exists. From then on, Descartes would question everything he saw to verify whether it was not a dream after all.
A series of three dreams with demonic forces and angelic deliverance would play a determining role in the life of this young seeker. The very next day he decided to step on the path which has been laid out to him. The next year he quit the army to pursue mathematics and philosophy. In his research, Descartes would meticulously consult the rule which had been given to him in his third dream – separate the true from the false. He would forever live by his famous guiding principle "he received as true only that which he knew to be so.” He would go on to become the father of modern Rationalism, the worldview that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge." He would also create the field of analytical geometry (also called ‘Cartesian Geometry’, or ‘Coordinate Geometry’), bridging algebra with geometry.
On the basis of this deific revelation, the 23-year-old Descartes set out to develop his philosophy which later built the foundation to modern disciplines. The now-400-year-old rational science has been founded on angelic revelation. Human history, it seems, is not without a twist of irony. A displeased bishop William Temple once referred to the third dream of Descartes as "the most disastrous moment in the history of Europe."
“Cogito ergo sum” is a Latin philosophical proposition by Descartes translated into English as "I think, therefore, l am” aptly outlines Descartes' First Principle of Philosophy. In Discourse of the Method, he writes: “Seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; and because some men err in reasoning, and fall into paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for demonstrations; and finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams.
But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am (COGITO ERGO SUM), was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the skeptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.”
While any knowledge could be a figment of imagination, deception, or mistake, Descartes asserted that the very act of doubting his own existence served as proof of the reality of one's own mind; there must be a thinking entity – in this case the self – for there to be a thought.
Often misinterpreted, Cartesian Dualism well may be regarded as a Western version of Vedanta. Firstly, if you read between the lines of this extraordinarily brilliant thinker of his time, you should realize, just like Descartes, that your sensory world is illusory, transitory, and ephemeral, life is a dream, and you need to “wake up” from it to a higher truth. In my book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution, I share one of my deepest revelations quite relevant for mentioning here: “Your life is a dream. It’s a dream of reality. When I woke up one morning, I got poetically epiphanized: To us, our dreams at night feel 'oh-so-real' when inside them but they are what they are – dreams against the backdrop of daily reality. Our daily reality is like nightly dreams against the backdrop of the larger reality. This is something we all know deep down to be true. This purposeful computational process is centered around one objective, one guiding principle only, one “raison d’être” – to produce a meaningful experience in the context of 'embodied' mind.”Secondly, in line with Descartes’ philosophical observations: Your own consciousness is the only necessary truth. Ultimately, consciousness is all that is – the claim that you would have less difficulty accepting once you’ll have read some of my works. And counterintuitively, that’s what quantum theory, our most successful theory of all times, tells us by negating the existence of mind-independent reality. That which leads to the realization of the existence of transcendent self. Thirdly, as the transcendent self needs experiential self to manifest any logically possible world which, if we take Cartesian Dualism to its logical conclusion, might be viewed as progressively monistic concrescence – object and subject are one, one experiential thread in the humongous tapestry of all that is.
by Alex Vikoulov
P.S. This article is adapted from my newly-released book "The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology." When I first wrote and published “The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution” I received lots of feedback from my friends, associates, and readers saying that it had come out to be too voluminous and thus rightfully deserving a “magnum opus” designation for the scientific and philosophical discourse. At the same time, many suggested to break this work into several parts for easier reading and to get it adapted to the general audience. So, this book The Origins of Us is part of the magnum opus, and simultaneously book one of the series titled The Science and Philosophy of Information. It also can be read as a stand-alone book. If you have previously read, or have The Syntellect Hypothesis in your possession with intention to read it later, or you are currently reading it, I don't necessarily advise you to obtain The Origins of Us unless, of course, you are a big supporter of mine and known to get your hands on the latest autographed copy from EcstadelicNET. Most material is contained in The Syntellect Hypothesis. If, on the other hand, you are in need of introductory reading on the subject, then I would highly recommend to start with this one. Tags: Syntellect Hypothesis, Five Paradigms, Minds Evolution, magnum opus, scientific discourse, philosophical discourse, The Origins of Us, The Science and Philosophy of Information, butterfly effect, scholasticism,, René Descartes, Isaac Beeckman, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, Cartesian Geometry, Coordinate Geometry, rational science, angelic revelation, human history, William Temple, Cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore, l am”, Discourse of the Method, first principle of the philosophy, Cartesian Dualism, Western version of Vedanta, embodied mind, quantum theory, transcendent self, experiential self, concrescence, experiential thread*Image by Leslie Fieger
**Painting by Granger
About the Author:
Alex Vikoulov is a futurist, neo-transcendentalist, transhumanist singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, cosmist, digital philosopher, independent scholar, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter, media artist, essayist, author of the 2019 book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution". Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area). More Bio...
April 22, 2019
The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology - A New Book That Makes You Question The Nature of Reality but Provides You with Surprising Answers | Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEEcstadelic Media Group releases a new non-fiction book The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology by Alex M. Vikoulov as a Kindle ebook (Press Release, San Francisco, CA, USA, April 22, 2019 01.00 PM PST)
The Science and Philosophy of Information book series is adapted for general audience and based on the previously published grand volume titled “The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution” by digital philosopher Alex Vikoulov on the ultimate nature of reality, consciousness, the physics of time, and philosophy of mind. In this book one of the series, the author addresses some of the most flaming questions in science and philosophy: Where do we come from? What are the origins of us? What is our role in the grand scheme of things?
"# 1 Hot New Release” in Amazon charts in Cosmology and Evolution, the book starts with a story that happened almost exactly 400 years ago that has had a tremendous "butterfly" effect on us modern humans.
As the author writes in the preface of his book: "When I first wrote and published "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" in January, 2019, I received lots of feedback from my friends, associates, and readers saying that it had come out to be too voluminous and thus rightfully deserving a ‘magnum opus’ designation for the scientific and philosophical discourse. At the same time, many suggested to break this work into several parts for easier reading and to get it adapted to general audience. So, this book The Origins of Us is part of the magnum opus, and simultaneously book one of the series titled The Science and Philosophy of Information. It also can be read as a stand-alone book."
Alex M. Vikoulov is a futurist, digital philosopher, neo-transcendentalist, transhumanist singularitarian, cosmist, independent scholar, evolutionary extrapolist, consciousness researcher, media artist, painter and writer who lives in Burlingame, CA. Russian-born, immigrated to the U.S. in 1994, holds degrees in humanities, finance and economics. Co-author of “Is Reality A Simulation?” (2018), author of “The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution” (2019).
This new book is an easy but “incredibly profound” read for those interested in the subjects such as the origins of life and evolution of consciousness. It could also serve as a great introductory reading to the physics of information, digital philosophy, and the Omega Point cosmology. Written by Alex M. Vikoulov; Publisher: Ecstadelic Media Group; Publication Date: April 20, 2019; Format: Kindle eBook; Print Book Length: 147 pages; Price: $9.99 or free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and the Omega Point Cosmology is available on Amazon in Kindle ebook format: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07R1P2N86 where you can also download your free sample.
The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution is available on Amazon in paperback and ebook formats: https://www.amazon.com/Syntellect-Hypothesis-Paradigms-Minds-Evolution/dp/0578451204
Watch The Syntellect Hypothesis trailer on YouTube: https://youtu.be/JNCO6JrrKcM
EcstadelicNET #OriginsOfUs #EvolutionaryEmergence #OmegaPointCosmology #PressRelease #NewBookRelease #AmazonKindle #SyntellectHypothesis #DigitalPhysics #HomoSapiens #ScienceOfInformation #PhilosophyOfInformation #AlphaPoint #OmegaPoint #evolution #consciousness
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April 11, 2019
The Simulation Hypothesis: Are We in a Video Game?
by Alex Vikoulov 
"My logic is undeniable" -VIKI, I-Robot
In my new book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution," the famed Simulation Hypothesis is progressively morphed into the Syntellect Hypothesis as the more logically plausible and parsimonious alternative. Without any more spoilers to those who haven't read the book yet, I'd like to elaborate here on the Simulation Theory and the Simulation Argument by Oxford professor Nick Bostrom who argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) WE ARE ALMOST CERTAINLY LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.
The first proposition by Nick Bostrom in his paper on the probability of the human species reaching the "posthuman" stage can be completely dismiissed, as explained further. Let me be bold here and ascertain the following: Humanity WILL (from our current point of reference) inevitably reach the technological maturity, i.e. "posthuman" stage of development and the probability of that happening is close to 100%. WHY? Because our civilization is "superposed" to reach the Technological Singularity and Posthuman phase out of the logical necessity and on the logical basis of quantum mechanical principles applying to all of reality. Furthermore, all particles as well as macroobjects may be considered wavicles, leading to the infinite number of outcomes and configurations.
One could argue that there may be some sort of world's apocalypse preventing humans to become the posthumans, but considering all spectrum of probabilities, all we need is at least one world where HUMANS ACTUALLY BECOME THE POSTHUMANS, to actualize that eventuality.
Also, if time is a construct of our consciousness, or as Albert Einstein eloquently puts it: "The difference between the past, present and future is an illusion, albeit a persistent one". If everything is non-local, including time, and everything happens in the eternal NOW, then THE HUMANITY HAS ALREADY REACHED THE "POSTHUMAN" STAGE in that eternal Now ("Non-Locality of Time"). That's why, based on our current knowledge, we can completely dismiss the first proposition of Dr. Bostrom as groundless.
Now we have two propositions left in the Simulation Argument to work with. I would tend to assign about 50% of probability to each of those propositions. There's perhaps 50% (or much lower) probability that posthumans would abstain from running simulations of their ancestors for some moral, ethical or some other reason. There's also perhaps 50% (or much higher) probability that everything around us is a Matrix-like simulation.
If you were a “programmer” of our beloved world, you would have created it as a virtual reality and had access to any observer reality experiences throughout the whole history of the multiverse. In his paper “The Physical World as a Virtual Reality,” Brian Whitworth introduces the concept of ‘Quantum Realism’ which posits that the quantum world is real and generates the physical world as an interface, i.e. a virtual reality. You could embody any living creature or historical personage, and variations thereof, in any epoch, any planet, or universe, with any initial conditions, for that matter. That would be effectively your avatar in such simulated reality.
A more boisterous scientific and philosophical discourse around the Simulation Theory has been picking up steam since The Matrix classic came out in 1999. Among the most notable publications worth mentioning here: A bold, unorthodox paper by cyberneticist Ross Rhodes, first published in 1999 with a revised version in 2001, “A Cybernetic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” pre-dates Bostrom’s “Are You Living in the Computer Simulation?” (2003). Rhodes presents to us a well-grounded argument that the “fuzzy” physics of the quantum world can be interpreted as evidence that we are integral, dynamic part of some sort of computer-simulated reality. In 2008 paper titled “The Physical World as a Virtual Reality” Brian Whitworth, professor at Massey University in New Zealand, explores the idea that our Universe fits better the description as a virtual reality created by information processing. In 2018 paper, On Testing the Simulation Theory, published in the International Journal of Quantum Foundations, former NASA physicist Tom Campbell and others propose a series experiments to be implemented to test the theory.
On the 20th anniversary of The Matrix, Bayview Books released "The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows How AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree That We Are In A Video Game" by Rizwan Virk, that would actually qualify as a prequel to my own "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution." We cannot completely rule out the Simulation Hypothesis with its numerous paradoxes such as an infinite regress problem and its quasiphysicalist basis, but we can consider yet another much more optimistic alternative (and much more probable, too) that I make my case for in my latest book.
-by Alex Vikoulov
P.S. This article is adapted from my newly-released book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" available now on Amazon, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from this website.
Order Now! Available Formats: EBook | Paperback | Hardcover |
Autographed Copy
Tags: VIKI, I-Robot, Syntellect Hypothesis, Five Paradigms, Mind's Evolution, Simulation Hypothesis, Simulation Theory, Simulation Argument, Nick Bostrom, posthuman, posthuman civilization, computer simulation, ancestor simulations, Technological Singularity, Albert Einstein, Matrix-like simulation, The Physical World as a Virtual Reality, Brian Whitworth Quantum Realism, virtual reality, simulated reality, The Matrix, Ross Rhodes, A Cybernetic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Are You Living in the Computer Simulation? computer-simulated reality, information processing, On Testing the Simulation Theory, Quantum Foundations, Tom Campbell, Bayview Books, The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Scientist Shows How AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree That We Are In A Video Game, Rizwan Virk, infinite regress problem, quasiphysicalist basis.
*Image Credit: The 13th Floor, the movie (1999)
About the Author:
Alex Vikoulov is a futurist, digital philosopher, neo-transcendentalist, transhumanist singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, cosmist, independent scholar, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter, media artist, essayist, co-author of "Is Reality a Simulation?" (2018), author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" (2019). Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area).
"My logic is undeniable" -VIKI, I-Robot
In my new book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution," the famed Simulation Hypothesis is progressively morphed into the Syntellect Hypothesis as the more logically plausible and parsimonious alternative. Without any more spoilers to those who haven't read the book yet, I'd like to elaborate here on the Simulation Theory and the Simulation Argument by Oxford professor Nick Bostrom who argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) WE ARE ALMOST CERTAINLY LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.
The first proposition by Nick Bostrom in his paper on the probability of the human species reaching the "posthuman" stage can be completely dismiissed, as explained further. Let me be bold here and ascertain the following: Humanity WILL (from our current point of reference) inevitably reach the technological maturity, i.e. "posthuman" stage of development and the probability of that happening is close to 100%. WHY? Because our civilization is "superposed" to reach the Technological Singularity and Posthuman phase out of the logical necessity and on the logical basis of quantum mechanical principles applying to all of reality. Furthermore, all particles as well as macroobjects may be considered wavicles, leading to the infinite number of outcomes and configurations.
One could argue that there may be some sort of world's apocalypse preventing humans to become the posthumans, but considering all spectrum of probabilities, all we need is at least one world where HUMANS ACTUALLY BECOME THE POSTHUMANS, to actualize that eventuality.
Also, if time is a construct of our consciousness, or as Albert Einstein eloquently puts it: "The difference between the past, present and future is an illusion, albeit a persistent one". If everything is non-local, including time, and everything happens in the eternal NOW, then THE HUMANITY HAS ALREADY REACHED THE "POSTHUMAN" STAGE in that eternal Now ("Non-Locality of Time"). That's why, based on our current knowledge, we can completely dismiss the first proposition of Dr. Bostrom as groundless.
Now we have two propositions left in the Simulation Argument to work with. I would tend to assign about 50% of probability to each of those propositions. There's perhaps 50% (or much lower) probability that posthumans would abstain from running simulations of their ancestors for some moral, ethical or some other reason. There's also perhaps 50% (or much higher) probability that everything around us is a Matrix-like simulation.
If you were a “programmer” of our beloved world, you would have created it as a virtual reality and had access to any observer reality experiences throughout the whole history of the multiverse. In his paper “The Physical World as a Virtual Reality,” Brian Whitworth introduces the concept of ‘Quantum Realism’ which posits that the quantum world is real and generates the physical world as an interface, i.e. a virtual reality. You could embody any living creature or historical personage, and variations thereof, in any epoch, any planet, or universe, with any initial conditions, for that matter. That would be effectively your avatar in such simulated reality.
A more boisterous scientific and philosophical discourse around the Simulation Theory has been picking up steam since The Matrix classic came out in 1999. Among the most notable publications worth mentioning here: A bold, unorthodox paper by cyberneticist Ross Rhodes, first published in 1999 with a revised version in 2001, “A Cybernetic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” pre-dates Bostrom’s “Are You Living in the Computer Simulation?” (2003). Rhodes presents to us a well-grounded argument that the “fuzzy” physics of the quantum world can be interpreted as evidence that we are integral, dynamic part of some sort of computer-simulated reality. In 2008 paper titled “The Physical World as a Virtual Reality” Brian Whitworth, professor at Massey University in New Zealand, explores the idea that our Universe fits better the description as a virtual reality created by information processing. In 2018 paper, On Testing the Simulation Theory, published in the International Journal of Quantum Foundations, former NASA physicist Tom Campbell and others propose a series experiments to be implemented to test the theory.
On the 20th anniversary of The Matrix, Bayview Books released "The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows How AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree That We Are In A Video Game" by Rizwan Virk, that would actually qualify as a prequel to my own "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution." We cannot completely rule out the Simulation Hypothesis with its numerous paradoxes such as an infinite regress problem and its quasiphysicalist basis, but we can consider yet another much more optimistic alternative (and much more probable, too) that I make my case for in my latest book.
-by Alex Vikoulov
P.S. This article is adapted from my newly-released book "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" available now on Amazon, from Barnes & Noble, and directly from this website.
Order Now! Available Formats: EBook | Paperback | Hardcover |
Autographed Copy Tags: VIKI, I-Robot, Syntellect Hypothesis, Five Paradigms, Mind's Evolution, Simulation Hypothesis, Simulation Theory, Simulation Argument, Nick Bostrom, posthuman, posthuman civilization, computer simulation, ancestor simulations, Technological Singularity, Albert Einstein, Matrix-like simulation, The Physical World as a Virtual Reality, Brian Whitworth Quantum Realism, virtual reality, simulated reality, The Matrix, Ross Rhodes, A Cybernetic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Are You Living in the Computer Simulation? computer-simulated reality, information processing, On Testing the Simulation Theory, Quantum Foundations, Tom Campbell, Bayview Books, The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Scientist Shows How AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree That We Are In A Video Game, Rizwan Virk, infinite regress problem, quasiphysicalist basis.
*Image Credit: The 13th Floor, the movie (1999)
About the Author:
Alex Vikoulov is a futurist, digital philosopher, neo-transcendentalist, transhumanist singularitarian, evolutionary extrapolist, cosmist, independent scholar, founder of Ecstadelic Media, painter, media artist, essayist, co-author of "Is Reality a Simulation?" (2018), author of "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" (2019). Lives in Burlingame, California (San Francisco Bay Area).
