The amount of time we have left in our lives can be measured in seconds. Let’s make it count.

Hallucinations – visions – are the closest our senses come to getting a glimpse of the infinite. The spiraling vortex, the mandalas, the Aztec calendar are all manifestations of the optic nerve brain interface with the universe.

It means being able to perceive your relationship to the physical world, all your memories, all your hopes and dreams, all the different forms of evolutionary struggle in their entirety – though chaos theory manifested in living, breathing fractal imagery. Quite possibly alien life forms for billions of years have merged their physical DNA with these geometric energy fields. We will too, someday, losing our flesh to machines.

Robert Anton Wilson

“As Lenin said, “the machine is running the engineers.” We can’t dismount, even if the horse seems to have gotten out of control. Information will continue to double faster all the time, leading to new technologies, and the new technologies will unleash Chaos (in the mathematical sense), and society will change in unpredictable and unexpected ways. I suspect or intuit that this ever-accelerating info-techno-sociological rev-and-ev-olution follows the laws of organic systems and continually reorganizes on higher and higher levels of coherence, until something kills it.

Since gene-pools last much, much longer than biological units, or persons, I assume gene-pools have higher intelligence than the isolated units. Since species last longer than their subdivided gene-pools, I assume that a species has a higher intelligence than any gene-pool within it. And since Gaia or the Big Computer or whatever you want to call the total Terran Geo-bio-mass has lasted billions of years –despite floods and earthquakes and meteors and massive extinctions and Ice Ages — I assume it has more smarts than any subsets like kingdoms, families, genera, gene-pools, etc.

The reason for optimism lies in the biological fact that it keeps you happy and busy, whereas pessimism just leads to lying around and bitching. I’d rather keep happy and busy than lie around bitching, but I know this will not convince those who really like lying around and bitching.

As Nietzsche said that optimism and good health always go together, and so do pessimism and morbidity, in the medical sense of the word.

COULD YOU speak about aliens on the planet?

I don’t do well speaking about things I don’t know anything about, so I’ll speak instead about the Unknown and the Inexplicable. I find them inexhaustibly entertaining as objects of speculation, since they obviously include a lot more than the known and the explicated.

I suspect and almost believe that the Unknown and Inexplicable played a role in the design of the DNA molecule, as suggested by Francis Crick, Sir Fred Hoyle, Dr. Timothy Leary and others. I also suspect that the Unknown has meddled a lot in human affairs, and the Inexplicable has laid hands, or tentacles, or something, on us many times.

As Thomas Huxley said, the universe acts a lot like a chess game in which the player on the other side remains invisible to us. By analyzing the moves, we try to form an image of the intellect behind them. Images that have seemed almost believable to me at various times have included the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece (if you develop a Classic Poetry habit, that kind of neurolinguistic programming can happen…) and also, of course, those extra-terrestrials who have so much popularity these days.

I have also considered the player on the other side as more impersonal, like the Tao, or more bizarre, like Shiva Dancing, or more abstract, like Philip K. Dick’s Vast Active Living Information System (VALIS.) Mostly, though I think of the player on the other side as a pookah — a resident of Ireland, in rabbit form, who may at any time dump a truckload of the Unknown and Inexplicable right on your doorstep.

I mean, what are we going to do? Are we going to download ourselves into a supercooled cube of gold ytterbium alloy buried a thousand feet deep on the dark side of the moon and wander through an ersatz electronic wonderland forever? Are we going to atomize our consciousness and spread it to redwood trees and coral reefs and termite colonies? Are we going to build ships the size of Manitoba and depart for the galactic centre?

The Age of Spiritual Machines

It’s not science fiction — and it’s coming soon

By Ray Kurzweil – SPECIAL TO MSNBC – Feb. 5 — “A threshold event will take place early in the 21st century: the emergence of machines more intelligent than their creators. By 2019, a $1,000 computer will match the processing power of the human brain — about 20 million billion calculations per second.

Organizing these resources — the “software” of intelligence — will take us to 2029, by which time your average personal computer will be equivalent to 1,000 human brains.

ONCE A COMPUTER achieves a level of intelligence comparable to human intelligence, it will necessarily soar past it. For one thing, computers can easily share their knowledge. If I learn French, or read “War and Peace,” I can’t readily download that learning to you. You have to acquire that scholarship the same painstaking way that I did. But if one computer learns a skill or gains an insight, it can immediately share that wisdom with billions of other computers. So every computer can be a master of all human and machine acquired knowledge.

MERGING HUMANS AND MACHINES
Keep in mind that this is not an alien invasion of
intelligent machines. It is emerging from within our human/machine civilization. There will not be a clear distinction between human and machine in the 21st century. Is it possible to create machines that will mimic human consciousness? Yes. It’s an inevitable evolution of technology.

First of all, we will be putting computers — neural implants — directly into our brains. We’ve already started down this path. We have neural implants to counteract Parkinson’s Disease and tremors from multiple sclerosis. We have cochlear implants that restore hearing to deaf individuals. Under development is a retina implant that will perform a similar function for blind individuals, basically replacing the visual processing circuits of the brain. Scientists recently placed a chip in the brain of a paralyzed individual who can now control his environment directly from his brain.

In the 2020s, neural implants will not be just for disabled people. Most of us will have neural implants to improve our sensory experiences, perception, memory, and logical thinking. These implants will also plug us in directly to the World Wide Web. This technology will enable us to have virtual reality experiences with other people – or simulated people – without requiring any equipment not already in our heads. And virtual reality will not be the crude experience that people are used to today.

Virtual reality will be as realistic, detailed, and subtle as real reality. So instead of just phoning a friend, you can meet in a virtual French cafe in Paris, or stroll down a virtual Champs d’Elysee, and it will seem very real. People will be able to have any type of experience with anyone — business, social, romantic, sexual — regardless of physical proximity.

COPY THE BRAIN Computers of the future will be human-like in design. They will claim to be human, and to have human feelings. And being immensely intelligent, they’ll be very convincing when they tell us these things.

One approach to designing intelligent computers will be to copy the human brain, so these machines will seem very human. And through nanotechnology, which is the ability to create physical objects atom by atom, they will have human-like bodies — albeit greatly enhanced. Having human origins, they will claim to be human, and to have human feelings. And being immensely intelligent, they’ll be very convincing when they tell us these things.

We will also be able to scan a particular person — let’s say myself — and record the exact state and position of every neurotransmitter, synapse, neural connection, and other relevant details, and then reinstantiate that information into a neural computer of sufficient capacity. The “person” who then emerges in the machine will think that he is (and had been) me. He will say, “I was born in Queens, New York; went to college at MIT; stayed in Boston; walked into a scanner there, and woke up in the machine here. Hey, this technology really works.”

IDENTITY CRISIS
But wait. Is this really me? For one thing, old Ray
(that’s me) still exists. I’ll still be here in my carbon-cell-based
brain. Alas, I will have to sit back and watch the new Ray succeed in endeavors that I could only dream of.

Are these new entities conscious? They will certainly claim to be. And unlike today’s virtual personalities, we’ll believe them. Now that’s a political prediction, not a philosophical one. Inherently, there is no objective test we can administer to measure the subjective experience of another entity. This reflects the very nature of the concepts “objective” and “subjective.” I accept the consciousness of other humans besides myself, but this is an assumption, not a testable conjecture. As for entities other than humans, we already argue about animals. When machines get into the fray, there will be plenty of room for disagreement.

As we go through the next several decades, the nature of consciousness will no longer be the abstract and polite debate that it has been since the Platonic dialogues. We will have no choice but to confront the issue in a very practical way. If a being is capable of suffering, then the ethical and ultimately legal implications will need to be addressed.

We will answer these questions as we always do: through a political process. And since these entities will be enormously intelligent, they will convince us to respect their rights.

They’ll get mad if we don’t.

So we’ll make a transition to man-machine, with our brains in semi-suspended animation in a cold meat locker in a Mini-Storage somewhere in Dallas – and eventually digitizing our brains into semi-organic sentience in an infinite inner cyberverse, eventually losing our singularity into a communal hive and joining together in light.

The trick now is to freeze your brain before you die, or live long enough to get cocooned. Anyway, we could become “Borg,” which meets other “Borgs” from other solar systems that already exist as “spirits” and form a huge superbrain Heaven on the material plane, wherein individual entities are basically neuron-type email addresses.

…and just maybe a Michael Bloomborg’s evolved brainmachine will run our newest hyperspatial transactional data systems, his brain being one of the first to be preserved.