Will Evolving Minds Delay The AI Apocalypse? – Part II

February 10, 2019 1 Comment

The idea of an AI-driven Apocalypse is based on AI outpacing humanity in intelligence. The point at which that might happen depends on how fast AI evolves and how fast (or slow) humanity evolves.

In Part I of this article, I demonstrated how, given current trends in the advancement of Artificial Intelligence, any AI Apocalypse, Singularity, or what have you, is probably much further out that the transhumanists would have you believe.

In this part, we will examine the other half of the argument by considering the nature of the human mind and how it evolves. To do so, it is very instructive to consider the nature of the mind as a complex system and also the systemic nature of the environments that minds and AIs engage with, and are therefore measured by in terms of general intelligence or AGI.

David Snowden has developed a framework of categorizing systems called Cynefin. The four types of systems are:

  1. Simple – e.g. a bicycle. A Simple system is a simple deterministic system characterized by the fact that most anyone can make decisions and solve problems regarding such systems – it takes something called inferential intuition, which we all have. If the bicycle seat is loose, everyone knows that to fix it, you must look under the seat and find the hardware that needs tightening.
  2. Complicated – e.g. a car. Complicated systems are also deterministic systems, but unlike Simple systems, solutions to problems in this domain are not obvious and typically require analysis and/or experts to figure out what is wrong. That’s why you take your car to the mechanic and why we need software engineers to fix defects.
  3. Complex – Complex systems, while perhaps deterministic from a philosophical point of view, are not deterministic in any practical sense. No matter how much analysis you apply and no matter how experienced the expert is, they will not be able to completely analyze and solve a problem in a complex system. That is because such systems are subject to an incredibly complex set of interactions, inputs, dependencies, and feedback paths that all change continuously. So even if you could apply sufficient resources toward analyzing the entire system, by the time you got your result, your problem state would be obsolete. Examples of complex systems include ecosystems, traffic patterns, the stock market, and basically every single human interaction. Complex systems are best addressed through holistic intuition, which is something that humans possess when they are very experienced in the applicable domain. Problems in complex systems are best addressed by a method called Probe-Sense-Respond, which consists of probing (doing an experiment designed intuitively), sensing (observing the results of that experiment), and responding (acting on those results by moving the system in a positive direction).
  4. Chaotic – Chaotic systems are rarely occurring situations that are unpredictable because they are novel and therefore don’t follow any known patterns. An example would be the situation in New York City after 9/11. Responding to chaotic systems requires an even different method than with other types of systems. Typically, just taking some definitive form of action may be enough to move the system from Chaotic to Complex. The choice of action is a deeply intuitive decision that may be based on an incredibly deep, rich, and nuanced set of knowledge and experiences.

Complicated systems are ideal for early AI. Problems like the ones analyzed in Stanford’s AI Index, such as object detection, natural language parsing, language translation, speech recognition, theorem proving, and SAT solving are all Complicated systems. AI technology at the moment is focused mostly on such problems, not things in the Complex domain, which are instead best addressed by the human brain. However, as processing speed evolves, and learning algorithms evolve, AI will start addressing issues in the Complex domain. Initially, to program or guide the AI systems toward a good sense-and-respond model a human mind will be needed. Eventually perhaps, armed with vague instructions like “try intuitive experiments from a large set of creative ideas that may address the issue,” “figure out how to identify the metrics that indicate a positive result from the experiment,” “measure those metrics,” and “choose a course of action that furthers the positive direction of the quality of the system,” an AI may succeed at addressing problems in the Complex domain.

The human mind of course already has a huge head start. We are incredibly adept at seeing vague patterns, sensing the non-obvious, seeing the big picture, and drawing from collective experiences to select experiments to address complex problems.

Back to our original question, as we lead AI toward developing the skills and intuition to replicate such capabilities, will we be unable to evolve our thinking as well?

In the materialist paradigm, the brain is the limit for an evolving mind. This is why we think the AI can out evolve us, because the brain capacity is fixed. However, in “Digital Consciousness” I have presented a tremendous set of evidence that this is incorrect. In actuality, consciousness, and therefore the mind, is not emergent from the brain. Instead it exists in a deeper level of reality as shown in the Figure below.

It interacts with a separate piece of ATTI that I call the Reality Learning Lab (RLL), commonly known as “the reality we live in,” but more accurately described as our “apparent physical reality” – “apparent” because it is actually Virtual.

As discussed in my blog on creating souls, All That There Is (ATTI) has subdivided itself into components of individuated consciousness, each of which has a purpose to evolve. How it is constructed, and how the boundaries are formed that make it individuated is beyond our knowledge (at the moment).

So what then is our mind?

Simply put, it is organized information. As Tom Campbell eloquently expressed it, “The digital world, which subsumes the virtual physical world, consists only of organization – nothing else. Reality is organized bits.”

As such, what prevents it from evolving in the deeper reality of ATTI just as fast as we can evolve an AI here in the virtual reality of RLL?

Answer – NOTHING!

Don’t get hung up on the fixed complexity of the brain. All our brain is needed for is to emulate the processing mechanism that appears to handle sensory input and mental activity. By analogy, we might consider playing a virtual reality game. In this game we have an avatar and we need to interact with other players. Imagine that a key aspect of the game is the ability to throw a spear at a monster or to shoot an enemy. In our (apparent) physical reality, we would need an arm and a hand to be able to carry out that activity. But in the game, it is technically not required. Our avatar could be arm-less and when we have the need to throw something, we simply press a key sequence on the keyboard. A spear magically appears and gets hurled in the direction of the monster. Just as we don’t need a brain to be aware in our waking reality (because our consciousness is separate from RLL), we don’t need an arm to project a spear toward an enemy in the VR game.

On the other hand, having the arm on the avatar adds a great deal to the experience. For one thing, it adds complexity and meaning to the game. Pressing a key sequence does not have a lot of variability and it certainly doesn’t provide the player with much control. The ability to hit the target could be very precise, such as in the case where you simply point at the target and hit the key sequence. This is boring, requires little skill and ultimately provides no opportunity to develop a skill. On the other hand, the precision of your attack could be dependent on a random number generator, which adds complexity and variability to the game, but still doesn’t provide any opportunity to improve. Or, the precision of the attack could depend on some other nuance of the game, like secondary key sequences, or timing of key sequences, which, although providing the opportunity to develop a skill, have nothing to do with a consistent approach to throwing something. So, it is much better to have your avatar have an arm. In addition, this simply models the reality that you know, and people are comfortable with things that are familiar.

So it is with our brains. In our virtual world, the digital template that is our brain is incapable of doing anything in the “simulation” that it isn’t designed to do. The digital simulation that is the RLL must follow the rules of RLL physics much the way a “physics engine” provides the rules of RLL physics for a computer game. And these rules extend to brain function. Imagine if, in the 21st century, we had no scientific explanation for how we process sensory input or make mental decisions because there was no brain in our bodies. Would that be a “reality” that we could believe in? So, in our level of reality that we call waking reality, we need a brain.

But that brain “template” doesn’t limit the ability for our mind to evolve any more than the lack of brain or central nervous system prevents a collection of single celled organisms called a slime mold from actually learning.

In fact, there is some good evidence for the idea that our minds are evolving as rapidly as technology. Spiral Dynamics is a model of the evolution of values and culture that can be applied to individuals, institutions, and all of humanity. The figure below depicts a very high level overview of the stages, or memes, depicted by the model.

Spiral Dynamics

Each of these stages represents a shift in values, culture, and thinking, as compared to the previous. Given that it is the human mind that drives these changes, it is fair to say that the progression models the evolution of the human mind. As can be seen by the timeframes associated with the first appearance of each stage of humanity, this is an exponential progression. In fact, this is the same kind of progression that Transhumanists used to prove exponential progression of technology and AI. This exponential progression of mind would seem to defy the logic that our minds, if based on fixed neurological wiring, are incapable of exponential development.

And so, higher level conscious thought and logic can easily evolve in the human mind in the truer reality, which may very well keep us ahead of the AI that we are creating in our little virtual reality. The trick is in letting go of our limiting assumptions that it cannot be done, and developing protocols for mental evolution.

So, maybe hold off on buying those front row tickets to the Singularity.

Filed under AI, Consciousness, digital consciousness, Life, Philosophy, Programmed Reality Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Disproving the Claim that the LHC Disproves the Existence of Ghosts

February 27, 2017 2 Comments

Recent articles in dozens of online magazines shout things like: “The LHC Disproves the Existence of Ghosts and the Paranormal.”

To which I respond: LOLOLOLOLOL

There are so many things wrong with this backwards scientific thinking, I almost don’t know where to start.  But here are a few…

1. The word “disproves” doesn’t belong here. It is unscientific at best. Maybe use “evidence against one possible explanation for ghosts” – I can even begin to appreciate that. But if I can demonstrate even one potential mechanism for the paranormal that the LHC couldn’t detect, you cannot use the word “disprove.” And here is one potential mechanism – an unknown force that the LHC can’t explore because its experiments are designed to only measure interactions in the 4 forces physicists are aware of.

The smoking gun is Brian Cox’s statement “If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made. We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection at the Large Hadron Collider. That’s almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies.” So, based on that statement, here are a few more problems…

2. “almost inconceivable” is logically inconsistent with the term “disproves.”

3. “If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist…” is an invalid assumption. We do not need information about our cells to persist in a traditional physical medium for paranormal effects to have a way to propagate. They can propagate by a non-traditional (unknown) medium, such as an information storage mechanism operating outside of our classically observable means. Imagine telling a couple of scientists just 200 years ago about how people can communicate instantaneously via radio waves. Their response would be “no, that is impossible because our greatest measurement equipment has not revealed any mechanism that allows information to be transmitted in that manner.” Isn’t that the same thing Brian Cox is saying?

4. The underlying assumption is that we live in a materialist reality. Aside from the fact that Quantum Mechanics experiments have disproven this (and yes, I am comfortable using that word), a REAL scientist should allow for the possibility that consciousness is independent of grey matter and create experiments to support or invalidate such hypotheses. One clear possibility is the simulation argument. Out of band signaling is an obvious and easy mechanism for paranormal effects.  Unfortunately, the REAL scientists (such as Anton Zeilinger) are not the ones who get most of the press.

5. “That’s almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies” is also bad logic. It assumes that we fully understand the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies. If scientific history has shown us anything, it is that there is more that we don’t understand than there is that we do.

lhcghosts

Filed under Consciousness, Future Tech, Life, paranormal, Philosophy, Physics, Programmed Reality, Quantum Mechanics, Science Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Slime Mold for President

May 9, 2016 1 Comment

In a year when many of us are losing faith in the intelligence of humanity, it’s refreshing to see an example of unexpected cognitive abilities in another species. But seriously, slime molds?

A slime mold is a bizarre single-celled organism which has the propensity to aggregate with others of its species to act like a large multicellular organism. Slime molds can be found on your lawn, in your gutters, or on decomposing logs, and might reach a size of a square meter or more. In both its unicellular state and in its aggregate slime state, the organism has neither a brain nor a nervous system.

So imagine scientists’ surprise to discover that one such representative species, Physarum polycephalum, has shown the ability to learn. Researchers from Toulouse University, placed the mold in a petri dish along with a food source, separated by a distasteful (to the mold) barrier consisting of caffeine or quinine. In the initial run of the experiment, the yucky tasting barrier stopped the mold from getting to its dinner. However, over a few hours, Physarum polycephalum learned to cross over the barrier to get to the food, after which each run of the experiment resulted in faster times and less hesitancy to get to its goal.

This rudimentary learning process requires “a behavioral response to whatever the trigger is, memory of that moment, and future changed behavior based on the memory,” which combination would appear to be impossible without a brain or nervous system.

Even more remarkable is Physarum polycephalum’s ability to solve complex mazes and emulate ancient Rome’s road building logic.

As science puzzles over this conundrum and develops theories based on cellular memory and binary genetic codes, I offer a simpler explanation:

Learning does require a sufficiently complex adaptive system, but that system does not necessarily need to be embodied in a central nervous system of the organism. Quantum Mechanics experiments have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that consciousness plays a central role in the creation of reality. This implies that consciousness is not an artifact of the system that it is creating – it is rather, a separate aspect of reality. Evidence abounds that we live in a consciousness-centric reality, and that consciousness is therefore “out there” elsewhere. The informational substrate in which consciousness resides is either “the true physical reality” or a “truer reality” than the virtual one in which we think we reside. It is that substrate that may contain the complexity for memory and learning on the part of the consciousness of the organism.

For my Masters project in college, I had to develop a system that would take rich complex information from weather balloon sensors and crunch the data to match the low bit rate telemetry limitations of the transmission system. In an analogous manner, perhaps, the consciousness that got stuck with the poor slime mold template has very little to work with in terms of interacting with its virtual world. But all the mold really needs is a small subset of the three elements described above: the ability to sense and deliver information to its conscious host and the ability to respond to instructions from that host and interact with its environment. The consciousness does the rest.

In a similar way, a perfectly respectable individuated consciousness may be stuck with a cognitively challenged human template running as a presidential candidate.

Yellow_slime_mold trump

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Transhumanism and Immortality – 21st Century Snake Oil

January 9, 2016 6 Comments

Before I start my rant, I recognize that the Transhumanism movement is chock full of cool ideas, many of which make complete sense, even though they are perhaps obvious and inevitable.  The application of science and technology to the betterment of the human body ranges from current practices like prosthetics and Lasik to genetic modification and curing diseases through nanotech.  It is happening and there’s nothing anyone can to to stop it, so enjoy the ride as you uplift your biology to posthumanism.

However, part of the Transhumanist dogma is the idea that we can “live long enough to live forever.”  Live long enough to be able to take advantage of future technologies like genetic manipulation  which could end the aging process and YOU TOO can be immortal!

The problem with this mentality is that we are already immortal!  And there is a reason why our corporeal bodies die.  Simply put, we live our lives in this reality in order to evolve our consciousness, one life instance at a time.  If we didn’t die, our consciousness evolution would come to a grinding halt, as we spend the rest of eternity playing solitaire and standing in line at the buffet.  The “Universe” or “All That There Is” appears to evolve through our collective individuated consciousnesses.  Therefore, deciding to be physically immortal could be the end of the evolution of the Universe itself.  Underlying this unfortunate and misguided direction of Transhumanism is the belief (and, I can’t stress this enough, it is ONLY that – a belief) that it is lights out when we die.  Following the train of logic, if this were true, consciousness only emerges from brain function, we have zero free will, the entire universe is a deterministic machine, and even investigative science doesn’t make sense any more.  So why even bother with Transhumanism if everything is predetermined?  It is logically inconsistent.  Materialism, the denial of the duality of mind and body, is a dogmatic Religion.  Its more vocal adherents (just head on over to the JREF Forum to find these knuckleheads) are as ignorant to the evidence and as blind to what true science is as the most bass-ackward fundamentalist religious zealots.

OK, to be fair, no one can be 100% certain of anything.  But, there is FAR more evidence for consciousness driven reality than for deterministic materialism.  This blog contains a lot of it, as does my first book, “The Universe-Solved!“, with much more in my upcoming book.

The spokesman for transhumanistic immortality is the self-professed “Transcendent Man“, Ray Kurzweil.  Really Ray?  Did you seriously NOT fight the producers of this movie about you to change the title to something a little less self-aggrandizing, like “Modern Messiah”? #LRonHubbard

So I came across this article about the 77 supplements that Ray takes every day.  From the accompanying video clip, he believes that they are already reversing his aging process: “I’m 65. On many biological aging tests I come out a lot younger. I expect to be in my 40s 15 years from now.”

He has been on this regimen for years.  So let’s see how well those supplements are doing.  Picking an objective tool from one of Ray’s own favorite technologies – Artificial Intelligence – the website how-old.net has an AI bot that automatically estimates your age from an uploaded photo.  I took a screen shot from the video clip (Ray is 65 in the clip) and uploaded it:

Ray Kurzweil Age

85!  Uh oh.  Hmmm, maybe the bot overestimates everyone’s age. I’m 10 years younger than Ray.  Let’s see how I fare, using a shot taken the same year at a ski resort – you know, one of those sports Ray says to avoid (Ray also claims that his kids will probably be immortal as long as they don’t take up extreme sports):

JimHowOld

I don’t know if it is the supplements that make Ray look 20 years older than he is, or the extreme skiing that makes me look 13 years younger than I am.  But I’m thinking maybe I’m onto something. [Note: I do realize that the choice of pictures could result in different outcomes.  I just thought it was ironic that the first two that I tried had these results]

Yes, I’m fairly confident that these supplements have some value in improving the function of various organs and benefiting a person’s overall health and well being.  I’m also fairly certain that much of traditional medical community would disagree and point to the lack of rigorous scientific studies supporting these supposed benefits as they always do.  On the whole, I suspect that, on the average, supplements might extend one’s lifetime somewhat.  But I doubt that they will reverse aging.  The human body is far too complex to hope that adding a few organic compounds would be sufficient to modify and synchronize all of the complex cellular and systemic metabolic chemical reactions toward a reversal of the aging process.  Kurzweil is obviously a very bright man who has had a significant entrepreneurial legacy in the high tech world.  However I think he and the rest of the materialist transhumanists are way over their heads on the topic of immortality and our place and purpose in the Universe.

My suggestion, Ray… skip the supplements, skip the self-promotion, skip the Google plugs, drive your goddamn car, and don’t be afraid to be active.  Stick with high tech, leave the evolution of the universe to its own devices, and enjoy the rest of this life.

Filed under AI, Consciousness, Future Tech, Life, Nanotech, Philosophy, Science Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Questions to Ask at the End of Your Life

August 1, 2015 5 Comments

“I wish I had worked harder.”  Said no one ever on his or her deathbed.

Isn’t it ironic how there seems to be a consensus on how not to live one’s life, and yet; very few of us really live our lives according to that wisdom. It is as if we have two identities: one, which revolves around playing the game, chasing the dream, helping corporations and governments move capital around like piles of sand from one place to the other, paying taxes, chasing passions, using the right apps, wearing the right clothes, and rooting for the right team. And then, there is the other identity, which wryly observes all of this madness and is deeply fulfilled instead by love, connections, service, spirituality, and beauty. Eckhart Tolle explains these two identities clearly in his book “The Power of Now.” The first identity, he says, is the ego, and is created from all of the mental thinking that we do when we focus our attention on the past and on the future. The second identity is our true Being, the individuated consciousness that is connected to everything else, to “all that there is,” which we find when we focus on the present.

So it got me thinking about what questions I would ask at the end of my life, as I look back and assess how well I did this time around. I came up with a few:

  • How well did I learn to love, forgive, and be compassionate?
  • How much of a positive impact did I make on other living entities?
  • How well did I learn the life lessons that I was supposed to, in order to evolve my consciousness?
  • How well did I attain happiness?
  • How well did I eradicate fear from my driving forces?

Questions I would not ask:

  • Did I work hard enough?
  • Was I punctual?
  • Did I follow the rules?

Still, I know that I am expending more energy following the ego’s plan, but it is ever so slowly shifting.

I would love to hear what questions others would ask and not ask.

questions

Filed under Consciousness, Life, Philosophy Tagged with , , ,

The Asset-Light Generation – A Sign of Humanity Evolution?

January 26, 2014 3 Comments

We are moving from an era where it was important to possess everything to an era where it is considered cumbersome.  From racks of CDs and DVDs to music (Spotify) and movies (Netflix) in the cloud, accessible by subscription from a small handheld device.  From bookcases full of books to reading on demand from an iPad.  From stores full of products to eCommerce sites full of data.  From workplaces with cubes and desks to telecommuting and Workforce as a Service (WaaS).  From owning cars to sharing cars (Uber).  From a physical wallet full of cash and credit cards, to digital wallet transactions with just enough bitcoin in the account to satisfy “just in time” needs.

This new era is called the Shared Economy or Collaborative Economy and the individuals who thrive in it are becoming known as the Asset-Light Generation (fka Millennials, or Gen Y).

It strikes me that in many philosophies and spiritual teachings, the suppression of material desires is a crucial step on the road to evolving the spirit.

“All suffering is caused by desire.”
– Buddha

“If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”
– Jesus Christ

“It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”
– Bertrand Russell

“When we share – that is poetry in the prose of life.”
– Sigmund Freud

“It ain’t no fun if the homies can’t have none.”
– Snoop Dogg

So I wonder – if each generation of humanity is becoming less interested in ownership and increasingly more comfortable with the idea of sharing resources, is that another indication that humanity is evolving spiritually?

Or is it just cool tech?

sharing400

Filed under Future Tech, Life, Philosophy, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,

Nature, Nurture, Neither?

January 15, 2014 2 Comments

Most of us are aware of (or may be part of) a family where siblings are radically different from each other, their personalities, interests, and value systems sometimes seeming to be completely opposite.  It is difficult to chalk this up to either nature or nurture because both parties couldn’t have a more common nature environment, or common nurture environment.  Having been raised in the same household for their entire lives, and being biologically from the same sets of DNA, what could possibly cause such stark differences?

Psychologists and biologists have attempted to tease out the influential factors by studying criminal records, IQ, personality traits, and sexual preferences of identical twins raised together, identical twins raised apart, adoptive siblings raised together, fraternal twins, siblings, and random pairs of strangers.  Criminality appears to have influences from both nature and nurture, while IQ seems largely hereditary.  Some studies support the conclusion that personality traits are mostly hereditary, while others lean toward environment.  Sexual preference appears to be unrelated to DNA, yet is also hard to explain by environment alone, given the results of identical twin studies.  However, even in studies of these traits, where correlations are observed, the correlations tend to be small, leaving a large portion of the reason for such traits up in the air.

Mathematically, nature plus nurture doesn’t appear to explain why we are the way we are.  However, if instead we adopted the well-supported and researched view that we are not our bodies, then our consciousness exists independent of our bodies.  As such, it is reasonable to expect that that consciousness learns, adapts, and evolves across multiple lifetimes, and perhaps non-physical experiences.  And this would certainly provide an excellent explanation for the anomalies listed above.  It would make sense, for example, that IQ, perhaps being related to the function of the brain, be largely influenced by genetics.  However, it would not make sense for value systems to be genetic, and the influence from family environment would only extend back to childhood; hence personality traits should show some nurture correlation from “this life”, with the majority of the influence being from past lives (and therefore, a mystery to those who don’t understand or accept this paradigm).

Research supports this view and notes that ‘many aspects of the child’s present personality have carried forward intact from the past life: behavior, emotions, phobias, talents, knowledge, the quality of relationships, and even physical symptoms.’  Sadly, such research is as heretical to scientific orthodoxy as heliocentrism was 500 years ago, although referring to it as epigenetics may be a safe way for scientists to dip their toes into the water without getting scalded.

So, the next time someone gets on your case for not living up to the family ideal, smile knowingly, and be proud of your karmic heritage.

nature_vs_nurture2

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RIP Kardashev Civilization Scale

October 30, 2013 5 Comments

In 1964, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed a model for categorizing technological civilizations.  He identified 4 levels or “Types”, simplified as follows:

Type 0 – Civilization that has not yet learned to utilize the full set of resources available to them on their home planet (e.g. oceans, tidal forces, geothermal forces, solar energy impinging upon the planet, etc.)

Type 1 – Civilization that fully harnesses, controls, and utilizes the resources of their planet.

Type 2 – Civilization that fully harnesses, controls, and utilizes the resources of their star system.

Type 3 – Civilization that fully harnesses, controls, and utilizes the resources of their galaxy.

halosphere500

As with philosophical thought, literature, art, music, and other concepts and artifacts generated by humanity, technological and scientific pursuits reflect the culture of the time.  In 1964, we were on the brink of nuclear war.  The space race was in full swing and the TV show “Star Trek” was triggering the imagination of laymen and scientists alike.  We thought in terms of conquering people and ideas, and in terms of controlling resources.  What countries are in the Soviet bloc?  What countries are under US influence?  Who has access to most of the oil?  Who has the most gold, the most uranium?

The idea of dominating the world was evident in our news and our entertainment.  Games like Risk and Monopoly were unapologetically imperialistic.  Every Bond plot was about world domination.

Today, many of us find these ideas offensive.  To start with, imperialism is an outdated concept founded on the assumption of superiority of some cultures over others.  The idea of harnessing all planetary resources is an extension of imperialistic mentality, one that adds all other life forms to the entities that we need to dominate.  Controlling planetary resources for the sake of humanity is tantamount to stealing those same resources from other species that may need them.  Further, our attempt to control resources and technology can lead to some catastrophic outcomes.  Nuclear Armageddon, grey goo, overpopulation, global warming, planetary pollution, and (human-caused) mass extinctions are all examples of potentially disastrous consequences of attempts to dominate nature or technology without fully understanding what we are doing.

I argue in “Alien Hunters Still Thinking Inside The Box (or Dyson Sphere)” that attempting to fully harness all of the energy from the sun is increasingly unnecessary and unlikely to our evolution as a species.  Necessary energy consumption per capita is flattening for developing cultures and declining for mature ones.  Technological advances allow us to get much more useful output from our devices as time goes forward.  And humanity is beginning to de-emphasize raw size and power as a desirable attribute (for example, see right sizing economic initiatives) and instead focus on the value of consciousness.

So, certainly the hallmarks of advanced civilizations are not going to be anachronistic metrics of how much energy they can harness.  So what metrics might be useful?

How about:  Have they gotten off their planet?  Have they gotten out of their solar system?  Have they gotten out of their galaxy?

Somehow, I feel that even this is misleading.  Entanglement shows that everything is interconnected.  The observer effect demonstrates that consciousness transcends matter.  So perhaps the truly advanced civilizations have learned that they do not need to physically travel, but rather mentally travel.

How about: How little of an impact footprint do they leave on their planet?

The assumption here is that advanced civilizations follow a curve like the one below, whereby early in their journey they have a tendency to want to consume resources, but eventually evolve to have less and less of a need to consume or use energy.

wigner

How about: What percentage of their effort is expended upon advancing the individual versus the society, the planetary system, or the galactic system?

or…

How about: Who cares?  Why do we need to assign a level to a civilization anyway?  Is there some value to having a master list of evolutionary stage of advanced life forms?  So that we know who to keep an eye on?  That sounds very imperialistic to me.

Of course, I am as guilty of musing about the idea of measuring the level of evolution of a species through a 2013 cultural lens as Kardashev was doing so through a 1964 cultural lens.  But still, it is 50 years hence and time to either revise or retire an old idea.

Filed under Cosmology, Future Tech, Life, Philosophy, Science Tagged with ,

Signs of Real Humanity Evolution

August 2, 2013 2 Comments

We humans spend a lot of time talking about and worrying about and doing stuff that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.  And I’m not just talking about the obvious things, like Real Housewives of New Jersey.  I mean stuff that the media and schools tell us is important.  Including stuff that I used to think was important – like politics, GMOs, how “big chemical” is poisoning us, the revolving door between government, finance and business, widespread corruption, and how the financial elite continues to fleece us peons.  I still think these things are important, because they impact those whom we care about.

But, from a broader, larger, and historical perspective, which party wins the election, what the stock market does, which countries rise or fall, or who wins the war, are, to quote Dr. Evil, “quite inconsequential.”  It’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.  Everyone dies and new humans take their place.  Every civilization declines and new ones rise.

Where is the evolution of humanity?

Evolution Devolution

It is a mistake to think it is found in science or technology.  As much as I love gadgets and the bleeding edge of high tech, products do not equate to the evolution of a species.  Cloning, nuclear power, nanotech, and 3D printing are not signs of human evolution.  They are merely examples of our ability to control matter.

Nor are medical advances that extend our life expectancy.  Does it really make sense that living longer evolves our species in some way?  On the contrary, it only causes more problems.  Humans now have to compete with an ever-increasing number of humans for limited resources.  Instead of dying of quickly of natural causes, we live past our natural life expectancy and instead die slowly and miserably, often without dignity.  And the increasing human population rapidly takes away and destroys habitats for countless species of other conscious life forms, as well as using them for cruel experimental medical research, which continues the cycle and only serves to make big pharmaceutical companies even bigger.  It is all based on the mistaken assumption that we live in a cold materialistic objective reality.  Hardly evolved thinking.

All is not lost however.  Despite the war profiteers and religious nuts that contribute to the devolution of humanity, we slowly progress in the right direction.  From the Magna Carta in 1215 to the United States Bill of Rights in 1789 to broader recognition of gender and racial equality in the 20th Century, to the fact that homicide rates have dropped by a factor of 30 in Europe over the past 500 years, it can be said that this trend represents positive evolution.

Another good sign is the general trend away from religious dogma and toward spiritual growth.  The percentage of Americans who don’t identify with a particular religious preference has grown steadily from 2% in 1950 to 16% in 2010.  At the same time, the desire for “spiritual growth” has increased from 58 percent in 1994 to 82% five years later, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll.  Why is this a sign of evolution?  Because religious dogma teaches you that you are right and they are wrong, while unaffiliated spiritual discovery almost always results in the recognition that love is what really matters.

And finally, my favorite sign of human evolution is exemplified by what India did a few months ago in declaring dolphins to be “non-human persons” with similar rights including the right not to be held captive.  Three other countries have similar laws and more are sure to follow.  I believe that this, along with a significant trend away from cruel animal practices (think free range chickens, more vegetarians, and the growth of no-kill shelters) is a sure sign that more and more humans are recognizing that they aren’t the only ones with rights on this planet.  Truly evolved thinking.

So maybe there’s hope for us yet.

Filed under Consciousness, Life, Philosophy, Uncategorized Tagged with , ,

Alien Hunters Still Thinking Inside The Box (or Dyson Sphere)

May 1, 2013 3 Comments

As those who are familiar with my writing already know, I have long thought that the SETI program was highly illogical, for a number of reason, some of which are outlined here and here.

To summarize, it is the height of anthropomorphic and unimaginative thinking to assume that ET will evolve just like we did and develop radio technology at all.  Even if they did, and followed a technology evolution similar to our own, the era of high-powered radio broadcasts should be insignificant in relation to the duration of their evolutionary history.  In our own case even, that era is almost over, as we are moving to highly networked and low-powered data communication (e.g. Wi-Fi), which is barely detectable a few blocks away, let alone light years.  And even if we happened to overlap a 100-year radio broadcast era of a civilization in our galactic neighborhood, they would still never hear us, and vice versa, because the signal level required to reliably communicate around the world becomes lost in the noise of the cosmic microwave background radiation before it even leaves the solar system.

So, no, SETI is not the way to uncover extraterrestrial intelligences.

Dyson Sphere

Some astronomers are getting a bit more creative and are beginning to explore some different ways of detecting ET.  One such technique hinges on the concept of a Dyson Sphere.  Physicist Freeman Dyson postulated the idea in 1960, theorizing that advanced civilizations will continuously increase their demand for energy, to the point where they need to capture all of the energy of the star that they orbit.  A possible mechanism for doing so could be a network of satellites surrounding the solar system and collecting all of the energy of the star.  Theoretically, a signature of a distant Dyson Sphere would be a region of space emitting no visible light but generating high levels of infrared radiation as waste.  Some astronomers have mapped the sky over the years, searching for such signatures, but to no avail.

Today, a team at Penn State is resuming the search via data from infrared observatories WISE and Spitzer.  Another group from Princeton has also joined in the search, but are using a different technique by searching for dimming patterns in the data.

I applaud these scientists who are expanding the experimental boundaries a bit.  But I doubt that Dyson Spheres are the answer.  There are at least two flaws with this idea.

First, the assumption that we will continuously need more energy is false.  Part of the reason for this is the fact that once a nation has achieved a particular level of industrialization and technology, there is little to drive further demand.  The figure below, taken from The Atlantic article “A Short History of 200 Years of Global Energy Use” demonstrates this clearly.

per-capita-energy-consumption300

In addition, technological advances make it cheaper to obtain the same general benefit over time.  For example, in terms of computing, performing capacity per watt has increased by a factor of over one trillion in the past 50 years.  Dyson was unaware of this trend because Moore’s Law hadn’t been postulated until 1965.  Even in the highly corrupt oil industry, with their collusion, lobbying, and artificial scarcity, performance per gallon of gas has steadily increased over the years.

The second flaw with the Dyson Sphere argument is the more interesting one – the assumptions around how humans will evolve.  I am sure that in the booming 1960s, it seemed logical that we would be driven by the need to consume more and more, controlling more and more powerful tools as time went on.  But, all evidence actually points to the contrary.

We are in the beginning stages of a new facet of evolution as a species.  Not a physical one, but a consciousness-oriented one.  Quantum Mechanics has shown us that objective reality doesn’t exist.  Scientists are so frightened by the implications of this that they are for the most part in complete denial.  But the construct of reality is looking more and more like it is simply data.  And the evidence is overwhelming that consciousness is controlling the body and not emerging from it.  As individuals are beginning to understand this, they are beginning to recognize that they are not trapped by their bodies, nor this apparent physical reality.

Think about this from the perspective of the evolution of humanity.  If this trend continues, why will we even need the body?

Robert Monroe experienced a potential future (1000 years hence), which may be very much in line with the mega-trends that I have been discussing on theuniversesolved.com: “No sound, it was NVC [non-vocal communication]! We made it! Humans did it! We made the quantum jump from monkey chatter and all it implied.” (“Far Journeys“)

earthWe may continue to use the (virtual) physical reality as a “learning lab”, but since we won’t really need it, neither will we need the full energy of the virtual star.  And we can let virtual earth get back to the beautiful virtual place it once was.

THIS is why astronomers are not finding any sign of intelligent life in outer space, no matter what tools they use.  A sufficiently advanced civilization does not communicate using monkey chatter, nor any technological carrier like radio waves.

They use consciousness.

So will we, some day.

Filed under Consciousness, Cosmology, Future Tech, Life, Philosophy, Programmed Reality, Quantum Mechanics Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

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