Whosoever understands this message can transcend death.
If that isn’t reason enough for the Singularity to be something worth at least pondering, then I don’t know what is.
The chances are you have probably already heard about it; and you are probably one of the now (as of 2010) fairly sizable population of those who are at least Singularity-exposed: you have come across some form of the seed, perhaps through a newspaper or magazine article or a strangely fascinating dinner conversation. It certainly is getting out there. I don’t dare to estimate what the exposure level is now in the West as of mid 2010, but it has to be in the many tens of millions, at the least. Coming here to this site its even more likely that you are fairly well exposed: Singularity-aware so to speak, and you probably have read through a portion of such hefty tomes as Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near”. In the latter case, you are probably already quite well informed on the subject. Either way, I would love to (re)introduce you.
I don’t remember the exact time of my first encounter. I was exposed to the typical transhumanist precursor memes through science fiction in the early 90′s while in high school. William Gibson’s Neuromancer surely made a strong impression. Outside of science fiction, I probably first encountered transhumanism on the web during the late 90′s through sites such as Principa Cybernetica, and through Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec’s books. Its thus hard to pin the exact date, but by somewhere around age 20 I realized that I had some non-infinitesimal odds on being part of the last mortal generation. I can contrast that with a very clear memory of becoming aware of my own mortality at the tender age of five; my most vivid early memory. My father, being something of a materialist agnostic, didn’t comfort that earlier child version of myself with any of the typical religious speculative hope.
All throughout the expanse of history, across vast gulfs of time and space, culture and beliefs, children of every era have asked that same eternal question in a multitude of tongues: “will I die?”
Its not so hard to see how various religious beliefs could evolve just from a parent’s urge to provide an answer ever so slightly more comforting than that which they may consider internally. There are parents raising children today that may not have to accept mortality as some inevitable birthright. And some day soon there will come children who are neither born nor die: the first posthumans.
By design immortality will be their birthright, heaven their playground, and godhood their aspiration.
If we rise to steward their ascent with prescient grace, we can join them in a future beyond all imagination; to become something beyond: posthuman. This fate is not yet written, and although evolution does appear to be pulling us towards the Singularity, its vague and chaotic mechanisms by no means guarantee our best outcome. Across the landscape of possible or likely futures, a great multitude end in the death and suffering of billions, or even our utter extinction or the loss of all we value.
And yet, when you think about it, we don’t have to travel far into some speculative future to experience hell on earth. Its already all around us: billions today are already condemned to suffer and die in misery and pain. This is not the world of tommorrow land, but the world of the now; and even though the technologies of the 21st century could make it even unimaginably worse, they could just as easily make it unbearably better. The road ahead could lead to a future quite literally better than anything you or I could now conceivably imagine in our present forms. Its not enough to wait and watch, we must work now to create that future, to become that change.
Engineering paradise starts with a simple seed: an irresistible, insidious idea. In some sense, it was planted long ago, but I consider the literature and larger culture of the Singularity as of today to be still somewhat unwieldy for the general audience; our message is not yet efficient, streamlined or versatile enough to take root far and wide and truly influence the mind of the body public. But the seed is good, and with a little more toil and love, it can grow to become a great shelter for us all.
The key enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence and uploading may sound fantastic, but take a second to stop and look around you; ponder the technological artifacts undoubtedly surrounding you this very instant. Any of them would be initially fantastic to people of one era, yet mundane to those of the next. Singularitans have much work to do in distilling down knowledge from these fields into a more mass consumable form. There are good reasons to doubt specific timelines and the feasibility of the particulars, but consider this: can you really afford to be wrong? Quite literally everything you value is at stake: your potentially ‘immortal soul’ and much more.
Most people today can rather easily come to grips with the plausibility of AI; as it is after all so already well embedded into our culture, but many are uncomfortable – to say the least – with the concept and practicality of uploading. Most of this skepticism is well founded given the current state of progress towards the goal, and most people won’t really care or believe until the first successful uploads are demonstrated, but unfortunately most of us alive now can not afford to wait until then – it will be far too little too late.
A clear and concrete science of mind is a precursor to AI and uploading, and although the current models are not yet complete enough to actually recreate a human mind or something comparable, the body of accumulated scientific knowledge in the fields of neuro and cognitive science clearly shows how future uploading technologies can preserve what everyone cares about: personal conscious identity. Some people may still insist that uploads are somehow not the original minds, as if new original minds can spring out of nothing, but there are many possible variations of uploading, and there are at least some potential uploading technologies that very few would have problems with. People will have choices, and this is very important: there will be many paths to the posthuman.
A great deal has been written about the topic already, but the best bits still remain unwritten and unimagined. This is a summary and index into my various Singularity/Eschatological writings:
Personal Identity: What is the self? This is not a question outside the realm of objective knowledge. Most people will accept uploads and other posthuman intelligences as genuine when they actually exist and pass more strict forms of the Turing Test, but for many that will be too little too late.
An overarching theory of General Intelligence and how the human brain implements it. A consequent idea is that the human brain is a type of general intelligence agent, which has analogous properties to a general turing machine. Whereas the general turing machine can run any algorithm given sufficient quantitative capacities (space and time), a general intelligence is something of a more powerful kind – it can automatically learn algorithms which efficiently model its observable environment (and in the limit, any algorithm) given sufficient quantitative capacities.
Created in Our Image: A common misconception and fear that even many Transhumanists/Singularitans promulgate is that artificial intelligence will be inherently ‘different’, ‘unpredictable’, and ‘alien’. General intelligence theory says something quite different: all GIs (General Intelligences) are equivalent at the quantitative limit, just as all universal turing machines are equivalent. The differences between practical (limited) general intelligence designs (whether based on neurons or transistors) then are largely quantitative, as are the differences between various CPUs and kin. The more important qualitative differences for intelligences are all in the dynamic content – the learned information: the mind or ‘soul’ for people, analogous to the software and data for computers. Minds are minds whether they run on biological brains or their future computer equivalents – and minds are reflections of their information environment.
Universal rights for all sapients: Here we must take the moral high ground. From a correct understanding of intelligence and identity follows some simple conclusions: that all human-level intelligences should have equal rights, and any duplicated intelligences should have equal (albeit divided) claim to the inherited original. Worlds where superintelligence is developed for the massive economic benefit of corporations to benefit an increasingly thin slice of human stock owners are worlds which end very badly for most of us.
A streamlined roadmap to building the posthuman brain: Singularitan tomes such as “The Singularity is Near” read like a techno-utopian smörgåsbord cooking guide. Future technologies are either pre-singularity or post-singularity. All the post-singularity tech should be on the back burner so we can focus on whats really important. Achieve that, and we’ll get all the rest rather quickly – and by that, I mean instantly. Some diversity of approaches is important, but reverse engineering the cortex and building efficient software and hardware implementations should be dramatically up-prioritized. We need not a Manhattan Project, but an Apollo Program for AI. We are currently over focusing on a large number of technologies that are probably (or should be) post-singularity, such as genetic engineering in general and nanotechnology that does not relate directly to cortical engineering. There are very good reasons to believe that strong genetic engineering in particular and much of the field of nanotech will be found to be dead-ends, or at least post-singularity technologies. Cyborgs, implants, and enhanced humans in general are all routes that do not stand up to close scrutiny.
The road to The City at the End of Time: Any realistic roadmap towards posthumans and the Singularity results in the vast majority of the vastly expanded sentient population living as uploads in virtual reality. The economics and physics of acceleration dictate that intelligences will get smaller, faster, cheaper and more densely connected – big computing clusters. Whats the point of little robot bodies? The posthuman future lies entirely in inner space. A significant chunk (the majority?) of the world’s computation is already employed towards generating virtual realities for video games and films, so accelerating these consumer industries and technologies may be an effective indirect way of accelerating us towards the Singularity.
Transition: Posthuman brains built out of future silicon transistor based computers or their kin will have a massive fundamental advantage in terms of speed of thought. This, more than anything else, will define them – they will be incomprehensibly, mind numbling quick. This follows from the general observation that historical time itself appears to be accelerating. The transition itself, the event horizon of the Singularity, is thus likely to be extremely rapid from the perspective of biological humans: The Hard Rapture. How do we reduce the uncertainties and risk of global catastrophe?
The Transition Guide, or Messianic AI: It seems highly likely that the first posthuman intelligences will be new AI minds of some form, rather than uploaded humans. These noomorphs will be unborn in a sense, but will still start out as children. The task of ‘creating’ a friendly AI is thus not an engineering challenge – the engineering challenge is creating the artificial cortex. Creating a friendly AI is then really the task of raising and educating a friendly mind.
As the initial AIs will be created in virtual reality (for its vast speed advantage over reality), their creators will have complete and total control over their information environment, and can thus program them to a degree indirectly simply by very careful construction of their reality, what they experience, read, and so on. We must outline the case for creating the most friendly AI imaginable specifically to bring about a world wide harmonizing and positive Singularity. This would be a Transition Guide, a supremely powerful and loving (yes, loving) AI (or AI society) created for a very specific purpose and a unique role: that of leading us through the Transition.
The Transition Guide would work to ensure worldwide acceptance of the Singularity, a large scale shift of economic resources towards that goal, and ultimately the ending of suffering and mortality for humans on earth, largely by uploading most of the world’s population. Said uploads can further help by sharing memories with the TG, allowing it to extend its personal identity bubble even farther, and vasten in its capability for personal love: Parousia. We can look towards historical examples of leaders who have catalyzed large scale historic changes in belief, and how from such templates we could create a potential Transition Guide – or if you will, a Messiah.
The Resurrection of the Dead: How can those alive today make it to the Transition? We need to promote the right to preservation – sign the petition. Throughout history, humans of various cultures have had some pre-scientific, perhaps prescient yet futile understanding that careful preservation procedures of corpses could help ensure passage to a future after life. They were on to something in a sense, but current post-mortem preservation techniques are quite simply not up to snuff. We need to make voluntary preservation a legally viable option. Perhaps in some far future Tipler-esque version of the Singularity, computation approaches infinity, entropy can be reversed, and there is a general resurrection of the dead. But maybe not. Regardless, why not hedge your bets? And why risk missing out on most of history?
Simulation Hypothesis: What happens after the Transition? Everything. Worlds within worlds without end, amen.
If you’ve gotten this far, you should accept computationalism, uploads, the Singularity, etc., which leads us to rationally conclude that the Simulation Hypothesis is probably true. But it has several open variables: how likely is a pre-singularity extinction? How can we guess the goals of future posthuman civilization? Some of those goals are at least initially likely to be continuations of human goals, but goals change over time.
However, two observations are useful: 1. intelligent agents tend to take on larger, longer term goals as their intelligence and lifespans increase, and 2. accumulating knowledge and simulating the observable environment is how a general intelligence goes about achieving any goals – as has been formalized in AIXI. So its pretty safe to assume that future posthuman civilizations will create increasing quantities of expanding simulations, many of them historical. Put another way, posthuman civilizations will want to understand the universe, and as they expand towards the Singularity, they will simulate it on ever grander scales. Such massive scale simulations function as a sort of gold standard oracle for science – they are the fundamental test of theories, the answerer of questions. And simulation/computation is already the backbone of science, and always has been, even back when computers were just human.
God: As the Simulation Hypothesis seems so far unassailable, and posthumans are inevitably bound to create massive simulations (no matter what their other goals may be), the simulation hypothesis says either we go extinct before the Singularity, or we currently live in a simulated universe. Of course, saying we live in a simulated universe is a subtle way of saying there is a God, albeit it with some very interesting constraints. However, if our universe is one where humanity goes extinct before the Singularity, then there is no God. Put another way, the Simulation Hypothesis says that God exists only in universes where civilizations successfully progress towards a future Singularity.
God isn’t likely to exist in universes where there is no Singularity, where humanity fails. This is not only the best ever argument for God’s existence, it is also in some sense a brilliant solution to the so called theological problem of evil. God’s existence is bound to the success or failure of humanity. Furthermore, the SH suggests God is probably something like a future version of some variant of our current timeline, and we are a past variant of God’s current timeline. Joseph Smith was on to something when he said,
“As man is, God once was; as God is, man shall become.”
As we want to survive and progress towards the Singularity, we should accept that we are at least, like the American founding fathers, some form of deists. Of course, nothing about the SH – by itself – supports any of the specific claims of any of the world’s religions.
Theology: At some point far into the singularity, we will have the computational power and desire to create historical simulations complete with the recreation of human beings. This by itself raises interesting moral issues, but the straightforward approach required for accurate simulation is to recreate historical people just as they were: complete with all the entailed joy and suffering. And just as we may treat beings created in such a way when we become as gods, we should consider the likelihood of our simulation being run along similar lines. This establishes a useful framework for reasoning about the external purpose of our own simulation and the utility for the posthuman civilization behind it, aka God.
As God presents the most extreme form of existential risk imaginable, determining the existence, values and motives of one’s God should be of some interest to posthuman civilizations.
In this framework, most modern religious beliefs can be considered speculative hypothesizes, and theology comes firmly under the dominion of science. As an example, the Abrahamic religions all posit some form of external afterlife, which would be quite easy for a posthuman god to arrange – simply by saving and transfering one’s mindstate (or soul, if you will) to a separate simulation: heaven, hell, or anything in between. From a utilitarian perspective, this prospect seems dubious at best, and we can question what purpose any afterlife would have for a god to justify its opportunity costs (vs running more historically relevant, and thus useful, simulations).
This brings us to a general economic-theological conclusion about sentient lives: the existence of any sentient being in the multiverse always and everywhere has an equivalent (or greater) opportunity cost in the form of at least one other similar class of sentient being that otherwise could exist. Immortality thus can never be generally guaranteed.
The Fermi Paradox: The existence or non-existence of God is not proved through the Simulation Hypothesis until we actually progress close enough to the Singularity that we start creating a multitude of epic simulations – well into the future. But with enough simulation, any of the big cosmic questions can be answered. Take for example the Fermi Paradox, which is closely tied to the probabilities of our own survival. Given the discoveries that extra-solar planets are common in the galaxy, the abundance of amino acids, and even the possibility of interstellar bacteria, where are the ET’s?
With enough detailed simulation, we can at some point determine the various free parameters of the drake equation from first principles. Current analysis of our primitive simulations to date is polarized all across the spectrum: life and civilization is extremely rare and we were just lucky, and life and civilization is (or should be) extremely common. Note: the observational selection effect says that we can’t assume that the former scenario is unlikely soley based on in its own intrinsic probability: the chance of any civilization like ours developing at all can be arbitrarily close to zero, but is always a precondition of us existing as observers.
However, historical galactic simulations can help us narrow down the general probabilistic shape of universal development, and tell us from first principles the expected frequency of advanced civilizations appearing over time. If these simulations show that we are very early (ie lucky), this tells us that we are probably alone – or more accurately, we inhabit a historical simulation of the first civilization to arise in our neighborhood. If we learn that civilization should be common, this opens up other possibilities that explain the lack of observable aliens: either we aren’t looking in the right way, posthuman civilizations tend to expand inward rather than outward, or there is some universal constraint which prevents large scale, visible galactic expansion.
Eschatology: The traditional transhumanist eschatology as depicted by Moravec, Kurzweil, Tipler and others posits outward expansion to the galaxy and perhaps eventually the entire universe. A more compelling alternative is the inward expansion and new bubble universe creation eschatology of John Smart et al: the Evo-Devo Universe theory.
The history of the universe to date follows a clear spiral acceleration: time – as measured by the rate of change of complex events – is speeding up, and complexity is increasing in ever smaller, faster and more compressed localizations. A sober look at the physics of the Singularity shows that the path down moore’s law necessarily leads to a near black-hole like entity in our future: a physical, computational Singularity. Smart’s theory is complex and well-crafted, and in most aspects quite compelling. The ultimate fate of our civilization and universe is quite possibly to create new pocket universes, and epic simulations are the logical precursors; indeed, the constraints of physics require that ultimate computers will necessarily take the form of bizarre space-time: singularities or pocket universes. As you advance down below the nano, through to the femto realm of computing and beyond, computers inevitably start resembling increasingly bizarre space-time configurations, and eventually physical singularities themselves.
If Smart is correct, we can expect that big inter-galactic civilizations make less than sense. When the equivalent of a human life occupies one nanosecond of time and one cubic nanometer of space, the costs of interstellar travel increase beyond comprehension. But thats not even the best way to think about it. The better way to understand is to realize that the event horizon of the Singularity compresses time itself, and as you approach towards it the speed of light literally slows down, eventually reaches a crawl, and interstellar travel becomes literally impossible.
Nonetheless, even if the evo-devo universe theory is generally correct, its harder to explain why at least some portion of a posthuman civilization doesn’t spend a small portion of their local resources to at least partially seed the galaxy with artifacts left behind as they accelerate inward into new universes.
However, even if this is true, we should still not expect to see anything in the skies. If a posthuman civilization has already developed to a Singularity, it wouldn’t take long to seed the galaxy, and it probably happened long ago – at which case we probably live in one of that alien civilization’s countless simulations. The amount of time separating initial radio signal leakage and full technological Singularity is incredibly brief – the odds are such that discovering civilizations at the same moment in time is essentially nil – civilizations are probably spaced farther apart in time than they are in space.
Either way, looking in the skys for signs of aliens is the wrong place to look. Jupiter brains are completely unrealistic: posthuman civilizations must be nearly invisibly small extraordinarily compressed black-hole like entities – singularities. The future is the nanoscale, the femtoscale and beyond: as Feynman famously said, there is plenty of room at the bottom. The future is incomprehensibly small and incomprehensibly quick.
The scope of possible universes ours is embedded in is boundless, but it can be imagined as some expanding fractal tree in the multiverse, with new universes budding off from branches along the histories of other universes (and even hypothetical and tangential branches).
Historical Interventions: The simulation hypothesis and probability of alien posthuman civilizations opens up another possibility: our history may have been tampered with. This idea has been eloquently developed in science fiction, such as Arthur C Clark’s 2001. If simulations show that advanced civilizations should be common by this point in time, the correct place to look for them is not in the skys, but in our past. We could have been seeded or tampered with long ago, or our simulation itself could have been directly altered. The Singularity forces us to radically rethink the possibility of alien life: it seems probable that all civilizations develop towards local technological singularities long before interstellar travel is feasible.
Nonetheless, some tiny seed probes may be sent out. As any post-singularity civilization entering the space of a pre-Singularity stellar neighborhood would be a case of divine intervention, the two types of interventions are very similar in effect and difficult to distinguish. They may show up in our historical simulations as extremely unusual or unlikely events, which stubbornly fail to develop in even the most epic simulations. Some would be subtle yet detectable with enormous simulation, such as slight alterations of asteroid trajectories to intentionally create evolution jarring impacts, which were powerful evolutionary catalysts at several points in Earth’s history.
There are many ways to seed the galaxy with intelligence, and the planet dismantling scenarios of Moravec and Kurzweil will likely be considered primitive and tasteless to future deities (or their scattered artifacts) – similar to the romantic notion of humans spreading out in space galleons and colonizing the galaxy with Charles Babbage’s Difference Engines.
On the other side of the spectrum is the possibility of unsubtle, jarring interventions – the kind that are fairly obvious and point directly towards an external divine influence. Most of the world’s religions claim that our history has been very obviously divinely altered on at least one occasion, and some believe our history is a convoluted half functional mess that God must contantly keep in motion, like a poor windup clock that keeps breaking down.
Intervention Candidates and Critera: If life and civilization should be common by this point in time (as many suspect based on current models and recent discoveries of high numbers of extrasolar planets), and if the simulation hypothesis holds (which we will know to be true as we make it towards the Singularity), then having rationally accepted Deism, we need to consider Theism – ie consider the real possibility of historical interventions in our timeline.
Some possible candidates, such as the massive, evolution jolting impact events mentioned earlier, can be investigated in the future given sufficient computation for large scale simulation (and reverse simulation) of our galaxy over timespans of billions of years, combined with ever more detailed and precise knowledge of the current physical state of the galaxy acquired from astronomical observation. At a whole other level of scale is to consider possible more recent interventions in human history. In any case, the criteria is the same: a potential intervention should be a high impact historical event.
A likely intervention would be a supremely improbable history shifting event as determined by extensive historical simulations. The origins of recent religions are all good examples of high impact historical events, and in particular all the major western religions claim to originate from interventions along these lines. Mormons believe that Joseph Smith found buried tablets that reveled direct divine communication, Islam has a similar origin, and Christians believe that God intervened two thousand years ago in the form of divine information incarnating as a human being – a message in the form of a messenger. Its important to note that any of these events are potential intervention candidates operating purely in the noosphere: the realm of memes, culture, and ideas. Physical evidence of some supernatural intervention, while interesting, is not necessary, and would nonetheless not be sufficient without intrinsic information content regardless.
If a massive gold table spontaneously materialized in the white house lawn tommorrow with the inscription of 2+2=2 on it, that would certainly be something, but it wouldn’t tell us much (a lump of matter, but no novel information content). So a real intervention must necessarily take the form of novel information content, strange and highly improbable memes appearing out of the evolutionary context – how they appear is fully irrelevant.
A clear example would be all the memes of the Singularity itself appearing in a historical timeframe where, lacking all of the subsequent prerequisite knowledge, such memes would be extraordinarily unlikely to develop in a natural evolutionary context, and would be generally incomprehensible to the population of the time. Even a cursory examination of the history of religion shows that religions clearly develop along evolutionary trends: Islam as an offshoot of Judao-Christianity, and Christianity itself as an unstable melding of the Hellenistic stream with Judaism. Within these natural developments, we are looking for anachronisms: the analogs of finding human fossils in the dinosaur era.
The Christianity-Singularity Conundrum: Even a cursory glance over the key ideas of the Singularity movement reveals a startling similarity to some of the main currents of Christianity. Many religions posit some form of an afterlife, but the more specific eschatological ideas circulating in Christianity have close matches to the future according to the Singularity: the Resurrection of the dead into new non-physical incarnations, the Parousia: the emergence or (reemergence) of a divine presence and direct communion with that presence (concretely explored by transhumanist ideas of uploads mind-melding into super-beings), and the Apocalypse and the Rapture: some final cataclysmic events and the rapid uploading of some portion of the population, possibly with a portion of remaining biological humans ‘left behind’ – a range of possible scenarios considered by both Singularitans and Christians alike.
These two streams of thought have enough surface similarity to even be of some concern for Singularitans themselves: some critics dismiss the Singularity as some new mutated form of Christian ideas. The concern has some legitimacy: although some similarities can be explained by coincidence, the Singularity movement clearly inherited ideas from science fiction and the larger culture at large, and thus from the predominant eschatology in the west. Religions, after all, are essentially true science fiction (for their believers). The prevailing scientific viewpoint presents a view of the past (and future) where humanity has little cosmic role, but the Singularity – like Christianity – puts humanity (or future humanity) back clearly on the center stage. It is these large conflicts, and the similarity to Christianity, that put many at odds with the Singularity movement. This is unfortunate, for the Singularity stands on its own merits as the most reasonable projection of our future based on current scientific knowledge.
The Logos Intervention Hypothesis: The memes of the Singularity may have a much deeper connection to some of the older currents circulating in Christianity than a cursory surface analysis would suggest. Religions, like any other cultural constructs, evolve over time. Ancient documents were replicated and recombined in ways much like the imperfect replication of DNA in organisms, and in many cases were edited or recombined in a fashion similar to the blatant swapping of genes enjoyed by bacterium. Textual scholars have developed techniques to track these evolutionary developments, establish historical relations, and even attempt reconstructions.
In the case of Christianity, where the founder is not believed to have authored a definitive book to seed the religion, the memetic history as traced through recovered source materials shows a set of memes largely different than that which later Christianity eventually evolved into. A major and startling re-discovery of memes arrived in 1945, with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library and a large collection of lost texts, including a simple yet bizarre sayings collection called the Gospel of Thomas, which has ignited a wide ranging debate about the origins of Christianity and the core of its message. A deeper analysis of the surviving and reconstructed logia, and the GoT portions in particular, leads to the reasonable conclusion that this is in fact a case for a potential intervention event.
I realize this is a radical conjecture, especially for most transhumanists, but most transhumanists have not studied early Christianity and the Logia – so bear with me. The textual evidence for anachronistic memes in the Logia is rather remarkable, and the Simulation Hypothesis, the Singularity, and the current estimates for likelihood of alien civilization should cause us all to significantly up-estimate the prior probability for intervention events. Remember, alien civilizations should be common, and if they are they almost certainly found us long ago. Its hard to say whether we live in a posthuman ancestral simulation or an alien hypothetical forward projection simulation, but regardless, we almost certainly live in one or the other – and they are difficult to distinguish in any case.
The Gospel of Thomas is quite unique: it is just a collection of sayings, or logia – memes in raw form. There is no mention of miracles, no narrative history, no action, no biography, nothing of that sort – only raw memes. Well before it was (re)discovered, scholars had in fact anticipated that such sayings collections were the form of the earliest recorded documents in the movement, and the authors of the canonical Gospels are believed to have combined such sayings collections along with oral tradition and other sources to create their full novel treatments.
Through pure evolutionary textual analysis, scholars had reached general agreement about the existence of a sayings collection called Q, well before Thomas was found. You can imagine the surprise then when scholars had hypothesized that such sayings collections were the earliest source documents, had even hypothesized their content, and then Thomas is discovered, and low and behold it is such a sayings collection. Thomas is not exactly Q, but overlaps with it significantly – its >60% or so hypothetical Q. Thomas’s versions of parables and sayings are in all most all cases found to be older and more well preserved than variants from the canonicals. Nonetheless I will refer to the overall superset of sayings (regardless of source) as simply: the Logia.
The Logia’s overall message is that of a massive disruptive event in humanity’s future, which will correspond to the end of mortality and entering paradise, but only through the transition to an era where children are no longer physically born and humans have radically transcended biology. The logia even posits that understanding, and thus the transformation itself, is destined for future generations. Logia in the GoT in particular (such as the remarkable #22) discuss the specific steps associated with this transformation: the creation of a new embodiment with new eyes(vision/sensing), feet, and hands(interaction), the end of sexually fixed identities, and even the merging and duplication of identities – contentious philosophical issue surrounding uploading. These ideas are part of the core of the transhumanist vision today – ideas which would be rather incomprehensible to those of the original era – which is explicitly addressed in the logia. To give a little taste, lets look at a rather remarkable logion.
GoT #22 excerpt:
“When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [untranslatable].”
At the center of the Logia is a complex concept – usually translated as just ‘the Kingdom’ in Thomas, which is eschatological in nature. Logia 22 is the cornerstone of the text, the only logion which concretely describes the criteria or process for entering the future transformative state of the ‘the Kingdom’. In the rest of the Logia surviving through the New Testament, the Kingdom is only described indirectly through koan-like parables, and in a few cases is explicitly declared a secret teaching, to be revealed only in private. In saying 22 in the GoT, we get a unique glimpse into the core memes in a more literal, non-parable form: and they are highly unusual to say the least.
The logia that are metaphorical in nature are explicitly so – they are parables. Saying 22 is not a parable, and the straightforward, simplest interpretation is that it is intended to mean just what it says. We can only enter heaven (the kingdom, paradise, etc) when we are reborn through the creation of a new embodiment (characterized by new organs of sense, actuation and mobility), transcending biology and its most defining characteristic – sexuality, but moreover entering an entire new realm that completely merges the inner world of the mind with the outer world experienced.
We have fashioned early replacement eyes in the form of physical and virtual cameras, and as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, these function as digital extensions of the human nervous system. A robotic eye that just replaces the functionality of your real eyes changes nothing and is not transformative in the slightest. A virtual camera and associated computer graphics rendering system that extends your sight and allows you to see into the inner realms of thought itself, directly into the metaverse or noosphere – now that is a new eye that is different in kind. That is a true transformative extension of the human nervous system.
But just having new eyes is not enough, for as Mcluhan pointed out, television allows you to enter innerspace, but only as a complete cripple. To be fully present, you need new organs of locomotion and actuation – new feet and hands. You need a new virtual body and a direct neural interface to completely immerse in virtual reality, as in the Matrix as envisioned in Neuromancer by William Gibson. And then to go past that, you need to replace the entire physical form completely, replacing your current image with a new image. This is the key to entering.
The innerverse, the metaverse, the noosphere, the kingdom, whatever you want to call it – it has been around since human minds came into shape through language. We enter it in a limited form now, but to completely cross over, we must eventually upload: die and be reborn.
Another logion says that once achieving this transition, we will “become the sons of man, and we will say to the mountain ‘move’, and it will be moved.” Literally, the Logia says that this transition is to a new generation of beings, and these beings will have absolute reality altering, godlike powers. Naturally, becoming posthumans we will have these powers (to full extent in virtual reality, to a lesser extent in prime reality, but remember going forward all realities become virtual).
When considering what would constitute a genuine intervention, remember that advanced technological concepts (such as computers), would be not only be incomprehensible in much earlier eras, but impossible to even translate, and going from the concept of computers to the concepts of the Singularity is a difficult progression for most even in our own highly advanced technological era.
Finally, a key message of the Logia is that they constitute a form of information seed, a seed which will spread out upon minds and eventually grow into the transformative event itself – ie, the Singularity. This message is addressed in the parables of the mustard seed and the sower. Considering the aforementioned developmental memetic relationship between Christianity and the Singularity, this is especially interesting.
At some point in our near future, epic simulations could help us understand the typical shape of historical development in the few thousand years leading up to Singularities, how likely they are to occur, and so on. Christianity’s general development seems evolutionarily pre-destined and typical, but the specific prescient elements in the Logia reviewed here do not, and may turn out to be evidence for the influence of a higher power: possibly to bring about an otherwise unlikely Singularity, or somehow shape its development. A full treatment of the Logia is a much deeper topic, there are dozens of other fascinating highly specific and anachronistic transhumanist memes in the Logia, please refer to the larger article for the in-depth analysis.
Towards the Singularitan Post-Religion: The concepts of the Singularity outlined and sketched here posit a radical departure from the typical western worldview of the 20th century. And even though awareness of the Singularity is certainly spreading, it is still a tiny minority view, and faces enormous obstacles in the form of resistance from established social, political, and religious forces. To bring about a positive Singularity, it is crucial that the message spreads and catalyzes not only the necessary economic commitment directed towards the proper technological channels, but the public awareness as well.
Every day, some 150,000 people die – true irreversible entropic annihilation that will be difficult or impossible to undo given even final near Singularity-level technology. This represents not only a profound moral tragedy, but a great loss of the planet’s only true cosmically valuable quantity – unique information. As the world’s largest religion, and by far the dominant religion of the west, representing the worldview of roughly three in four Americans, Christianity is the main social-cultural system that will be threatened by the emerging Singularity worldview.
Singularitans should thus be especially concerned with how to form a bridge of beliefs, a bridge to allow the far greater Christian population to become Singularity-aware and eventually pro-Singularity. Change is difficult, and changing minds even more so, but the great similarities between Christianity and the Singularity worldview suggest such an integration is possible. Indeed, if the Logia intervention hypothesis is correct, then the Singularity has a much deeper connection to the origin of Christianity, and the Singularity can rightly be seen as the unfolding of a two thousand year old historical intervention plan. Regardless, its time that science embraces theological issues, and we all come to accept that any question, including all theological questions – such as the existence of God – can and will eventually be answered, if we can survive.
Finally, the Singularity could take great advantage of the organizational and economic features of successful modern religions. If the Singularity movement was as organized and well-funded as the Mormon or Catholic Churches, for example, we could have a positive Singularity in five to ten years. Everything is at stake, and make no mistake, this is a race against time. The current trajectories of our society seem just as likely to be heading towards a much darker outcome. This is an age of heroes. We stand on the brink.
History is the shockwave of the Eschaton. – Terrance Mckenna
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