Lapidarium

Apr
25th

Wed

“We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). (…) The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade; that is, paradigm shift times are halving every decade (and the rate of acceleration is itself growing exponentially).

So, the technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 200 centuries. In contrast, the twentieth century saw only about 25 years of progress (again at today’s rate of progress) since we have been speeding up to current rates. So the twenty-first century will see almost a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor.”

— Ray Kurzweil, American author, scientist, inventor and futurist, The Law of Accelerating Returns, KurzweilAI, March 7, 2001.
See also: ☞ Waking Life. Eamonn Healy speaks about telescopic evolution and the future of humanity

Jun
26th

Sun

“The old computing is about what computers can do, the new computing is about what people can do.”

— Ben Shneiderman, American computer scientist, and professor for Computer Science at the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland

Apr
21st

Thu

Lawrence Krauss and Werner Herzog on the future of man

Werner Herzog: “It’s quite evident that human beings, as a species, will vanish and fairly quickly. When I say quickly, maybe in two or three thousand years, maybe 30,000 years, maybe 300,000, but not much more, because we are much more vulnerable than other species, despite a certain amount of intelligence. (…)

I’m not speaking of self-destruction, which could happen, of course, but that many events thinkable out there which would instantly wipe us out.

Lawrence Krauss: Oh, absolutely. That’s likely to happen. That will inevitably happen anyway. But I think there might be a rosier future. Just let me throw one thing in which I think is rosy. (…)

I’m not sure it’s the rosy future that some people would think about. But, you know, I’ve talked about the fact that, you know, we imagine we are the pinnacle of evolution, but I doubt that’s the case.

And in fact, I think it’s quite clear to me in the long run that I think computers will one day be - if we persist as a species to develop them - will one day become self-aware and conscious, and it’ll be obvious to me that they’re much, much - they’ll probably be much superior to us, and biology will have to, in some way, adapt to them. (…)

So I think, you know, we may disappear as a species just because we become irrelevant, as well as being destroyed. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. That’s just - that may be the future.

And I think, you know, I think where I really would agree with what - certainly what Werner said, in some sense, is that we shouldn’t be - and with Cormac - we shouldn’t be depressed if we disappear. We should be thrilled that we’re here right now.

I see no purpose in the universe, from science, and that doesn’t depress me. That just means we should make the most of our brief moment in the sun. (…)

Sometimes, when you try and confront the real world, as a scientist, it’s terrifying because it forces you to throw away a lot of things you believe. And sometimes, you have to go away from it. And I think - that’s what I mean. I think the convergence of science and art in the sense that if -that what that science was saying is confronted with the reality of those caves (unintelligible).

And I - and even as a theoretical physicist, sometimes just alone at night, confronted with the possibility that the real universe might actually correspond to something you’re thinking about is terrifying. (…)

And in some ways, we have to realize that, yet, once again, we have to confront our own, in some sense, an unfriendly universe potentially, but also our own insignificance in a cosmic sense, and what significance we make of ourselves. To me, part of it is our ability to - this amazing gift we have to appreciate the universe and imagine it not just as it is but as it might be in order to understand ourselves better. That’s why I find this connection.”

— Lawrence Krauss, American Theoretical Physicist, Werner Herzog, German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and opera director, Connecting Science and Art, NPR, April 8, 2011.

Mar
25th

Fri

Mark Changizi: The path to enhancing our brains is not to change or add to it, but to harness it in altogether novel fashions

“As I recently discussed in a “manifesto” of sorts, the key to our future human development will be technology that harnesses our brain’s evolved functional powers. That’s how we got to be the humans we take ourselves to be today, so radically different from our essentially genetically identical Homo sapiens ancestors. Chief among those differences are writing, speech, and music (arguably the pinnacle of the arts) – I argue in my research and books that cultural selection has acted over time to shape these core artifacts to fit our brains like a glove, redirecting brilliant ancestral powers into modern ones. We read, for example, not because we evolved by natural selection to read, but because writing culturally evolved to be shaped like the fundamental contour combinations found in natural scenes (I call it nature-harnessing), just what our visual system is optimized to process.

This “harnessing humans” vision is an intrinsically humanistic one, and is in stark contrast to the “sci-fi” flavor of the artificial-brains prognosticators. In fact, rather than sci-fi, my viewpoint is best illustrated by another genre of fiction: fantasy, and, in particular, the magic found within it. (…)

The biologically innate powers hundreds of millions of years of evolution gave us are like magic. They are ancient, inscrutable and potent, and should be studied, safeguarded and revered. And just as you can’t beat magic with human invention, we cannot hope to out-engineer our brains and bodies.

The human condition has been granted a finite number of “magical powers,” and the best route to moving forward is to exploit those powers in new ways. The path to enhancing our brains is not to change or add to it, but to harness it in altogether novel fashions.

In my “manifesto” I suggested that via understanding how culture harnessed us we are in a better position to intentionally harness our brains more effectively, with the hope of tapping into powers far beyond that which any artificial brain is likely to wield for a long, long time.”

— Mark Changizi (evolutionary neurobiologist, cognitive scientist, aiming to grasp the ultimate foundations underlying why we think, feel and see as we do), Harnessing Humans, Forbes, March 25, 2011. See also: Mark Changizi on Humans, Version 3.0.

Mar
18th

Fri

“If you build a machine that makes connections between everything, accumulates all the data in the world, and you then harness all available minds to collectively teach it where the meaningful connections and meaningful data are (Who is searching Whom?) while implementing deceptively simple algorithms that reinforce meaningful connections while physically moving, optimizing and replicating the data structures accordingly - if you do all this you will, from highly economical (yes, profitable) position arrive at a result - an intelligence — that is “not as far off as people think.”

— George Dyson, scientific historian cited in Kevin Kelly, Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism, The Technium, October 24, 2008.

Mar
3rd

Thu

Samuel Butler on “mechanical life” (1863)

“Our present business lies with considerations which may somewhat tend to humble our pride and to make us think seriously of the future prospects of the human race. If we revert to the earliest primordial types of mechanical life, to the lever, the wedge, the inclined plane, the screw and the pulley, or (for analogy would lead us one step further) to that one primordial type from which all the mechanical kingdom has been developed. (…)

We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at. (…)

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question. (…)

For the present we shall leave this subject, which we present gratis to the members of the Philosophical Society. Should they consent to avail themselves of the vast field which we have pointed out, we shall endeavour to labour in it ourselves at some future and indefinite period.”

— Samuel Butler (signed Cellarius), Darwin among the Machines, The Press newspaper on 13 June 1863 in Christchurch, New Zealand. The article raised the possibility that machines were a kind of “mechanical life” undergoing constant evolution, and that eventually machines might supplant humans as the dominant species. See also: A First Year in Canterbury Settlement With Other Early Essays

Feb
23rd

Wed

Mark Changizi on Humans, Version 3.0.

The next giant leap in human evolution may not come from new fields like genetic engineering or artificial intelligence, but rather from appreciating our ancient brains.

“It is this unheralded mechanism that will usher in the next stage of human, giving future people exquisite powers we do not currently possess, powers worthy of natural selection itself. And, importantly, it doesn’t require us to transform into cyborgs or bio-engineered lab rats. It merely relies on our natural bodies and brains functioning as they have for millions of years.

This mystery mechanism of human transformation is neuronal recycling, coined by neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, wherein the brain’s innate capabilities are harnessed for altogether novel functions.

This view of the future of humankind is grounded in an appreciation of the biologically innate powers bestowed upon us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. This deep respect for our powers is sometimes lacking in the sciences, where many are taught to believe that our brains and bodies are taped-together, far-from-optimal kluges. (…)

These and other inborn capabilities we take for granted are not kluges, they’re not “good enough,” and they’re more than merely smart. They’re astronomically brilliant in comparison to anything humans are likely to invent for millennia. (…)

Like all animal brains, human brains are not general-purpose universal learning machines, but, instead, are intricately structured suites of instincts optimized for the environments in which they evolved. To harness our brains, we want to let the brain’s brilliant mechanisms run as intended—i.e., not to be twisted. Rather, the strategy is to twist Y into a shape that the brain does know how to process. (…)

There is a very good reason to be optimistic that the next stage of human will come via the form of adaptive harnessing, rather than direct technological enhancement: It has already happened.

We have already been transformed via harnessing beyond what we once were. We’re already Human 2.0, not the Human 1.0, or Homo sapiens, that natural selection made us. We Human 2.0’s have, among many powers, three that are central to who we take ourselves to be today: writing, speech, and music (the latter perhaps being the pinnacle of the arts). Yet these three capabilities, despite having all the hallmarks of design, were not a result of natural selection, nor were they the result of genetic engineering or cybernetic enhancement to our brains. Instead, and as I argue in both The Vision Revolution and my forthcoming Harnessed, these are powers we acquired by virtue of harnessing, or neuronal recycling. (…)

After all, the change from Human 1.0 to 2.0 is nothing short of universe-rattling: It transformed a clever ape into a world-ruling technological philosopher.

Although the step from Human 1.0 to 2.0 was via cultural selection, not via explicit human designers, does the transformation to Human 3.0 need to be entirely due to a process like cultural evolution, or might we have any hope of purposely guiding our transformation? (…)

The point is, most science fiction gets all this wrong. While the future may be radically “futuristic,” with our descendants having breathtaking powers we cannot fathom, it probably won’t be because they evolved into something new, or were genetically modified, or had AI-chip enhancements. Those powerful beings will simply be humans, like you and I. But they’ll have been nature-harnessed in ways we cannot anticipate, the magic latent within each of us used for new, brilliant Human 3.0 capabilities.”

— Mark Changizi (cognitive scientist, author), Humans, Version 3.0., SEED.com, Feb 23, 2011 See also: Prof. Stanislas Dehaene, “How do humans acquire novel cultural skills? The neuronal recycling model”, LSE Institute | Nicod, (Picture source: Rzeczpospolita)

Feb
12th

Sat

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”

— Irving John Good, mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing

Jan
9th

Sun

Timothy Leary on cybernetics and a new global culture

M. C. Escher, Peeled faces
“Cyber” means “pilot.”

A “cyberperson” is one who pilots his/her own life. By definition, the cyberperson is fascinated by navigational information - especially maps, charts, labels, guides, manuals that help pilot one through life. The cyberperson continually searches for theories, models, paradigms, metaphors, images, icons that help chart and define the realities that we inhabit.

“Cybertech” refers to the tools, appliances, and methodologies of knowing and communicating. Linguistics. Philosophy. Semantics. Semiotics. Practical epistemologies. The ontologies of daily life. Words, icons, pencils, printing presses, screens, keyboards, computers, disks.

“Cyberpolitics” introduces the Foucault notions of the use of language and linguistic-tech by the ruling classes in feudal and industrial societies to control children, the uneducated, and the under classes. The words “governor” or “steersman” or “G-man” are used to describe those who manipulate words and communication devices in order to control, to bolster authority-feudal, management, government-and to discourage innovative thought and free exchange. (…)

Cyberpunks use all available data-input to think for themselves. (…) The classical Olde Westworld model for the cyberpunk is Prometheus, a technological genius who “stole” fire from the Gods and gave it to humanity. Prometheus also taught his gene pool many useful arts and sciences. (…)

The cyberpunk person, the pilot who thinks clearly and creatively, using quantum-electronic appliances and brain know-how, is the newest, updated, top-of-the-line model of the 21st Century: Homo sapiens sapiens cyberneticus. (p. 62-64.) (…)

The term “cybernetics” comes from the Greek word kubernetes, “pilot”. The Hellenic origin of this word is important in that it reflects the Socratic-Platonic traditions of independence and individual self-reliance which, we are told, derived from geography. The proud little Greek city-states were perched on peninsular fingers wiggling down into the fertile Mediterranean Sea, protected by mountains from the land-mass armies of Asia.

Mariners of those ancient days had to be bold and resourceful. Sailing the seven seas without maps or navigational equipment, they were forced to develop independence of thought. The self-reliance that these Hellenic pilots developed in their voyages probably carried over to the democratic, inquiring, questioning nature of their land life.

The Athenian cyberpunks, the pilots, made their own navigational decisions. (p. 64.) (…)

Cyber: The Greek word kubernetes, when translated to Latin, comes out as gubernetes. This basic verb gubernare means to control the actions or behavior, to direct, to exercise sovereign authority, to regulate, to keep under, to restrain, to steer. This Roman concept is obviously very different from the Hellenic notion of “pilot” (making their own navigational decisions) (…) the meaning of “Cyber” has been corrupted. The Greek word “pilot” becomes “governor” or “director”; the term “to steer” becomes “to control”. The terms “cybernetic person” or “cybernaut” return us to the original meaning of “pilot” and puts the self-reliant person back in the loop. (p. 66.) (…)

These words (and the more pop term “cyberpunk”) refer to the personalization (and thus the popularization) of knowledge-information technology, to innovative thinking on the part of the individual.

According to McLuhan and Foucault, if you change the language, you change the society. Following their lead, we suggest that the therm “cybernetic person, cybernaut” may describe a new species model of human being and a new social order. (p. 67.) (…)

The postpolitical information society, which we are now developing, does not operate on the basis of obedience and conformity to dogma. It is based on individual thinking, scientific know-how, quick exchange of facts around feedback networks, high-tech ingenuity, and practical, front-line creativity. The society of the future no longer grudgingly tolerates a few open-minded innovators. The cybernetic society is totally dependent on a large pool of such people, communicating at light speed with each other across state lines and national boundaries.

Electrified thoughts invite fast feedback, creating new global societies that require a higher level of electronic know-how, psychological sophistication, and open-minded intelligence.

This cybercommunication process is accelerating so rapidly that to compete on the world information market of the 21st Century, nations, companies, even families must be composed of change-oriented, innovative individuals who are adepts in communicating via the new cyberelectronic technologies.

The new breeds are simply much smarter than the old guard. They inhale new information the way they breathe oxygen. They stimulate each other to continually upgrade and reformat their minds. People who use cybertechnology to make fast decisions on their jobs are not going to go home and passively let aging, closed-minded white, male politicians make decidions about their lives.

The emergence of this new open-minded caste in different countries around the world is the central historical issue of the last forty years. (p. 73-75.)

(…) The social and political implications of this democratization of the screen are enormous. In the past to local geography or occasional visits. Now you can play electronic tennis with a pro in Tokyo, interact with classroom in Paris, cyberflirt with cute guys in any four cities of your choice. A global fast-feedback language of icons and memes, facilitated by instant translation devices, will smoothly eliminate the barriers of language that have been responsible for most of the war and conflict of the last centuries. (p. 76.) (…)

Most young people in the liberated lands want to depoliticize, demilitarize, decentralize, secularize, and globalize.

The new breed is jumping the gene pools, forming postindustrial, global meme-pools. They are the informates. From their earliest years, most of their defining memes have come flashing at light speed across borders in digital-electronic form, light signals received by screens and radios and record players. Their habitat is the electron-sphere, the environment of digital signals that is called the info-world. The global village.

The are the first generation of our species to discover and explore Cyberia. The are migrating not to a new place, but to a wide-open new time. The new breed will fashion, conceive, and design the realities they inhabit. (p.77.) (…)

The Information age (1950-2010)

In the information age, evolution is defined in terms of brain power.

- The ability to operate the brain: activate, boot up, turn on, access neurochannels.
- The ability to reformat and re-edit mind-files.
- The ability to communicate in the multimedia mode; to invent audiographic dictionaries and audiographic grammars. (…)

The 21st Century will witness a new global culture, peopled by new breeds who honour human individuality, human complexity, and human potential, enlightened immortals who communicate at light speed and design the technologies for their scientific re-animation. (p. 80-82.) (…)

Our survival asset is not hive inteliigence, as in the social insects, but individual intelligence. Our species is classified as Homo sapiens sapiens. Victorian scholars apparently decided that we are the creatures who “think about thinking.” Our growth as a species centers on our ability to think and communicate. Predictions about our future would focus on improvements in the way we think.

Our young, rookie species has recently passed through several stages of intelligence:

1. Tribal: For at least 22,000 years (approximately 25,000 to 3000 B.C.) the technologies for sapient thinking-communicating were those of a five-year-old child: bodily, i.e., oral-gestural.

2. Feudal: During an exciting period of approximately 3, 350 years (3000 B.C. to A.D. 350) humans living north of the 35th-parallel latitute developed organized feudal-agricultural societies. The technologies for thinking-communicating were hand-tooled statues, temples, monuments. Their philosophy was enforced by emperors, caliphs, and kings.

3. It took approximately 1,250 years (A.D. 350 to 1600) to coopt the feudal kings and to establish the mechanical assembly-line managerial society. In this age, the technologies of thought-communication were mechanical printing presses, type-writers, telephones, produced by efficient workers in highly organized factories, run by centralized bureaucracies. (…)
By now (…) we have migrated from the “real worlds” of voice, hand, machine into the digitized info-worlds variously called hyperspace, cyberspace, or digital physics.

This migration across the screen into the digital info-world marks the first phase of the postindustrial society. (…)
In twenty years we will spend seven hours a day actively navigating, exploring, colonizing, exploiting the oceans and continents of digital data. Interscreening - creating mutual digitalrealities - will be the most popular and growthful form of human communication. (p. 83.) (…)

The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains.

Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.” (p. 248.)

— Timothy Leary, American psychologist and writer (1920-1996), Chaos & Cyber Culture, Ronin Pub, 1994 See also:
☞ The Rise of the Conversation Society: information, communication and collaboration
☞ Luciano Floridi on the future development of the information society
☞ Cyberspace tag on Lapidarium

Dec
9th

Thu

“In the ascending spiral of evolution each new generation absorbs the experiences of the previous level and expands upon them…This “consciousness expansion” has reached a velocity of evolutionary acceleration at which several transformations occur within the life-span of a single generation. Because of mankind’s inevitable symbiosis with the mind-manifesting hallucinogens of the ecology on the one hand, and his organic partnership with machines on the other, an increasing number of the inhabitants of this planet live virtually in another world.”

— Gene Youngblood, theorist of media arts and politics, and a respected scholar in the history and theory of alternative cinemas, Expanded Cinema cited in Jason Silva, Imaginary Foundation, Connecting All The Dots - Jason SIlva on Big think, Dec 2010

Jason Silva, Sanford Kwinter & Gene Youngblood on cyberspace

“As Sanford Kwinter describes “the boundaryless new medium of “virtual” reality is not a simulated environment, as many continue to claim, but a new space altogether… Cyberspace, of course, as the now classic adage goes, is “where we are when we are talking on the telephone.” It is, in other words, neither in a Here nor a There, but is a continual process of articulation…. In other words, it is not where “we” are at all, but where our Attention is within a promiscuous, multidimensional, electromagnetic matrix, even when our bodies are hopelessly fixed in viscous Euclidean “real space”. (…)

Gene Youngblood seems to agree in Expanded Cinema:
“The computer does not make man obsolete. It makes him fail-safe. The computer does not replace man. It liberates him from specialization…The computer is the arbiter of radical evolution: it changes the meaning of life. It makes us children. We must learn how to live all over again.” He continues… “It is the belief of those who work in cybernetic art that the computer is the tool that someday will erase the division between what we feel and what we see.” (…)

R. Buckminster Fuller adds:
“The most important part about tomorrow is not the technology or the automation, but that man is going to come into entirely new relationships with his fellow men. He will retain much more in his everyday life of what we term the naïveté and idealism of the child. I think the way to see what tomorrow is going to look like is just to look at our children.”

— Jason Silva, Imaginary Foundation, Connecting All The Dots - Jason SIlva on Big think, Dec 2010

“To understand is to perceive patterns” — Imaginary Foundation

Ray Kurzweil too, expounds on this idea of the power of patterns: “I describe myself as a patternist, and believe that if you put matter and energy in just the right pattern you create something that transcends it. Technology is a good example of that: you put together lenses and mechanical parts and some computers and some software in just the right combination and you create a reading machine for the blind. It’s something that transcends the semblance of parts you’ve put together. That is the nature of technology, and it’s the nature of the human brain.

Biological molecules put in a certain combination create the transcending properties of human intelligence; you put notes and sounds together in just the rightcombination, and you create a Beethoven symphony or a Beatles song. So patterns have a power that transcends the parts of that pattern.”

R. Buckminster Fuller refers to us as “pattern integrities.” “Understanding order begins with understanding patterns,” he was known to say. E.J. White, who worked with Fuller, says that: “For Fuller, the thinking process is not a matter of putting anything into the brain or taking anything out; he defines thinking as the dismissal of irrelevancies, as the definition of relationships” — in other words, thinking is simultaneously a form of filtering out the data that doesn’t fit while highlighting the things that do fit together… We dismiss whatever is an “irrelevancy” and retain only what fits, we form knowledge by ‘connecting the dots’… we understand things by perceiving patterns — we arrive at conclusions when we successfully reveal these patterns.

Fuller’s primary vocation is as a poet. All his disciplines and talents — architect, engineer, philosopher, inventor, artist, cartographer, teacher — are just so many aspects of his chief function as integrator… the word “poet” is a very general term for a person who puts things together in an era of great specialization when most people are differentiating or taking things apart… For Fuller, the stuff of poetry is the patterns of human behavior and the environment, and the interacting hierarchies of physics and design and industry. This is why he can describe Einstein and Henry Ford as the greatest poets of the 20th century.” (…)

Barry Ptolemy’s film Transcendent Man reminds us that the universe has been unfolding in patterns of greater complexity since the beginning of time. Says Ptolemy:
“First of all we are all patterns of information. Second, the universe has been revealing itself as patterns of information of increasing order since the big bang. From atoms, to molecules, to DNA, to brains, to technology, to us now merging with that technology. So the fact that this is happening isn’t particularly strange to a universe which continues to evolve and unfold at ever accelerating rates.”

— Jason Silva, Venezuelan-American television personality, filmmaker, gonzo journalist and founding producer/host for Current TV, Connecting All The Dots - Jason Silva on Big think, Dec 2010

Nov
17th

Wed

“To an increasing extent every machine comes into being as a function of every other machine; and, again to an increasing extent, all the machines on earth, taken together, tend to form a single, vast, organized mechanism. Necessarily following the inflexive tendency of the zoological phyla, the mechanical phyla in their turn curve inward in the case of man, thus accelerating and multiplying their own growth and forming a single gigantic network girdling the earth. And the basis, the inventive core of this vast apparatus, what is it if not the thinking-centre of the noosphere?”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The Formation of the Noosphere” Revue des Questions Scientifiques (Louvain), pp. 7-35, January 1947, cited in Teilhard de Chardin’s The Future of Man, pp. 165-166, New York: Harper & Row, 1964.

Oct
21st

Thu

Wildcat and Jason Silva on immortality

Raphael, Mercury Offering The Cup of Immortality To Psyche
Wildcat: “And yet it is our desire and probably our duty to deny our biological ‘end-all time stop’ and extend the moments of pleasure of beingness into a longer state of existence, a state that will not be plagued by old age and illness, a state that will allow us to take our evolutionary destiny in our hands.
There are many reasons why we should want to extend our lives, to actually slow or even reverse the entropy of our bodies and the most natural may be because, it is simply the highest form of beauty we can conceive of.

To my eyes longevity and eventually immortality can and should be conceived as a canvas upon which we will paint our own masterpiece, a design of such grand proportions and ambition that to work it out demands time, lots of time, and hence a large canvas is needed, an immense all encompassing canvas, upon which we will brightly color our expansion into the universe. (…)”

Jason Silva: “Alan De Botton said that one of the reasons that sublime beauty makes us a little sad is because we implicitly realize that what it hints at is the exception. We see that beauty is transient and therefore we are moved not so much by its rapture but by the contrast of that rapture against its fleeting nature. We realize, in the shadow of the ideal, that everything is transient and we become hyper-aware of mortality, of entropy, of endings.
Everything dissolves in irony when we zoom out far enough… the only solution is to rebel against this condition- to insist on eternalizing the ideal. Immortality is a beautiful idea because it makes us all poems without end. Alan Harrington said “we must never forget we are cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everybody” The goal of humanity is to transcend death. The goal of humanity is for poetry, art, aesthetics, love and knowledge to be the only constants. Death and disease, mediocrity and limitations, should be phased out. (…)”

Wildcat: “We are at present accessing a universe in which the ballad that is the body will be turned into a grand symphony.

There is nothing natural, moral or ethical about dying of old age, nay, there is something totally unnatural about endings, about pain and suffering. The elimination of death, of pain and suffering is perhaps the most important human endeavor we have ever undertaken.
The reason as Jason Silva will have it, and I concur, is an aesthetic one, we need time to explore beauty, we need time to love, we need time for art and music and dance, in other words, time enough for becoming aesthetically pleasing beings.

I have no doubt that the drama of our sense thought reflections is about to turn into an explosion of senses, a revealing of almost magical proportions, turning us into enthused Gods indeed. The basic code of life having been unlocked we are now pressing hard into a future in which our genetic heritage and evolution has become an active choreography, a new mastery of life. (…)”

— Wildcat, Fresh from the Pulp The Aesthetic singularity or Turning into Gods a documentary by Jason Silva, Polytopia, Oct 16, 2010, See also: Spaceweaver, Becoming Immortal, Polytopia

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