The Consciousness Singularity Options

[maximus242]

The Consciousness Singularity, some people are very familiar with the topic, but many have not quite heard of this concept yet. There are also a lot of unanswered questions about the Consciousness Singularity, such as, how do we know that we are not already in a Singularity and that is reality is simply a dream of unified consciousness?

The Consciousness Singularity is a completely different theory from the Technological Singularity. There are some similarities, the idea of many minds connecting together as one, however the way this is intended and the concepts of reality - are completely different. The Consciousness Singularity is about the mind transcending the body and the reaching a higher state of consciousness, where it connects with other minds and forms a unified conscious mind. The Technological Singularity is about using technological devices to allow many minds to connect together and form one, much larger mind that becomes a single consciousness. Now this is something of great interest to many people, how do we go about bringing a Singularity? Well, like all things, the concepts to bringing such a change should be kept simple. What we are looking at is a possible point in evolution where human brains will be able to communicate to each other without using a sense. In essence, you would be linking human minds together in order to form a larger and more powerful one - when all conscious minds become linked together, that is called the Consciousness Singularity.

Think of it like this, a single personal computer is not capable of calculating complex equations, but.. if you link thousands of personal computers together, you have a supercomputer. Yale University is actually running a program between three universities and thousands of computers where they use the PCs processing power to help calculate complex equations when the owner isn't using it. Here's an interesting thought, right now it is economically impossible to build a computer that can emulate the human brain, this is mainly because of power consumption, however, if a person were to link thousands and thousands of computers together and use their processing power to form a massive neural network, you could very well have the next 'matrix'. These are the same concepts of the Consciousness Singularity, link many minds together and become something beyond what any single conscious mind is capable of.

So, how do we get all those computers to link together? Through the Internet right? Well, in order to bring about a Consciousness Singularity, we need an Internet for the brain. Actually we could put the brain on the Internet, well in some ways, it already is. You communicate over the Internet using your sense of sight, in this way, there is a limited form of connection. What is needed for a Consciousness Singularity is to have a stream of thought so that the neurons in one brain could communicate to the neurons in another one. What happens after that is the neurons begin forming new pathways on a much larger scale, absolutely massive if you think 7 billion people connected together - we cant even emulate one brain, let alone the power of 7 billion of them.

The raw thinking and cognitive abilities of such a thing are so immense that it would supersede everything else and this, is where we have our consciousness singularity. Each mind could be responsible for a small piece of the puzzle, just as how each PC adds a little bit of processing power to the supercomputer. The most powerful computers in the world could be toppled if enough cheap PCs were linked together. Its almost unimaginable what such a thing would be capable of, 7 billion minds connected together, the possibilities are endless. Another interesting point about the Consciousness Singularity is that should it occur, or if it already has, then we never really die. Rather, we are preserved in a collective consciousness, so our memories and personality - everything, would be preserved in the stream of consciousness. The Consciousness Singularity is mainly about the mind surpassing the body and then those minds unifying together.

Have you seen those ugly zombie looking Borge from Star Trek? Well, the Borge is essentially what would happen in a Technological Singularity gone wrong, similar to the matrix but not identical. Essentially, to go back to my supercomputer analogy, if you link a bunch of computers together - someone needs to tell them what to do. What happens is one rules all, that harpy woman who is ordering all the Borge soldiers around is the one making sure everyone does their job. So why wouldn't this happen in a Consciousness Singularity you ask? Because each mind is like one neuron, no single cell precedes any other. So every mind would be equal and it is the result of all these minds working together that creates something more. This is the same as how many neurons work together to form something more powerful than any individual neuron.

Also, the Consciousness Singularity is much more evolutionary and mentally based where as the Technological Singularity is about using science to cause Singularity. The Consciousness Singularity can draw from a lot of science, especially neuroscience but it doesn't necessarily have to. The Consciousness Singularity is about the mind transcending the body, this can be by religious means, meditation, enlightenment, astral projection, ect. This means that the Consciousness Singularity could come about in one of many ways or perhaps by a combination of methods. Perhaps the real need is a change in human thought, an enlightenment of the mind, perhaps this will allow us to move forward in bringing about the Consciousness Singularity. Places like Brain Meta are important, because they allow people to work together in thoughts and ideas in order to bring about new ideas and insights. Could you imagine what it would be like if everyone on Brain Meta had a clear and unfiltered flow of conscious thoughts from one person to the other? Imagine the insights we could gain and how much deeper our understanding would become.


Think about this, if you knew the experiences, the thoughts, the skills and the insights of every person on this planet, you would be capable of such tremendous things! Its this concept which makes the Consciousness Singularity so exciting, imagine all at once you knew exactly what Einstein thought and you could speak every language in the world, you would know everything about science every known and you could do anything to your hearts desire. This is really no different that connecting computers together and sharing the information between each computer. For example, lets say you needed to do Brain Surgery, you could draw on the experiences of the worlds top neurosurgeons and conduct the best possible operation. This is primarily because you would have the sum of all their experiences, so lets say there are 1,000,000 neurosurgeons, they vary in experience from 1 - 50 years. So you could very well have 100 million years worth of experience in preforming neurosurgery! Now perhaps you can see just how startling and world changing the effects of a Consciousness Singularity would be. The sheer volume of information is mind boggling, for the amount of memory a computer would need to store all of it - your are talking about numbers that do not even exist yet. The most difficult subjects facing scientists today would seem to be something of extreme stupidity to such a powerful mind, everything we think is hard to do and to think about would seem to be the most easy thing in the world to a singular consciousness. Subjects like Mathematics would be reduced to the amount of thinking required to breath.

The key to remember is Consciousness Singularity, not Unconscious Singularity, if we are not Consciously aware of the Singularity then it is like having a Ferrari in your Garage but riding a bike instead.


Such an occurrence would change the world and reality to such an extent, it is almost incomprehensible. At that point, one very well may be considered some sort of God, by then you would probably know how to make your own universe and life itself.

[Technologist]

It begs the question. Why is it aware of itself?

Because, why not?

And the answer to this question is... Er, help me out here, Tek! I know you have an answer that I am going to like. And try to keep it in layman's terms.

Begs the question might have been a poor choice of wording on my part. What I meant was that the nature of consciousness needs to be further elaborated on…

Asking what some individuals believe to be the “ultimate question� – how can something come from nothing? – is a consequence of misunderstanding the nature of nothingness. I would argue that nothing can only be defined or conceptualized as a relational property of two or more somethings. Thus, nothing comes from something, and not the other way around. If reality consists fundamentally of one substance, and that one substance is *mind* or *consciousness* or *awareness* or what ever you’d like to call it, then that substance is the something, beyond which it is nonsensical to beg the question. So, mea culpa.

With that said, refining (if we can even call it that) our understanding of this fundamental substance is reasonable, and even imperative on our parts. So, here are some vague, philosophically unrespectable thoughts, compliments of yours truly:


(1) The type of awareness that we currently have definitively knowledge of is a rather insignificant example of the connectivity of reality. If we entertain the radical form of monism that I have put forward - which really amounts to a hybrid form of simulation – then intentionality, in the philosophical sense of the word, is mind-to-mind connectivity.

(2) Witnessed from the condition of Being, awareness will always appear as process, as becoming, because we can not escape temporality. However, from the impossible vantage point of omniscient objectivity there would be no potentiality, only actuality.

Similarly, for a cognition, that which is directly observed, or which falls safely within a strictly established epistemic criteria (like the wall of china for those of us who have never visited Asia), are actualized possibilities. The infinite subset of infinite logical possibility that falls outside of these boundaries are merely perceived as possibilities – not actualities. Such goes the nature of Being.

(3) The kind of awareness that we are all familiar with are actualities, but they are not actualizers; at least not in the narrow sense of the word which I have in mind. We can take solace in our actuality while still yearning for more. An actualizer can produce environments in which other actualities developed. Of course, notions of production and development are how we interpret reality from within Being, but there is really only actuality of infinite complexity.

(4) Getting even more ridiculously speculative… If actualities exist within an actualizer, then those actualities are the actualizer, and with this idea comes the idea of there existing a strong level of intimacy between the actualizer and its actualizations. And if the actualizations themselves become actualizers, then the intimacy extends outward through the vastness of possibility.