Ok, enough wishy-washy fluffy talk of the Consciousness Singularity, how do we do this thing? I want details. No crystalline, chakra, or third-eye nonsense. Just suggestions rooted in hard facts. Here are some concrete ideas for bringing about the Consciousness Singularity:

FIRST STEP: Establish transpersonal consciousness

1) expand cingulate cortex and synchronize with other people's

2) synchronize thalamic rhythms between people

3) synchronize other brain activities between people

4) screw synchrony, let's hardwire two brains together

5) let's try augmenting one or two people's brains, either by enlarging, enhancing plasticity, or doing something else


Please keep your posts topical or they will get bumped Here

another way, genetic engineering:
In the July 19, 2002, Science, Walsh and his colleague Anjen Chenn, now at Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago, described genetically engineered mice (targetting the gene beta-catenin) that develop cerebral cortexes with greatly increased surface area, so much so that the mouse brains have a more humanlike, wrinkled appearance. "It looks as if these wrinkles don't require any special genetic tricks. It seems to be a passive response to having a brain that's bigger than your head," says Walsh.

There are scientific report out there which might contradict your data, there, Lucid. For Example, It's a proven fact that the longer we stay married, the smaller the overall male brain-size will become. And, oddly enough, so does our wallet size, and even our weight, in some of us. But women star shooting the opposite. They stop dieting for one thing, that could be a cause of their winning weight, as we lose it.

Some claim to be able to do this, already.



With these tools, I don't know.



Like in Yoga?

Trip, I moved your posts because they were off-topic and did not address the question I posed at the start of the thread. If it was just a few off-topic posts you made, I wouldn't have moved them. But you made over 15 off-posts in quick succession and were trying to hijack my thread, which I will not allow. This thread is meant to be a serious discussion, not your own personal circus.

My view on god is still open for discussion. My definition of god is definitely far away from the religious definition of it. I like to think that so much beauty such as there is in the universe carries some kind of order. And I think Shawn is right about the Universe becoming aware of itself through our conscious recognizion of its existence. I tend to put god where Rick has it: A concept; for now. But still open for discussion, though.

That was me, sorry. (FTLI)

As a said, my concept of god is still open for discussion. Although he seems to have found a pulpit here.

Trip, if you want to start your own thread, go ahead but do not hijack mine or post derogatory remarks or they will be deleted.




This may be due to our brains shrinking as we grow older, and not due to marriage per se. Do you remember the study that implicated marriage?



I don't understand, is this a thread you're referring to?

Codebuttons, why do you think Yoga synchronizes brain activities between people?

lucid you ARE a pathetic idiot, stop deleting my posts.

Your lucky I can't reach through this screen.

You would become enlightened pretty quick, at least in the primordial sense of reality.....you would experience and be quickly collapsed to ur ultimate singualarity

No, but it refers to the post on this thread that you just deleted.
EDITED BY ME: CODE 3/10/06

I like Lucid's idea of hardwiring brains together. It seems likely that further evolution of the human brain will be incremental at best, as we may be running into physical limitations. Therefore, artificially joining brains into a larger aggregate may the the next logical step in human mental evolution. Any volunteers?

hardwiring is one possibility. I'm not sure it would lead to the singularity but it sure would be interesting to knock out the thalamic reticular nucleus as this exerts a tonic inhibitory tone on the thalamus and may be involved with certain thalamus oscillations. Knocking out the thalamic reticular nucleus, either through a knock-out mouse mutant or through some immunotoxic lesion, could result in a disinhibition of the thalamus and who knows what state of consciousness that would produce. As a first step, we would need to find out what genes are expressed just in thalamic reticular nucleus before we could create the knock-out mutants or use immunotoxic lesioning. So what genes are expressed, preferably as membrane-bound proteins, just in the thalamic reticular nucleus?

I don't believe that. Physical evolution, maybe. Physiologicaly, we're only begining to understand how it works.

Darn it again. FTLI

I didn't delete your post. I moved off-topic posts to a separate thread, which were mostly Trip's posts but also I guess included one of your posts, Codebuttons. Trip deleted that thread, including your post. Apparently he could delete the thread since his post appeared first on the thread, which meant he was considered the thread creator and could thus delete the thread, which he did. So maybe you should be asking Trip why he deleted your post.

Sorry, then. Never mind that post, then. Thank you for the reply

anytime, Codebuttons.

Using antibody specificity to selectively destroy or enhance neuronal populations is a good idea, Neural. I know someone who does that, but like you said, the problem is in finding genes that are only expressed in the given structure.

Rick, one of the problems of hardwiring brains is the brain-hardwire interface. There have been experiments using multielectrode arrays to stimulate neuronal populations but it's very crude in its current state.

Interesting article on brain-computer interfacing

that article uses scalp-EEG. We need something to plug directly into multiple brains, to actually hardwire them together. Unless there's a better idea...

Here's a science fiction-like idea that, ethically, is an abomination, but could be an interesting thought experiment:

Get away from the brain-wire-brain interface problem by creating a brain-brain interface. Take a bunch of cloned human embryos and let them develop in-vitro until brain structures are differentiated. Then remove and join at the brain-stem several brains and put them in one large skull, created as a composite from several skulls, on one body. Getting the blood plumbing right may be a big problem. The remaining unsolved problem is how to measure the resulting consciousness. We couldn't just ask the resultant lifeform if his consciousness were greater than normal because he would have nothing to compare it to.

This is just science fiction folks, actually doing it would not be ethical.

Rick, I'm going to try your idea out right now at home! Luckily I have a few spare human embryos on hand in the fridge!

I'm joking. Your characterization of if as an abomination is a good one, though a very interesting abomination at that.

I'm not sure joining at the brainstem would connect the various brains enough. Maybe growing diffuse and distributed connections between brains in close proximity would work.

You folks are starting to sound like the doctor who built Frankenstein! I thought that you were after something more concrete. Well, this is a viable concrete application if I've ever heard one. LOL.

Good luck with that experiment (while you both are in the luny bin)!