You Don’t Understand How Crazy the Singularity Is

And neither do I. I was talking about the singularity with some friends, one of which had just begun to think about the mind blowing implications of this transition, a friend who is very interested in music. He inquired whether I thought that after the singularity digital music will be able to perfectly simulate live analog music, and before I was able to reply “most definitely yes,” another friend did one better. He said that it’s not just that digital music will exceed the quality of live music, it’s that we will be able to augment our minds so that we can turn on music in our heads whenever we want to, and hear anything we want to.

This basically typifies the singularity. It is when the line between reality (analog) and the virtual (digital) stops existing, when computer simulations become real and our experience becomes anything we want it to be. X-ray vision, fine tuned hearing, eyes miles or light years away, these are all possibilities, and only the beginning. We will be able to do anything we imagine, and I am quite serious about this, because even if it’s not physically possible, we can construct a physical universe where it is possible. But it gets even crazier, because when you think about it, our brains are puny compared to what they will be after the singularity (down the line a bit), and our imaginations are stunted by the world we were born into. When we start crafting our own worlds in our own minds, we will be able to do more than we can imagine now.

People are talking about exoskeleton suits that soldiers will wear in the future, and others are looking further to talk about augmenting our very bodies to be more impenetrable, becoming invincible conscious robots. But it’s even crazier than that, the singularity is about transcending matter in ways we don’t understand yet, existing as pulses of information which augment the universe with no discernable bodies. People talk about us becoming like gods of Greek mythology, being able to wield great power to create and destroy, but it’s even crazier than that. Down the line consciousness will permeate the universe to such an extent that we may be the God of Christian mythology, a creator of everything, an omnipresent force which encompasses all that is, a universal consciousness.

That may not happen, but as I said before, my brain is currently too small to know what the possibilities are, and if it’s not possible in this universe, it will be in a universe we create ourselves, in our own minds.





About Prometheus


Posted on June 15, 2011, in Consciousness, God, Technological Singularity and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.

  1. Wow, I think you put it pretty well. Very much along the lines of Terrance Mckenna, who said things were going to get so nuts, people will have to talk about it because its just so nuts! He called it the Omega Point, loosely referring to the singularity. I think we are the first of many to talk about how nuts it is getting, and I love and trust in it. “The Singularity IS A Religion!”

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