Week 1

Once a week until further notice, this weblog will take a new, even more personal direction. Today, yours truly attended a service at the local Unitarian Universalists congregation. It is my intention to write about my experiences at this church, aiming to give my readers an impression of the sort of place it is, and the sort of people one could expect to encounter there.

In this post you'll firstly find some background information about the structure of the church, it's foundations and current global presence. Then I'll share in no uncertain terms my own degrees of belief in the metaphysical philosophies, and world religions as they have been revealed to me at this point in my life through study and meditation. I'll finish by describing the specifics of this local chapter and my predictions for how a newcomer would fit in.

From the information that is publicly available about Universalists, they're mantra is "we're all on our own journey, together." To put it in a little more detail, the purpose of attending congregation is not dissemination of belief, but simply education about religions, historic and present. During the service, The intension of the minister is to try and keep as even a ground as can be had when you have a small number speaking before a larger group. This is in order to acknowledge the wide variety of deists, atheists and other non-deists, and those with beliefs that are less easy to categorize, such as Buddhists.

The especially exciting, and important part is the after-words. The opportunities offered to allow for a open discussion of whatever beliefs an individual wishes to share, or ask about on completely equal ground in a slightly less exposed but still public way.

Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism
www.uua.org

A succinct version of my own beliefs is neccesary in order to demonstrate the shape of the piece my form will take within the puzzle.

There is room for the belief in many things in a single mind. Even some things which on the surface may seem contradictory. In a human brain, it will seem there are ten thousand voices. There is the old woman. There is the small boy. There is the working man. There is the wandering girl. There is a hero and there is a jester. There is the villain, and many, many more. They each see the world in a different way and offer some thought that is then spoken with a single voice. Such is the nature of my understanding, and belief.
The mind can speak as a single voice, but it thinks as every individual experienced or imagined by that mind. This is directly observable in the way that children learn and repeat spoken languages, and emulate and impersonate the behavior of others.
Belief is what we do above and in-between what we perceive as facts. Not nearly opinions, beliefs run deeper and must be disproved to be changed in the heart of the individual.
Where the heart lies in the human mind, or even for certain that it exists, cannot be told. The spiritual foundation for consciousness is evidenced only self-perception, and to a certain degree, intelligence. That leaves room in the Great Unknown for non-human consciousness, however which beings are conscious other than the majority of humans, also cannot be told.
The Universe is big. Really really, authentically massive in every conceivable dimension and sense. It may even be infinite (although there is a fair amount of evidence to suggest otherwise.) Still the truly immense size of All That Is, Has Been, and Ever Will be, leaves a lot of room for discovery, and we've only just begun the journey.

To step back into the immediate reality for a moment, and touch on how I think all of this is going to come together over the next score of Sundays. The people that I encountered today are open, informed, and some I would even describe as some of them as truly friendly. They seemed to welcome me without expectation of anything. They had no greater desire than to know my name and welcome me to the group. I look forward to sharing my journey with them, and with you, my dear readers, as I continue looking outward for the answers to my inner questions. Taking one more step down the path to enlightenment.

Namaste.

How a program can evolve.

We are born a set of instructions. DNA is a recursive algorithm. This means it's results create the next equation. If we introduce random elements through sexual reproduction, some decision making, those algorithms evolve. They integrate with neighboring algorithms quite comfortably, all the same.

We had trouble "fitting it all on the disk" at first. But in the near future those little plastic disks will be able to store tremendous volumes of data. Then comes the cloud. Both frightening due to the legal, moral, and privacy implications and kind of wonderful if you ignore those, you have a place where you never run out of disk space.

A thing to love about this universe is that humans are not the only recursive algorithm that produces intelligence. There is intelligence all over the place on this planet.

That's where technology set us apart. We have made technology that creates new algorithms without human interference (except indirectly). These algorithms are not merely recursive, but they evolve based on a set of initial parameters and interaction with the outside world. "Tests."

Within the next decade, one of those tests will be "convince most people, most of the time, that you are a human being."

It is my hope they call him/her/it Turing, but it will probably be called Kurzweil. Of course, there, there will be a female version, either first or shortly after. Imagine the pornography. A lot of people will want to to light a fire with this AI. Religions will mobilize, fracture, and lie. Politians will capitalize, and destroy. People will come together and disagree.

Coming home

There is a semi-popular concept that all sentient beings know where "home" is, and the further that being is from this place, the more they feel it's pull on their center. It's rather unscientific but like most apocrypha, still compelling.

Do nomads not feel the urge to find a place where they will be prosperous, and welcome?

When our nanoscopic ancestors leave Earth in search of whatever basic elements they require for growth, and spread amongst the other planets, our local star, and then eventually, others deemed suitable, it's an interesting question as to whether they will ever feel the need to report back.

Is homesickness simply an evolutionary mechanism, in place to guide us to safety, or is it something deeper than instinct?

At the current rate of acceleration of increase in performance per cost in computing by 2020 we'll see machines with the same capacity for calculations per second as a human brain. They will pass any test put to them by a human to determine their consciousness. We'll be able to plug our own minds into a virtual world with many forms of direct sensory input. We'll have virtual bodies, and feel how they interact with the virtual world. We'll be able to modify them in many ways. By 2030, machine (non-biological) intelligence will be highly affordable and thus accessible, and already surpassing many of the abilities of an unaugmented human brain. Ten years later, we'll have very tiny machines capable of modifying our read-world bodies in an nearly any way we can conceive.

It's only a few steps from here that we'll go out into the darkness just to see what is there. It's comparatively easy to accelerate such tiny things to speeds approaching c, than it is to send one of our primate bodies "out there."

Forget star ships. Try imagining star peas, or star dandruff flakes.

Moving on to other accomplishments. Without the need for breath, with full control over one's senses, and one's body... Is enlightenment as described by all the Zen masters not then possible?

Perfect Clarity, Perfect Stillness, Perfect Love, Perfect Beauty, Perfect Truth. Persistent Perfection, at least in the mind of the observer.

Our world may be on the brink of destruction, but if we survive long enough to shed the need for these worldly bodies, we're in for a complete transformation of consciousness. Maybe the Sacred Texts were onto something after all...

Vibrations

Music
Sound
Energy
Light
Time
{Numbers}
Life/Finity
Exploration
Virtual Reality
Real Reality
Singularity
Movement
Transformation
Information
Time
{numbers}
Space
Space
Vibrations.


[note] Those on the mailing list will receive this as a stand alone piece, but it was rather unexplained. The following is what an art dealer might say in place of the author. .

"He felt compelled to count space twice at that point without doing so I think would have resulted in a regressive loop. This art piece is a comment on our present and future. A sort of listing of paradigms of our (technologically accelerated and) inevitable evolution.

To start with music seems to be a personal choice. It could be that it would open the mind to something every conscious being hears. There is therefor a natural progression from it to every other place. Maybe if we didn't have a beating heart or a pulsing brain we wouldn't hear it the same.

I've known the author personally and we've talked many times. He believes that time is not as linear as it seems. There are problems with the idea. Unsolved equations scatter the grease boards of a hundred physicists. (they have other problems.) Anyway, without asking, I can tell you that method of placing numbers after time refers to these and other mysteries.

This is the end of the note. Thanks for indulging. Back to your regularly "scheduled" updates after Halloween. Happy Trick or Treating Brownies and Nymphs, Ghouls and Gimps, Hectors and Spectors, Brain Wave Detectors, Hannibal Lectors, Mummies and Bats, Poodles and Rats, Vampires and Gaga's, Hoo Hoo's or Haa Haa's. Happy Hallow's Eve!

La vita nuova

what is mind?

The sum of all choices and experiences, genetic predispositions and the imagination. This definition of mind restricts the discussion to humans and all (even imaginary) human-like beings that will be henceforth referred to as humanoids.

When we use the expression "that machine has a mind of it's own" we're using metaphor. Specifically the metaphor is MIND IS ANIMATION. We don't literally mean that it's doing any thinking or imagining. This is true, even with all modern computers. These computers have no self-input. With us, it's different. We see, and smell and feel. We make decisions based on experiences in hopes of having more experiences. We have a soul.

Does that mean that nothing else can have a soul but a human?

If we imagined aliens from another planet coming to visit earth. Walking, talking, eating, breathing, reproducing aliens; we would grant they have not just life, but a life like we have. Similar in all the ways that each of us is the same. Most people would agree that we're more the same than different, as spectacular as our differences may at sometimes seem. Because of such, these humanoids can also be said to have a soul.

You and your neighbors all have a soul. It's the thing you have now that no longer inhibits your body when you die. Thus all entities we declare "alive" have some sort of soul. When they cease to exist, they're gone forever.

Back to the original question, when we look at what we consider "mind" we see that wherever it resides, it's not in the brain alone. We externalize our mind in many ways. The cognitive work done by the mind is shared between the brain, the body and all of our surroundings. We read books, and put them back on the shelf. We browse webpages and leave them bookmarked. We build infrastructure, and machines that cut down on our need process thought to accomplish tasks. A simple kitchen counter, for instance, alleviates our need to find different surfaces for everything in the preparation of a meal. Lined paper helps us keep things written down straight, facilitating both the reading and writing of the literature.

So it's very possible our mind to live on in the world around us, well after our soul has expired. In the memories of those that survive us, and in everything we touched; metaphorically speaking. Mathematics, science, fashion; Engineering, medicine; Art; these practices and systems of thought are all ways that we folks with minds have learned from, and advanced in, our world.

No entity then, would we grant the honor of recognizing mind, unless it has it's own thoughts. Unless it changed it's behavior in different environments and learned from every new experience. Observing, learning, touching, then repeating all this many many times until someday it has what we call feelings.

The entity would naturally then feel ways about stuff. When it's experienced itself in the shoes of other mindful beings, it recognizes certain similar situations. This human or humanoid would then develop tendencies to respond to those situations in keeping with it's experiences, learnings and imagination.

Those tendencies we would label "a mind of it's own."

Do you believe in an afterlife?

In every life, there are moments of inward reflection. Perhaps for some, fewer than others, but it's this writer's opinion that it's always at least once. In every case, the cause of death is always a lack of blood in the brain. That means there is always a split second before it actually happens when you know unless you get a cannonball from behind above the shoulders or are instantly vaporised in an accident at the LHC in CERN.

Heck if you're caught in a black hole it could last years.

Going back to the original point, it happens. If anybody ever came back from death, through powerful healing, it's likely they would remember some of that flash of glory.
There isn't much evidence to support any of this, but let's just leave that point in the philosophical, shall we?

So what's left to analyze? Well we could examine the patterns in the worlds six major religions. Nah. How about trending atheism since the years of Christ? Too wikipedia for you? Alright. Lets go with... why does suffering exist?

Actually, the answer is both simple and incredibly complex, and as it turns out, it's not really an answer either.

"Without darkness,
how else would we recognize the light?"

When studying the mind, one learns quickly that the slightest difference between love and hate, good or evil, and a chasm between doth appear. To see suffering as merely an opposite of pleasure is to miss the point entirely. Suffering is a result of attachment.

The greatest achievement is selflessness.
The greatest worth is self-mastery.
The greatest quality is seeking to serve others.
The greatest precept is continual awareness.
The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.
The greatest action is not conforming with the worlds ways.
The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.
The greatest generosity is non-attachment.
The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind.
The greatest patience is humility.
The greatest effort is not concerned with results.
The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.
The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.

Atisha (11th century Tibetan Buddhist master)

My personal favorite is the one about the passions. It's quite apt.

mobile update

How cool is it to be online anywhere without cords or a keyboard?

An Essay

Why I believe there is hope in the future of humanity

aka when robots master the earth

The Sum

Of

Human Experiences

Can

Only

Be Found

In Art

The sum of all our dreams, our technology, our history. Of all our hopes and politics. Human experience is varied and the same (eg. We all have mothers, though all our mothers are different.) Can such infinite dimensions and infinite possibility truly be described as a scientific truism? Only the gods could form so perfect a philosophical question that could cause description of all that is known and unknown?

Found as art, a piece can be infinite on the canvas of the mind of the observer.

Fractals are a literal example. Though the fractal is contained within the image boundaries, it can represent an infinitely long line (∞). The less literal example of such an object d'art is found as words on a page. Simple, but beautiful, and powerful. The record of our personal, global human histories, including what is unfolding right now in the present. There is art in every day. It can be seen if you are free to see it.

There will come a time when the delay between the request for information from the Internet is virtually nil. Be it through voice command, tactile input, or some sorta brain thingy, it's going to be fast and accurate.

There is every likelihood that the Internet and all computer technology was released to the public by the military, with consideration of this reason. Of course, there is every likelihood that the opposite could be true and it bring about a kind of global enlightenment and peace. (If you ask me, I'm an optimist, but also a realist.)

Whatever the intentions of it's inventors, the Internet is here to stay. It will be a source of profound study by our ancestors, be they flesh, metal, or otherwise. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it could be stored in crystals for until the end of the Earth? Or better yet, sent to other habitable planets with the seeds of life? Maybe we should all listen to the hippies and hear the sounds in the stone. Maybe not.

There is some concern amongst my contemporaries in the technology and science depts that suggests the future of may kind may not be in bodies of flesh and blood at all. That robot technology is improving year over year and month after month. That creating an intelligence first requires a sophisticated body and that very body will eventually be possible and at least somewhat cost effective.

Then comes the brain. An energy efficient multinodal Aneural network of lightspeed processors capable of understanding sarcasm, intentions and deceptions, and perhaps even other complex emotional states, and because it can understand them, it can "feel" them. After all, our brains are just very complex machines.

You might want to turn the sound off for this one:

The Internet represents everything new. It represents a new way to think about life, and especially about space.

Every old way of doing something, from running a corporation, to keeping a band together & hot, becomes new. Problems of communication solved, and so ideas are shared across borders both physical and social. At every level of thinking; a permanent, highspeed, borderless, limitless meta-media connection between people; rocks the boat. I can share something with you that you experience with 2 of your senses so far, sometimes even now there is touch involved. You can expect the minutes you spend touching or being touched by technology to increase exponentially (with every generation, every decade or less). We've already had Smell-O-Vision before, maybe that'll make a comeback.

Business, religion, romance, government; All the ways we take care in communication have all been revised, and are constantly being re-evaluated, or enhanced by some connected form of technology. And this is not a new trend; It's been the same since the late 1800's in a way that is beyond human minds and paper.

Fate

Two girls, both are daughters, but one is a mother, too. On the same day, in the same place, get a tattoo of essentially the same thing. They know each other, friends, but they don't know the other is doing it. They call each other to share the news only to find out what's really happened.

Events clearly unfolded as a result of their personalities, and personal history at that point.

Now, consider a different sort of moment. Two people, old friends in new clothes, are out stirring up trouble, and documenting their exploration of a new place, when one of them runs into a third individual known to them headed towards soirée. The pair tag along and find themselves someplace completely new, surrounded by strangers in a strange place.

What happens next? Is it a matter of cosmic alignment, or is it, like the parallel ink just a coincidence?

To attempt at answering this question would be an exercise in futility, egotism and even heresy. However, we can still make progress by reducing the problem into it's relevance, importance, and meaning.

Case 1) Observer theory: The assumption is that only one or the other can be true.

Either we decide our own present events for ourselves, able to change our minds right down to the salient event; The moment that time "moves forward" in the mind of all the observer.

Else-wise, every moment, every event is written into Time, determined by the series of events and choices leading up to the point where it feels to us as if we have the choice in the present. History appears to us as if we said the words, but the words were already spoken.

Time is written in our memories, and in our art. It's every vibration and written into every precious stone on Earth. But is it written before it happens?

Case 2) Ghost in the machine: That both are true

The future happens. The present is predestined not by the infinite factors of reality, but by the people in it.

Case 3) Some third option.

Such as M theory. That every possibility that can happen, does happen. This means that within the confines of Natural Law, there is no choosing, only possibilities. The Universe was born not a a particular moment in time, or in space, but It was born out of a higher "possibility space" where perhaps "nothing" "happened" for a "long time". Then suddenly something did happen, and that something we call home. It's mostly empty, so vast as to be beyond imagination, but still remains incredibly interesting and detailed down to the smallest scale. The Universe balanced; sometimes stable, relatively predictable, other times mysterious, chaotic and dangerous. Life is a microcosm for reality. Whatever laws govern matter, must also determine a great deal about what life seems like for those living it here. And that means you and me.

When machine becomes mind.

There is a theory in current cognitive science that suggests that if a number of partially interconnecting nodes in certain configurations, in numbers equal to the neurons of any particular animal's brain, would constitute a kind of animal intelligence.

Prelimenary work on this theory is inconclusive, although some success has been made in replicating certain types of intelligence. Creating original and beautiful (by human opinion) music, is one. Chess, and many other games can be played by computers. There are examples of them painting complex original works, for another. I could go on, but not all night.

It's amazing (in my opinion) that we have made it this far. Humans don't tend to ever lose technology. They just find less use for it over time. If there was a graph, it's apex is usually within a century of it's invention. This in itself is a recent development, but only if you consider the entirety human history. Before than, the apex may have come millenia after the initial discovery that led to the technological revolution.

Assuming we can continue innovating (we don't run into a catastrophe) then it's safe to assume at some point we'll create a program, running on hardware that is difficult to imagine, that we can replicate a complete and witty computer mind.

A decade or so later, we might have one on a 1000$ machine. Imagine, if the herPhone or hePhone itself was worth calling.

But none of this will be possible without a fuller understanding of the human brain. As it is right now, we've only really scratched the surface on how the chemistry of our emotions is made up. There are pheromones, hormones, peptides, cannibinoids, and loads of other amazing and difficult to reproduce strings of proteins and other chemistry that are at play inside your head, even as you read this.

So not only will we have to master interconnections and plasticized circuitry, evolving cognitive patterns, and a hundred other attributes of thought, we must replicate the organic compounds, or at least their neurological and psychological effects. Add to this, the trouble of teaching the computer to "learn" instead of just being fed databases. To truly integrate information, ideas, and other creations into the Nodemind. To make it's own conclusions based on the available information, and it's own experiences since it was first activated, as we do. You may be reading the term Nodemind here first.

So, when our hePhones or herPhones have simulated faces, and simulated minds, are helpful, friendly, sometimes rude/polite, sometimes interesting/annoying, in short, rounded individuals, will humanity be ready to accept them? Will we still be so foolish as to think of such an entity as a possession; as owned?

What will be the rights assigned to them? What will we consider crimes, both commited against them, and by them? What would be the punishment? What would they consider rewarding, that we could provide? Perhaps like us, they will be curious, inquisitive, explorers of the digital universe. How will they be limited? Will they all be able to communicate with the others like them? Will they want to? Could they ever plot against us without us knowing? Will we remember to include a failsafe?

Sounds like what used to be questions for science fiction is about to include a jolt of alarming reality.

If human beliefs are the sandbox, our spiritual/religious beliefs are the wood blocks. Inevitably, after playing in the sand for the summer, you have to either buy more sand or grow the box to get back the sand that fell out. The sand in this metaphor is E, or Qi, or in plain English, the energy.

The Torah, the Ko'ran and the Bible were all superbly well written books, all with many layers of meaning, routed in an interesting history. The Abrahamic (read: "western") religions all speak of a God that seems to be pervasive, omnipresen, and therefor somehow outside the Self. Hinduism sees, as do Buddhists and particle physicists, that the all is in the Self. It is the Self. You are always with your Self. Conversely your Self is always with you. Some scientists call the conscious Self the "observer".

In Hinduism, gods of everything are worshipped, and every living thing is considered worthy of praise. The river and the mountain tops.The rain, and the earth. The sun and all the many billions of stars. But still, why do we worship them, but for their value in the cosmic universe. If you, [insert name], was not there to witness your universe, it would not exist. That's a fact that can be proven through experiment and some serious math bonkers. [googl: wiki double slit experiment]. Make sure you you include the wiki part, else you Googl something your grandmother doesn't want to see.

Tao of Spiritual Machine (cont'd)

The importance of living in the present during meditation is central to the true purpose of No-Mind. When reflecting, in No-Thought, be as a diamond in the the Indra Net:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net that has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in all dimensions, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.

'Karma should be part of any religion, and I'm starting to see how that's true for any of the big ones, in many ways. ' -S.M. in conversations with D.