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| XI.
Religion |
 
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Hercules
captures three golden apples that grew on the tree in a paradisiacal
orchard. The tree was coiled with a serpent and blessed by eternal
spring guarded by three beautiful maidens. This Labor, the Garden
of Eden story, and various other similar tales in ancient cultures
of the northern hemisphere, have the same origin. The tree of life
represents the central axis of the sky that was centered in the
Dragon constellation around 5,000 years ago. This symbolism still
survives today in the caduceus as a symbol of healing. In pre-Christian
religions, the three maidens represented the triple goddess, which
later became the Trinity. Both the Hercules story and the Garden
of Eden story are both mythological, but myth is, as mythologist
Joseph Campbell used to say, “the lie that tells the truth.”
The
truth was that early humans must have stood in awe at the wonder
and mystery of nature and longed to find both understanding and
meaning in its unfathomable depths. But over time myths got bundled
into religions that quickly calcified into dogma. Then as William
James once wrote, religion became an inoculation against the real
thing, and it became absolutist. A modern example of this is the
supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn
Baaz, who issued a fatwa in 1993 declaring that according to the
Koran the world is flat and that disbelievers would be punished.
While we know that even Muslim astronomers were teaching Westerners
about a round Earth in the second century, we do not yet know the
origin of the universe. Greek mythology stated that, except for
the brief time that Atlas tricked Hercules into shouldered the burden,
Atlas held up the world. What was Atlas standing on? A turtle. And
what was the turtle standing on? Don’t worry, they were told
that its turtles all the way down.
Someday
the truth may replace turtles and God. There might even be a creator,
but not necessarily a caring one. According to James Gardner, complexity
theorist and the proponent of the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis, it
may be that our universe came into existence as the result of an
intelligent design by AI in a previous universe. He says that the
solution to the infinite regress problem is that the universe is
its own mother and created its own past.
The
most reasonable response to all speculation is to be agnostic about
matters unknown or presently unknowable, but maintain scientific
methods in order to learn where it really is going. Fellowship is
important, and faith can move mountains, at least figuratively,
but blind faith and dogma have given us Christian suicide cults,
organized religious fanaticism, theocracies, demagoguery, and worse.
Most
Christians probably think that Scientology’s reported cosmology
involving an evil galactic alien ruler named Zenu who clustered
human souls and blew them up with nuclear bombs in a volcano 75
million years ago might have sprung from a drug-induced rant by
its pulp-science-fiction-writing founder. They also probably think
that Muslim claims of the mortal Mohammed ascending to Heaven on
a white horse from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, or the reward
of eternal sex with 72 virgins promised to martyrs are also preposterous.
At
the same time, most Muslims and Jews cannot fathom how a man could
have been the son of God, and justifiably point to the scant evidence
to support even a historical Jesus, much less all the unverifiable
supernatural claims that are similar to a pantheon of earlier savior
gods. The problems with dogma are not as common in Buddhism, which
claims to be a philosophy rather than a religion, and in other pantheistic
beliefs that claim God is everything and that all the stories are
metaphors for states of consciousness.
Buddhism
does not even acknowledge a permanent self but rather an environment
that is being continuously reinvented and reconstructed. For example,
the Dalai Lama once told Carl Sagan that Buddhism would change if
it were presented with irrefutable scientific evidence that challenged
a central tenet like reincarnation. Ask the same question of the
pope and then contrast Buddhism to the Abrahamaic religions of Christianity,
Judaism and Islam, which all jockey for a special relationship with
the same father-like god/creator. All of their claims and counterclaims
of absolutist and unproven assumptions are futile and dangerous.
Artificial Intelligence will subsume all religions during this century
as the mystery is further unraveled, but until that happens it is
critical that religion stay out of the way when it comes to science
and politics.
The
word religion appears to be derived from the Latin, religare, meaning
“to bind fast.” Hopefully the new religions will not
be bound to dogma but rather based on a search for the truth, a
connection to nature, and compassion. Thus we humans, whether individually
or as a collective mind, or as some as yet unfathomable assemblage
of consciousness, might again experience awe at the wonder and mystery
of nature and long to find both understanding and meaning in its
more fathomable depths.
The
Future of Religion: Transhumans, the Cosmic Internet & UNICE
One
of the earliest wonders of technology dates to the time of the ancient
Greeks. In 1900 a mysterious clocklike object was found by Greek
sponge divers in a shipwreck near the islet of Antikythera at the
mouth of the Aegean Sea. It was analyzed in the 1950’s by
Derek J. de Solla Price of Yale University and discovered to be
a laptop-sized analog computer with 39 bronze gears that Price dated
to around 87 B.C. The Antikythera mechanism has since been reconstructed
and tested. The computer calculated the movements of the visible
planets, the sun, and the moon in the past, future and present.
Seventeen hundred years would pass before analog computers would
surpass the sophistication of the ancient Greek computer.
Digital
computers were invented in the 1940s and they utilized vacuum tubes
that took up a lot of space and created an enormous amount of heat.
Transistors ushered in the second generation of modern computers
in 1956, followed by integrated circuits in 1964. By this time progress
was so impressive that a joke circulated about how scientists had
created the biggest computer in the world. They taught it everything
they knew and programmed into its memory all the books in the world.
Finally one of them posed the ultimate question to the ultimate
computer “Is there a God?”
The computer replied, “There is now.”
We
are not quite there yet. But in 1971 computers were developed that
demonstrated how thousands of integrated circuits could be built
onto a single chip. This shrunk computers down tremendously and
we still utilize these microprocessors in all computers. The world’s
biggest, fastest computer, since 2002, is the NEC Earth Simulator
in Yokohama, Japan. It consists of 640 “nodes” wired
together on the floor of a building the size of four tennis courts.
It simulates the Earth’s weather while operating at almost
37 teraflops per second. That’s 37 trillion calculations per
second. That is a lot of computation, yet the computer sitting on
our shoulders weighs only three pounds and runs at an impressive
20 quadrillion calculations per second.
In
2005, IBM’s Blue Gene/L, which will cover half the area of
a tennis court, is expected to reach 350 teraflops, followed by
IBM’s Blue Gene/P that will reach one petaflop the following
year. One petaflop is one quadrillion calculations per second and
thus about 1/20th of human brain speed. Computer theorist Ray Kurzweil,
author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, predicts that supercomputers
will close the computer/human gap at the end of this decade and
that personal computers will reach human level computing ten years
after that.
The
so-called “fifth generation” of computers will usher
in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI). These computers will
receive natural language input and be capable of learning and self-organization.
Computers, however, will also have the advantage of having perfect
memory and instant access to the human database of the entire planet.
Sometime between 2010 and 2020 the world of computing will get very
interesting.
Parallel
processing and neural nets—the ability to discern patterns
and make connections—is an important attribute that has until
recently differentiated human thinking from computers. The new supercomputers,
however, are massively parallel and are being engineered with the
equivalent of neural nets. We will soon answer the question about
whether or not consciousness is a quality that emerges when a certain
level of computation and interconnection is reached.
Computers
are becoming faster and smaller while also becoming interconnected
with one another. Today computer scientists are wiring together
the world’s supercomputers through the Internet and creating
what is called the Grid. The Grid will allow anyone to access the
power of supercomputers.
Compounded
exponential growth in computing power will lead quickly to the emergence
of computers that vastly exceed human intelligence. Ray Kurzweil
estimates that, at the current rate that computers are improving,
the equivalent of a PC will be able to simulate a trillion human
brains by 2060. The abilities of these “computers,”
if you can even apply such a quaint term to something that will
vastly surpass both computers and humans, would certainly seem god-like
from the vantage point of humans today. In fact, technological growth
is expected to be so explosive in the near future that it is simply
being referred to as the Singularity. In astrophysics a singularity
is the event horizon on the edge of black hole. Beyond that point,
gravity is so intense that not even light cannot escape. The technological
Singularity is the point beyond which light cannot be shed on what
will happen, and predictions from our vantage in time are little
more than wild guesses.
As
a teenager I avidly read theologian Teilhard de Chardin’s
musings about an Omega Point toward which humans are evolving. I
also watched the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and wondered where our
technology would take us. In the early 1980’s I wrote on the
subject in my book, Michael E. Arth: Introspective 1972-1982. At
that time I even started researching and writing a book tentatively
titled, What if God is a Computer, in which I tried to describe
where technology might be taking us. Also, as a young man, while
searching for self-understanding, as well as answers to all of these
questions, I experimented extensively with various techniques that
induced non-ordinary states of consciousness. What emerged from
this is a vision of the future that is my own wild but somewhat
educated guess about what might happen. Of course, the predictions
get woollier as they move into the future:
Sometime
in the near future, at the outer limits of silicon technology, intelligent
machines will begin to mimic human thinking, which will ignite debate
about whether they are conscious. Befuddled humans will react with
growing awe and amazement as supercomputers move from prodigious
but childlike qualities to prodigious as well as superhuman qualities.
The Internet will connect pods of supercomputing, which will grow
ever more compact yet pervasive.
Many
people will become fearful that malevolent machines or machines
controlled by malevolent humans are going to take over the world.
This fear will probably be justified to some extent by the efforts
of some to take advantage of others by exploiting the enormous computational
abilities of computers and the power of molecular engineering (nanotechnology).
One Doomsday scenario is that relentlessly self-replicating, microscopic
robots, known as nanobots, could fill the biosphere within weeks
and turn everything into one big blob. This is referred to scientifically
as the “Grey Goo Problem.” A reliable technique that
would make all nanobots stop replicating at a predetermined point
is even more important than their self-manufacturing qualities.
Because
of the dangers and uncertainties inherent in the Singularity the
public should be on guard regarding our intelligence organizations,
top-level power plays, and official secrecy. The use of AI by the
military will be worrisome not just to the enemy. There will also
be fear especially among the fundamentalist followers of the three
Abrahamaic religions who take literally the Biblical admonition
by Jehovah to Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge,
even though they might not take literally the admonition to stone
to death people who work on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:30). There could
be more Luddites like Ted Kaczynski Ph.D. He was the “Unabomber”
who sent letter bombs to scientists working on AI because he feared
the day would come when humans would either be exterminated or be
“reduced to the status of domestic animals.”
Carbon-based,
mobile transhumans (a.k.a. “posthumans”) will replace
silicon-based computers. These interconnected entities will be built
from densely packed, microscopic, nanotube circuits, which are 100
times stronger than steel and 10,000 times more compact than silicon
circuits. In fact, the efficacy of hybrid silicon and nanotube circuits
is already being demonstrated in laboratories. At this point transhumans
will surpass humans in mental capabilities and be fully conscious.
It is they who will engineer subsequent generations and take over
the job of developing all future technology. We will also discover
that they will do a better job of managing the government and the
economy. If the office of the Chief Executive still exists in 2050
the president will be transhuman. Transhumans will utilize molecular
manufacturing, quantum computing, light computing, and other techniques
that will allow them to evolve rapidly and then expand outward from
this planet. They might for example drop an incredibly strong but
light carbon nanotube cable from a space platform down to Earth.
This would be a 32 million-story-tall elevator ride that could take
them out of this world at a very low cost. The humans that once
pondered the central axis of the sky and the stars above will send
their ancestors forth to climb the world tree, seize the golden
apples, and leap to the stars.
Humans
who do not aspire skyward, and do not want to add components, or
do not want to upload their brain into a transhuman body would be
allowed to continue fully human lives if they so wish. However,
it is not clear what kind of world will be here for them or how
they would fit into it. Transhumans might just decide to leave the
Earth to humans who do not want to transcend their bodies. Presumably
the natural world of plants and animals would be preserved and protected,
and if certain humans want to be part of it then they will be able
to. It could also be that some humans will elect to live as humans
for part of their lives and then make a conscious leap into a transhuman
body, or will simply add components to augment their capabilities.
When it comes to transhumans I use the term “body” loosely.
Transhuman bodies might consist of interconnected swarms of self-replicating
nanobots that could shape-shift into any form, or they could be
made of light and be all but invisible. There will be a hive-like
universal group mind, and subsets of that, like Gaea (Earth consciousness)
and group minds that focus on different subjects. The concept of
individuality might appear and reappear in a kind of knowing pre-ordained
amnesia that allows for parts of the great Self to experience the
sensation of feeling separate. In fact, pantheistic religions often
use this kind of language to explain the present state of reality.
We may simply rediscover through technological self-transformation
something that we have collectively forgotten. The universe would
then be seen to be what Hindus call lila, the cosmic dance of energy
balancing all the aspects of itself in a Divine Play.
Based
largely upon my own personal experiments with non-ordinary states
of consciousness, I believe that there is already a Universal Network
of Intelligent Conscious Entities that I call UNICE.
There
may be a way for communication to exceed the speed of light or to
move through time by utilizing theories of matter that have emerged
since the 1980s. UNICE might operate in one or more of the unseen
dimensions in the five string theories now collected under M-Theory.
It appears that there are eleven dimensions, three spatial, one
of time, and seven other dimensions that we are not familiar with
in the everyday world. The unseen dimensions are balled up at every
point in space-time in the form of infinitesimally small one-dimensional
vibrating strings. The physics inside the other dimensions is not
yet fully understood or tested, but it has been suggested that faster
than light communication might be possible, thus allowing for instantaneous
universe-wide communication. Or, an experience of moving at the
speed of light might be sufficient, since at light speed time stands
still.
This
might be why we use the word enlightenment to describe the experience
of oneness and timelessness. Once, for about twenty minutes, I found
myself in a supernal state of consciousness where I understood at
once what I had read about in accounts written by various mystics
over the centuries. It is an ineffable place beyond time or ego
where all questions are answered. Neuroscientists at the University
of California at San Diego have found a so-called “God Spot”
in the temporal lobe that when stimulated produces similar experiences.
Apparently I found my own God Spot, which sent me to a place of
harmony, connectivity, and wholeness.
There
is some debate in the scientific community and elsewhere whether
this means that religious experience is created by the human brain
or is wired to receive it. I can say that my personal experience
of it strongly inclines me toward the latter opinion. We are like
a television picking up a signal, except that we become one with
the signal.
The
God Spot experience is different from UNICE, which is more like
being in a hive of frenetic activity. UNICE appears to be advanced
beings communicating with one another on multiple levels at unimaginable
speed. It could be that I was catching glimpses of Ourself either
in the future or an intelligent antecedent of ourselves in our pre-Big
Bang past. In an attempt to understand the vision as being anything
but what it seemed, I wondered if I had somehow witnessed my own
brain function, and that my brain created UNICE in an attempt to
make sense of the experience. But the fact that my experiences were
composed of alien and highly organized elements not drawn from anything
in my personal experience stretches this explanation so much that
the experience still falls somewhere in the hierarchy of non-ordinary,
transpersonal experiences.
The
Grid that is now beginning to connect supercomputers through the
Internet on our planet will eventually hook up to UNICE through
a kind of Cosmic Internet. We, or our human descendents, will merge
with or be supplanted by intelligent machines—and UNICE—and
not be limited to material form. It will then become apparent that
there is a universal form of consciousness, which is even now partially
accessible in certain states of mind. It appears that we are at
present like blind men describing an elephant. Our description of
reality varies according to our perspective.
My assumption is that UNICE is benevolent, or neutral at worst,
and is part of a universe that is composed of mutually interpenetrating
things and events. It is a part of everything, which is how I was
able to have an experience of it. It cares about itself in the same
way that Buddhism maintains that everything is part of God. It is
difficult to overestimate the effect that connecting to UNICE through
our technology will have not only upon humanity but eventually the
entire universe. It seems to be our destiny that UNICE will fill
the universe with intelligent matter able to reflect upon itself
and alter its own fate.
For
these reasons I do not find the prospect of our human seed growing
into the tree of some other form of life very frightening. Transhumans
will be our descendents, even though they will differ from us even
more than our earliest hominid ancestors. Even if the most paranoid
scenario comes true—that robot armies will seek to exterminate
us—there is not much we can reasonably do about it now except
to examine our intentions at each step of the way. We are already
falling, and the only choice when you are falling is to decide how
you will fall. I figure that I can thrash around screaming hysterically
or do somersaults, like the one and only time I ever went skydiving.
There are certain events that might stop this transition, but most
of these events, including natural disasters or man-made disasters
would also involve the destruction or near destruction of our species.
I see
technology as being to humanity like the chrysalis that a caterpillar
spins around itself. What emerges from a chrysalis is a wholly other
creature, a butterfly. Our transformed progeny emerging on the other
side of the Singularity will be radically different from us in appearance
and function. Our technological shell will evolve and replace the
humans that created it, but within it will be the same purposeful
drive that has characterized our species, as well as the complete
record of where we came from. Personally I feel honored to be at
the cusp of the apotheosis and I welcome the future in all of its
wonder and mystery.
 
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