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.