It’s God Jim, but not as we know it.

Musings on the Highest Transcendence and the engineering of Leela

A dictionary definition of the term “transcendent” can be 1) above or beyond the range of normal or physical human experience,  2) higher than Aristotle’s 10 categories (essence, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, habitus, action, affection) 3) beyond comprehension or 4) exceeding usual limits.

In my philosophy I would like to give a new definition to the term “transcendent”: Reconciling opposing or even mutually exclusive concepts in a higher dimensional framework (e.g. of understanding or as nested levels of a program) that exceeds yet includes both concepts without contradiction. The reason for this different definition is that whatever is not knowable or what is not part of reality is not worth bothering about and whatever is part of this reality must be knowable to a sufficient extent and can ultimately not be beyond comprehension or beyond our experience.

There are concepts and phenomena which may not be within the framework of experience or understanding of the average person today, but society evolves and within a few generations, what is now cutting edge technology may be part of common knowledge. So ultimately there will be nothing that fits the traditional meaning of “transcendent” and those traditional meanings that still apply do find a place within my new definition.

In the Technovedantic philosophy “Transcendent” is a kind of synonym of “all-inclusive”. This is perhaps best illustrated by the Indian parable of the elephant. Several blind man touch an elephant to learn what it is. One touches the tail and concludes that it’s a broom, another one touches a leg and concludes it’s a pillar, a third touches the tusk and concludes it’s a horn etc. Whereas from their own perspective none of them is really wrong, from the higher all-inclusive perspective they are all wrong to a certain extent and right to another extent. The dichotomies are resolved by a higher dimensional entity and perspective, which is the elephant, which transcends but does not exclude the partial perspectives.

Hence the famous quote by Nagarjuna:

“Anything is either true,
Or not true,
Or both true and not true,
Or neither true nor not true;
This is the Buddha's teaching”.

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More of this chapter can be found in my next book, which I have submitted for publication.

The Infopsychological Concrescence of Conspansive Transcendence

The contemporary technoprophets Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis focus on three technological areas to bring about the so-called Technological Singularity (T.S.), which is the point after an artificial intelligence explosion beyond which events may become unpredictable or even unfathomable to human intelligence. The three areas for which they consider development crucial to bring about the T.S. are Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics, also abbreviated by them as “GNR”.

I was struck by the similarity of these three areas with the three last phases of “neurological evolution” in the 8-circuit model or “Infopsychology” scheme by Tim Leary in the book “SMI²LE!”, which has been further adapted in Robert Anton Wilson’s “Prometheus Rising”.

The terminologies Leary and Wilson use are “Neurogenetic, Neuroelectric and Neuroatomic”. Neurogenetic corresponds to the Genetics of the singularitarians, neuroelectronic to the robotics and neuroatomic to the nanotechnology.

Whereas Leary and Wilson essentially describe these levels as higher consciousness levels, the experience of which can be accessed/triggered by the use of certain psychoactive substances, meditation or sleep deprivation, they also mention their modern technological counterparts. Whereas only very few people have access to these higher internal experiential dimensions, the external physical world is in a certain sense ahead of their development in already providing the physical substrates for an artificial intelligence (AI) that could access these dimensions.

The scheme of Leary and Wilson describes an evolution for experience from gross levels to ever more subtle levels, which allow the consciousness to grasp and encompass ever greater dimensions of experience. Whereas Leary’s and Wilson’s work is mostly a psychological guide to get rid of our mental semantic gibberish so that we can open our experience to higher non-semantic levels, their scheme is useful for stratifications to be built in future artificial agents. Moreover their scheme is essentially congruent with the seven chakra or eight octaves of existence scheme and thereby can be said to be an image of the Vedic teachings.
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More of this chapter can be found in my next book, which I have submitted for publication.