The Syntellect Hypothesis by A.Vikoulov (My foreword)

I had the honour of writing the foreword of Alex Vikoulov's recently published masterpiece and bestseller "The Syntellect Hypothesis". Hereunder you can read my foreword:

"If you picked up this book, it is not unlikely that you may have heard of the early 20th century philosophical movement of Cosmism. This movement, which originated in Russia, was striving for conquering the planets and stars, for radical life extension, immortality and resurrection of our loved ones by the means of technology. Perhaps one of its most important pioneers was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose aspirations did not only venture into the realm of the Macro, but also explored the Micro. He spoke of the atomic world as being animated and can thus be considered a kind of cosmist-panpsychist.

The foundational work of the cosmic aspirations of man by the Russian Cosmists soon reverberated through the intellectual world of the early 20th century and found a resonance and fertile ground in the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard saw evolution as having a direction, namely the direction of concentrating consciousness in form, striving towards accumulation of knowledge, which gradually is attained by the formation of the Noosphere and which will culminate in the apotheosis of the Omega Point. Teilhard de Chardin considered that Omega Point is not necessarily merely a future construct, but in a sense is already here as the “Great Presence.” Thus, his pantheism is more panentheism in which God has both an immanent and transcendent aspect.

In the sixties of the previous century, the science of Cybernetics emerged, which its founder Norbert Wiener defined as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” Whereas the cyberneticists perhaps saw everything in the organic world too much as a machine type of regulatory network, the paradigm swapped to its mirror image, wherein everything in the natural world became seen as an organic neural network. Indeed, self-regulating networks appear to be ubiquitous: From the sub-atomic organization of atoms to the atomic organization of molecules, macromolecules, cells and organisms, everywhere the equivalent of neural networks appears to be present.

Not strange that these developments have led to a present-day zeitgeist, which sees everything as a kind of computation. With computation came computers, which – when linked – lead to yet another meta-level of neural networking, a.k.a. the Internet.

The technological and scientific developments have over time changed the way people try to explain the world around them: from the steam driven worldview of thermodynamics to an everything-is-electricity. From the everything-is-matter via the quantum-mechanical ubiquitous energy to the all-is-information paradigm. From a resonance paradigm to a cybernetics regulatory network worldview, from a survival-of-the fittest conviction to pancomputationalism. Not that any of these paradigms is truer than another; they appear to be able to coexist as the different parts of  the elephant  in  the  Buddhist  parable  and  mostly  reflect  the  primary technological current of the moment.

In the nineties Vernor Vinge wrote his seminal paper and introduced the term ‘Singularity’ as relating to a point in time, where technology and in particular superintelligent artificial intelligence will have progressed to such an extent, that it will be impossible to predict our future beyond that point. Kurzweil made clear that such a “technological singularity” may not be far away at all  and  perhaps can be attained within a few decades.

This impossibility to predict the future has led to a broad range of science fiction speculations, not only as regards the last stages up to this point but also beyond that point. Where cyborg type man-machine mergers, transhuman eugenically improved humans and a wide range of robot helpers are on the conservative side of such futuristic predictions, mind-uploading, simulated worlds and quantum-archaeology-based resurrection can be found on the more-fancy optimistic side. From these notions it is then not a far-fetched idea that our present world we’re living in itself is a simulation. A concept, which virally spread as a meme thanks to the cult movie “The Matrix.” 

A burgeoning field of futurism seems to be our current paradigm. As we are stepping into the future, the ideas the media feed us are also strongly loaded with a futuristic technology and social development broth. Not in the least place by the presently  popular  Netflix series “Black Mirror,”  which  warns  us  for  the dystopian consequences our over-enthusiastic technological optimism might result in.

It is here, where this overwhelming tsunami of ideas appears like an expressionist chaotic patchwork of weirdness, that digital philosopher Alex Vikoulov with his present book “The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution” brings order. The author boldly steps in the footsteps of his Russian forebears and shows us to be a postmodern cosmist.

When you wonder what yet a further book on the Singularity might bring (if you have reached a certain level of futurism saturation), I can reassure you: This is the book which brings an integration of the aforementioned paradigms. This is the scripture which will put the history of futurism into perspective. This is the creed, which shows how everything wires up, a journey into the fractal of the Universal Mind. 

In five paradigms, from the Noogenesis of computational biology to the Techno-cultural Rise of Man, from the superintelligent AI emergence of the Syntellect to the transdimensional Theogenesis, from the multiversal propagation, arising as a Phoenix in the heavens of eternal expansion of the Macro, to the transdimensional propagation, digging in the deepest shells of the Micro, the author will make this chord progression culminate into the coda of the Vikoulovian Apotheosis: absolute enlightenment of the Omega Point.

Vikoulov will make you transcend time and demonstrate that the Omega Point is not something merely of the future, but rather how past and future mutually influence each other, as an intertwining braid of causality and retrocausality. The author will show us how the exchange of experiences between self-aware machines and enhanced humans will result in an “intelligence supernova” and the establishment of a global brain. This global brain which is more than a single mind, but rather a society of hyperconnected digital minds. Prepare for the waking up of Gaia as a living sensing conscious superorganism.

And as Tsiolkovsky and De Chardin already anticipated, we will learn about all-encompassing framework to fit all our paradigms in. Vikoulov takes us to a pantheistic dimension where organic life and machine networks fade into each other as the pictorial values of a palette. Consciousness as great denominator, both engendering and emerging as a self-reflexive fractal Ouroboros. An Intellect that synthesizes itself from parts of itself - and hence indeed rightfully deserving the denomination ‘Syntellect’- at ever increasing levels of complexity via meta-system transitions. A poetic interplay of “metaphiers and metaphrands” in terms of Julian Jaynes’ bicameral mind, showing us how information, language, energy and matter are merely kaleidoscopic shadow patterns of the all-pervading networking of the theogenic Syntellect Emergence process of the greater primordial consciousness.

Be ready to have your mind blown!"

You can find/order "The Syntellect Hypothesis" by clicking the link.

Infinitism: The Ouroboric tailbiting

According to Wikipedia Infinitism is the view that knowledge may be justified by an infinite chain of reasons. It belongs to epistemology, the branch of philosophy that considers the possibility, nature, and means of knowledge.

How unfortunate that the philosophers have claimed this very finite definition of a terminology, which on account of its literal meaning would imply so much more...yes endlessly more.

I'll try propose a new all encompassing indicator for Infinitism, which cannot a definition, because the Infinite cannot be finite. An attempt, which is bound to fail, because the Infinite cannot be grasped by a finite set of words. But a good description may give a hunch of what I feel it points to.

For me Infinitism relates to the concept that any aspect of existence is infinite. The Infinite is not defined by anything. And as it has no limits it must necessarily encompass all what is, for if it were to exclude anything, that would already impose a limitation on the concept.

One could argue that it also implies that anything which can be possibly thought of, must de facto exist within the view of infinitism. Any scenario of what possibly could happen to you does happen then somewhere in a parallel universe or somewhere in the infinity of time. Like Boltzmann Brains popping up in the Sea of Dirac. Tegmark pushed to the extreme. This is Everett’s multiverse of an infinite amount of parallel universes. What can be thought of, must necessarily be there, according to these scientists. Including a plethora of hellish nonsensical universes, where we repeat the same actions ad infinitum or do cruel actions all the time.

But infinitism runs into logic contradictions. Because a thesis and its mutual exclusive opposite must both be able to coexist... and yet not, because the concept that they do not coexist, must also exist within infinity. If infinity has an aspect of suchness, it would be delimited, but if infinity excludes an aspect of suchness it would also be delimited, by virtue of the absence of the aspect.

Logic is about a world of here and there, now and then, about polarities of any kind. Logic deals with a world of things. In other words logic is a set of rules for a system built on dualities.

But the very nature of existence might be non-dual. Everything being infinitely tangled up. A Supermetatautological holographic fractalnetwork of self-similarities, where only limited perspectives of a confused mind believe that there are "things" with a spacetime location.

The very nature of being may transcend logic as we know it. Because there is only a "whole" and any delimitation of a concept, any perceptual delimitation and classification of a perceived object as being "part" or belonging to a category, are by-products of the workings of the Mind and the Ego. The confusion of the seeming parts that believe they are separate from the whole.

Infinity must therefore transcend logic and mindlike comprehension. Aspects of suchness and their absence are both part of it. How? Perhaps by the concept of time and space? Infinity encompasses all times and all spaces thereby encompassing all aspects. But not every seemingly partial spacetime universe may encompass all aspects in a manifested way (though it does in a potential way).

But what then about the concept that every seemingly partial spacetime universe encompasses all aspects in a manifested way?

If this would not be possible, then infinity would be limited by an impossibility.

Again it is logic biting its own tail. Infinity cannot be grasped in words and logic. Because there are no parts. Parts are illusory. So then infinity would be delimited by the notion that parts are illusory.
...
More of this chapter in my next book, which I have submitted for publication.