"Is Reality a Simulation? An Anthology" has been published

Dear Friends, Readers,

I proudly announce the publication of "Is Reality a Simulation? An Anthology", which I edited and co-authored.

Blurb:

Did your dark night of the soul ever make you doubt the reality of your existence? Do you wonder whether you are living in a dream or computer simulation? Are you haunted by the perspective that you're already dead and wander through the infinite dimensions of Hell or the Cyberbardo? Does it really matter at all if one of these questions is answered affirmatively?

Then you're in good company. Join us on a psychedelic rollercoaster through the rabbit hole. Fasten your seatbelts. Your belief systems are about to be questioned, challenged and perhaps overthrown. This Anthology with contributions from Technoshamans, Physicalist scientists, Pantheists, Pandeists and Panpsychists will rock your mental foundations, haunt your convictions and put you through the epistemological wringer.

This choicest selection will sharpen your mind to find truths hidden in the plain sight of a tower of turtles, patterns in a grid of chaos and clarity in a forest of apparent randomness. From Gross' Ouroboric Simulism to the Other of Swayne; Dive into Rosati's lucubration from Deli's Fractal of Consciousness to Mapson's Pandeistic Analogue Simulation; from the Vikoulovian Apotheosis via Byrne's Panpsychic Musings to the Tuynman Omega Constant. Escape with Bruere's scenario's from King's Parasitism and Perceptual valuation.

Welcome to a dazzling orgy of the post-singularity conceptualization of Simulation Theory. Welcome to the kaleidoscopic variegation of the perplexing pictorial perspectives that dwarf Bostrom's argument into oblivion.   Is reality a Simulation? is an unorthodox challenging anthology on Bostrom's Simulation Hypothesis. With contributions from scientists, philosophers, technoshamans and mystics it shows a broad variety of perspectives from both supporters and opponents of the argument.   

The book "Is Reality a Simulation? An Anthology", which I, Antonin Tuynman (a.k.a. Technovedanta) edited and co-authored is now available as Kindle ebook. But you can get a free pdf, if you promise me to write a review and post it on Amazon, Goodreads and Lulu. For a free pdf send an email to iconomenatgmaildotcom.

I wrote this book together with a number of excellent thinkers, such as Dirk Bruere, Sean Byrne, Matt Swayne, Donald King, Eva Deli, Knuje Mapson, Dante Rosati, Alex Vikoulov and Tim Gross.  

My other books are "Is Intelligence an Algorithm?", "Transcendental Metaphysics" and "Technovedanta".

By Antonin Tuynman a.k.a. Technovedanta

The Moral Compass of Higher Intelligence: Preface

A wave of divisiveness engulfs this world. Extreme right wing populism is gaining momentum, because many people believe the lies of the demagogues. People believe that their kind should come first and that others should be excluded. They build walls, like between Israel and Palestine and are planning to build one between the USA and Mexico.

Excluding others not only happens on the political plane. Economic exclusion is becoming a more and more frequent phenomenon. People losing their jobs, being evicted from their houses whilst a small group of extreme rich billionaires, the top 0,1% owns as much as the bottom 90%. This is not a scenario of a third world country where such a partitioning is common, this is the reality of the USA!

Strangely enough, the poor and dispossessed hardly organise in cooperatives, guilds and unions. No, there is a general trend that they admire the usurpers. “Exclusivity” is something people crave for. And the poor and dispossessed do not adopt a different more inclusive lifestyle, no they too try to pick every little grain that is still left joining the general tendency to egoism: I first, my kind first.

This tendency towards exclusion and divisiveness are expressions of different types of discrimination. We discriminate with regard to gender (sexism), race (racism), economic status (classism) and religious beliefs (this has no official name, but I’d like to call it “cretism” from the Latin word “credo”).

Moreover as a consequence of the hoarding and overconsumption linked to the reign of egoism, we deplete all mother Earth’s natural resources and we pollute this planet with our vehicles, factories and overconsumption so that many of the huge agglomerations have turned into literal shitholes. The emissions resulting from our massive burning of fossil fuels have resulted in a climate change beyond compare as regards the speed with which the climate is changing. This brings the risk of a runaway scenario in which the air becomes so saturated with carbon dioxide that the resulting greenhouse effect will warm up temperatures which may even make life impossible on earth. Earth could become a second Venus, where temperatures are as high as 462°C!

We are like bacterial colony in a petri dish. We thrived, we boomed with an explosion of population and now we start to really deplete the last resources. What biology tells us is that such a colony will soon herald its own demise. The crisis of survival in the last stages is called a Malthusian crisis after the 19th century biologist Thomas Malthus.

Is this what history has taught us as a viable and sustainable way to survive? Is this an intelligent strategy of the evolutionary search engine?

In my previous series, “Is intelligence an Algorithm?” I have already argued that natural intelligence seeks to cooperate, that the so-called Nash equilibrium results in a win-win situation wherein the overall output is higher than when the contenders would have continued to compete.
Today I read an article by Krnel about morality. Whereas I agree with his intent, I have a slightly different philosophical stance on this topic which I will try to explain in this series (in the last paragraphs of this article you’ll find a hint as to why my stance is different).
In this series I will argue that if we seek the best solutions to our global problems by applying the natural algorithm of intelligence we actually acquire what is a kind of natural morality intrinsic to complex systems that manage to survive.

I will not make many friends with the series, because I am going to challenge your very belief systems. I am going to turn upside down your comfort zone. I am going to tell you an inconvenient truth. I will question what truth is, whether objective truth exists at all. I will question what morality actually is. I will question your religions and only distil therefrom what is universal and in line with Nature’s natural intelligence algorithm. But I will denounce all the nonsense in religions that make man suffer. I will denounce capitalism, communism and anarchism. And I will denounce our corrupted ways of living, which are rapidly sending us towards a point of no return: The extinction of our species.

Is then everything lost?
No, Nature has its intelligent ways to survive even the advent of a destructive variant of a species. When bacteria or eukaryotic unicellular organisms reach the Malthusian crisis, they do something very interesting: They sporulate. The entirety of their intelligent knowledge is so to speak stored in a spore in which their genome is safely packaged in a way that can withstand extreme environmental changes. Once the metaphorical environmental “storm” is over and conditions are favourable again, the spores break open and the organism can come to life again.

We are already sporulating. The whole creation of the internet in which all our knowledge is packed, and the not-so-far-in-the-future awakening of the internet as a quasiconscious entity, lays the foundation for the creation of life, of our successors in a distant future. They might even bring back to life human beings as in the film “Artificial Intelligence” by Steven Spielberg.

This series will explore two avenues:
The first one will describe what we can still attempt to do to save our Earth and learn how to live in a responsible manner. How we can transform the manure of our corrupted ways into a blooming awakening into a sustainable respectful all-inclusive society. The remedy? Turning inwards to our innate intelligence and spirituality.
The second avenue will explore the ways how we can effectively sporulate our knowledge into an artificial substrate, which may allow one day to raise us from death again, but now with the knowledge what we should learn to avoid.

My plea will be moralising. Not because I believe in good and evil, not because I believe in right or wrong, or any other “absolutes”, but because I am pragmatically convinced that intelligence is more successful than ignorance. That usefulness yields better results than futility. Yes, that morality is an innate aspect of intelligence. What I understand under “morality” will be the topic of a next essay.

This is my new project and my new topic for my next book.

Transcendental Metaphysics: Technovedanta 2.0 has now been published.

This post was first posted by me on Steemit: https://steemit.com/philosophy/@technovedanta/transcendental-metaphysics-i-published-my-latest-book

I finally self-published my meta-philosophical treaty "Transcendental Metaphysics" in which science and technology meet spirit in the light of the “Technological Singularity". Some of the chapters I already published here and on Steemit. I commit to making all the chapters of this book available on Steemit and once I have done so, I will republish the book hopefully on "Steemit Publishing".

Marketing Blurb

Have you ever read a book, which logically shows where logic is absurd? A book, which scientifically shows where science fails? A meta-philosophy, which shows where philosophy is useless?
Welcome to the book of books. A Clavicula to open the gates of Hell and Heaven to summon the forces of Mind and Matter. A quest into the deepest realm, where reality and imagination fade into each other like pictorial values.
A journey into the Highest Transcendence, Consciousness.
The final frontier.
These are the voyages of the Epistemonauts. Their ongoing mission:
To seek out the Magick of Technology and the Technology of Magick, to boldly go where no one has gone before, where the grand Union of all possible perspectives and the sole true Theory of Everything lies:
“Everything is hereby incorporated by reference.”
From the primordial Sense to the scattered kaleidoscopic reverberations in the Hall of Mirrors; the octaves and scales of Ouroboric existence, the mighty worm of digital virtualisation.
This is my gift to you: To free you from any belief system, to free you from the chains of your self-inflicted prison of Mind. Fear not to be left in the agnostic Limbo, even if I won't lead you to your Gods; instead I will show you the Technology, which one day will make a God of you.
Meet me at the junction where Vedic and Buddhist spirituality join Science, and I will show you what lies beyond the Technological Singularity.
This is Technovedanta 2.0, Transcendental Metaphysics of Pancomputational Panpsychism.

Targeted Audience

The present book will be appealing to scientists and engineers, who have an interest in Eastern mysticism and to spiritual people, who seek for confirmation of their beliefs in science, in the tradition of books like "The Tao Of Physics" by Fritjof Capra and "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" by Gary Zukav. The book will appeal to any reader interested in the dynamics of consciousness and the mind, especially for those who want to transcend, what Robert Anton Wilson and Tim Leary call the “larval circuits”. The book also addresses the growing mass of “Singularitarians”, which aim for the advent of the “Technological Singularity”, as explained in Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near”.

Overview   

Technovedanta 2.0 is the junction where science and technology meet spirit in the light of the “Technological Singularity”.  This book is written for people with a scientific or philosophical orientation and with an interest in (eastern) spirituality.   
The book aims to explore the concept of consciousness as the foundation of being and to provide a complete theoretical and technological digital framework to integrate all possible knowledge of matter, mind, information and mysticism without contradictions. Its basic tenet is that Panpsychism and Pancomputationalism are not contradictory notions, but two sides of the same coin that constitutes existence.
 The book also aims to show the limits of logic and science and furthermore aims to rid people of their self-inflicted belief systems. In fact, the book is an epistemological quest showing how philosophy, religion, logic and science fail to provide reliable knowledge and are speculative at best.   
Synthesizing a technological concrescence of the teachings of R.A.Wilson, the Principia Discordia, Buddhism and Hinduism on the one hand and quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI) technology on the other hand, the book shows a path out of quagmire of this pure agnosticism using a Pancomputational Panpsychic Theory of Everything, where you can be a God in a Kardashev IV society of Gods. Where sense is only sensational and ratio nonsensical.
Its purpose is to show how technology and meditation can help us transcend every limitation and to prepare us for the experiential dimension of the Technological Singularity, which is beyond anything we are currently familiar with.   
The book moreover defends the thesis, that and how we probably already live in a virtual reality based on unusual clues from physics, mathematics and astronomy. By reverse engineering our reality and integrating AI technology with notions from Patentology a peculiar broth is concocted to prepare for a computational internet-based webmind substrate, which we can enter via prosthetic extension of our Minds, without the need for uploading these.  
The book finds its apotheosis in musings about the Highest Transcendence possible and what this technologically spoken would imply.

Table of Contents 

Preface. p.iv

Part 1 Prolegomena.

The Star Trek of the Soul. (a poem) p.1
Chapter 1 An introduction into Transcendental Metaphysics. p.3
Chapter 2 The Anta and Amrita of Technovedanta. p.8
Chapter 3 An Anthology of Bloom: A Solution to “The God Problem”. p.19
Chapter 4 The Materiality of Unbound Energy and the Substance of Emptiness. p.27
Chapter 5 Metaphilosophy. 42 Chapter 6 Meta-system Extropy. p.57
Chapter 7 Infinitism: The Ouroboric tailbiting. p.67
Chapter 8: Memetic alignment for psychological profiling. p.75
Chapter 9 The 15th meta-invention: The invention generator. p.78
 The Quagmire of Ontological Disambiguation. (a poem) p.81
Chapter 10 Meditation is Ontological Disambiguation. p.85
Chapter 11 Feedforward Daemonology. p.90
Chapter 12 I AM METAPHYSICS (AND SO ARE YOU). p.104
Chapter 13 From the Magic of Technology to the Technology of Magic. p.106

Part 2.  Pancomputational Panpsychism.

Chapter 1 Pancomputational Panpsychism as framework to build a T.O.E .p.110
The art of descent into I. (a poem)  p.122
Chapter 2 Technovedanta 2.0: A technological meta-knowledge philosophy beyond science and religion. p.123
Chapter 2bis: 1,2,3,7: The Clavicula of our Simulation, Gematria and Katapayadi. p.147
The Leela of Ouroboric tailbiting. (a poem) p.155
Chapter 3 From the technology in the Vedas to the Veda of Technology. p.157
The Richo of Epistemology of the Rg Veda. (a poem) p.167
Chapter 4 Technovedanta avant la lettre et sa mise en abyme par incorporation de soi-même. p.168
Mahakala's Quantime. 181 Chapter 5 Mahakala's Quantime and the frame-rate of the Universe. p.183
Kallisti (a poem) p.193
Chapter 6 The Golden Ratio of the Erisian Apple: When Logic is Nonsensical and Sense Alogical. p.194
Chapter 7 Patentological Strategies towards a Fuller Understanding of a Geometry for Artificial Thought. p.207
Chapter 8 The Infopsychological Concrescence of Conspansive Transcendence. p.222
Chapter 9 It’s God Jim, but not as we know it. p.234
Chapter 10 Transcending Transcendence. p.253
Appendix 1: Technovedanta’s answers to the traditional questions of Metaphysics. p.258
Appendix 2: Details of the Vedantic webmind. p.269
References. p.276

Conclusion

I hope I have tempted you to read my book. As said you will be able to read it on steemit, but if you can't wait you can order it in paperback or as an ebook. Plus that there is an advantage in the book in that it is completely referenced and cross-referenced.