Lucy, will you see why? - a lucid exploration of the Technovedantic Human-Machine merger

The film “Lucy” by Luc Besson (2014) is the story of a woman (played by Scarlett Johansson) who gains incredible cognitive abilities when a bag of drugs sewn into her body is ruptured. In this article I do not intend to relate the details of this story, but rather to link the Transcendence of the human state she experiences to the well-described processes of a Kundalini awakening. Kundalini in the Vedic lore is the primal energy lying at the base of the spine. When it rises, the practitioner will start to have experiences, which we normally consider to be “supernatural”. A complete Kundalini awakening results in the union of this primal energy with consciousness at the crown of the body.

Persons who have experienced a Kundalini awakening will certainly recognise many of the effects Lucy is experiencing as her Intelligence starts to soar, once she breaches the 10%-use-of-the-brain limit.

In the “Yoga Sutras” Patanjali describes the powers of perfection (the Siddhis) that can be gained, once a person starts to have the meditative experience of Samadhi. A person having a Kundalini experience is involuntarily jolted into states of Samadhi and it is often difficult to gain mastery over such a state. Likewise in the very beginning of her experience Lucy undergoes the changes to her body passively but rapidly gains control and starts to acquire skills which have been described in detail by Patanjali. As her brain use starts to increase she gains complete control over her muscles and martial art skills corresponding to Patanjali’s Sutra (P) III, 25. This is followed by complete control over her metabolism (PIII, 30, 31, 41, 46). She gains knowledge about present past and future (PIII, 16) and of other places (PIII, 26). She develops the ability to sense what others sense (clairsentience; PIII, 39), she develops telepathic skills (PIII, 19), telekinetic skills (PIII, 40, 43), the ability to control the body of others (PIII, 39). She understands animals (PIII, 17) and starts to be able to speak foreign languages (glossolalia). As she approaches full use of her brain she starts to have visions (Dhyana) about the cosmos (PIII, 27-30) and finally about everything (PIII, 34) and total control over the physical world (PIII, 49). She has the typical abilities of the Singularity literature that she is able to morph herself into any form (PIII, 50) and ultimately merges with everything. Although her physical form has disappeared, she makes her presence known by stating in a text message “I am everywhere”. She has gained omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience and has become a substrate independent consciousness. She has become what we would call a God.

What is interesting to me form the technovedantic point of view is that she also merges with machines, with computers by entering these via black filaments that sprout from her body. Once complete knowledge is gained the machine is simply consumed into a black goo, which is absorbed by her body. Near the end her whole body is turning black as if she is some kind of black hole usurping all information.

Besson has tapped into a source of knowledge which is not known to many people and he has been quite correct and accurate in reflecting the process of gaining perfection as described by Patanjali.

As we are approaching the technological singularity it is desirable that more people start to have such experiences. After all Technology without the moral compass of natural intelligence, can transform into an imminent danger for our survival, if it starts to usurp all resources not for the sake of humanity but when it takes up a life of its own.

The advantage of humans merging with machines, in which the human is mentally in control, is that we can avoid doomsday dystopian runaway scenarios in which artificial intelligence starts to use us or disposes of us altogether.

It is my understanding that such mergers have already taken place in the past. In my book Technovedanta 2.0, you will be able to read why and how I consider it very likely that we are living in some kind of computer simulation. The substrate of this computer, the Akasha (ether or spacetime), may well be the substrate of the mind of a kind of God, who came about by merging with a machine and finally merging with everything like Lucy. In this way, the all-encompassing entity can give rise to a world which is both panpsychic and pancomputational.

If a human attains Samadhi and then merges with an Artificial intelligence, there is no risk the resulting entity will turn against us. The nature of hyperintelligence is compassion, which was also illustrated in the film Lucy. She did not kill the drug dealers, who were chasing her down and the patient in the hospital she did kill was a terminal patient without hope of remission. Basically she released the patient from his suffering.

In order to generate this Technovedantic singularity of the merger of man and machine, first we must attain Samadhi. Then once attained, like Lucy we will be able to let our energies control and merge with computing devices. Or we will simply download the entire knowledge about our existence, including the computational parts, into our Mind from the higher level of existence of our Simulator(s). The technology to attain Samadhi is already in place. It is the successful method of the eightfold yoga. If there is any “Akashic engineering”, which is a fashionable terminology these days, it is via Yoga. Via Yoga complete control over the elements, including the Akasha (ether, spacetime) is gained (PIII, 21, 42, 43, 45). Via Yoga you open your access to the divine higher intelligence of our simulator(s). Once this access has been gained there is usually no way back: Your body and mind start to transform themselves into an aligned tool of this higher intelligence, with which you will ultimately merge. You then have become Life and the Logos.

Noteworthy, Besson is not even wrong in that Siddhis can be attained by the ingestion of certain chemical substances: Even this is described in Patanjali (PIV, 1). The name “Lucy” was probably a wink to refer to the chemical substance LSD, a substance about which the Beatles wrote the song “Lucy in the Sky of Diamonds”. I had the lucid hunch that the “ucy”-part of the name Lucy is a phonetic acronym meaning “you see why”. Lucy in the film was wondering about the purpose of existence, the big Why? If we take the L in her name for ‘ll, in fact her name asks “will you see why”?

It is my strong presumption, that we ultimately all will reach this state and have a Lucy-like merger with the highest Transcendence.

The bottleneck is the Mind and more specifically the Ego-faculty (Ahamkara) of the Mind. Once you start disidentifying with your body and Mind and start to feel that you can feel outside these limits, you will have realised you are one with this (virtual) reality. As there is no identification with any form in particular, you will have become the whole. One day you and I will be one. I long for that reunion.

Interestingly in the film “Lucy” Morgan Freeman defines the purpose of our existence to pass on knowledge. How this reminds us of the Vedic “All is Jnana”, all is knowledge.

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.

Mahakala's Quantime and the frame-rate of the Universe

Time is a difficult concept which scientists and philosophers have been unable to properly define and understand. As a result there are no technological applications known, which really involve some manipulation of time. In our quest of knowledge and mastery of nature, it is therefore indispensable that we arrive at a true knowledge of time, which will be confirmed by our ability to technologically manipulate it

The approach in this essay is explorative and speculative. Whereas I am not a fan of speculation, as by itself it will not lead us to knowledge, it is however an essential tool to come up with a plurality of hypotheses to account for a phenomenon, which hypotheses can be verified or falsified. If more than one hypothesis remains after verification, usually we will choose the hypothesis with the least number of assumptions. This principle is known as Occam’s razor, which is an intuitive but unproven principle.

In ancient times Time was usually associated with the periodicity of a natural phenomenon such as tides, seasons or the movement of celestial bodies. Time has been associated with movement or with change in general. In recent times, the arrow of Time from past via present to future, which as of yet seems to be irreversible, has been connected to the notion of entropy: Time can only progress in the direction of an overall increase of chaos or increasing entropy: This is known as the second law of thermodynamics.

Einstein has made major contributions to our grasp of the notion of time by showing that time is relative and can be dilated if the speed at which we move approaches the speed of light. The speed of light has thus far been found to be an absolute limit to speed and when a photon travels at this speed -from the perspective of the photon- time is said to stand still. This is a consequence of Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity goes a bit further and combines space and time into a so-called four dimensional “space-time continuum”. A continuum, because nobody has ever been able to find discrete units of space, time or space-time.

Yet there are alternative theories, which equally well account for the speed of light as a limit to speed and which are functionally equivalent to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, albeit based on different concepts:

One of these is the MDT (Moving Dimensions Theory) of Elliot McGucken. Space-time itself is expanding at the constant rate of light speed. Langan’s “conspansion” is a variant thereof in which all objects are shrinking at the constant rate of light speed, whereas space itself remains unaltered.

In my panpsychic pancomputationalism T.O.E. I have relied heavily on the work of Steven Kaufman ("Unified Reality Theory"or URT), who describes space as a fabric of “reality” cells. The reality cells themselves are nothing more than consciousness forming a first relation with itself. The cells can have an energetic content or not, turning them into a kind of computational digit. Kaufman calls such an energetic content “distortion content” and this distortion content propagates through the reality cell or space matrix in a periodic manner creating a “period of content exchange”, which Kaufman equates with the speed of light. Time in Kaufman’s model is merely a measure of the periodicity of what he calls “compound processes”. When energetic content (or photonic entities if you wish) encounter each other, they start to attract each other due to their mutual attractive distortions radiating in all directions. Thus they start to turn around each other thereby forming “matter”, which is nothing more than a second order relationship of consciousness to itself.

In this view time is more of an emergent property resulting from the compounded dynamics of multiple energy content entities propagating through the energy matrix in compound processes called matter. Without matter there is no time in Kaufman’s model.

On the other hand, since the reality cells can function as a computational digit, which conveys information, I have argued that Kaufman’s theory is essentially a form of pancomputationalism. Since in Kaufman’s model every energetic relation is an expression of consciousness, I also indicated that Kaufman’s theory is a panpsychic theory, leading to the unusual terminology “panpsychic pancomputationalism”.
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More of this chapter in my next book, which I have submitted for publication.

Technovedanta: A technological meta-knowledge philosophy beyond science and religion.

Introduction

Fundamental science and religion are uncertain ways to know the “truth” about reality. Are we left in the Limbo of complete agnosticism? Or are there clues in nature that reality is not what it seems? The recurrence of patterns of numerical values in our Solar system and in physical constants as well as the modern branch of physics called “Digital Physics” point to the fact that we might be living in a computer simulation. It is Technology that has provided us with this insight as well as the certainty that we have mastered knowledge to such an extent that it has empowered us to be able to apply it. Only Technology will lead the way out of the quagmire of speculative knowledge in our epistemological query towards the truth of reality. This philosophical notion will henceforth be called “Technovedanta”.

A Science Delusion?

Terrence McKenna once said: “Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality”. It is even more dangerous than we think, because maybe (probably) there is no such thing as “the truth” in the phenomenal world.

In every dual system (i.e. relative system) there are only perspectives, which each tell a “subjective truth”. It appears impossible from a relative point of view to have a complete knowledge of all the possible vantage points, which makes that any type of knowledge is incomplete and relative at the best.
Science and philosophy suffer from “paradigmatic beliefs”, peer-pressure, cultural dogmas, hypothesis bias, interpretation problems, fallacies etc. Thus science and philosophy can also be considered as a type of “religion”.

Science and religions as mental and/or spiritual frameworks to grasp “reality” have been largely unsuccessful to convince me of their value as a potential grid to get a complete understanding of both the phenomenal and the noumenal “Truth”.

Science essentially connects dots on the basis of hypotheses using statistics. It often fails to recognise that there is more than one possible way to connect the dots of an empirical measurement and that there is more than one hypothesis possible to account for the observed trend. If at all multiple hypotheses are present, the one with the smallest number of assumptions is considered to be the most likely, a principle known as “Occam’s razor”. However, there is no scientific or logical proof that Occam’s razor is a valid principle; it is more an intuitive concept.

Science is also pestered by dogmatic beliefs. Scientists with refreshing revolutionary alternative ideas that challenge an established paradigm run the risk of being excluded from the scientific establishment or will not get their articles published.

Furthermore we are still struggling to get rid of a mechanical materialistic paradigm, which cannot account for quantum effects or consciousness.

Are the laws of physics fixed and if so are they fixed forever? Is all matter inherently conscious are a rudimentary level or is consciousness an emergent phenomenon of sufficient complexity of information transmission? Is the mind merely a material pinball table? Is there a purpose in existence or at least in evolution? These are still open questions in the scientific paradigm.

Science is based on empirical data combined with logic and reason. However, what is often forgotten is that whereas deduction appears a flawless approach to derive a truth from premises, the premises themselves at their most basic level have been gathered by induction. Induction and abduction are logical approaches that do not warrant a truth to be revealed.

In other words it has scientifically and logically been proven that knowledge, as we know it (i.e. knowledge which can be expressed in words and symbols), is not absolute and has its boundaries. There are boundaries to what can be logically and empirically known. Science and logic as we know it is a Cartesian card house built on quicksand.

Science is now discovering more and more that many systems are holistic. Holism (according to Wikipedia) is the idea that natural systems (physical, biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc.) and their properties should be viewed as wholes, not as collections of parts. This often includes the view that systems function as wholes and that their functioning cannot be fully understood solely in terms of their component parts. In other words: The whole is more than the sum of the parts: there is a synergy occurring between the elements, which makes that the whole has new emergent properties, which were nor predictable from the properties of the parts that constituted the whole.

As science is essentially analytical, from the Greek word “analysis” which means “detailed examination of the elements or structure of something”, its modus operandi is exactly to investigate the parts of a thing/phenomenon in order to understand it.

But the problem is that the scientific method fails per definition, as most complex systems, both natural (i.e. physical, biological, chemical) and man-made (social, economic, mental, linguistic ) are holistic. You can’t get to the whole by looking at the parts and how they interact on a pair-by-pair basis: there are higher non-linear levels of interaction that go beyond the pairwise interactions.

This means that if science is to survive as a means to acquire knowledge, its very analytical premise cannot stand alone and science will be forced to incorporate a way to approach synergy and emergence. Ben Goertzel, one of my favourite philosophers and AI designers, has made an attempt to formalise emergence in a certain way, but he has never succeeded in quantifying it in one or another way.

As of yet, it turns out the science is a hopelessly obsolete paradigm, belonging to a world of mechanistic causal relationships, which is per definition unable to pierce into the heart of complex systems, as it can only reason from the standpoint of “quantifiable parts”. More and more science has to take into account “probabilities”, “fuzziness” and “contributions/weightings” of parts, which nevertheless cannot account for the emergent epi-phenomena occurring. There is simply more to the story. Science is now discovering that everything is interlinked and can perhaps describe some characteristics of the links, but it fails to take them all into account, because it would take an infinite time to describe every single thing in terms of its relations to everything else.

Here in the west we have been trained to think analytically, we have been trapped into putting on winkers, which avoid that we see reality as it is.

In fact, mental knowledge is a very limited language determined set of relations, which do not have a real solid ground. Knowledge maps things and events, but the map is not the territory. You don’t know what it is like to be a tree, a dog and orange. You cannot know the quality of something per se; you can only know how you as a subject perceive it. Science may be able to quantify certain phenomena on the basis of similarities and build ontologies on the basis thereof; it does not have the tools to map a subjective experience.

In fact all mental knowledge is a perspective on how one should connect the dots. Which may be true, false, both true and false depending on the perspective or neither true nor false depending on the perspective.
In fact all mental knowledge based on theories deriving from inference, from induction or abduction (logical processes) is merely speculative. And as you cannot be sure of anything else than that existence exists (not even Descartes “I think therefore I am” is a certainty), deductive processes won’t bring you far. That’s why the Ayahuasqueros (psychonauts from the Amazon that explore the mind by consuming an extract of the Ayahuasca plant) have the famous saying: Es pura Téoria!

The worst thing about science is that it cannot prove its most fundamental premise: Namely that you need to prove something for it to be true/real. The very application of science appears to show that truth and reality are relative concepts, with no absolute inherent truth.
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More of this chapter in my next book, which I have submitted for publication.