A Vedic interpretation of the Bliss and Curse of physical Technology

Not many people will disagree, if you state that modern technology has brought many benefits. We live longer, have eradicated many diseases, we can do everything faster: commute, communicate, conduct a business, we can generate more food in a shorter period, we can keep our food fresh for a longer time, we have more choice in amusement, we can spend more of our time for leisure activities, it has generated wealth and globally reduced poverty.

But has it increased our happiness? Has it improved the depth of our social interactions? Have we become more responsible, more involved and more caring towards each other? Has it paved the way for us to open ourselves to self-realisation?

Or are we are drowning in an excess of choice, an excess of ennui? Are we drowning in pollution of air, water and land? Are we suffering from noise, electromagnetic and visual pollution? Are we suffering from the massive scale of everything? Have we entered the proverbial multiplicity of Hell?

Think of it. The air has become polluted with exhaust gases from vehicles and manufacturing plants, the content of CO2  has also risen due to these factors, plus due to the gases produced by humans and animals, in particular by industrial farming. In cities as Beijing and New Delhi, the air is frequently unbreathable due to the smog. The resulting climate change will have dramatic effects changing ecosystems, flooding and provoking extreme weather conditions. 

Water and soil have become massively polluted due to plastics and metal littering and dumping. Especially the single use non-degradable plastics are responsible for this. Chemical waste, pesticides, fertilizers, oil spills, heavy metals, toxins and nuclear waste already render the conditions for life more precarious than ever before. Deforestation, loss of biodiversity and poisoning the food chain do not promise an auspicious future for our posterity.

We may have eradicated certain diseases; with our current lifestyle we're introducing many new ones. Microorganisms becoming resistant to antibiotics, cancer on the rise due to the dumping of toxic waste on the farmlands (.e.g. by the Mafia in Italy; due to solar cell! production in China) or due to the accumulation of toxic heavy metals in the food chain, especially in fish.

Bon appetit!

We can travel faster to any place of the world... at the cost of causing air and noise pollution on a massive scale. We can spend less time on cleaning our house or preparing our meals. To have more time for our self-development? No. In general people just spend more time being numbed down looking at a screen.

Children suffer from attention deficit disorders on a large scale due to computer gaming or other activities on their computers, tablets or mobile phones. Family members do not connect on a deep emotional level anymore; there's hardly any communication left. All family members autistically absorbed on their own computer device, chatting with unknown people they have never met, seen, touched or smelt. People are flooded with information and drown due to the overflow of choice. 

The world doesn't become a safer place either. Drugs and criminality flourish, like bacteria on a rich broth.

Has technology brought happiness? Perhaps initially in the 20th century, yes. But it seems it has gone over the top. We've entered the phase of diminishing returns. What we add doesn't become better. At present it only seems to worsen the state of life on Earth.

Is it intrinsic to technology that it brings all these devastating side effects? Or is this a consequence of the corrupted short term profit based thinking without regard for our posterity that has put us in this predicament?

Let's test our technologies in the light of the moral prescriptions from the yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the Yamas or "Don'ts".

Ahimsa means non-violence. Certainly our industrial farming technology is purely based on violence and cruelty. There are many more ways to rear livestock and to carry out the slaughtering in a more respectful way than the brutal approach of the farming industry. But if you ask people why they still buy the industrially farmed kilo package deal at the supermarket instead of the organic product at the specialist shop, they will tell you they can't afford it; that it's up to the government to take care of this.

Well, you can also simply leave it. You won't die from becoming a vegetarian.

Our plastic and metal waste pollution is not only an aggressive act towards our posterity, it is also directly in the here and now an act of violence against all the animals that get stuck in this waste or become poisoned by it. The same can be said about our short term benefit attitude towards the climate; but we're already ourselves undergoing the damaging effects thereof.

Yet there are alternatives possible. Technology has progressed so far that biodegradable plastics have become available. Moreover, we can responsibly refuse to buy any item which contains single use plastic. It is here that the manufacturers have a huge responsibility. The number of unnecessarily products packaged in plastic is appalling. Say no to these plastics!

Indifference is the mental disease of this generation populating the Earth; the attitude of "after me the deluge". It is not cool to be indifferent. You may become a victim of your inactivity one day. It is time to take responsibility and become like caring parents to our planet. This is the Amrit or nectar of Karma yoga.

The second of the Yamas is Satya; the guideline of truthful intent. If the preservation of life and consciousness is the truth, than it does not take much intelligence to realise that our corrupted technologies are a big metaphorical lie towards life. Our ways are a lie towards later generations and towards plant and animal life.

The third of the Yamas is Asteya: the Guideline of not appropriating what isn't yours a.k.a. refraining from stealing. Our corrupted ways stela from the future generations by exhausting the planet. What will be left of Earth's resources in five more decades if we continue to produce at this pace?

The fourth of the Yamas is Brahmaccharya. If you see the concept of "energy containment" in a broader sense than only sexually (as is usually the interpretation), you will see, we are not respectfully dealing with the energy management of our planet.

Still here again there are plenty of renewable energy resources that could solve our dependency on fossil fuels. Clean technology does exist. Geothermal, wind, hydroelectric, and tidal energy sources are just some examples. Our technology has advanced far enough to become completely independent of fossil fuels. What lacks is the political and economic willingness to do so. Our short term objectives outweighing the long term sustainability.

Finally there is Aparigraha, or refraining from greed. What else then our greed is the source of our predicament? Our striving for short term pleasure, wealth, possessions, money, a reputation?

Has Gautama Buddha not taught us that true happiness is not to be found in feverishly striving after our pleasures but rather in equanimity? Has he not taught us that this peace of mind, which the Greek called Ataraxia, can only be achieved by living a simple life? Is not Seva, service to others a hallmark of Hinduism? Why then this hunger for more material possessions and success? Is it going to bring us any nearer to the purpose of life, which is Self-Realisation?

When Arjuna had to choose between Krishna and his armies, he decisively chose the first. Krishna stands for Oneness, Consciousness and Quality. The armies stand for plurality, matter and quantity. The world of material phenomena is just a temporal appearance, only Consciousness is eternal. Similarly in the Western tradition, Spirit stand for Oneness, Unity and peace; the Hell is represented by the many. Excess in everything, excess in choice, we are flooded by the effects of the corrupted ways we have implemented our technology. More is not always better. Certainly not here. 

Technology, to be of benefit to us, must be high quality, recyclable or biodegradable. Technology must be true, kind and necessary.

Until we change our corrupted ways, we must try to minimise our dependence on technology that does not fulfil these criteria. 

This is the teaching of Technovedanta.

You can find my books on Amazon in paperback or ebook format (in India only 50Rs.)

Technovedanta (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07D92DZYZ),

Transcendental Metaphysics

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07D912ZW7)

Is Intelligence an Algorithm?(https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1785356704/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_1785356704)

Is Reality a Simulation? An Anthology  (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07D7JX4RS)

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.

Announcement about my next book

Most of the posts in this blog have been transformed into chapters of my next book. I have taken out the bulk of each chapter, so that what is left in the posts is now a kind of teaser. The book also contains additional chapters. I have submitted the book for publication, but I am still waiting for approval.

In the meantime, to tickle your curiosity, here is a teaser for the new book:

"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."

From the technology in the Vedas to the Veda of Technology

Image from http://www.vediccomputing.com/about.html

 
In this blog I have defined Technovedanta as a technological meta-knowledge philosophy beyond science and religion. The underlying epistemological idea is that mental knowledge can a priori only be speculative and in order to really know that our knowledge is valid, we must be able to reduce it to practice in the form of a technological application.

You may wonder why I introduced the word “Vedanta” which refers to a collection of Vedic scriptures. What do the ancient Indian Vedas have to do with epistemology?

The reasons are manifold: Prior to this blog I wrote a book called “Technovedanta”, in which I proposed an architecture for the internet as aware network (the Awwwarenet) based on stratifications derived from the Indian philosophy of Vedanta to create a functional mimic of consciousness, quasi-consciousness. Writing this book, the investigation of nature’s fundamental primacy of consciousness led me to the hypothesis of a panpsychic theory of everything.

But my ideas continued to evolve on this topic: In this blog I deepened my T.O.E by adding a pancomputational dimension, as described in the post on panpsychic pancomputationalism. As a corollary I became interested in the topic of epistemology: What can we really know for sure and how can we be so sure that what we know is “true”. Since my philosophy was extending into the very core of epistemology and my conclusion was that true knowledge can only be confirmed by a technological application thereof, it was apt to use a terminology that combined both technology and knowledge. But I already had proposed a terminology that was fit for that concept, namely “Technovedanta”. 

The Sanskrit word “Veda” means “knowledge” as come from the root “Vid” to know. As Sanskrit is an Indo-European language, it will be no surprise that we find back this root in other Indo-European languages: In the Germanic languages Norwegian and Swedish to know is “vet”, in Dutch it is “weten”. In Slavic languages such as Slovakian it is “vediet”, in Slovenian “vedeti” and in Belarusian “viedac”.

It is important to realise that with the word Veda the Indians did not only mean the different scriptures called the Vedas, but rather the totality of all knowledge, including transcendent knowledge, which is the root of consciousness: Consciousness can only become aware of itself by knowing. At that moment when the knower realises that the only thing he can know is the content and the process of his own consciousness, knower, known and knowing merge into a oneness. In other words in a transcendent sense Veda or knower-knowing-known is a kind of synonym for consciousness.

Veda as synonym for consciousness fits my quest into the ultimate nature of being perfectly, because that’s what my book was mostly about. 

But there is more to the story; Veda is also understood as the cosmic knowledge which is more fundamental than the physical world. In fact the Indian philosophy of the written Vedas (or Vedanta as the larger body of Vedic scriptures encompassing more than the traditional four Vedas only) is a form of Idealism: what we call reality is fundamentally mental or at least immaterial. It is not consciousness that emerges from matter as in materialism, but matter that is born out of consciousness in an attempt to know itself.
...
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.
...
More of this chapter in my next book, which I have submitted for publication.