I've believed for a long time now that we are all connected in some way.  I also believe that spirituality and science will find more and more common ground over the years.  (Hence, my recent articles like The Law of Attraction -- And Backward Causality, and pointers to sites like Antimatters -- science and the humanities from nonmaterialistic perspectives, and reading of books like The New Physics and Cosmology Dialogues with the Dalai Lama).

I've recently come across information from lots of different sources that describes our universe as both holographic and fractal in nature.  In a hologram, every part has information about the entire image (albeit at a lower resolution).  Every part of a hologram is initimately related with every other part.  It is believed that our brains store information holographically.  Kurzweil points this out in "The Singularity is Near".  In a fractal, a microcosm of the whole still looks like the whole.  Fractals are often found in nature.  For instance, take the branch of a tree.  Its structure looks very much like the original tree (only smaller).  This property of nature and of the universe can occur over huge scales.  Take my recent pointer to "The Universe Looks Like a Brain Cell."  Both the holographic and fractal nature of the universe means that we can not look at ourselves in isolation.  We must realize that we are a part of a whole.

Until recently, I had forgotten about an article I read in an issue of Scientific American a few years ago that explains the theory that the universe is holographic.  It's a very interesting read, but it's pretty hard core.  Fortunately, it doesn't contain much math, or I would have been completely lost.  If you're scientifically-abled and brave, I found it here -- it's titled "Information in the Holographic Universe".

But the "pièce de résistance" is the article I ran across today by Michael Talbot, who, according to Wikipedia, "was the author of a number of books highlighting parallels between ancient mysticism and quantum mechanics, and espousing a theoretical model of reality that suggests the physical universe is akin to a giant hologram." His best known book is "The Holographic Universe." I'm definitely going to give this one a read.

The following is an article that summarizes the content of "The Holographic Universe."  It's a great read about how were all connected, about the nature of consciousness, and about how many paranormal phenomena may be explained by the holographic nature of the universe.  This would include the "collective unconscious," ESP, etc.  It's not mentioned here, but it could also easily be tied to "The Law of Attraction."  It's a bit long, but well worth the time to read it.  I definitely have a lot more reasearch to do in this area.

Spirituality and Science: The Holographic Universe 

By Michael Talbot

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris, a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since travelling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three-dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

Holograms
To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern(the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has laboured under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart some thing constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

The aquarium model
To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fishes, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

Cosmos as a super hologram
In addition to its phantom like nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected. The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of super hologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the super holographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the super hologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the super hologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the super hologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the super holographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development". Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

The brain as a hologram
Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain. In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica). Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage -- simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information -- another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of across-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neuro physiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses(light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists. Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability. Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

The synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views
But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion. We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the super hologram.

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with scepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm. In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level. It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

Regressions into the animal kingdom
In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsulated in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species? anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal.

The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.

Transpersonal psychology
Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.

Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.

As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

Consciousness creates reality

The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.

The power of visualization
Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because in the holographic domain of thought images are ultimately as real as "reality". Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagorical events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams. Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

A new reality
Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".

starbuckyou said that the guy singing "The Java Jive" at starbucks is "the smartest marketeer God ever created."  I have to respectfully disagree.   The greatest marketeer ever is...

Sir Richard Branson!

   Technology News From KurzweilAI.net

My sister informed me that her truck was stolen last Monday evening.  The last (and only other) time she had a car stolen was back in 1986, the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded, killing the teacher on board Christa McAuliffe.   Well today, at 6:36 p.m. EDT, the space shuttle Endeavor lifts off with McAuliffe's replacement teacher, Barbara Morgan.  Very strange coincidence, indeed.  I hope nothing goes wrong.

Just What Is Our Future Anyway?

A lot of my current thinking has been influence by Ray Kurzweil and his concept of the Singularity, and the Law of Accelerating Returns.  If one looks back at trends in technology of all kinds, they follow an exponential curve.  There is no reason to believe (barring a catastrophy), that these trends will not continue in the future.  Limits in one technology give way to the potential in the next paradigm, which fuels continued exponential growth.  Technology, says Kurzweil, is evolution by other means.  Ultimately, and soon, as we round the knee of the exponential curve, we will reach a point where significant transformations in our way of life will happen so fast, that ordinary humans will not be able to participate in a meaningful way.  I’ll try to explain here what this means for us “ordinary humans” and where this will eventually lead us in our place in the universe.

Exponential Growth

Exponential growth is not very intuitive.  We humans tend to think linearly.  We look back in time at the progress we’ve made in the last 50 years, and expect to make similar progress in the next 50.  People who try to predict future trends often think linearly.  This leads to optimistic predictions in the short term (because the details were not well understood), and pessimistic predictions in the long term (because the growth was far greater than a linear view).

When something grows linearly, it means it grows by adding in some amount over each period in time.  If you save $100 a week by stuffing it in your mattress, your accumulated wealth will grow linearly.  Every week you’ll add $100 more.  Every year, your savings will grow by $5200.  After 20 years, you will have accumulated around $100,000.

When something grows exponential, however, the growth is multiplicative rather than additive.  It increases by a percentage of the current amount.  Imagine that instead of stuffing your $100 in your mattress, you give it to an investment banker who puts it in mutual funds and equities that return 12% annually in growth and dividends.  At the end of 20 years, you’ll have more than $350,000.  In another 20 years, the difference is even more stark.  After a total of 40 years, your mattress savings will be up to $200,000, while your investment account will be worth an amazing $3,800,000.  After 60 years, compare $300,000 to a startling $38,000,000!  (This is assuming, of course, that you don’t have to pay taxes along the way. J )

Exponential growth can be a very powerful thing.  In the above example, with 12% interest, we double our money about every six years.  If you look at compute power historically, we are doubling at a rate greater than every 2 years!  This is true even if you go back to the early 1900’s to mechanical computing devices, and follow the trend through relays, tubes, transistors, and integrated circuits.  However, it is only in the last 20 years that computers have begun to have a significant effect on our lives, and the trend is only accelerating.

Exponential growth can sneak up on you.  It seems very slow and insignificant at first, but that can change dramatically as we round the knee of the curve.  Consider the following graph showing the exponential nature of human population growth over the last 2000 years:

Note that it took us tens of thousands of years since modern man came into existence just to reach the first billion of population around the year 1800.  In just a little over 200 years since then, the population has exploded to nearly 7 billion.  (Of course, with population growth, there may be resource issues and population controls put in place that act to curb this growth, as can be seen in future years where the graph is expected to roll in the other direction).

I had my own experience with exponential growth sneaking up on me recently.  Before I went on vacation for a week, my kids’ above-ground pool had a few insignificant splotches of algae that had taken at least a week to grow on the floor of the pool.  If I’m gone for a week, I shouldn’t have to worry about it, right?  Well, not exactly.  When we returned, the entire pool was neon green!  Two gallons of shock, and a week later, we finally had clear water again.

When it comes to technology, we are currently at the knee of the exponential curve.  We know this because paradigm shifts are occurring multiple times within our lifetimes, and occurring more and more frequently, and adoption is taking less and less time.  Just look at how fast the adoption of the world wide web took place!

GNR

GNR refers to 3 major areas of technology that Kurzweil talks about – “Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics (specifically Artificial Intelligence – or AI).”  These are the areas of technology that will have the most profound impact over the coming decades.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about the specific technical advancements that have been made in these areas.  Kurzweil spends a good chunk of “The Singularity is Near” covering these in detail. 

I will talk about some of the major impacts, and what it means for us going forward.

Out of the three, genetics/biotechnology will have the greatest near-term impact.  We have already seen real applications in this area, from cochlear implants, to treatment of Parkinson’s disease using electrodes in the brain, to more directed forms of cancer treatments, to genetically modified crops.  There have been experiments in neural implants that interface the brain and nervous system to electronics.  A monkey was trained to control a robotic arm with the power of its mind alone.  Over the next 15 years, we will see rapid advancements in treatment of disease, helping those with disabilities, and using circuits to overcome damage in the brain and nervous system.  We will even make real progress toward modifying all the mechanisms that cause aging. 

While the power of controlling biology has its benefits, it also has its risks.  Genetically modified viruses, or even viruses created from scratch are a dangerous possibility that we need to be prepared for.  We need to keep moving forward, though.  We can’t turn our back on technology and bury our heads in the sand.  As TR said, this only exposes our backsides to the world.  This is true – since those with malicious intent would continue to develop the technology, while we would now be powerless to combat it.

While nanotechnology is a little further behind, its implications are even more profound.  We’ve been able to do some relatively simple things so far – make simple gears and motors and carbon nanotubes, move individual atoms around, etc.  Eventually, we’ll be able to make nano-sized robots that can perform all kinds of functions – from manufacturing everyday products to making cellular repair in the human body.  Ultimately, material things will become very cheap to manufacture.  The true value will come in the information – the pattern of how to make them.  As I had mentioned in another post, the world is moving ever closer to one based entirely on information/IP.

Nanobots in the human body will be able to carry out a whole host of other functions – from delivering medicine, to making repairs, to replacing blood as the carrier of oxygen.  Nanotechnology will also eventually allow scanning of the human brain from the inside, which will complete the details we need to create computational devices that accurately replicate the function of the brain.  Nanotech will also ultimately allow for direct neural stimulation that creates virtual environments that are as convincing as true reality.  Just imagine the possibilities there!  Kurzweil believes that the nanotechnology revolution will be in full swing, come the later part of the 2020’s.  Here’s an interesting related article -- The Human Machine Merger: Why We Will Spend Most of Our Time in Virtual Reality in the Twenty-first Century

by   Ray Kurzweil -- Raymond Kurzweil's keynote address delivered at the 2000 ACM SIGGRAPH conference in New Orleans.

The dangers associated with nanotechnology are even more ominous.  The “grey goo” scenario is what happens if an uncontrolled and malicious self-replicating nanobot gets loose that can exist and replicate itself in a normal environment.  If there is not a nanobot “immune system” already in place in our bodies and in the environment, it’s all over.  The entire biosphere could be reduced to dust in a matter of weeks – much faster (hours) if a smart “Trojan” version invades the biosphere undetected before full-scale replication begins.

Does this scare you?  It should.  It scares the heck out of me.  It has also scared professionals in the nanotech field to already start thinking about measures to help make sure this never happens.  Certain ethics must be followed – such as no self-replication allowed that can take place in an uncontrolled environment.  But this doesn’t eliminate the possibility of an accident, or malicious intent.  This is exactly why we need to stay on top of it and have countermeasures ready.   What may help us out of this predicament, according to Kurzweil is the next technological revolution – Robotics – in particular, AI.

As I alluded to before, compute power is growing at an exponential pace (it actually appears to be double-exponential, but let’s not go there for now).    Kurzweil’s books have all kinds of data, graphs and references to back this stuff up.  It won’t be long before we have enough compute power to fully simulate a human brain.  In order for this to be possible, we also need to understand how the brain works.  There has been a lot of progress in this area as well, that Kurzweil spends considerable effort documenting.  Here’s a really cool graph that shows how compute power is growing.  It shows the amount of compute power that can be purchased for 1000 (normalized) dollars over the years and projected into the future:

Note that this is a logarithmic plot (see the increasing exponential scale on the left).  If a trend is exponential, it will show up as a straight line in a logarithmic plot.  Because it is curving up in this case, it means that the growth is actually double-exponential – which means the rate of change is actually increasing.  Note that for $1000, you’ll be able to buy compute power equivalent to the power of the human brain around 2025 – and equivalent to the power of ALL human brains around 2055.  For supercomputers, this capability will be achieved sooner.   The following graph projects that we’ll be able to simulate a human brain by 2013.  It also projects that we’ll be able to scan and download the exact details of a particular human’s brain in 2025 (in other words, a simulation that will be indistinguishable from the individual on which it was modeled).  This assumes that we’ll also have the technology to scan and understand every necessary detail in a human brain (which will be aided by nanotechnology in this timeframe).

Once we create intelligence equivalent to a human, says Kurzweil, we will necessarily soar past it.  This is because a computer that has human intelligence is actually far superior, as it will be able to think relatively much faster.  It will be able to modify its own design, becoming increasingly more capable.  Machines will also have the advantage of being able to easily share their knowledge with one another.  These machines will plead their case that they are conscious – even human – and we will believe them.  They will have the full range of human emotion, creativity, and appreciation for the arts.

Once artificial intelligence takes hold, our ability to solve the worlds problems with its help will seem to become unlimited.  While machines become ever more capable – so will humans.  Neural implants, and brain-enhancing nanotechnology will vastly improve our ability our brain power and memory.  Those people choosing to remain fully biological (MOSH’es – “Mostly Organic Substrate Humans”) will have an impossible time keeping up with the changes.

Once again, with great power comes great responsibility and great danger.  A malicious AI may not care what happens to humans.  This is why we must “create them in our own image” and build in safe guards so that they will revere humans and their origins.  I’m sure some of you are familiar with the Asmovian “Laws of Robotics”:

First Law:  A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

It may not go exactly like this – but you get the idea.

The Singularity

The emergence of strong AI (AI at or exceeding human intelligence) will be a primary driving force of the singularity.  Things will evolve so fast that MOSHes will effectively not be able to participate in any meaningful way.  Those choosing to leave technology behind, says Kurzweil, should not fear.  Just as we have natural parks to preserve our environment and our heritage – so will the advanced societies of the future.  (Still, one can not help feeling that the human race will be reduced to pets or zoo animals).

By the time the singularity happens, people and machines will spend most of their time in virtual realities.  Machine intelligences will be able to manifest bodies in real reality – through nanotechnology.  Biological humans – who will have most of their biology replaced by more permanent and reliable systems by then – will be able to change their bodies in the same way.  This won’t really be necessary, though, as things will be so much easier and more flexible in virtual reality – and well, more “real.”

Human suffering will be a thing of the past.  Naturally, there are a lot of moral dilemmas to face along the road to the singularity.  We can discuss these later.  For now, I’m just trying to communicate the mechanics here.

So when will the singularity happen?  I think Kurzweil predicts around 2045.  There are some more graphs to support that we are very near the singularity.  Take the following:

Once again, this is a logarithmic plot.  It marks events considered by various experts as paradigm shifts in evolution of the universe, life, and technology (Kurzweil explains this stuff in a lot greater depth in “The Singularity is Near.”).  You can see that as we go from the creation of the universe 13 billion years ago to the present, the time between paradigm shifts is becoming exponentially smaller.  What it’s showing is that as we approach the present exponentially, the time between paradigm shifts is exponentially approaching zero.  Thus, it is expected that soon things will be changing faster than we can possibly comprehend today.

Post Singularity

As Kurzweil says, it’s difficult to see what lies beyond the singularity – just as it is difficult to see beyond the event horizon of the singularity known as a black hole.  Still, he offers us some predictions.

First of all is the possibility that we will be able to download our minds and consciousness to a computer (far more capable than what we have today).  By then, we’ll have quantum computing based on some of the fundamental properties of matter and energy.  The computing substrate won’t look anything like what you’d call a computer today.  By moving our human “patterns” from a biological to a non-biological substrate and ditching our bodies and inefficient brains, we’ll be able to fully participate in whatever happens next.  The natural question is whether or not we’ll be ditching our humanity in the process.  Kurzweil thinks not.  I’m not sure myself.  We’re free to discuss the possibility and what it means.

As things progress further, we’ll continue to find more and more efficient and fundamental ways to utilize matter and energy to perform computation.  At this point, information and computation will be the only things in the real world that underlie our existence.  The patterns inscribed on this base of computation will be what defines our consciousness and who we are.  Kurzweil and others would argue that this is fundamentally who and what we are right now.  That sounds like a very sterile and boring existence on the face of it – but it’s fundamentally not.  There will be worlds of experience within this virtual reality that not only meet our own wildest dreams of existence, but far exceed them.  And there will be nothing stopping us from interfacing with “real” reality in whatever way we want. (Note:  This is the point where I start wondering about our current existence, and just how real it is.  Are we just a simulation running on someone’s computer?  Are we in a virtual reality inside of another reality?  Maybe a reality inside of a reality inside of a reality?)

Kurzweil projects that by the end of the century, we will have fully saturated all the matter and energy in our immediate vicinity (i.e. solar system) with computation, and be spreading outward at a speed close to the speed of light.

Long Term

What happens next depends on whether or not it is possible to send information faster than the speed of light.  If there are ways, our descendants will find and exploit them.  Open up a small wormhole, for example, and send through some nanobots and some info and continue the process.  If we can get around the speed of light, it will take 100’s of years to saturate the entire universe with “intelligent matter” and energy.  If the speed of light is truly a limit, it will take billions of years.

Kurzweil believes that the universe currently does not have a consciousness – but it will once our intelligence spreads across the cosmos.  Kind of a romantic thought (or empty, or disgusting, or blasphemous, depending on your particular point of view).  This begs the question (and he addresses this in his book) as to whether we are the first intelligent life in the universe.  If we’re not, wouldn’t the matter of our solar system have already been absorbed by some other spreading intelligence? Well here are some of the possibilities:

- We really are the first.  This doesn’t seem likely, because that puts us in a privileged position.  Most theories about life in the universe assume that we’re not “special” because that’s far more likely.  We could fall back on the anthropomorphic principle though.  It’s the same theory that’s applied to the universe in general.  Why are the physical laws so exact as to lead to life in the universe?  Well, if they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here discussing it.  Same argument with us being the first intelligent life – If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be here discussing it.

- We can’t overcome the speed of light.  Each intelligence is confined to a region of the universe.  We just haven’t met up with any yet because of the distances involved.

- There are other intelligences in the universe, and they have fully saturated most of the matter and energy in the universe.  They are just leaving us alone.

There is one other possibility to consider that Kurzweil did not think of.  Perhaps intelligence has found a way to saturate some of the most fundamental properties of matter and energy with computation while leaving alone the more macro properties we are familiar with (chemical, nuclear, maybe even quantum).  In this case, we could coexist and we wouldn’t even know it (well, they would – but not us).  In this case, even the atoms that make up our very existence right now would be teeming with intelligence and consciousness.  And we won’t recognize this until the day we evolve to the same level.

The End of the Universe?

Does it really matter what happens if some day the universe just expands forever and cools until there is no activity left, or just crunches into another big bang and all is lost?   That is somewhat depressing.  But there are other possibilities.   Perhaps the intelligence of our progeny will find a way to create other, new universes and extend their life and intelligence to them.  Thus, intelligence and consciousness will continue to evolve forever.

References

Recommended reading

Kurzweil, Ray – “The Age of Spiritual Machines – When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence” - 1999

Kurzweil, Ray – “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology” – 2005

Links

Kurzweil’s web page – KurzweilAI.net

Raymond Kurzweil -- Wikipedia

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