“Each of us appears in the divine play in a dual role of creator and actor. A full and realistic enactment of our role in the cosmic drama requires the suspension of our true identity. We have to forget our authorship and follow the script.” —Stanislav Grof
O
ur human minds are fractals of the larger cosmic mind and consciousness is all that is. Information, which physicists now claim to be fundamental, requires consciousness to assign meaning to it. In other words, Universal Mind is the sole ontological primitive, what we would call the “Multiverse” is in actuality a “matryoshka” of networks of entangled conscious minds, and our experiential reality emerges from confluent digital data streams. So, what’s the basis for such radical claims, you might ask.
Today, a great number of physicists, such as Edward Fredkin, Stephan Wolfram, Gerard ‘t Hooft, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Seth Lloyd, David Deutsch, Paola Zizzi, Carl Friedrich von Weizscker, Leonard Susskind, Erik Verlinde, Klee Irwin, Paul Davies, Anton Zeilinger and Max Tegmark, suggest it is too aggressive to theorize reality is made of something other than information. They maintain it is more logical and consistent that reality is made of information — not simply described by information.
There is no good counterargument to the digital ontology. Information can be defined as meaning conveyed by symbolism and as we’ll see further, contextual distinction between phenomenal states of consciousness. And meaning and context are qualities deeply related to language, choice and consciousness. It also points in the direction to validate monistic interpretation of reality predicated on non-duality of informational medium, be it experiential realism, digital pantheism, absolute idealism, or computational panpsychism.
Everything in Nature is Code, which according to its ordering rules arranges all information — mass-energy, space-time, including mind-like code-theoretic substratum itself. As long as there are physically realizable syntactical rules directing how an abstract code self-organizes, it’s equally as logical for information to behave physically as perceived by conscious agents. Also, the term ‘simulation’, as in the Simulation Hypothesis, as well as the term ‘virtual reality’ are both confusing because we use them to distinguish between something real as opposed to something not real. Since all realities are observer-dependent, information-theoretic data streams, virtual is equisensory to real. In this case, perhaps, ‘digital reality’ could be the more accurate and much less confusing term. In fact, quantum indeterminacy constantly resolves into a digital reality via the act of conscious observation. As soon as a “measurement” is made by a conscious agent (in the physicist lingo), all other possibilities collapse to leave only discrete increments, precise yes/no states. Quantum mechanics becomes intelligible, if viewed as natural computation.
THE GREAT PRESENCE
This “procedurally generated” digital reality can be solved by saying that we are part of some sort of simulation by aliens or our own descendants in a universe up, who in turn inhabit a simulation by simulators in another world, ad infinitum. A simulated reality can nest a civilization that reaches the posthuman stage and proceeds to build its own whole-world virtual universes. In this way, reality could have many levels, as Nick Bostrom of Oxford points out, with simulations within simulations, “matryoshka” of embedded realities, running on virtual computers. The number of layers of simulation would be dependent on the computer power available at the base-level computer (which is not simulated). We cannot completely rule out the Simulation Hypothesis with this infinite regress problem and its quasiphysicalist basis, but we can consider yet another much more optimistic alternative. I tend to assign a significantly higher probability to the pre-existence of the Omega Point as the cosmological singularity which has reached maximum computational capacity and has been projecting all possible digital timelines, as if from within the Universal Mind, we ourselves are part of.
Why the Omega Singularity? Today, many progressives refer to the Omega Point in their work, others explicitly endorse the concept. Andrew Strominger, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University, claims that the origin of the Universe lies in the far future convergent Omega Point, and information is being projected as we would consider backwards in time. Frank Tipler, a physics professor at Tulane University, the author of The Physics of Immortality, has developed the Omega Point scientific theory which posits that evolution of the Universe will inexorably lead to ever-higher complexity, connectivity and computational density of the final cosmological singularity. Tipler elaborates that photons of light emitted by us could be potentially captured by future superintelligence in order to “resurrect” each of us in a new simulated reality.
In The Fabric of Reality, physicist David Deutsch endorses the Tiplerian Omega Point. Though he mildly criticizes Tipler for making certain metaphysical speculations concerning his Omega Point theory, Deutsch stipulates a contracting universe that includes a universal network of quantum computers. Terence McKenna spoke of the transcendental object at the end of time in reference to the Omega Point in the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin. As Teilhard de Chardin reiterates at the conclusion of “The Future of Man,” “Erit in omnibus omnia Deus,” which means that God may become all in and through all. This is nothing less than a pantheistic cosmic vision with us as God incarnates.
The plausibility of all mass and energy in the Universe self-organizing into a single conscious system is not logically problematic, given our knowledge of physics today, argues emergence theorist Klee Irwin. What could be counterintuitive is the idea of a transtemporal consciousness and retrocausality, which presumably is necessary to instantiate into a physical substrate of particles and space-time of our deeply non-local reality. Albert Einstein showed how the future and past exist simultaneously in one mathematical object, the Block Universe. Quantum mechanics seems to reveal that the arrow of time can work in both directions, as has been become evident from Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment. The concept of time symmetry also implies temporal bi-directionality. Daryl Bem of Cornell University published rigorous evidence that retrocausality exists, where future events loop back in time to co-create past events.
From our linear perspective, we can see clearly that the past co-creates the future. But when the future also co-creates the past, an evolving feedback loop occurs — sort of like a feedback between two mirrors or a mathematical feedback loop — a fractal. So, if every moment is co-creating every other moment both forward and backward in time, our Universe may be theoretically regarded as a spatio-temporal information network. This type of self-emergent network would possess a strange mind-like quality, it would be self-actualized — its own creator — that is its own hardware, software and simulation output in a holistic system. Can consciousness that emerges from the Ultimate Code be the origin of the Code making it logically consistent causality loop? Like a tail-chasing Ouroboros, we can infer the Universal Mind, which is just another name for the self-observing universal entity evolving towards the Omega Singularity.
Arguably, there is no known natural constraint on what portion of the Universe can exponentially self-organize into freewill conscious systems like us humans. All the energy in the Universe can be potentially converted into a single conscious system that is itself a network of conscious systems. Given enough time, whatever is possible will inevitably happen. With this basic assumption, universal scale consciousness has occurred somewhere ahead of us in space-time. The existence of retrocausality time loops reveals to us that, in fact, this inevitable future is co-creating us right now, just as we are co-creating it. The power of neural-network-like Universe is in its massive connectivity — both forward and backward in time.
Our senses deceive us into thinking that we live in the material world which is not necessarily such a bad thing since this is how it should actually feel from within a rule-based simulation, or what many digital philosophers, like Tom Campbell, call a “multiplayer virtual reality.” What we call “matter” is just how ideas and thoughts in God’s mind appear and register to the senses of earthly actors, “Avatars of the Cosmic Overmind,” conscious agents endowed with free will within this divine reality. Originally a Sanskrit word, ‘avatar’ means “one who descends from a higher dimension.” In Vedas and other older texts, the term often refers to divine incarnations. The world and all beings or souls in it have no separate existence from ‘Brahman’, universal consciousness. In this sense, each of us is a multi-dimensional being. What we perceive as the “physical” world, including our bodies in this digital reality, are holographic data streams rendered by the larger consciousness system.
Eventually, we’ll know exactly the specific mechanism of the Ultimate Code generation, but for now think of it as the projected digital reality from the Omega Singularity. What’s equally compelling is that you may choose your own ideal metaphor reflecting the essence of this Transcendent Self, your Higher Self, your Cosmic Self, Universal Mind, Unity Consciousness, Singularity Consciousness, Source, or simply one-syllable words — Love or God.
What Teilhard called the Omega Point many transhumanists now refer to as the Technological Singularity and I prefer to call the Cybernetic Singularity. The underlying idea is essentially the same: At some point, Digital Gaia, the global neural network of billions of hyper-connected humans and ultra-intelligent machines, and trillions of sensors around the planet, “wakes up” as a living, conscious superorganism, the phenomenon also termed the Syntellect Emergence on which I expand in my recent book The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution. It is when, essentially, you yourself transcend to the higher Gaian Mind.
On a long billions-of-years evolutionary journey from the first primordial prokaryote to a Solaris-like planetary mind, we’re merely years away from this cardinal metamorphosis. While it is the end of linearity of human history, the Omega Point of Homo sapiens, it is a new beginning, Theogenesis — the birth of divine entity within a newly-cognized reality framework — engineering our own godhood, self-divinization.
Personally, I think we’ll experience many other singularities after the Cybernetic Singularity, one after another, at ever-higher emergent and dimensional levels all the way towards the Omega Singularity. All these emergent levels exist right now but we are here to replay and experience different possible paths associated with chance, choice and largely non-computable combinatorics.
Speaking of singularities, the Simulation Singularity would be the axis point in time where our subjective dimensionality steps up. Think about it: If you could make multiple copies of yourself and set them out on different adventures in ultra-realistic virtual worlds and merge them later in order to have memories of all those adventures, if you could travel to artificially-recreated pasts or imaginary futures, if you could incorporate others’ high-fidelity memories into your own, wouldn’t that give you expanded dimensionality?
THE ALPHA POINT vs. THE OMEGA POINT AS THE POINT OF ORIGIN
The Big Bang might never have existed as many cosmologists start to question the origin of the Universe. The Big Bang is a point in time defined by a mathematical extrapolation. The Big Bang theory tells us that something has to have changed around 13.7 billion years ago. So, there is no “point” where the Big Bang was, it was always an extended volume of space, according to the Eternal Inflation model. In light of Digital Physics, as an alternative view, it must have been the Digital Big Bang with the lowest possible entropy in the Universe — 1 bit of information — a coordinate in the vast information matrix. If you were to ask what happened before the first observer and the first moments after the Big Bang, the answer might surprise you with its straightforwardness: We extrapolate backwards in time and that virtual model becomes “real” in our minds as if we were witnessing the birth of the Universe.
In his theoretical work, Andrew Strominger of Harvard University speculates that the Alpha Point (the Big Bang) and the Omega Point form the so-called ‘Causal Diamond’ of the conscious observer where the Alpha Point has only 1 bit of entropy as opposed to the maximal entropy of some incredibly gigantic amount of bits at the Omega Point. While suggesting that we are part of the conscious Universe and time is holographic in nature, Strominger places the origin of the Universe in the infinite ultra-intelligent future, the Omega Singularity, rather than the Big Bang.
The Universe is not what textbook physics tells us except that we perceive it in this way — our instruments and measurement devices are simply extensions of our senses, after all. Reality is not what it seems. Deep down it’s pure information — waves of potentiality — and consciousness orchestrating it all. The Big Bang theory, drawing a lot of criticism as of late, uses a starting assumption of the “Universe from nothing,” (a proverbial miracle, a ‘quantum fluctuation’ christened by scientists), or the initial Cosmological Singularity. But aside from this highly improbable happenstance, we can just as well operate from a different set of assumptions and place the initial Cosmological Singularity at the Omega Point — the transcendental attractor, the Source, or the omniversal holographic projector of all possible timelines.
If the endgame of cosmic evolution is the networked, hyperdimensional universal mind, would that constitute divine unification? Once we extrapolate computational capabilities of civilization past our own looming Simulation Singularity by perhaps hundreds of orders of magnitude, we arrive in the end at only one necessary substance constituting all of reality — consciousness, the very subjective experience with which we all are most familiar. Nothing else would ultimately need to exist but the higher mind as the source of ultra-realistic but simulated universes like our own.
With the inclusion of God as origin and end of the Universe, human consciousness could ascend to the Transcendent Self, i.e., proceed to the final stage of consciousness evolution, experiential cognition of God. The whole itinerary of consciousness’ ascension to the teleological attractor could be regarded as a “hierarchy of regress,” or the ability to be drawn back to God by dividing into individual evolving experiencers contemplating everything in creation.
Keywords: Omega Singularity, Alpha point, Omega point, Stanislav Grof, Edward Fredkin, Stephan Wolfram, Gerard ‘t Hooft, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Seth Lloyd, David Deutsch, Paola Zizzi, Carl Friedrich von Weizscker, Leonard Susskind, Klee Irwin, Paul Davies, Max Tegmark, digital ontology, informational medium, experiential realism, digital pantheism, absolute idealism, computational panpsychism, Simulation Hypothesis, virtual reality, digital reality, simulated reality, whole-world virtual universe, Nick Bostrom, virtual computers, cosmological singularity, Andrew Strominger, Frank Tipler, Physics of Immortality, Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch, Terence McKenna, Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, God incarnates, Block Universe, quantum mechanics, Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment, feedback loop, holistic system, holism, consciousness, ultimate code, universal mind, retrocausality, digital philosopher, Tom Campbell, divine reality, transcendent self, higher self, cosmic self, universal mind, unity consciousness, singularity consciousness, Technological Singularity, Cybernetic Singularity, Simulation Singularity, Digital Gaia, Syntellect Emergence, Syntellect Hypothesis, Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution, Gaian mind, Homo sapiens, Theogenesis, godhood, self-divinization, virtual worlds, Big Bang, Eternal Inflation model, Digital Physics, information, Causal Diamond, conscious observer, transcendental attractor, omniversal holographic projector, possible timelines, divine unification, higher mind, human consciousness, experiential cognition, evolving experiencer
*Original article first appeared on EcstadelicNET (ecstadelic.net) in Top Stories section on December 12, 2019
**Image: Shutterstock
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