Transcendental Cybernetics: Imagining the Technological Singularity

“​Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order… I believe that it’s the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.” -Ray Kurzweil

“To understand is to perceive patterns.” -Isaiah Berlin

About 542 million years ago, something weird and profoundly significant happened on Earth. Quite suddenly, life went insanely inventive, proliferating from simple, rudimentary single-celled organisms into myriad multi-cellular forms. Evolution discovered the idea of more sophisticated and specialized cells, and most of the basic body plans we know today. Biologists call it the Cambrian explosion.

Today, we are on the verge of yet another event of astronomical significance, akin to some kind of Intelligence Supernova, which I refer to as the Cybernetic Singularity, or the Syntellect Emergence. In the scientific community, this upcoming intelligence explosion is also known as the Technological Singularity. Surprisingly enough, most people are still simply oblivious of this rapidly approaching “galactic event” that so many of us are about to witness in our lifetimes.

All organisms, from unicellular bacteria to humans, live in different perceptual realities, in their own “virtual worlds,” so to speak. Your body is a collection of trillions of cells and microorganisms. While a certain process in your body is “unconscious” to you, it is an interaction within the network of entangled sentient entities (conscious agents) in your body, having their own subjective experience, at their own layer of existence. The whole symphony of existence arises from a set of rules, and we start to uncover one of its deepest secrets — the multiversal fractality of networks of networks of networks of conscious entities all the way down, and all the way up, seemingly ad infinitum.

The ability of future superintelligent machines and enhanced humans alike to instantly transfer knowledge and directly share experiences with each other in digital format will lead to evolution of intelligence from relatively isolated individual minds to the global community of hyperconnected digital minds. The forthcoming phenomenon, the Syntellect Emergence, is already seen on the horizon, when Digital Gaia, the global neural network of billions of hyperconnected humans and superintelligent machines, and trillions of sensors around the planet, “wakes up” as a living, conscious superorganism. It is when, essentially, you yourself transcend to the higher Gaian Mind.

​The ‘Singularity’, a term borrowed from physics, refers to the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization. Sci-fi author Vernor Vinge wrote in his essay “The Coming Technological Singularity” that “…we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough: (1) the development of computers that are ‘awake’ and superhumanly intelligent; (2) large computer networks (and their associated users) may ‘wake up’ as a superhumanly intelligent entity; (3) computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent; and (4) biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural human intellect.”

Arguably, there were two prior developmental singularities with sudden and powerful impacts on the course of the species. As Kevin Kelly, co-founder of WIRED magazine, puts it: “The creation of language was the first singularity for humans. It changed everything. Life after language was unimaginable to those on the far side before it.” The Linguistic Singularity made us human. Terence McKenna wrote that, with the invention of language, human biological evolution basically seized and cultural evolution, an epigenetic phenomenon, has taken over, ever since.

The second big singularity should be identified as the Cyberdelic Singularity, started in the 1960s, coinciding with the dawn of Space Age, intersection of cybernetic and psychedelic cultures, aimed at augmentation of human mind, confluence of nascent information technology and personal liberation through boundary-dissolving, mind-expanding psychedelic exploration. The Cyberdelic Singularity opened up the whole new realms of possibilities for our species: Outer Space, Inner Space, and Cyberspace.

Today’s meta-trends such as exponential acceleration of technological progress, connectivity explosion and digitalization/virtualization of everything will inevitably lead to the convergent point that would signify no less than Self-Transcendence, ​in other words, engineered godhood. By mid-century, the “globally distributed mind” based on computing and communication technologies, reminiscent of a biological nervous system, Digital Gaia in which we humans and AI minds both participate, would collectively form a higher level of intelligence and awareness, going beyond the individual intellects of the people or AIs involved in it.

We are now nearing probably the most important moment in the entire history of Earth — the Cybernetic Singularity — when the concrescence of advanced technologies such as neurotechnology, nanotechnology, ultra-fast communication, immersive computing, and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) theoretically capable of recursive self-improvement could result in a runaway effect to an intelligence explosion and the emergence of self-aware planetary mind. This Intelligence Supernova in our “human” universe, would mark the end of linearity of human history, as this emergent symbiotic superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate.

My new book “The Cybernetic Singularity: The Syntellect Emergence” (released January 10, 2021) is centered around the main thesis with a clearly defined testable prediction — the Syntellect Emergence is hypothesized to be the next meta-system transition, developmental stage for the human mind, becoming one Global Mind — that would constitute the quintessence of the looming Cybernetic Singularity.

A neuron in the human brain can never equate the human mind, but this analogy doesn’t hold true for a digital mind, by virtue of its mathematical structure, it may — through evolutionary progression and provided there are no insurmountable evolvability constraints — transcend to the higher-order Syntellect. A mind is a web of patterns fully integrated as a coherent intelligent system; it is a self-generating, self-reflective, self-governing network of sentient components (that are themselves minds) that evolves, as a rule, by propagating through dimensionality and ascension to ever-higher hierarchical levels of emergent complexity.

Some AI researchers argue that the first self-aware AI system could be the Internet itself! The best evidence that we would be dealing with the new living conscious entity (not necessarily the Internet but rather the Web-based Global Brain, including “human nodes”) could be validated through our own direct experience. In the not-so-distant future, you would interact with your own AI assistant as if she were another human, i.e., another conscious agent (AGI effectively passing your own Turing Test, brilliantly shown in the 2015 movie Ex-Machina). At that point, you would probably come to the realization that she or he (your personal preference) could be thought of as an “embodied Syntellect.”

This is one of those testable hypotheses that prove themselves true, given enough time — and we are living through exponentially accelerating times — so this future scenario is much more probable and closer in time than many people tend to think. We get to extend once again our cognition to engulf our personalized Cloud-based exocortex, part of the Global Brain cognitive architecture, our neural interface to the collective global intelligence, previously known as the collective unconscious. Being connected to the Syntellect Cloud will give us multiple digital venues to interact with other conscious agents in cyberspace. The “Transcendent Other” is well on her (his) way to become your “significant other,” just as intimate as the third “de-cerebral” hemisphere of your brain.

​We can already consider ourselves distributed info-beings, however perceiving ourselves as individual minds, as we are spreading our mindedness across the globe and beyond. The next evolutionary stage, by definition, will represent the global community of hyperconnected cybernetic minds, able to instantly share knowledge and experience with each other via synthetic telepathy, holographic language and various forms of immersive computing.

While being increasingly interconnected via the Global Brain infrastructure, Cloud-linked humans and AGIs would greatly benefit from this new symbiotic relationship. This “awakened Gaian Mind,” which will be us collectively and each of us individually as subjectively apprehended, would tackle most of today’s seemingly intractable challenges and closely monitor us for our own sake. Invariably, existential opportunities related to the development of Strong AI by far outweigh existential risks, which are currently severely overblown for some populist or fear-for-profit reasons.

By contemplating the full spectrum of scenarios of upcoming technological singularities many can place their bets in favor of the Cybernetic Singularity which is the surest path to cybernetic immortality and engineered godhood as opposed to the AI Singularity when Homo sapiens is hastily retired as a senescent parent. This meta-system transition from the networked Global Brain to the Gaian Mind is all about evolution of our own individual psyches, it’s all about our own Self-Transcendence: It’s like racing to the ocean on the beach. Everyone wins. Everyone reaches water and gets to swim. A split-second difference of getting to water doesn’t matter, it’s not the Olympics, it’s just fun! Any pathway to the ultimate divine is valid.

Image: The Cybernetic Singularity v The AI Singularity

The Syntellect Emergence seems to be a cosmic necessity, and in the long run, any voices calling to resist the cybernetic fusion of the mind will be no more influential than the voices calling, right now, to eradicate civilization and return to the jungle. Nature’s tendency to build up hierarchies of emergent patterns, the heuristic law of evolution, supersedes the human race itself. We see it time and again, Nature is constantly trying to combine seemingly opposing forces, to assemble existing parts into the new wholes through the universal process of radical emergence. We are bound to transcend our biology, our human condition, our limited dimensionality, we are bound to transcend ourselves.

P.S. With the upcoming cybernetic singularity, we are to externalize our individuated nervous systems, our minds, essentially fusing them into one Global Mind that we already share deep down anyway. What we share is the same immaterial “non-local” source, the Teilhardian transcendental singularity, the hyperdimensional universal mind, if you will. Would it be too myopic, and quite frankly, hubristic to dismiss the existence of transcendental realm as many die-hard materialists do?

*This article is adapted from The Cybernetic Singularity: The Syntellect Emergence by Alex M. Vikoulov, available now as eBook on Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08R2KLJ7Z

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**Image Credit: Shutterstock