Minutes from Sunday, 4am
I had a really interesting conversation with Aubrey and a guy named Nate in the wee hours of Sunday morning after everyone else had fallen asleep. We were talking about evolution, and Nate said he read an article talking about how, by 2030, robots will be able to process everything that the human mind can, and it’ll take another 4 years for them to realize that. I believe the article spoke of an evolution something like this.
And as I was talking about synchronicity earlier, Aubrey and I had just had a conversation earlier in the afternoon about how life on earth is water-dependent, and the first creatures on land, the insects, were able to make it out of the ocean because their evolution figured out that by using exoskeletons to keep the water in, they would be able to survive in what are basically organic space suits. But since the exoskeleton was too heavy on land, the invertebrate system was the way to go. [this is a weak paraphrasing of Aubrey, who is a scientific genius].
We were talking about how groups that come together have a synergistic intelligence that far exceeds individual units, such as cells creating complex organ systems. The same thing happens when people are grouped together, from small villages to mass societies. Intellectual/Intuitive resources are pooled along with the material, and group entities take on their own psyche and will.
Evolution is an agreement among the parts, an agreement whose goal is the survival of the group entity. Previous human focuses have been on scientific studies to improve the human body in order to more sufficiently and efficiently contain each individual piece of the collective for as long as possible. Socially, we have been striving to learn how to communicate and connect with the different pieces that represent parts of this group entity in order to have more resources pooled and expand more greatly. If you break down everything we have done scientifically and socially in the decades since our collective became “conscious” (due to heightened intellectual consciousness and awareness of individual people), our core motivations have been focused on two things: 1. Survival of the species; 2. Dominance of our environment and all elements within the environment.
Since I could write a whole thesis on the motivations of science and society, I’m not going to get into it right now. Just assume that humans have proven to be strongly driven in part by a need to ensure that our physical bodies (what we need to remain “in the game”) survive in order to allow our group consciousness to survive.
Considering that we are currently burning through our resources and our continued dependence on oxygen is threatening our survival, our collective focus has suddenly turned to artificial intelligence.
If it is true that computers will one day have the capacity and programming to value judgments using the processing of parameters and data the same way a human mind does (regardless of consciousness), then they could conceivably one day become autonomous intellectual beings. If the next step of artificial intelligence involves evolving to the point where consciousness and “soul” is developed, the human species could very well be on its way to evolving into a different form, one that is not based on a need for oxygen. If this is true, perhaps our obsession with computers and their processes is our collective way of coming up with a better model of “carrier” for the individual pieces of our group entity, thus doing away with the flawed and inefficient system that is the human body in its current form.
Maybe someday, hundreds of years from now, my consciousness and my own collective memory will be in a body that is completely unlike the one I possess now. It’s very possible that my consciousness has lived lives as bacteria, but I have no way of remembering the experience because it is completely unlike the current state of my evolution.
Regardless, it can’t be denied that we are moving somewhere and there’s a purpose. It’s so easy to dismiss the trends in human advances as having implications that are too science fiction, or to be too caught up in hyperbolic imagination. I think the truth is that we all move forward, and just as organisms were able to leave the confines of the ocean and humans were able to leave the confines of their continents, we will soon be able to leave the confines of whichever limits we are currently held under. Furthermore, advances made in artificial intelligence also have a huge impact on time/space, as time is the way in which our current intellectual processing is able to keep track of external logic, and is a completely subjective interpretation of the systems outside of us.
There’s a lot more about this that we talked about, that I want to talk about, like how our mastery of transportation allowed us to break away from other animals because it broke the time/space rule (an ant can only travel so far in its lifetime, if it tried to walk from one point to another in a straight line from its birth on, versus a human, which has greatly increased its distance versus time with its transportational inventions, thus, actually collapsing space in the time/space continuum). But I can go on forever and the implications of everything are so big that I can only deal with it piece by piece without going on and on and on and getting distracted by the pertinent tangents. Sometimes I wish my brain were bigger or had more processing power.
We also talked about Silver Spoons, that 80s show starring Ricky Schroder and were trying to remember its theme song.
Nate went home and Aubrey and I were ready to collapse as well, but somehow, having a glass of scotch together turned into a scotch tasting. My favorite is still Johnny Walker’s Gold Label, even over Blue Label.
Went to bed just after 7am. Woke up cranky. Wished Aubrey and Candice lived closer.