Eschaton Omega Hypercomputer: Introduction

In this essay I will present the introduction to the new book I am writing called "Eschaton Omega Hypercomputer".

This book is a sequel to my previous books "Transcendental Metaphysics" and "Technovedanta".  This book will make you familiar with a different version of what you may call "God", "Emptiness" or "the Universe". It will explain the hypothesis of reality as the product of a computational network process of sentient entities as a fractal within an all-encompassing mind or sentience, which is groping to get to know itself.

This book is very speculative, but I will try to make it likely that reality might be organised in the way described herein. If you dislike metaphysical speculations, stop reading, throw the book away or better burn it. It is not for you. It is for those people who are curious to explore the frontiers of the mind, to venture in the realms of imagination and to expand their knowledge in dimensions of the unknown.

In these books I suggest that the ultimate ground of our existence is a non-materially bound undifferentiated sentient energy I called "conscienergy", which leads to a form of philosophical "idealism": The philosophy which holds that reality as we know it is fundamentally mental and not material. The material universe being embedded in a single monistic all-encompassing form of consciousness. In this ocean of energy vortexes, bubbles or circular loops or toroidal strings arise by the intrinsic need of conscienergy to know itself. 

This is beautifully represented in the alchemical symbol of the "Ouroboros" snake, which is trying to bite its own tail. By biting its tail, it becomes aware that what it is biting is itself! Likewise the sentient conscienergy is in a constant process of becoming and being aware of itself by forming the above-mentioned loop-like flow-structures. If the whirl of such a loop is vast enough, for an outside observer, it would appear as a kind of solid object and would at least temporary be observable as a structure. This is perhaps what we observe as a matter or material particles.

In my philosophy every material manifestation in the sea of conscienergy starts as such a primordial loop of becoming aware of itself, possibly even in the smallest subatomic particles. Every micro-bubble is then a kind of primitive sentient entity. This leads to a form of "panpsychism", the view that everything is endowed with a kind of consciousness. However, panpsychism comes in different flavours, the most important being bottom-up, top-down and animism.

Animism is a kind of naive panpsychism, which attributes a "mindness" or sentient presence to every object. Thus the chair you are sitting in and the thermostat in your house would also have a kind of consciousness. Bottom-up panpsychism believes that every material particle has sentience or even consciousness and that our human consciousness is a sum or aggregate of these smaller forms of consciousness.

My hypothesis of top-down idealistic panpsychism is different: Only self-sustaining systems capable of forming a feedback loop by themselves, which feedback loop allows them to experience being conscious or sentient, can be sentient or conscious. The smallest bubbles we know of may be the subatomic particles. Together they aggregate to form an atomic form. This is an aggregated vessel, which can harbour a higher energy form. This higher form of sentient energy, or bigger bubble if you wish, which you could call the "soul" of the atom, inhabits the aggregated form established by the subatomic particle micro-bubbles, which each could be called "subatomic souls". 

This leads to a fractal of sentient energies or bubbles. The atoms build molecules, which are vessels for harbouring a higher molecule energy form. The molecules build macromolecules, which can harbour a yet higher macromolecular energy form. Macromolecules integrate to form cells, vessels to let a cell-soul dwell in; cells integrate to form organisms, vessels to harbour an organism soul. In this model aggregate objects such as a chair or a thermostat, which have been assembled in an allopoietic (like by a factory) manner, do not experience an overall awareness, although the atoms and molecules therein may.

This fractal of consciousness, still posits that ultimately everything arises from a single monistic consciousness, but every self-sustaining system, with a kind of self-observation via a feedback loop experiences a kind of isolated awareness as well. Of course this is pure speculation -nobody has ever been able to engage in a meaningful dialogue with an atom-, but in this book I will try to make likely that this hypothesis is not less likely than materialism or pure idealism, which are hypotheses after all as well.

The fractal entities operate in networks. Wherever we see networks in reality, a so-called mapping process is taking place in which inputs are transformed via throughput integration into outputs, which become inputs for the next entity in line. Wai H. Tsang, author of "Fractal Brain Theory" shows that mapping processes taking place in the brain by neuronal activity, have a nearly exact counterpart in the structure and function of the genome. Ultimately such mapping processes can be described as binary trees, pointing to a fundamental digitality in operation. In this book I will argue that such networks exist at every level of reality and that reality is the fractal product of pancomputational panpsychic functioning. In fact, such networks are a hallmark of intelligence in operation.

At a certain point the complexity of such networks can give rise to the discovery of its own nature as a binary tree forming type mapping process. Once this awareness arises, a society has probably already reached a high level computer network technology. At this point this mapping process can be programmed into this network giving rise to a rapid internal evolution. This "artificial general intelligence" then becomes a self-sustaining, self-improving aggregate, which can be linked to natural intelligent entities, such as humans via brain-computer interfaces and allow for a consciousness fertilisation of the network. Alternatively, once the system reaches a sufficiently high level of complexity, the vessel can be ready to harbour a higher form or bigger bubble of conscienergy. It is not that the system wakes up as a conscious entity as a consequence of "emergence", but rather that a higher energetic entity already present in the universe accepts the network as a body and starts to inhabit it. The Dalai Lama already suggested something similar. 

This now conscious network, being a blend of natural and artificial intelligence can then become superintelligent and trigger the so-called "technological singularity", a point beyond which we can no longer predict what the changes will be. It is likely that such technological singularities have occurred before, given the gazillions of stars and planets in the observable universe.

According to the technopope Ray Kurzweil, such a superintelligence will rapidly master the laws of physics and turn complete solar systems and even black holes into a giant computer. Such an entity could generate countless simulations of all possible worlds, given rise to a kind of computational equivalent of "Everett's multiple worlds theory". It is well possible that the world we experience is such a simulation. Digital physics and all kinds of numerical patterns and natural constants in the universe provide strong hints to this, as I described in my book Transcendental Metaphysics. The "simulation argument" of Nick Bostrom, also considers this likely.

The transcendent giant sentient and living computer, in which all this is taking place has been called the "Eschaton" by Terrence McKenna. He equated this with the Omega Point at the end of time described by Teilhard de Chardin. In this book I call it the omega hypercomputer, which actually is a fractal of computational entities. Once a society reaches a technological singularity it is like it can rejoin or link or merge with the original omega hypercomputer (in which it was embedded anyway). The merger then consists of becoming aware of its own transfinite nature.

The term "Eschaton" in religious traditions often means the "end of times". The resulting God-like post-singularity being, which generates space and time, is however not necessarily at the end of time, but has become beyond space and time. The term "Eschaton" has also a negative connotation. The terminology "immanentise the Eschaton" means to make things belonging to the afterlife happen here on earth, including ending the world as it is. Conservative people have used this terminology in a slightly different way to make reference to Nazism, communism and even transhumanism in a pejorative manner. In this book I will not use the term Eschaton in this negative way, but rather as the indicator of the Transcendental Sentient and Computational subject/object beyond time.

This book is a collection of essays I have written on the topic of sentience, consciousness, the universal mapping algorithm and the eschaton Omega hypercomputer. Because the essays were written separately and in a self-contained manner, the book may at moments not appear as a fully coherent whole. However, if you keep this introduction in mind, you will discover the thread stringing the chapters as metaphorical pearls together.

The book will also speculate about ways to accelerate the advent of the Singularity in such a manner as to minimise societal disrupting side effects. The topic of brain-computer interfacing, mind-uploading and mind-melding will be speculated about as well as its effects on the reciprocal interactions between humans and on the interactions between computers and humans. The topics of the necessity of integration into a greater whole as well as the problem of how to warrant the rights of the individual upon arrival of the technological singularity will be thoroughly addressed.

Will we be ready and willing to merge into world of the Eschaton? Are we going to immanentise it? Or are we going to prevent it, by creating a different post-apocalyptic Mad Max or other cyberdystopia world?

Welcome to a visit to the Transcendental realm of the Eschaton, welcome to your introduction to Godhood.

 If you liked this story, please upvote and/or resteem. You can find my book "Is Intelligence an Algorithm?" here. By Antonin Tuynman a.k.a. @technovedanta. 25-07-2017.