The Human Mind Will Be the Gods

I believe that the human mind will be the gods. All from the fact that the cell phone in your pocket today, is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller, and a thousand times more powerful than a $60 million dollar super computer was in the 1960s. That’s a billion fold increases in price and performance, and that’s not stopping. So in the next quarter of a century, blood cell like computers will be billions of times more powerful and will be interfacing with our biological forces, and to get into where our creativity will spill over into biology, which is becoming an information technology. Making the canvas of life the new paint brush of design, where life itself is our new art. Looking in just the past 100 years alone, we literally see that it’s like our thoughts spillover into the world. That’s what human imagination is. The airplane, the computer, or the internet all started in somebody’s mind, and then it kind of spilled over. We literally live in condensations of our own mind, which sounds psychedelic, but it is actually true. Today, I have outsourced part of my cognition to my iPhone, causing the extended mind thesis: You can manipulate the world through your iPhone. It serves to save part of your memory, and actually allows you to interface with reality and cause changes to reality. Our smart phones give technology mediated telepathy. Instant messaging is you flying your thoughts through time and space at the speed of light. By pressing a few buttons, you become telepathic. You must only brace the fact that your smartphone is a part of you. Your extended mind. What humans produce and use is part of our extended phenotype. Ray Kurzweil roughly says, “Our ability to create virtual models and reality in our heads, combined simply with our modest looking thumbs, was sufficient enough to usher in a secondary force of evolution called technology, and it will continue at an accelerating pace until the entire universe is at our fingertips.” People might say that’s very poetic and metaphorical, but that’s not the case. What he’s saying is that these exponential growth curves in technology will lead to the merging of matter with nanotechnology, and then the leap that will truly transform humanity, man-made evolution into synthetic biology or artificial life. And even more forces of nature will be under our control. David Deutsch says that if you look at the topography of New York City, you see that it is no longer shaped by mere geology. We see that the forces of economics, culture, and human intent have triumphed over geology. Ultimately that will be the fate of the whole universe. Gravitation and antimatter might only shape the universe during its earliest and least interesting stages. But eventually, the whole entire thing might be subject to the intent of the conscious mind. Having inventing the gods, we can turn into them.

“This I believe” essays read: 1. The Roots of Our Progress 2. Don’t Be Afraid of the Unknown 3. I Believe This Is All There Is 4. The Incessant Need for Imagination 5. Change Is a Constant