splitting and merging

After going through the singularity you might go to a dance and meet two beautiful women and not be able to decide which one to dance with. No worry - I will have invented the splitting device where a person comes to a fork in the road of life and they can take both options. So you dance with both women and one of you dates one and the other, the other. Now with one you may fall in love but with the other, all you do is fight and you break up. Well by now I have also invented the merging device where you put two of you, having previously split, back into one.

A hundred years after that, or maybe it is ten years (who can tell?) the earth is overpopulated from lack of death and abundance of splitting (should I eat at this restaurant or that?) so a benevolent, omnipotent Governor decides that a lot of merging should go on.

Now you were told in kindergarten that you are unique and that there is no one else like you. Well that's not quite true. You are not even one in a million, but more like one in 5,000. So this benevolent, omnipotent Governor will merge all 100,000,000 of you into one mind. Even though you have all these memories you still feel like one person.

Now some people are more unique than others. Some great artists are 1 in a billion, so there will only be a few hundred crammed in there. At the other end of the spectrum there are really common people who are one in a hundred so they will be much more crowded.

That's the kind of future i see.

The Singularity is Opaque

You have no business being optimistic about the future. Nor should you be pessimistic, because either of these positions ignores an essential truth:

the singularity is OPAQUE

I keep trying to metaphorize my conception of the transition. Imagine our world civilization is a raft of rafts, bound together with twine and glue, and drifting in an accelerated manner into the future. As we approach this special point, it's as if one portion of the raft gets a jet engine tied to it. Now what will happen? I'd say it would rip apart but I have to remember: OPAQUE.

In that time maybe all the rafts get jet engines together. Maybe it will start to rip but then be tied together in a different way - with steel cable instead of twine.

What do I mean by "raft"? Well, I want to remain vague because I don't know. One raft could be Europe and the other Africa. One could be the rich and the other the poor. The young vs. the old. Maybe the raft is something abstract; one raft romantic love and the other economic activity; or technology vs. wisdom. Society as we know it will go through great stress. That's all we can say.

descartes' folly

I would hate to be the one to tell him, but descartes was wrong when he inferred his own existence. To bring everyone up to speed, Rene Deacartes famously and systematically doubted all there was until he got to one little nugget of certainty" "I think, therefore I am." He reasoned that even if all was illusion and he was being deceivded, he could still be certain that he existed as the observer of such deception.

I think, in the end we might even give up this monolithic, individual observer. Sure, other people seem like individuals, and it is practical to treat them as such, but looking within shows that it's not so easy. I used to smoke cigarretes and I wanted to quit. When it was time to buy more cigarettes I wanted to smoke. How could one person hold contradictory desires? Well, there are multiple voices withing my self. I don't mean like multiple personalities, but competing voices within a more or less healthy and more or less integrated self.

We could say I(a) want to quit smoking but I(b) don't. In this case (b) won out for a long time and (a) won out in the end. It is worth noting that the philosophy of "Do what thou wilt" doesn't really settle anything. What's implied is do what thou wilt at this moment, a sort of impulsiveness, which is impractical. I may want to kill someone for a second but I won't because I live in a larger temporal context.

That brings up another context of multiple selves: that of past, present and future selves. My past self got this silly tattoo and my present self must deal with it. Well I remember putting that tattoo in and it was my present self (at the time) saying, "I will mark you so that you will always remember where you were at this point in life" because it is unbearable to think that those things I currently hold dear will be discarded and disowned, not by some enemy, but by my own self.