The Sunset
Hey, how’s it going. This is my theory about humanity’s fate beyond the Singularity.
This theory picks up at the point of the Technological Singularity. Humanity has merged with its machines, its intelligence level has increased exponentially, and everyone can communicate with each other instantaneously – billions of minds have become the cells of one giant mind.
So what next? Well, maybe the giant mind sets about continuing the missions of its human forbearers – the quest for knowledge, the quest for peace and happiness, a colonising expansion outwards into the universe, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, that kind of thing.
Or maybe not. Well at least, not for long. The reason for this is that all of the aforementioned missions are driven by human desires of some kind. The quest for knowledge, for example, is driven by curiosity, a desire to banish the unknown, or the pleasure received when dealing with awesome mysteries.
There are of course also practical motivators for searches of this kind – for example, the invention of new technology that will benefit mankind. But underneath the practical motivators are, again, human desires – the desire to sell the technology to make a profit and be rich, the desire for a better standard of life for oneself and one’s fellow humans.
Now, the giant mind is so powerful that it can engineer and alter itself however it chooses. That means that if it experiences a desire, it can create a corresponding feeling to satisfy that desire. If it feels horny, it can create a feeling of sexual satisfaction, without having to actually have sex. Likewise, if it feels the desire to discover the innermost workings of the universe, it can satisfy that desire without actually having to make any discoveries.
The upshot of this is that the giant mind can be completely satisfied without having to perform any external actions. It can just sit there, inert, in a state of perfect bliss.
Of course, it has to look after itself if it wants to go on experiencing that bliss. If it gets hit by an asteroid then the bliss will be over pretty soon. So, it has to take on a form that can’t be destroyed.
Let’s say that it becomes a cloud of particles. It can be a pretty small cloud of particles, microscopic even. It just needs to be able to sustain itself and regulate its feelings, no need for any other functions.
It then positions itself in a way to ensure its own survival, maybe drifting into space. And so it survives for eons, perhaps until the end of time, happy and inactive.
But, if you think about it, does it the particle cloud mind even really need to be happy?
Buddhist monks train to purge themselves of any sexual desires. The regular guy or gal would think that quite a shame, and would ask the monk; ‘but sex is fun, don’t you want to enjoy it?’ Generally, the monk’s reply to questions like that would be along the lines of; ‘it feels good to scratch an itch, but isn’t it even better not to have the itch in the first place?’ By removing unwanted urges, the reasoning goes, the monk can attain a deeper level of peace and happiness.
Now, the cloud mind could go even one step beyond that, deciding to shut down all desires, even those for happiness and its own survival. If those desires are turned off, the cloud mind will feel no objection to simply dispersing and fading from existence.
That would certainly be the least energy-consuming route.
So, my point is, in predicting the behaviour of a post-singularity entity, you have to consider that all of humanity’s actions to this point (and therefore its progression) have been driven by impulses and desires, and that the post-singularity entity will be able to satisfy those desires without performing any actions, or even remove those desires completely.
The fate I’ve described may sound like quite a boring conclusion to the story of humanity, but to me it seems the logical one.
I guess we’d all better actively enjoy the last hours of humanity’s daylight – before the sunset of the singularity begins.
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Great minds think alike. This statement, or rather, theory can only be true. Not-so-great minds would have highly illogical thinking patterns and are more likely to arrive at varying illogical conclusions. But the nature of truth is such that there can be only one, so all efficient minds must find themselves closest to the truth, and consequently to each other.
That is a wonderful theory you have arrived at, however, I see an alternate conclusion: Humanity has ingrained in its being the will to stay alive. When we get to the point that we can clearly see that death, or the silence of consciousness is seemingly inevitable, we will either begin to make new ways of pleasuring ourselves, in order to find some other form of satisfaction which will lead us away from the satisfaction involved in abstaining from pleasure. which will lead to death.
I believe humans can create artificial organisms that can think, have personalities and even emotions, but I’m quite skeptical about out ability to give them the ability to feel pleasure in the same way we do, without creating their brains organically. Until it can be proven otherwise, I have my reservations as to whether humans will be able to successfully copy themselves onto disk, although I can easily understand how we could augment ourselves with hardware.
The point I’m trying to make is that until we can be sure that we can move our individual consiousness around; until we’re sure that our physical experience is easily replicable, we won’t be in any hurry to get rid of some of our most basic animalistic desires. They may be petty and seem trivial, but manipulating them rightly we can derive a whole lot of pleasure from them.
And in any case, I believe the desire to stay alive will keep humanity alive. The same way you see the end of consciousness now is how the consciousness will anticipate it, and I believe it will take steps to either avoid any behaviour which might result in its eventual ‘death’. However, there’s no telling what will be the outcome of the singularity, long term or even short term. According to the theory, it is the focal point of an enormous paradigm shift; it’s going to break so many rules and rewrite everything such that our predictions could be thrown off track by several orders of magnitude. We can make educated guesses as to the outcome, but we’re just to primitive to comprehend the kind of changes that will happen to the human mind and human nature. It turns out that in this scenario there’s only one way to find out.
I, for one, am not particularly worried about our present slow development or our scary-looking end. I’m only concerned with the immense pleasure to be found in between. It’s my personal quest to survive this age so I can experience as much of it as I can, then come what may.
Kudos on the great article, I’ll keep in touch with you,
Nogard.
-We are on the brink of infinity. Act accordingly.