Everyone Everywhere, All at Once!

In the last post, we tackled two super weird things happening lately: the advent of LLM AI, and recent research in Animal Consciousness.

Because understanding how we hold natural intelligence can give us insight into how we’re approaching artificial intelligence. (Check it here)

The Upshot:

IF

a) we used to think that a whole bunch of cool stuff we did was the exclusive province of some humans, then all humans, then some animals, then most animals (including insects and dinosaurs!)… "consciousness" appears to be way more widely distributed than we once thought.

THEN

b) as we've attributed consciousness to more people (like former colonial nations) and more animals (like gorillas and whales) we find ourselves increasingly ethically compelled to treat them better. And this might also apply to how we treat silicon intelligence too.

Once we know they know, we can't pretend we don't!

So onto Thing Three that’s shaking up our world view lately to bring this home.

Thing Three: The Nobel Prize in Physics 🔬

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In 2022, the Nobel Prize for Physics went to three researchers who delivered a formal proof of Non Locality—a bizarre and counterintuitive instance where elements can be separated by unlimited time and space and yet still somehow remain connected and exchanging information.

Einstein was never a fan of the concept and sniffed at the implications of "spooky action at a distance."

But here’s what a recent SciAm article had to say about the new research:

"One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half a century is that the universe is not locally real. In this context, “real” means that objects have definite properties independent of observation—an apple can be red even when no one is looking. “Local” means that objects can be influenced only by their surroundings and that any influence cannot travel faster than light. Investigations at the frontiers of quantum physics have found that these things cannot both be true. Instead the evidence shows that objects are not influenced solely by their surroundings, and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement."

That means that a pair of electrons, that must have matching opposite "spins" i.e. one positive and one negative, will keep flipping and flopping to stay in balance, no matter how far apart they drift.

It's a bit like a pair of socks where one gets lost in the wormhole of the dryer and disappears. If an alien finds the missing right sock, then the one still in your drawer has to be the left foot sock. Right?

But if the alien looks again and finds the wormhole sock has somehow flipped to the left footed one, then the sock still in your drawer must magically morph into the right footed version!

And they make those flip flops instantaneously. Faster than light. Including all the way to the other end of the universe.

Which kind of breaks our sense of time as well. Since time is usually deployed as a measure of distance–how long it takes to get from here to there.

If There and Here are somehow connected instantaneously, then that pesky electron pair isn't "light years away." It's right here. Right now.

Somehow.

(if you've always been a little baffled by Einstein's train experiments, and never fully grokked time-bending relativity, check out this ten minute animation with Columbia physicist Brian Greene. Once you get it, you'll never forget it. It's the only visual that's ever worked for me. Share it with your kids too! It's amazingly helpful).

This insight about simultaneity isn’t new. It's one of the handful of thought experiments that gave birth to New Physics back in the 60's. This field was born during that heady time when physicists-with-muttonchops-who-also-toked-doobies began to ponder the implications of all of this stuff. #lookingatyouSagan

But what’s different and notable about Now vs. Then, is that now we’re well past the Tao of Physics, or What the Bleep Do We Know meanderings, and firmly crashing the hallowed halls of the Nobel Institute…

Who, What, When, Why❓

So who are we? "The only animal to hold the divine gift of consciousness" has kinda gone out the window. We're sharing that throne, apparently, with crows and bumble bees. (and maybe Sydney the Chatbot)

What are we? a carbon-based lifeform with a prefrontal cortex, a spinal column and opposable thumbs who holds some rudimentary sense of self awareness and may be engineering some silicon-based dopplegangers in the form of AI to keep us company and do our dirty work.

When are we? We used to think we were coming from our past, living in the present, and moving towards our future in some linear Time's Arrow kinda way. But the notions of non-locality and simultaneity are scrambling that pretty thoroughly.

We’re smeared across the timescape, lost somewhere between Everywhen and Neverwas.

So why are we? That one's getting a little trickier to figure out. And some of the most prominent voices may not be speaking our language.

As Open AI founder Sam Altman noted at Burning Man this summer, "Although the merge has already begun, it’s going to get a lot weirder. We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.

That kind of thinking from one of the leading architects of AGI should give us pause.

Altman (and many of the other leaders in the movement) are of a very specific sub-culture of Silicon Valley tech nerd. They skew libertarian (nobody tells me what to do!), transhumanist (meat suits are a temporary limitation), and long termist (one trillion future space humans matter more than pesky people now).

Which when bottled and shaken up, doesn’t jive that well with democratic, humanistic, here-and-now-ism. AKA: the rest of us. And what we might think.

For Altman to blithely muse that a silicon/carbon merger is inevitable, and that the entire human species may end up being little more than a “bootloader” or startup program and then die off, is seventeen shades of crazy.

Don’t let the almost-familiar software analogies fool you.

And it’s the leaders of private companies that are making these decisions. Not theologians, philosophers, or even government officials. For-profit, venture backed, tech bros. Subject to all of the incentives and drivers of market-based mayhem.

(see Elon Musk’s recent interview claiming that his former friend and Google co-founder Larry Page “wants to create a digital god.”)

What could possibly go wrong???

Looks like we’re gonna have to keep looking for a more satisfactory answer to our purpose than “biological bootloader” to what’s next.

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However it goes down, the advent of the three forces we’ve covered in these last couple posts, AI, animal consciousness, and Nobel Prizes in Entanglement–are all popping off right here, right now.

And they are nudging us, ass backwards, into the transformation that Jesuit mystic Teilhard de Chardin once called the Omega Point.

It's that hypothetical moment in the future where Everyone Everywhere and All at Once converges in the shared realization that we are all One, and that there is only Now, Always and Forever. (Amen).

Alex Grey’s Cosmic Christ

It seems linear, rational materialism is on the outs.

Rational Mysticism is in.

We are realizing that Time is elastic and Consciousness is omnipresent. That the universe is alive and thrumming with intent.

Only today, that's a logical conclusion to be drawn from our newsfeeds. Not from the philosophical musings of a heretical priest!

Or, even from the monologues of a stoney physicist, like Carl “We are made of starstuff” Sagan.

Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once 🌀

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This realization that the universe is weirder, wonkier and more self aware than we imagined—as far out as it might sound—isn't new.

We're slip-sliding into something close to quantum animism or panpsychism.

(from Noema Journal)

"Plato and Aristotle had panpsychist beliefs, as did the Stoics. At the turn of the 12th century, the Christian mystic Saint Francis of Assisi was so convinced that everything was conscious that he tried speaking to flowers and preaching to birds. In fact, the history of thought is dotted with very clever people coming to this seemingly irrational conclusion.

William James, the father of American psychology, was a panpsychist, as was the celebrated British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead; the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck once remarked in an interview, “I regard consciousness as fundamental.” Even the great inventor Thomas Edison had some panpsychist views…“It seems that every atom is possessed by a certain amount of primitive intelligence.”

What’s old is new again.

And that makes this mind-bending, time-bending singularity just exactly perfect for our moment.

Turns out, we humans are only a small part of a vast ecology of sentience. Past, Present and Future are entwined through Time and Space.

Everyone. Everywhere. All at Once.

Now, I must admit, when reading Teilhard de Chardin, I wouldn't have pegged 2023 as a likely candidate for when the Omega Point would arrive.

Something that transformative felt like it had to be centuries away, if ever.

But when you consider that history never plays out exactly like the pundits predict, our current moment makes as much sense as any.

So perhaps this is how it ends:

Maybe we're not slouching towards Bethlehem after all.

Maybe we’re slip-sliding Home, ass-backwards and cross-eyed…

Omega Point or bust.

Fingers crossed we get there.

(if we haven’t already).