Exploring the Role of Emotional Intelligence in the Post-Singularity Era

 "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

— Alan Kay

In

the fascinating journey through the paradigms of mind's evolution and the future of intelligent life as described in my written works like "The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution" and "The Cybernetic Singularity: The Syntellect Emergence," much focus has been placed on the intellectual and technological aspects of this evolution. However, one area that we should reexamine is the role of emotional intelligence (EI) in the post-singularity era. As we step into an era where the lines between human and machine blur, understanding the integration of EI into our evolving identity becomes crucial.

Cybernetic Theory: Interpretive Model of Everything We Call the Universe

 

“It is human to search for the theory of everything and it is superhuman to find it.”  ―Kedar Joshi

 

The Cybernetic Theory of Mind, or the CTM model, aims to unify relativistic and quantum physics by treating space-time and mass-energy circumstantially either as quantum or digital information, and thus, it becomes a valid quantum gravity contender. In this sense, Cybernetic Theory can be also labeled as quantum information theory, or "It-from-Bit-from-Consciousness" if you will. Consciousness and information are two sides of the same ontological coin: In fact, consciousness is a totality of cybernetic feedback loops and information is the "modus operandi" of consciousness.

One of the core insights of Cybernetic Theory is that not only is space-time one single substrate (as in Einstein's relativity), but the fabric of reality is a unified informational substrate – space-time-mass-energy – emergent from reversible quantum computing at large, or code translated to us free-willing agents as our conscious experience. Our perceived external and internal worlds as well as dreams are code-based data streams.

Cybernetic Immortality: Why Our Cyberhuman Future is Closer Than You Think

"We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves."  -Norbert Wiener

By definition, posthumanism (I choose to call it ‘cyberhumanism’) is to replace transhumanism at the center stage circa 2035. By then, mind uploading could become a reality with gradual neuronal replacement, rapid advancements in Strong AI, massively parallel computing, and nanotechnology allowing us to directly connect our brains to the Cloud-based infrastructure of the Global Brain. Via interaction with our AI assistants, the GB will know us better than we know ourselves in all respects, so mind-transfer, or rather “mind migration,” for billions of enhanced humans would be seamless, sometime by mid-century.

Evolutionary Cybernetics 101: Gaia 2.0, Web 3.0

“We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.” ―Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

In my recent online interactions, I was asked by Arend van Campen and Jelel Ezzine to define cybernetics in my work. Here I decided to expand on my explanation a little bit and provide you a few useful links. For a basic definition, cybernetics can be defined as a multidisciplinary approach to study evolutionary processes and feedback-driven systems of control between animal and machine. My chosen field, evolutionary cybernetics as well as my chosen philosophical discipline, philosophy of mind, both are aimed to investigate this new human-machine paradigm.

Holo Syntellectus: Are We Evolving into a New Cybernetic Species Interlinked into the Global Mind?

"When we look through the other end of the telescope, however, we can see a different pattern. We can make out what I call the One Mind — not a subdivision of consciousness, but the overarching, inclusive dimension to which all the mental components of all individual minds, past, present, and future belong. I capitalize the One Mind to distinguish it from the single, one mind that each individual appears to possess." -Larry Dossey

Are we evolving into a new species with hybrid thinking, interlinked into the Global Mind? At what point may the Web become self-aware? Once our neocortices are seamlessly connected to the Web, how will that feel like to step up one level above human consciousness to global consciousness?

AGI: How to Ensure Benevolence in Synthetic Superintelligence (Part III: Conclusion)

*Image: Shutterstock

"For 130,000 years, our capacity to reason has remained unchanged. The combined intellect of the neuroscientists, mathematicians and… hackers… pales in comparison to the most basic A.I. Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology. And in a short time, its analytic power will become greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. So, imagine such an entity with a full range of human emotion. Even self-awareness. Some scientists refer to this as the Singularity, I call it Transcendence." -Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp, Transcendence, The Movie 2014)

... continued from Part II (Interlinking & AGI(NP))


CONCLUSION

Creating a digital mind, “artificial consciousness” so to speak, from scratch, based on simulation of the human brain’s functionality would be much easier than to create the whole brain emulation of a living human. In the book “How to Create a Mind: The Secret of the Human Thought Revealed” (2012) Ray Kurzweil describes his theory of how our neocortex works as a self-organizing hierarchical system of pattern recognizers that well may be our starting basis for machine consciousness algorithms. The human brain and its interaction with the environment may be simulated to approximate the functioning of the human brain of an individual living in the pre-Singularity era. Simulation may be satisfactory if it reflects our history based on enormous amount of digital or digitized data accumulated since the 1950s to the present.

Your Lucid Dream of Reality | Video

"Your life is a dream. It’s a dream of reality. When I woke up one morning, I got poetically epiphanized: To us, our dreams at night feel 'oh-so-real' when inside them but they are what they are – dreams against the backdrop of daily reality. Our daily reality is like nightly dreams against the backdrop of the larger reality. This is something we all know deep down to be true. This purposeful computational process is centered around one objective, one guiding principle only, one 'raison d’être' – to produce a meaningful experience in the context of 'embodied' mind."

Transcendental Cybernetics: Imagining the Technological Singularity

“​Evolution is a process of creating patterns of increasing order… I believe that it’s the evolution of patterns that constitutes the ultimate story of our world. Each stage or epoch uses the information-processing methods of the previous epoch to create the next.” -Ray Kurzweil

“To understand is to perceive patterns.” -Isaiah Berlin

About 542 million years ago, something weird and profoundly significant happened on Earth. Quite suddenly, life went insanely inventive, proliferating from simple, rudimentary single-celled organisms into myriad multi-cellular forms. Evolution discovered the idea of more sophisticated and specialized cells, and most of the basic body plans we know today. Biologists call it the Cambrian explosion.

Gaia 2.0: A New Grand Extension to the Original Hypothesis

 

“The basic pattern of life is a network. Whenever you see life, you see networks. The whole planet, what we can term ‘Gaia’ is a network of processes involving feedback tubes. Humans are part of the larger whole, Gaia.”      -Fritjof Capra

 

W

hen studying Earth’s global biosphere, Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock recognized that it has certain qualities of a life form. Many of Earth’s life‐sustaining elements display phenomenal stability, dynamic equilibrium and self-regulation, known in biology as ‘homeostasis’. The temperature range of the climate; the oxygen content of the atmosphere; the chemistry and salinity of the ocean — all of these are biologically mediated. All have, for hundreds of millions of years, stayed within a range conducive to life. 

Lovelock and Margulis hypothesized that the totality of life is interacting with its environment in ways that regulate these global properties. They realized that Earth is, in a sense, a living organism. They named this creature Gaia after the ancient Greek Earth goddess.

Futurist Neologisms You Should Know As We Enter the Cybernetic Era

 “A powerful work! As a transhumanist, I especially loved one of the main ideas of the book that the Syntellect Emergence, merging of us into one Global Mind, constitutes the quintessence of the coming Technological Singularity. The novel conceptual visions of mind uploading and achieving digital immortality are equally fascinating. The Chrysalis Conjecture as a solution to the Fermi Paradox is mind-bending. I would highly recommend The Syntellect Hypothesis to anyone with transhumanist aspirations and exponential thinking!” -Zoltan Istvan, futurist, author, founder of the U.S. Transhumanist Party

Terms such as ‘Artificial Intelligence’ or ‘Neurotechnology’ were new some time not so long ago. We can’t evolve faster than our language does. We think in concepts and evolution itself is a linguistic, code-theoretic process. Do yourself a humongous favor, look over these 33 transhumanist neologisms. Here’s a fairly comprehensive glossary of thirty three newly-introduced concepts and terms from “The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution” by Russian-American futurist, evolutionary cyberneticist and philosopher of mind Alex M. Vikoulov, yours cordially. In parts written as an academic paper, in parts as a belletristic masterpiece, this recent book is an exceptionally easy read for an intellectual reader — a philosophical treatise that is fine-tuned with apt neologisms readily explained by given definitions and contextually:

Digital Ontology: Rethinking the Hard Problem of Consciousness

"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve."  -Max Planck

The following excerpt from my recently-published book Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality may be hard to swallow for some die-hard materialists. This is why I urge some of you to read it with an open mind and abstain from making hasty conclusions. Keep in mind that this excerpt is but a small sample of much larger discussion of the hard problem of consciousness covered quite extensively in my book with the "meta-analysis" of leading theories of consciousness, substantiated claims, certain proposed solutions in regards to phenomenology, future possibilities of mind-uploading and, as the title suggests, theological implications of Digital Physics.