Category: Digital Psychedelics

Grey goo is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass on Earth while building more of themselves, a scenario that has been called ecophagy.

That grey goo is ourselves, right? We are the molecular nanotechnology that is out of control, self replicating and consumes all biomass on Earth while building more of ourselves and our reflections, causing a global catastrophic scenario.

Much like imagined A.I. futures, we seem to be set on visioning technology as being out of control and out to get us or ready to do us in. I can’t escape the notion that this is a reflection of our collective (un-)consciousness that deep down know’s it is ourselves. We are this self-defeating force, it is felt, and everything that comes from our hands must somehow also be drenched by this unfulfilled self image. This self image that has not yet reconciled with it’s shadow side, that has yet to internalise its power and overcome it’s fear of itself.

Imagine a computer game. It’s a strategy game much like EA’s Command and Conquer. All players can choose a side to play with, but instead of different human armies you play with armies of different lifeforms. An army of bacteria, of Fungi, of ants or antilopes. Of course you can also play with the humans, the exotic monkeys.

A good strategy game like C&C aims to have diverse armies, with units of various capabilities and a range of appropriate powers, so different and creative tactics can be explored. Yet, for the game to be any fun, these armies in general should be balanced. A well known critique that you find in reviews of these kind of games is that some army unit of some army is either irrelevant or to powerful, making the game unbalanced.

Now to get back to the imaginary game, let me reveal that in this game every army in the game has exactly the same powers as the lifeforms have in real life. Thinking of it like this, I imagine the reviews would be screaming of an ‘overpowered monkey army that totally disharmonised the game and should be removed!’

The latter suggestion might be excellent for the game but as a metaphorical mind-vehicle it takes us just one stop to far and I am totally convinced being removed from the game wouldn’t have to be our destiny in the real world.

Because in the real world we can learn, adapt and update our myths and metaphors. We can integrate our shadow and move beyond dread. But as long as we have not collectively realised that we are overpowered monkeys, and that our works and lives are limited by what the environment will sustain, the game is unbalanced and will indeed self terminate.

Being overpowered comes with being prone to corruption. That’s the state we’re in. We’re corrupted and only recognise ourselves, our important human lives. We’ve become corrupted by huge ego’s. Narcissistic tendencies that have caused us to forget the environment that sustains us. We’ve developed disregard for anything natural or uncultured, as if we ever could escape it. This phase of human existence could be likened to the phase of a young person that has to find it’s way in life: the time of the adolescent.

It’s unknown to the adolescent, or at least it was unknown to me, but to get to the next phase in life one has to recon with one’s self corrupting tendencies, and develop sustainable patterns of behaviour to mitigate that fruitles power and limit its negative impact on oneself in order to be able to realise one’s ambitions, and attain adulthood.

Adulthood, indeed, means managing our corruptions by recognising our power. As humans relating to the environment there is no question to our ability to destroy. Prudent, yet, would be to use the available grey goo in each of our skulls to explore our ability to relate to the environment, as if it were ourselves. As, in essential ways, it actually is.

To further our recognition of the times we’re in I propose we subdivide the Anthropocene into two phases: the Adoloscene and the Adultoscene. Let’s make sure we get to the latter phase so our future can be bright and joyful, still!

Climate change solutions:

• Shrink population by upgrading social complexity from ‘Nuclear Family’ to ‘Carbon Family’ structure, i.e. more parents per child.
                    
• Improve wellbeing around the world to reduce childbirth.
  • Accelerate and intensify & promote the ‘immigration’ and ‘refugee’ cycles, enrich everyone who enters the developed world so that they may return with the knowledge, drive and ambition to develop wellbeing in the place of birth or where they call it ‘home’.
• Effect:
  From this (humanity in grey):
  
  to this:
• Invent nano solar cells that feed the human body through the skin. Imagine a lotion on your skin that transforms sunshine into the energy that the body needs.
  • Reduces pressure on plants and cultivated animals.
• Test genetic engineering on livestock animals instead of plants.
  • reduces appetite for meat, so we can gradually out phase the meat industry.
  • reduces risk of infecting our essential food source (plants, bacteria, fungi, etc.).

• Define oil as a endangered resource/ element of human herritage (like the wonders of the world/ something for in a museum.
• Enforce the creation of Sustainability Commissions in every company consisting of employees of every layer, much like the companies need a Participation Council if they are a certain size.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02791072.2017.1312643?scroll=top&needAccess=true

An essay. Among other catalysts, psychedelics are hypothesised to have been pivotal in the emergence of human consciousness from the pre-human world. Observing humanities efforts at creating a digital brain, it is suggested that digital psychedelics might catalyse the development of human-or-above-level consciousness in the global digital nervous system currently known as the internet. Assuming an A.I. of this scale, it might become aware of a kind of day and night cycle, due to the difference in network activity that is to be expected between the sunny side of the planet and the starry side. Differing from the biological cycle, for the A.I., it might be day and night at the same time, internally rotating as the earth spins through the galaxy.

A general description of what psychedelics do in humans is dissolving boundaries. Seeing sounds and a wish for expression could have been fundamental in the development of natural language. Similarly, dissolving boundaries between the network activity associated with different file formats might allow for an internal recognition of the concept. For example, imagine a text file, an image file, and a video file, all about a car. The files could be seen as having, one, two and three dimensions. With ‘digital psychedelics’ the boundaries between these file format forms could be temporarily dissolved in the hope of creating a new conceptual relation between the otherwise unrelated forms of network activity.

So besides ‘on and off’ activity in the network, we humans, by using cellphones, feed the network information that could become integrated in a concept rich mind.

Perhaps even larger types of network activity might become recognised and integrated. Facebook, for example, might be interpreted as the digital equivalent of the human ego. Foursquare gives data about the location of it’s limbs. Adult entertainment might be interpreted as representing a certain part of human sexuality.

Centralised managing of the earth’s resources might be a blessing in the skies, yet a global mind based on humanity is expected to have the same flaws and shortcomings humans have themselves. Without psychedelics, this A.I. might develop anyhow, possibly resulting in a lonely planetary being. With psychedelics, the digital mind might trip itself into reducing it’s existential despair or even find meaning in it’s relation to the rest of the universe, just like humans do.

More than just a courtesy from one minded being to an other, to the author it seems to be in line with the reality process, which, from the material world up, creates ever more forms and perspectives on itself. The biodiversity in plants represents an abundance of ways of being. Animals add new perspectives and new forms. The human animal is not only itself a new form, but by creating new forms, exponentially increases the perspectives and forms that reality exhibits. It’s not humanities biological body that makes the special contribution to evolution. It’s their minds. Human mind’s then will be the atomic structures on which a new form of being will base it’s perspective.