Welcome in the middle of nowhere

For all the wandering hobbits of the middle earth…

Author: raphyduck

World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humans and Machines – Michael Chorost – 2011

This book is formalizing perfectly my thoughts for the future of mankind: How to better link humans through technology, specifically mind to mind technology. It was a fascinating account of how we might interface brains between them, using existing technologies (that still needs to be much improved upon).

The book was also telling the personal story of its author, how he found meaning, how he discovered the power of touch, of real human contact, and how he found love. This might seem completely how of place for such a book, but it is not. On the contrary, he knew we could accuse him of wanting to replace humans by a mindless zombies dystopia like the Borg in Star Trek. So the author used his personal experiences to stress the importance of rediscovering human relations and sense of community. To illustrate how a technology that would allow humans to share emotion over the internet might be more humanizing that current communication systems.

The book imagined how a global self aware consciousness might emerge and what form it could take.

In short, this is a very inspiring book. I hope it encouraged entrepreneurs to explore the possibilities of brain-computer interface. Certainly I will be paying close attention to the field and help if I can make this dream come true.

The Years of Rice and Salt – Kim Stanley Robinson – 2002

This book is the kind of science-fiction that takes place in the past. More exactly it is an alternate history fiction.

To call it “science fiction” is actually a bit of a stretch. The book tell of the history of humanity after the Black Death entirely decimated Europe, through the eyes of a few protagonists that lives through many reincarnation. This is quite a stretch for science, and it through me off a bit.

But after a while, it grew on me and I could enjoy the book though certain lyric discussion on religious matter were a bit of a stretch. It still made for an interesting book, but don’t expect many surprise: the history of technological and scientific progress is the same. This is actually the “thesis” of this book: to show that Europeans are not specials, that with them humanity would have followed the same trajectory. This is a thesis based on liberal faith rather than science, but I think it is true: life tends to evolve toward increasing complexity, which science and technological development certainly are a sign of.

Earth in Human Hands – David Grinspoon – 2016

Earth in Human Hands is an optimistic book about our future, and the future of our planet. And in an unexpected way it touches upon a topic that has been of increasing interest to me these last few months: mind to mind communication. Well, not explicitly of course! It is a book about ecology and human and what to do with all of our power.

But the author revisited with insistance the “Gaia Hypothesis”, the idea that the planet is a single organism, with each elements interacting with all the others in endless feedback loops. And for the author, the humans could become a precursor to a planetary mind, the planet becoming self aware. No mind to mind communication here, but the idea is certainly a variation on the subject of integrating everything under a global and conscious entity. In a sense, it already is integrated, though we can’t say the planet is yet self-aware. Only by massively increasing the brain to brain bandwidth could we achieve that. But I disgress.

This book opened my eyes on just how tightly everything interacts with everything. For example, the CO2 in our atmosphere is absorbed into the ocean, integrated with organisms that die and fill up the bottom of the oceans, to finish in the Earth’s crust, then in its mantle, then back into the atmosphere when volcanoes erupt. This cycle keeps the climate under control, avoiding runaway greenhouse. That is until a species became so successful as to fill the whole planet with themselves and CO2 faster than the ocean can pull out. This just shows how fragile our planet is.

But no doomsday gloom here, no hatred of humanity, no wish to return to a pre-industrial state. David Grinspoon is not opposing human civilisation and ecology, on the contrary, he makes the case that only through our ingenuity, through moderation, through maturity, through worldwide cooperation, can we overcome the challenges that we created for the planet, and help it to enter a new eon he coined the “Sapiezoic”, an eon when the planet becomes self-aware.

This is a message for ecology we can all get behind!

Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's FutureEarth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future by David Grinspoon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a great read. There were so many powerful ideas crammed into it, though it certainly could have been written with a bit less anecdotes about who is who and did what etc

But all in all a very hopeful message for humanity.

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Artemis – Andy Weir – 2017

My review on Goodreads.com:

ArtemisArtemis by Andy Weir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am not a fan of the vulgar comic relief style of Andy Weir. I don’t identify easily with this style of first person narration, probably cause I am a prude and don’t “think” like that. Still, I enjoyed the thrill The Martian and thought I would give this one a go.

It took me several pages to realize the hero was a girl, until the first pronoun in fact. As others more eloquently put it, putting Mark Watney’s style into a girl “mouth” seemed even less credible.

And yet, I went on and about half way through the book, I realized I was hooked. I love the realistic depiction of a lunar colony, with geek attention to technical, scientific and sociological details. The story was also very enjoyable, and I ended the book wishing for more.

A very good read.

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Four day water fasting

Today I broke a 4 days water fast started on Thursday.

Up until now I only made 3 days water fast. I had symptoms of lightheadedness and muscles pain yesterday, and discovered that adding salt to the water I drank helped A LOT.

So the lesson of the day: During fasting, drink a lot of water with added salt. Adding magnesium could be a good idea too.

This is what I broke the fast with:

20190225_125235

Followed half an hour later by 1kg of mince beef with 400g of kimchi. Yumi!

The Nexus Trilogy – Ramez Naam – 2012 – 2015

The Nexus Trilogy is a postcyberpunk thriller novel trilogy written by American author Ramez Naam and published between 2012-2015. The novel series follows the protagonist Kaden Lane, a scientist who works on an experimental nano-drug, Nexus, which allows the brain to be programmed and networked, connecting human minds together. As he pursues his work, he becomes entangled in government and corporate intrigue. The story takes place in the year 2040.[1][2][3]
Nexus tied for Best Novel in the 2014 Prometheus Awards given out by the Libertarian Futurist Society.[4] It was also shortlisted for the 2014 Arthur C. Clarke award.[5] Nexus was published in 2012. Its sequel, Crux, was published in 2013.[6] The third volume of the trilogy, Apex, was published in 2014, and won the 2015 Philip K. Dick Award. The film rights to Nexus were purchased by Paramount in 2013.[7]

The Nexus trilogy – wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nexus_Trilogy

Somehow this introduction from Wikipedia doesn’t do justice to this trilogy. This trilogy was among the many sci-fi books on my to-read list. After finishing the Foundation universe from Asimov, I was interested in the idea of connecting or merging mind and other mind-to-mind technology, so this book Nexus seemed look a good read. And boy it was.

Nexus describes the world as it could be in the near future, and how society and people around the world would react to various human enhancement technologies.

First, I found that the author did a great job trying describing these technologies without embellishing them too much. The “headlight” technology of the book, Nexus, is a computer made of nano-“processor/antenna” sitting in and interfacing with the brain, able to wireless communicate to the near surroundings. The potential for abuses are great, mind control, slavery, rape, theft,… All of this are part of the plots in the books, and all these technologies brings their fair shares of sufferings and violence especially in the last one.

With that said, the author does make the point that the benefits outweighs the costs. I am biased in that I already think humans should enhance themselves by any means (in fact I think this is the only way out for us as a species), but still I think the arguments he presented are convincing. The main take away is that all this technologies are about connecting more deeply. And when you think about it, language and speech is a way to communicate more deeply, to transmit more ideas to one another; in this light, telepathy is just a step up speech, and it is not a fundamentally different change. Of course some could argue that one change is natural and the other artificial but this doesn’t actually hold against rational scrutiny.

So these books do an excellent job at convincing us that human augmentation, and especially mind to mind communication, is desirable (especially in the first book in which the author explores the argument again and again.

But what took me by surprise was the place taken by meditation in the story. Meditation is everywhere, and actually a crucial and necessary piece of the final resolution of the story (spoiler spoiler). And this is what made this trilogy so special to me. It is clear that the goal of transcendence, the goal of the Buddhist Nirvana, of tearing apart the illusion of the self, is what we should all look forward to. And the nexus nanites are presented as just a more efficient way to bring the masses to nirvana, and a way to merge individual consciousnesses into one “global mind”, a consciousness that is “more than the sum of its parts”, as Naam insist on throughout the story. Buddhist monks play important roles throughout the books, and with them, and through the eyes of the main protagonist, the author allow the reader to discover what meditation is, what it means, what it can bring. Having recently “discover” mindfulness myself and been slowly transformed by it, I particularly appreciated this marriage between mindfulness and transhumanism. The 2 should go hand to hand together. In fact, if we don’t want to get lost by technology, we want them to come together, to stay on an ethical path that doesn’t leave behind (or worse) any humans.

So the Nexus trilogy is describing a violent future. But this violence is a childbirth pain to a new state of humanity, with less suffering, more intelligence, more beauty. And while I very much hope we never come to the violence depicted there, I do wish to see humanity embrace transhumanism, go to its next step in evolution, and take the whole planet with it toward Gaia.

The Inevitable – Kevin Kelly – 2016

“The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future” is a book from Kevin Kelly that tries to anticipate the near future of technology.

My Goodreads.com review:

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our FutureThe Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was pretty interesting, and it is an easy read if you are a “future enthusiast”.

I think the author was pretty spot on on identifying the current trends shaping technology. The author says he tries to not speculate too much about the future but rather just take existing trends and push them further. Well, there is definitely some wild speculation there, but I think it is more to illustrate potential technologies rather than assert exactly how the future will be.

There is one point that made me uneasy: his defense of mindlessness. Kelly spend a lot of time justifying how our scattered attention is not a problem, how it is just a welcome evolution forced by technology; how it doesn’t matter much that you can finish a single article in one go without ten times checking ten social feeds. The irony is that people that actually read his book probably don’t fall into this category, or at least are trying not too. After spending years without reading a single books because I couldn’t take my eyes off various time-wasting stuffs on the net, I discovered the benefit of mindfulness, cut off social medias time and finally learnt again to read (to this day this is still a hard exercice of attention). Maybe it means I am old, but I believe mindfulness is important and it will be a challenge for future generations to hold it in the face of so much attention grabbers.

With that said, I enjoyed the book a lot overall.

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Foundation’s Edge – Isaac Asimov – 1982

Spoiler Alert: This post might give away crucial details of the book. Read at your own risk.

Foundation’s Edge is the sixth book of the foundation saga by the genius Isaac Asimov. The foundation universe, which merged with the robots universe of the same author later in his life, happens in an unknown time in the future. The human expanded across our galaxy in a Galactic Empire, and only our galaxy. No aliens exist in the Milky Way (the reason for this is actually a funny story), and humans don’t seem to have conquered other galaxies.

When the foundation series begins, the Empire is on the brink of collapse. A mathematician genius, Hari Seldon, is the only one that can foresee this thanks to his science child, pyschohistory. He has a plan to reduce the dark ages that will follow the Empire from 30,000 years to a mere thousand of years.

Fast forward 500 years. The Plan laid by Seldon five centuries ago, based on psychohistorical principles, is still on target. Or is it? Trevize, a former officer of the Navy and now member of the council of the powerful Foundation is sent to investigate the survival of the Second Foundation, a secret organisation set up by Seldon to ensure that the galaxy continues to follow the Plan.

During his investigation, Trevize will encounter a very powerful being that could turn Seldon’s dream upside down…. Gaia…

As the renowned SciFi author and futurist David Brin explained, the story being the Foundation series writing is quite interesting:

First he wrought the Foundation, treating a quadrillion humans as ‘gas molecules’ whose destiny could be calculated through Hari Seldon’s wondrous new science of psychohistory. And that satisfied the young nerd in biochemistry… for a while. Only…

Later, Isaac realized that perturbations would interfere with statistical predictability, even in such a marvelous new science. (Today we call it the Butterfly Effect.)

So he introduced a secret cabal of psychic-mathematicians (the Second Foundation) who would be dedicated to guiding the Seldon Plan back in line, should the emerging New Empire drift down a wrong path.

That seemed to satisfy, for a while. 

But a decade or so afterwards, Isaac realized the moral flaw of the Second Foundation… that it left humanity led forever by a secret, inherited aristocracy!  A mutant branch of the race, locked into permanent, psychic dominance over all the rest.

This was offensive to Isaac’s liberal-democratic sensibilities. Hence, he searched and found a solution to this, by bringing both halves of his life-work together… by inserting robots into the Foundation Universe!

Daneel Olivaw and his scrupulously honest positronic followers would act behind the scenes, manipulating even the Second Foundation, all for our own best interests and welfare, of course, and preventing dominance by a lordly human caste. Picture dedicated court eunuchs, who cannot conspire to become lords themselves, because they will have no offspring. (And hence my observation that Asimov’s fabled Empire was less Roman than actually rather Chinese!)

Loyal robot eunuchs, standing beind the Second Foundation, manipulating it to only do good. They can be trusted… right?

Or can they? A little while later, Isaac realized something… free will had been reversed!  

The mechanical servants had memory and volition. They were rare, precious and powerful! While humans were as numerous and powerless as insects. The “masters” had amnesia about their past and no control over their future, utterly and secretly controlled by all-powerful “servants.” Now that didn’t sound like such a great destiny either! 

What a life Isaac had! Holding this decadal conversation and argument with himself. Finding an answer to a problem, then having the honesty to admit that it caused a new problem! And answering that one… only then honestly coming to realize…

== Iterating Destiny ==

He sought a way out of the powerful-servants dilemma of the 1980s… and came up with Gaia! The ultimate robotic plan for humanity — for us to transcend together as a race, leapfrogging beyond our loyal-but-manipulative servants into a a new level of being, transforming all of humanity into a single, all-powerful mind! 

Okay, you’ve seen this concept positively portrayed by a third of the greats… by Arthur C. Clarke* in CHILDHOOD’S END and in 2001: A Space Odyssey… and it goes back to Teilhard de Chardin and others. But never explored with Asimovian attention to detail. You’ve also seen this notion — of monolithic group transcendence — portrayed negatively in Star Trek’s infamous Borg! (Indeed, I tried to give it a subtle twist-and-spin in EARTH.) 

The Gaia/Galaxia resolution that Isaac put forward in FOUNDATION’S EDGE seemed to solve his problems. It would eventually deify humanity, restoring our memory and authority over robots again, in a fashion that Daneel Olivaw would find acceptable, because it would eliminate the fractious individualism that was always messing things up with violence and confusion and chaos. Such a coalescence into mega wisdom would make humanity mature, allowing Daneel at last to put down his ancient burden and step aside for a long deserved rest.

dAVID bRIN, https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-robots-and-foundation-universe.html

So Foundation’s Edge is about a future for humanity, a future where humans aren’t quite only human anymore, but something more. I found this to be a stark contrast with the previous foundation novels written decades earlier by a much younger Asimov; these earlier novels were actually very conservative in their depiction of the future (one could say unimaginative, but that would unfair to someone living in the 1950s, when computers were barely out of the theoretical.

So those novels were describing a society which were quite like the ones we live in. In fact, I think Asimov said he was inspired by the fall of the Roman Empire for his first foundation novel. So we hare emperor, general of wars, politics and human bickering, the set is just the Milky Way rather than just Earth. Don’t get me wrong, it was still amazingly written, full of clever insights, a pleasure to read and re-read. Asimov also started to “innovate” by introducing telepathy in the second foundation book. But the context still was that of a “conventional” human society, one which we all recognize quite well. There was some women and men that had the super power of telepathy, but that was about it.

Only in Foundation’s Edge, Asimov started to describe us a different kind of society. A society in which it is not easy for us to imagine ourselves living in. Not as in a dystopia, but as in living with characteristics hard to relate to: telepathy, the sharing of thoughts and emotions and ideas, but everything, not only humans, but animals, plants, minerals,… And Asimov followed the logical conclusions of these telepathic properties: such a planet would ressemble nothing like Earth: from the complete communication between sentient beings and more matters would emerge something more, more than just the sum of its components: a “super-organism”, conscious in its one right, whose “neurons” are each individual minds and components of the matter.

What would it be like to live and be part of such of planet? What would it mean for us as an individual? What would it mean for the ecosystems? For society? Asimov explores some of these questions, like privacy, in this book and the following (Foundation and Earth).

This book had a profound impact on me. I have been reading the whole robots/foundation series for almost a year, this was inspiring, exciting, thrilling for the scifi geek that I am. But this was the first time I encountered the notion of group transcendence in depth like this (my reading culture is not so deep actually). And it is when I realized: “this is it”. “This is what the future of humanity and life should be”. This is what I want future techs to converge to, this is what I want life to evolve into. This is something I would like to help make happen. More than robots, more than immortality or mind upload or space travel: making every sentient being part of a greater, “universal” consciousness.

If you ask me: would you do it today should it be possible? I am not sure I would. I would share that kind of link with my wife. With everyone on earth? I don’t know (strangely enough, I have no problem sharing my minds with other species. There is something about self consciousnesses here…). I don’t think anyone born and grown as an individual could ever be confortable with being part of a greater whole, at least not without a long adaptation.

Why do I think this is a worthy whole? I am not sure. I think it resonates with the stoic philosophy I recently discovered, according to which we should keep in mind our place a just a tiny part of a whole, of the human race, of the universe. Maybe (probably) some other more hidden reasons. Who knows.

Would it be a good idea? I like to think so. I like to think it would help eliminate suffering, it would be more inclusive, it would quell the existential crisis we human so often share. At the price of a certain idea of individuality. An idea that I think is wrong anyway (not morally, just factually).

Will it happen? A better question could be “Could it happen?”. I read in a further book the argument that spoken language like we humans evolved is but a step toward telepathy. I think this is right. I think telepathy is just a better, much better, much faster and with much more “bandwidth”, language. Language allowed us to evolve superbe and powerful collective structures. It didn’t prevent us a certain privacy. Is it possible that telepathy would be but a step up: less misunderstanding, more inclusion, and the emergence of a global “super mind”?

If this view of telepathy as a language is correct, then it may very well happen. Now, will it? It depends on so many factors. That’s what’s so exciting about the future!

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