Christian Transhumanism: March 2015

The Fantastic Potential of Main-Stream Science and Technology

Lately, people are noticing how technology is becoming more and more empowering, specifically nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science (NBIC). NBIC technologies are focused on improving human performance. They are also converging technologies, meaning they are considered to be interrelated fields of study that often overlap and impact each other yielding accelerating improvements. For over a decade now the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Commerce have looked at combining these four fields in order to improve the application of technology to human cognition, human health, and even community and social applications. Each type of technology involved in NBIC plays a role in the bigger picture:

Nanotechnology is important because organic structures develop from the nanoscale.
Biotechnology involves the application of advanced technology to biological organisms.
Information technology represents a specific sector of these types of applications.
Cognitive science applies in various ways to IT-related research and the pursuit of items such as technologies that map the brain.

Using converging technologies, or NBIC principles, we enable the human populations of the future to be stronger, healthier and more capable overall. (1)

Christian Transhumanism

We are now consciously evolving. Humanity has acquired the ability to choose what the species Homo sapiens becomes in the future (2) and we are calling it transhumanism. (3) Let’s take this directed evolution, or transhumanism to the limit: Over the ages a natural trend of growing in understanding and creative powers will yield a supernatural looking state of being. The very most optimistic outcome for life, the supreme state of being, is to become eternally self-sustaining and universally creative. That is what God is. This eternal state of being is shared. Do not let anyone talk you out of that. This state of being promises everyone an eternal healthy life. We stay interested and engaged. We create and we diminish hardships forever.

The most intelligent thing we can do now is focus on consciously evolving to the one and only state of aseity, the property by which a being exists of and from itself. It will be easily understood that this property belongs, and can belong only, to the immortal, all-knowing God, a selfless and universal state of being which is in us all. It is provocative for sure, arrogant sounding for sure. But essentially this goal is the source of life:

It gives meaning to life and motivates us to live on.
Figuring out who God is in this way is actually the most authentic worship,
It is a moral responsibility, the surest way to unlock the abundance in this world necessary to feed and educate the growing masses.

I call this Christian Transhumanism because it is conscious evolution to Christ. It is the tendency and desire of the spirit towards an intimate union with the Divinity. Through contemplation and love, a direct and immediate intuition of the Infinite (7) will be actualized... with NBIC technologies.

This is a dangerously narrow path, especially using technology. If you are meek, just have faith. You will inherit the good earth. But, if you are a pioneer with the Holy Spirit strive on with confidence; from a transcendent view your tower stands tall because it:

is built with perfect love,
was built with perfect love,
and will be built with perfect love. (4)

It takes a healthy balance of faith and work to grow to be not only like Christ, but to accomplish the task set forth in the New Testament to actuate Christ: (Man and God, merged) and actually participating in the creation. Wisdom of the ages says we stay out of the stagnating trap of idolatry laid by many egotistical church leaders, politicians, and corporations by:

Never being satisfied with anything less than the one true omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God.
Proceeding carefully with unwavering humility and selfless love.
Recognizing ignorance in yourself and others, forgive it, and grow from it.

The Nationalism Factor

(In God and Technology We Trust)

Without a vision a people will perish, says Proverbs. Why? Howard Bloom says it well; "Because a vision of a goal, a destination, a promised land, a view of a destiny that can uplift all of human kind, opens a vast reserve of energies. Not the energies that come from solar panels, wind farms, or oil. The energies of the human spirit. The energies of your spirit and mine. It is a matter of Biology". We are weak without inspiration.

A new race is on akin to the nuclear era and the space race. The new race is for the cognitive high ground where intelligence will rule all aspects of life. Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Mathematician Vernor Vinge predicts that superhuman intelligences, however created, will be able to enhance their own minds faster than the humans that created them. "When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress," Vinge writes, "that progress will be much more rapid." This feedback loop of self-improving intelligence, he predicts, will cause large amounts of technological progress within a short period.

Early signs of the crisis are emerging today. The Internet security company report that approximately 120 countries have been developing ways to use the Internet as a weapon and target financial markets, government computer systems and utilities. In activities reminiscent of the Cold War, which caused countries to engage in clandestine activities, intelligence agencies are routinely testing networks looking for weaknesses. These techniques for probing weaknesses in the internet and global networks are growing more sophisticated every year.

Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee Avert Labs, was quoted as saying "Cybercrime is now a global issue. It has evolved significantly and is no longer just a threat to industry and individuals but increasingly to national security." They predicted that future attacks will be even more sophisticated. "Attacks have progressed from initial curiosity probes to well-funded and well-organized operations for political, military, economic and technical espionage,"

The danger will come suddenly but so will opportunities. The Lifeboat Foundation explains; "An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns", such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity; technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light."

We need a leader to rally us to a goal of conscious evolution as Kennedy did with the space race in the sixties. Here is an excerpt from JFKs Moon Speech;

"If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space (replace space with conscious evolution) which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take. Now it is time to take longer strides-time for a great new American enterprise-time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement (conscious evolution), which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth." John F. Kennedy

50 YEARS LATER... manned space flight is suffering from lack of tangible returns on investment. It seems real space travel requires further evolution.

How should we evolve? It seems that Mind Space is the new land of opportunity. A very important point to realize is: consciousness is substrate independent. When your dynamic "self" is placed in the right order you can be conscious in any media, or combination of media.

Nationalism is just one force motivating growth in understanding and creative powers. In this Christian Transhumanist's view, the cognitive high ground could be no other than Christ. His love is the winning strategy where ignorance is a disconnection that weakens and love empowers because it provides the highest form of understanding. Could this be God's Plan? If it is, America would be in the best position to gain the high ground, the Holy Grail of the information age, because of its curious mix of God and Technology. In God and Technology we trust.

What God?

God the Father is a timeless and transcendent state of being: (Revelation 1:8) “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, says the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty." The beginning and the end come together in this timeless and eternal aspect of God, creator-sustainer and goal, in one supreme state of being.
God the Son is also present in time, and within us: In-between the alpha and omega there is the presence of the lord God in “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). We are this body of Christ living and growing in time... and we become that “which is to come”: timeless, eternal, Almighty, because that is our true love.(5)
God the Holy Spirit is acts of love: The process of connecting everything, timeless and present. God loves mankind, mankind loves God. Luke 10:27 says it best: 'You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.' And, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" This is where science comes in. The product of this kind of love is true understanding, and the creative power that goes with true understanding. If love is efficient and sustained, true understanding increases exponentially. Humility and selfless peace allows unwavering devotion so that your love can establish a clear connection. Forgiveness is important to your growth because it establishes an exhaust for misunderstanding and disorder. With this truth we transcend. John (4:8) He that loves not knows not God; for God is love... Love rules, ignorance dies.

Love is the winning strategy. Ultimately there is only one way, life, and truth because of the forces of convergent evolution. (6) Convergent evolution would say the laws of nature dictate what the requirements are for eternal self-sustaining life. Imagine the evolutionary branches in the kingdom continuing to flourish, yet all life forms, whichever way they seek to grow, will converge on that one essential state of being. It all converges on the Christian Divine Nature (Godhead). That state of being is the center of unification (precisely to fulfill its motive, collective and self-sustaining function). The end is the means. Because of the very nature of space-time we know that the “Supreme State of Being” we seek is pre-existing and transcendent. Because of the very nature of space-time we are connected to the Divine Nature.

The meaning of love in the information age. Besides the Christian concept of love, what could love mean in the context of transhumanist science and technology? I see a grainy and rough “love process” going on in the technical world, and it is resolving daily into a finer construct. Just like Christianity this technical trend is aimed at achieving the same optimum point of life: eternally self-sustaining, universally creative... and fun. Whether Christian, or Transhuman, love is the winning strategy in the “game” of life.

The power of life: “We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge, and when the love is sufficiently disinterested and sufficiently intense, the knowledge becomes unitive knowledge and so takes on the quality of infallibility.”(8) Eternal and infallible works: We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. We inherit the good works of evolving species, scientific progress, and spiritual growth. This idea is the catalyst for a Christian-transhumanism synthesis.

With NBIC Technologies we have discovered the science of the love process. As it should, the process of connecting is emerging as a fundamental law of nature ready for our technical and spiritual application. There are peer reviewed papers out (9) linking consciousness to connection of information in a system. That connection is measurable. Its strength and growth is obviously trending to The Great I Am (if you have an optimistic outlook on life). The more integrated the system is, the more synergy it has, the more conscious it is. The latest theory of consciousness is precisely expressed in the language of mathematics using notions from information theory such as entropy. Given a particular brain, with its neurons and axons, dendrites and synapses, one can, in principle, accurately compute the extent to which this brain is integrated and so the level of consciousness. From this calculation, the theory derives a single number. Measured in bits, this number denotes the size of the conscious repertoire associated with any network of causally interacting parts. Think of number as the synergy of the system. The more integrated the system is, the more synergy it has, the more conscious it is. This system can be established in a brain, a silicon based computer, electromagnetic fields in space-time, a society...or across all such systems at once. There is obviously much room to grow... This is where we grow. Now think Christian-Transhumanism, it is so grandly synergizing it has emergent properties... real transcendent properties...a new level of consciousness that is hard to relate back.

With Christian Transhumanism Belief in God

is Warranted, Justified, and True Belief.

The Christian Gospel is essentially that we participate in an eternally self-sustaining, universally creative state of being, and that takes perfect love. What evidence is there? The miracle of being, and this dynamic evolutionary trend: emergence of life, emergence of consciousness, and conscious evolution aimed at an eternally self-sustaining, universally creative state of being... that can only be achieved with perfect love.

Physicist John Wheeler and many others(14) say the physical universe is a gigantic information processing system (read: Word of God, and Logos here). Every particle, field of force, even space-time itself is ultimately manifested to us through information. This is called the participatory universe where observers are central to the nature of physical reality and matter is ultimately relegated to mind. Frank tippler of Tulane University in New Orleans sees intelligence spreading throughout the cosmos participating more and more in the workings of nature until it becomes nature. The dominion mandate calls for life to gain control of larger and larger domains just as God said we should with the very first words spoken to mankind in Genesis 1:28 (11) . It is the Jesuit Pierre Tielhard Chardin’s omega point (12) but with technology as the actuator. I take it further and say the creation is a strange loop where “the processor” boots itself up and sustains itself through block-time. When the universe is seen as logos we can dismiss the notion of a ghost in the machine not because there is no ghost but because there is no machine. (10)

Life is an information gathering and utilizing system (13) that maintains order upon itself. Life replicates, and modifies itself through feedback loop of doing-learning-modifying-doing... This definition is directly influenced by Cybernetics and Information Theory. Life learns adapts and changes its behavior. This "circular causal" relationship is necessary and sufficient for a cybernetic perspective. Life is special because of its signaling and self-sustaining processes.

Assuming we meet the dominion mandate and take control of the whole creation, it follows that the creation can be understood as a vast homeostatic super organism that actively produces the conditions necessary for its survival. It is a closed loop of Creation-Evolution-Creation. Plot this over time like a Stephen Hawking space-time diagram but actually plot information in the Claude Shannon sense, instead of space, because we know that matter and life at its deepest level are information.

What might the creation look like when we focus on a continuum of understanding (data- information-knowledge-wisdom and creation)? This is where Cutting edge Physics, Greek Philosophy, and Early Christianity come in. Using peer reviewed references, I need to model Creation- Evolution-Recapitulation (in the sense of salvation to get us back) to Creation. I found over the years that this model is best approached using the concept of block time. With block time we must remember General Relativity, where time is a dimension not a dynamic. "The hardest thing to realize about this type of diagram is that they represent the past, present, and future all in one diagram. The evolution of physical systems is represented by looking at successive horizontal slices in the diagram at successive times. Space-time diagrams represent evolution, but they don't evolve themselves."

Moving up to the central point of this torus is what Christians know as the Rapture, some Transhumanist call it the Singularity, and those on the fringe call it the Rapture of The Nerds. The central point is where Shannon entropy is at its lowest with information compressed to a SIMPLE phrase like; "I Am". I stress simple because here God is not composed or divisible by any physical or metaphysical means. I have called this point The Critical Point of Understanding and the Supreme State of Being. This point is It is singular not plural.

If the central point of this torus is I Am then what proceeds above that point is the answer to the question; Now What? The upper portion of the torus represents the creation; big bang let there be light. There is cosmic inflation and noisy chaos as far as information is concerned. He made a difference.

From the radius of the torus down to the bottom represents the compression of information into the elements and the appearance of life. Here it is critical to define life in terms of information. Again, with life, significant information processing starts at the immanent or local level. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann defines life in terms of information most elegantly in his book the Quark and The Jaguar. He calls life an Information and gathering and utilizing system.

At the bottom nearing the center is where we are today growing in understanding. This part of the Torus represents the learning strategies in the evolution of life and the Christian concept of worship. With my model above, life looks for a winning strategy and finds it! Sustained forever as in the "infinite continuum of life". Like anything else you do for fun and as a form of expression...You get to do it again a different way.

A Universe from Nothing... But Not By Nothing

We live is a participatory universe according to John Archibald Wheeler, colleague of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, mentor to many of today's leading physicists. He devised the figure here, whose caption is:

“Symbolic representation of the Universe as a self-excited system brought into being by ‘self-reference’. The universe gives birth to communicating participators (us). Communicating participators give meaning to the universe … With such a concept goes the endless series of receding reflections one sees in a pair of facing mirrors.” All things are gathered up in Christ. Ephesians 1:10

How is this Christian? In Christology, the concept that the Christ is the Logos (Greek: for "word", "discourse" or "reason") has been important in establishing the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus. Christian theologians consider John 1:1 to be a central text in Christian belief.

The concept of Logos derives from the opening of the Gospel of John, which is often simply translated into English as: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Logos has an analog in physics, and that would be information. Many physicist see the universe and life, is at heart information, and is therefore reason, rational, Logos. The universe can be conceived of as a conscious self-referential I AM made from, and by, abstract Logos. You are living proof that this can be, when you realize I Am. No one can ever deny or take away the eternal miracle of being, something from nothing... material.