The Bewilderness

There will only be one Singularity

In the current landscape of slow growth, declining living standards and the blame game, few will raise their eyes above the contemporary to contemplate life in five or ten years. For one faction of the transhumanist community, the events during this timescale will bring forth evidence of how close the technological Singularity will be. The evidence will also enhance our understanding of its potential underpinnings.

Rick Searle sets out an interesting scenario in his discussion of the Singularity: that the event could be triggered more than once by a multiplicity of technologies. The path of the event will be determined by the successful research program. Where Searle departs from the overwhelming concept of the Singularity is his reduction of event by country and culture. This subordination of the event to human seedcorn is a critical attempt to grapple with the ideology of its proponents, not the prophecy itself.

Any event will be structured by its context. Yet, arguments of different Singularities in different countries does not work. Part of the beauty of the Singularity is its overwhelming, universal threshold: beyond which we cannot see, in the original Vingean. That is probably why I am unsure as to the reasoning for AGI as the basis: my preference is the increasing pace of change based upon the effective use of information.

Life will get faster!

I speak therefore I think

I have just finished Julian Jaynes, 'The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind'. It is a tour de force, though not a convincing or rounded theory. Jaynes is important for the idea, not the work: that consciousness, defined as a culturally evolved introspective 'I',as distinct from cognition, developed in response to environmental catastrophe and the creation of writing. One of my first thoughts on this hypothesis is the lack of contemporary evidence: surely we should have seen evidence of this lack of introspection amongst preliterate societies such as the Australian aborigines or Khoi san. There is no evidence that they are not conscious in the sense that we conceive,

Jaynes was an influential force in fostering thought on how culture, language and neurology all reinforce each other. We cannot define how we think without the assumptions embedded in our language and culture: without language and concept, there is no thought.

In recent years, Jaynes  has acquired a greater stature. The research programme that he promoted, using scanning technology, has provided evidence for some of his assertions. This does not prove his point but confirms that he was an acute observer and speculative thinker.

His legacy is one of flexibility in thinking about consciousness: an important breakthrough when examining how this could be implemented on other substrates. Whatever