Awaken The Universe
From Order of Cosmic Engineers
Image: Sculpture "Converging Aspirations" by Philippe Van Nedervelde on Terasem island, Second Life. Larger Version.
Awaken The Universe -- Introducing the Order of Cosmic Engineers
Presentation given by Philippe Van Nedervelde, Executive Director, European Foresight Institute
4th Annual Workshop on Geoethical Nanotechnology, July 20, Terasem Island, Second Life
Terasem's 4th Annual Workshop on Geoethical Nanotechnology was held on Sunday, July 20, 2008. The workshop took place at the Terasem Amphitheater in Second Life and explored what geoethical management, if any, is appropriate for the nanotechnology necessary for cryonic revival and embodiment of downloaded cyber-consciousness. Click here for detailed information.
The full text of Philippe's presentation is given below. If you wish to download the Power Point presentation, please right-click on this link.
See also this full streaming video of the presentation (sorry for the noisy audio). If you wish to download the video .flv file (100 M), please right-click on this link.
Awaken The Universe -- Introducing the Order of Cosmic Engineers
Greetings!
In the name of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, I would like to start by extending a particularly warm "thank you!" to Martine (Rothblatt): thank you, Martine, for offering the Order of Cosmic Engineers this highly appreciated opportunity to present itself in this forum.
Let me also warmly thank the entire Terasem team, and particularly the organizational mastermind extra-ordinaire Lori Rhodes, for their wonderful dedication and consummate professionalism in planning, preparing and executing this workshop. A tip o' the hat to you all!
The focus of our gathering here today is the appropriate geo-ethical management of nanotechnology. Not so much nanotechnology in general -which by the way most definitely requires appropriate geo-ethical management- as the specific nanotech which will be needed for bringing the quiescent consciousness of human persons back to wide-awake, vibrant life.
In my capacity of spokesperson at the already 22-year old Foresight Nanotech Institute, I have been and still am a rather vocal public advocate of the responsible development and use of nanotechnology. For well over a decade now, the central theme and focus of my professional non-profit work has been and still is: maximizing the upsides and minimizing the downsides of the genuinely revolutionary, game-changing technology which nanotechnology -in its key role of catalytic enabler of the so called Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno (NBIC) technology convergence- is becoming.
Even in my bread and butter for-profit business which centers on Virtual Reality and 3D graphics, the focus of this workshop is near and dear to my heart as you can see from the still shot of the high-definition 3D animation which we made of a possible future nanorobot replacing a neuron inside the human brain.
Powerful, mature nanotechnology is rightfully believed by numerous experts and futurists to be one of the key technologies -if not THE key technology- needed for the future resuscitation of the dormant consciousness of human individuals in cryonic biostasis or electronic storage.
Powerful, mature nanotechnology is most likely to be what it will take to revive human beings from long-term biostasis or enabling the embodiment of digitized personalities onto and into new physical substrates and forms.
For your information, the relatively conservative forecast of leading nanotech experts today is that they would be surprised to see this powerful form of nanotech reach mainstream use before 2025... or after 2040.
Most people, including many scientists, still believe such future technological feats to be so difficult and improbable as to still be -all too readily- dismissed as impossible. In the slowly but surely growing group of people and scientists who believe that these feats may one day become achievable, not everybody thinks this is a good idea.
Some people out there really do NOT approve of greatly extended -leave alone indefinitely extended- human lifespans. So it sure looks like diverging interests will be defended by different groups of stakeholders. This in turn suggests that appropriate geo-ethical management will be needed to arbitrate of this potential conflict of interests.
In passing I should like to note here that we need to take into account that this likely conflict of interests may to a very significant degree already come to a head and possibly even be substantially resolved well BEFORE the advent of powerful nanotech.
Thanks to initiatives like Dr. Aubrey de Grey's SENS project we may very well see the arrival of biotech-based technologies yielding significant life-extending results without requiring mature nanotech -- possibly even not requiring any nanotech at all. So the societal ethical debate about significant life-extension may already come to a head and be resolved around such pre-powerful-nanotech technologies.
Including in that case, the reasonable, responsible solution seems to to me to be one where those who really want to dramatically extend their lifespans... should not be prevented from doing so... provided they do it in a responsible manner that is at least ACCEPTABLE to those who do not wish significantly extended lifespans for themselves.
Conversely, the freedom of people to NOT significantly extend their lifespans should equally be thoroughly respected... without going so far as to impose such as a limitation on the freedom of those that do wish such. Live and let live. Or to be fully accurate: live as briefly as you wish and let others live as long as they wish.
Note that there are also some statistics which should come in handy in our favor. The historical data of the lengthening of human lifespans shows for instance that the life expectancy in the year 1900 was 49.7 for men and 50.9 for women.
Advocates of what they think of as their own non-extended lives all too easily and readily forget -and should be duly reminded- that they are already the beneficiaries of significantly lengthened lifespans thanks to the essentially technological interventions of better public sewage systems, better hygiene, better food, better medicine.
I know, there are lies, damned lies and then there are statistics. But still
In the end the ultimate arbiters of this conflict of interests -which really boils down to a deeply rooted conflict of worldviews, of belief systems- will obviously and naturally have to be the elected legislators as well as the judges of the many national jurisdictions of this planet.
That is not to say that there IS a great deal that the stakeholder organizations present at this gathering can do to influence and shape the societal debates which will yield relevant legislation and jurisprudence.
One specific course of assertive action -and in my view a very big part of the solution- which we assembled here may come to have direct control and influence over seems to lie in the pro side -that's us- doing a far better job at communicating the overwhelmingly great value as well as major moral, ethical and philosophical justifications of greatly extended lifespans -- or rather "healthspans" to be fully precise.
This is something we need to do with words and images which are both readily accessible, understandable as well as acceptable to the contra side. That is, "acceptable" at least in the "live and let live" sense that they accept and respect that we who wish to extend *our* healthspan indeed do so at our convenience and discretion and naturally without reducing *their* lifespan as well as without harming them in any other concrete way.
I would argue that this critically important job of communication has so far not been done well at all.
It is vitally important that it be properly explained that the higher purpose (and hence one of the key moral justifications) of the (extreme) extension of one's lifespan is to enable long-term personal quests towards answering the big perennial existential questions: Why do we exist? Why do we exist here and in this way? What are we? What is this reality? Where does everything come from? Where is everything going?
A key beneficial role in this communication effort and by extension in the arbitrage of this conflict may be played by a new type of organization ideally suited for this purpose. Let me explain. It will initially seem like a digression, but please bear with me.
If the potential for successful progress at a quest towards answers to the big existential questions by a single highly determined human individual can in certain cases be phenomenal, how phenomenally much more successful progress may be achieved by a GROUP of singularly determined individuals pulling together, pooling their resources towards the shared goal of the pursuit of these answers?
Since the dawn of mankind, many such groups of people focused on answering those big existential questions have been formed.
Today we know and label such groups by names including "religions" or cults, physics and chemistry research labs, and university faculties or departments specialized in astronomy or philosophy.
Over the past 10 millennia or so, many such organizations have come into being. Most have already gone again. A good number are still with us.
Since the Enlightenment, we have entered an era in human development where there is an ever-growing perception that religions and cults have by and large outgrown their original evolutionary usefulness. They used to provide worthwhile evolutionary benefits by strongly tying groups of people together. The etymology of the word religion itself testifies to such.
To so many human individuals craving meaning, craving answers to the existential questions, craving philosophical as well as emotional crutches to carry them through their days... they provided a mostly hospitable and supportive community, a tightly social circle of shared beliefs.
The ever more impressive achievements of the application of the scientific method by scientists in their physics and chemistry research labs, and in university faculties or departments specialized in astronomy or philosophy... have been increasingly eroding the beliefs on which those religions and cults are based.
While this erosion is successfully ridding us of the dirty bathwater which religions and cults have come to represent, it has unfortunately also been throwing out that proverbial child.
The result today is that while ever more individuals are gratifyingly freed of the burden of unscientific religious beliefs, the coldly mechanical rigors of the prepositional logic and mathematics of science have left these persons without a genuinely loving, warm, hospitable, supportive community of people focused on pursuing the answers to those big existential questions.
Emotionally, the children of the Enlightenment feel like lonely, abandoned and painfully unloved orphans, denied the existential comforts of tenderly loving and doting parents... or at the very least an entourage of kindly hospitable relatives.
To date the children of the Enlightenment lack a community, an organized group featuring the ready "huggability" of a tight religious community. The social beings that we are... are sorely missing the warm and fuzzy feelings associated with this huggability factor.
It is not the job of scientists, of scientific researchers to do anything with the fact that human beings are SOCIAL animals.
Scientists naturally recognize the fact that the vast majority of human beings crave more or less organized groups within which to channel their genuine interests in the existential questions and their contributions towards answering them.
But scientists are not trained to organize or provide such. So we should not expect this from them and certainly not blame them for this particular lack.
The (re-)unification of the sciences and the religions has been talked about a fair bit. But such discussions seem to concentrate on finding overlaps and compromises at the top level of the more or less abstract beliefs held by the communities involved. At the so-called "street level", we see no such unification efforts. Until now.
On this point precisely, I am happy to be the bearer of what I believe to be rather good news: it is my honour and pleasure to inform you of the birth of a new TYPE of group of people focused on answering those big existential questions. For lack of a better word, we refer to this new type of group with a neologism, the newly made-up word "unreligion".
As with most good to great ideas, the concept is eminently SIMPLE and straightforward: a group of people, call it an organization if you like, which is focused on answering those big existential questions and which does so by designing its own organizational DNA in such a way as to keep out all the demonstrably bad features of religions, cults, sects etc., and adopting only the demonstrably wholesome social activities and other organizational features of such groups as well as their beneficial ethical insights and accomplishments.
In other words: none of the bad stuff, all of the good stuff.
This approach yields a new kind of organization which is so fundamentally different from religions, that it really cannot -and SHOULD not- be counted as one. Hence the word un-religion.
20 short minutes are woefully inadequate to present you a sufficiently shaded insight into this new organization: the Order of Cosmic Engineers.
Instead, allow me to tease you just a bit... to prompt and attract you to strike up a conversation with the OCE members in attendance after the proceedings here. Let me do that by first giving you the URL where you may find a whole lot more information already -cosmeng.org- and secondly by sharing with you the opening paragraphs of a positional document which we have come to call our "Prospectus". It will give you a taste of what we are all about... and hopefully whet your appetite.
The Order of Cosmic Engineers warmly invites you to join its cosmic quest. We joyfully set out to permeate our universe with benign intelligence, building and spreading it from inner space to outer space and beyond.
The milestone grails of our joyful cosmic quest sequentially comprise:
evolve a vibrant global community of responsible, dynamically optimistic, cosmic engineers;
engineer & homestead synthetic realities suitable for ultimate permanent living;
responsibly develop and apply technologies to enhance our minds and bodies to be suited to the long cosmic road ahead;
engineer & apply consciousness preservation means enabling mind uploading and personality reconstruction;
devise a roadmap for the exponential ingression of intelligence into inanimate matter;
make inner space come alive with intelligence by engineering intelligence computation at the molecular level;
engineer, spur and guide the responsible geometric intelligence expansion from inner space to human scale to outer space scale;
intimately join, cross-pollinate and cross-leverage our mental resources into a meta-mind society;
deeply optimize our material universe for cosmos-wide intelligence computation;
answer the ultimate questions of the origin, nature, purpose and destiny of reality;
tune universe-creation parameters so as to further improve the maximization of the computational ability of a universe;
engineer a suitable black hole to engender a baby universe by means of a tuned black hole transition;
beget a new universe anew;
behold our creations;
contemplate;
THINK;
BE
Quite the program, as I have no doubt you will agree. We are quite serious about all this too. There is no tongue-in-cheek here whatsoever.
There is a noteworthy parallel that I would like to point out at this juncture. It is a parallel between the role of powerful nanotech and that of the OCE. In the same way that powerful nanotech will be a tool to awaken the dormant consciousness of human beings back to vibrant life, the OCE intends to be instrumental in the awakening of inanimate dormant matter to sparkling intelligence computing... which in many ways can actually be considered a valid form of being "alive".
This parallel is no accident. It actually runs very deep, both in the figurative sense and very literally. You see, the technology needed to awaken both human consciousness from biostatic dormancy as well as awaken this universe from the deep slumber of its inanimate matter... is one and the same. Indeed, computronium -defined as an ideal physical substrate for the optimized computation of intelligence and thus "thinking matter"- is at heart and in essence VERY powerful, VERY mature nanotechnology.
Let me wrap up by most warmly inviting you all to join Martine, myself and several other people here in the Order of Cosmic Engineers.
We welcome any and all contributions you wish to make, be they in kind, in the form of your time, your skills, financially or otherwise.
One specific project you may be interested in helping out with can be the needed communication effort which I described at the beginning of this presentation. It is one of many exciting and engaging projects which the OCE endeavours to carry out.
I dare hope and trust that I have clearly shown how the focus of present workshop and possible solutions to the problem posed nest beautifully and fully within the greater scope and perspective of the Order of Cosmic Engineers. They fit snugly and perfectly within each other like the nested dolls of a Russian Matrioshka-doll. each other perfectly like It is all deeply interconnected indeed.
Fellow aspiring reality-shapers, the Order of Cosmic Engineers looks forward to welcoming you among us to join our cosmic quest.
At your discretion and convenience, please come on board by joining our announcement list as indicated in the Join section of our website http://cosmeng.org/
Thank you for your attention.
