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On the Path to God, 2001: A Space Odyssey

I'm reading a 1968 Stanley Kubrick interview right now. I completely agree with him regarding the path of development of civilizations towards superintelligence. And I think that the superintelligence is already near us, because it does not have protein bodies and it does not need to fly a starship for thousands of years to visit another star system.

Here is an excerpt from an interview with Stanley Kubrick:

"I will say that the God concept is at the heart of “2001” but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. If you accept that, it’s reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Now, the sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans."

A great film, one of the best science fiction films in the world according to international film critics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR_e9y-bka0

And more thoughts on this topic from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

1932
"Having entered a high-level radiant form, humanity becomes immortal in time and infinite in space.
I believe that at present, such a 'radiant humanity' cannot be understood by anyone. It seems absurd, preposterous... However, amazing premonitions have never deceived a thinking person."

In the distant future, humanity, having undergone many stages of evolution and cosmic expansion, will transition from a biological form to a higher form—radiant—that is, a form of pure energy (radiant energy), immortal and filling cosmic space. This will be a single collective consciousness or "idea," existing as highly organized energy, without the need for gross matter.

Such ancient civilizations, long since abandoned protein and artificial bodies, retaining only the form of energy, are like gods. But they are still not the supreme God, the creator of our entire Universe. Perhaps the Creator encompasses everything and everyone, knowing absolutely everything.

Replies (8)

It is interesting to think of our ultimate past and future. Where did we come from and where are we headed.

I have my thoughts, which are held based on my current understanding and which I will change as new info comes in. I am always open to new ideas, even if, or especially if, they differ from mine. That's how I learn, and not simply confirm my existing biases.

The Past

I think the universe has always been here, and no god created it. If one posits a creator god, where did this entity come from? If it was always there, then the universe could also have always been there.

I think the stuff in the universe acts upon itself according to patterns that we have come to discover and name things like physics and chemistry. Eventually physics and chemistry resulted in things that could self-replicate and then biology was born. Self-replicating biology is not exact replication so there is variety. Some of that variety does better in the environment it is in and becomes dominant in the competition for resources.

The biological entities develop information processing because those that do are better able to thrive in their environment. The information processing system becomes able to collect information about the fact that it is processing information and so becomes self aware, and so we have consciousness.

We also become aware of the fact that there are other information processing beings out there, some who want to cooperate with us and some who want to eat us. The part of our brain that detects these other information processing agents becomes hyper vigilant over time because those that hear a rustling in the grass and do not notice become lunch for the lion. We're left with creatures that have a lot of false positives because we're quick to attribute agency where it may not be, but at least we avoid the true negatives and we live.

As these beings communicate, they realize they have similar things to talk about, and stories to answer questions arise. We think agents are behind everything - wind, lightning, thunder, heavenly objects, floods, etc. These supernatural agents are worshiped to appease them so their abilities don't harm us. Finally a few thousand years ago, some people think it is just one Agent, not multiple ones. And we have God.

The Future

I do see us changing into something we probably can't quite imagine now.

In the short term we'll still have individual people but they will be enhanced even further by tech. Maybe even becoming cyborg or fully robotic.

I think robots will be able to grow and change and repair themselves and self-replicate. I think this happens by having the robots made of tiny cube shaped robots. These cube bots can have computing ability as well as the ability to move. Each cute bot has the plan for the entire robot in its memory as well as its position in the robot, so it knows which of its 6 faces needs to be attached to its neighbor and which don't, in order for structural integrity and weight bearing.

There can be pathways in the robot that allows for the passage of the cube bots. If a cube bot fails, it marks itself as failed and moves to the passage for elimination. New unattached cube bots are also in the passage and the closest one will head to where the failed cube bot was, to replace it. Hence self-repair.

Any of the cube bots can be tasked with making a new copy of the robot. It might make its way to an internal or external pool of unattached cube bots and grow into an exact copy of the robot by attaching new cube bots to the growing structure, telling each new cube bot the plan and its position in the plan so it knows which of its 6 faces need to bind with another cube bot. Hence self-reproduction.

Growth and change of robot structure is simply broadcasting the new body plan to all the cube bots who then seek free cute bots to bind with according to the new plan.

This can all be done in the near future because it is becoming easier and easier to create smaller and smaller computers and actuators that will make up the cube bots. At first we'll have robots looking like Roblox, all jaggedy, just like early computer displays we jagged, and for the same reason - pixel (or voxel in the case of 3D cube bots) size starts off large and then keeps shrinking. Regarding pixels, no one these days even realizes the screens they look at are just a matrix of very tiny individual elements. Once we can make cube bots sufficiently small, the robots they form will look smooth.

Back to the idea of doing this in the near future - the fact that the cube bots are all identical will facilitate this. Mass production of just one thing is faster than making lots of individual things. The cube bots are all identical but their function will differ depending on what the plan calls for, for each cube bot to be.

I don't see people or anything becoming energy without matter. I'm not sure what that even means. I think energy depends on there being matter. I think energy without matter to contain it and do things for it will just expand and dissipate.

But who knows! We'll have to wait and see!

Thanks for the great article which got me thinking of the things I wrote about here.

Have a great week ahead!

!ALIVE !BBH !UNI !PIZZA !LADY

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