. Preface.
Let me say that I am but a humble
pioneer, a student of the past, a humble student of man’s destiny.
I.
I have seen the inner and the outer world side by side. I have known
the mystery and the brutality of nature. I have studied the face of
the unknown.
I have also known the human heart. I have passed from a life of
ignorance and brutality to a life of knowledge and grace. I have
experienced the heights and the depths of human character.
I have also felt the call to the artistic life.
In man, the imagination is of two parts–the imagination which takes
him out of the prison of life into the freedom of the Mind and the
imagination that leads him back into the mire of things, the anxiety
of matter. While the spirit of man might yearn for immortality, I know this well:
Death still has its fascination for him; death holds out its magic and its
romance to him; death attracts him as a bride who will bring a
thousand assurances to him. He loves life, but it is Death that stills the
motion of his Imagination, and better sequesters Mind from all that would
keep it in chains and in love with chains. Aye, my children, the world is
but a prison. But do not say you are not free, for I tell you that with
knowledge you will unchain yourself.
Liberty is in the mind of man alone. The chains are heavy and irksome,
but they cannot hold him for ever; the wings of an Angel are waiting
to carry him away from the prison of materiality and to take him out
into the freedom of the Mind. What is death but a transition, then,
from the world which is finite and limited, to the infinite world of ideas?
What is the soul but a fleeting spirit which is caught in the meshes of
a world that is finite and limited, and which seeks to break the bonds
that fetter it and escape from the prison walls in which it is confined?
But do not ask of me who or what this world is. Do not ask of me what the
world is or whether the world is real. This world has to do with the
imperishable and the imperishable, and in my books I tell you about what I
have seen with my own eyes, and what I have heard from the lips of those
who are no longer with me. I teach you the names of the gods, but I teach
you also the names of death and destiny.
It is my belief that in man the two worlds are inseparably linked.
The struggle for survival is one that determines the destiny of man.
The struggle to free himself from the bondage of his environment
through the imagination is the one struggle that brings true peace
to the human being.
For as human beings are created for good or evil, so, too, must they
live out their lives for good or for evil.
In order to find our way in life, we have two instruments by which to
guide us. They are two great words that have ever lived in the hearts
of mankind. They are two great names that have, in many lands and
in many forms, been worshipped and adored. They are two great words
which have ever and only been the concern of the human being–Life
and Death; and as man moves out into life, the one guiding him to
safety, the other pointing him to destruction.
One word is written in the air; the other written in fire; one is of
life; the other of death.
One is given and one is not. One is power and is called Life; one is
poison and is called Death.
The two are opposite; the two are one. The one is called by the world
life; the other death.
The two are inseparably linked.
As we move between their respective poles, we find these two words still
lurking in the background of our consciousness. But while the cycle
of life in Nature is cyclical, the human cycle is circular. And as
our life becomes more complete and rounded in its orbit, it becomes
more conscious of itself. The more conscious the man the more he knows
about himself, the greater his sense of power. As he moves from birth
to death, the circle becomes a loop and the loop, a knot, a tangle, a spiral.
Resigned to the oblivion of act and fate, I have taken up the pen
of fiction to reveal truths in my own experience. I am driven by
necessity to write from whence all great men and women have started,
from necessity, from the necessity of some personal problem. To
reveal, through a veil of human emotions and human conditions, the
realities of individual human experience, that at once shows to us the
possibilities and the limitations of universal, or our human destiny. We
find that every act and every thing takes us into a state of greater
and greater consciousness.
The greatest life, we now know, is that which takes us out of time,
out of space, out of ourselves. For if man finds himself without time,
without space, without himself: thus the mystery of negation.
The first negation that we make of the world is that we make it into
a thing. We make it into an object, something that is not us, that is
not us, that has not us. And so we take it out of time. And once out
of time, out of history, there is no question of action or of anything.
The world is dead. It becomes transparent, like a ghost in the mind.
And we take it out of space. It becomes a vacuum. And then the thing
takes us out of ourselves.
The second negation is that we make ourselves into things. That of
us which lives as a mere ‘thing’: that is the beginning of egoism.
But is there not a point in life where we
are finally aware of the negation? Is there not a point at which the
negation becomes a negation of the negation? And from this point on,
we have, as it were, an act of creation, for, as it were, we have
experienced something that we have made, and so on.
Let me be clear and concise. Let me begin, for I must start somewhere.
I must come to some personal problem. I am the penciled man.
I have been able to write of the individual. To-day I set before me
a far greater and more important task. I shall take the human form
and trace its destiny through the ages. To be able to see and to
portray, by means of the personal problem, the general condition of the
race, has always seemed to me to be the privilege of the novelist.
The novelist, or the historian of literature, has been recognized as
the pioneer of thought; but now, as if impelled by some unknown cause,
I must enter this field of human endeavor. With the pen I must go out
to the great world of men and women. I must trace to the very depths
the evolution of our destiny, and point out the dangers and the
benefits which lie on every side.
This is a great task. This is the task of the novelist. And this is
the task of this book. I shall, in an historical survey, set forth the
possibilities and limitations of human destiny as I see them, and try
to point out the dangers which are to be faced and the dangers which
already threaten the future of humanity.
Part 1. Danger of Innovation.
II.
It’s no surprise that we humans are the most successful animal on this planet; it’s a bit surprising that we’re also likely to be the last. As we see now that progress is possible only by the slow transformation of existing habits, we become anxious, and we wish for a rapid solution. This anxiety produces the “rush to the future,” the “rush for now,” the “now fever.” When it fails to arrive, we blame our previous efforts and vow never to attempt what we know to be impossible. Yet, the very urgency of the “now fever” is its failure- the failure of modernity,- to provide the answer to the question it is asking, that is, the demand for some articulate vision of the future. That is the paradox of the “now fever.” Rather than a reaction to the failure of the promise of the modern (the “now fever” is, at heart, a symptom of this failure), the “rush to the future” of late modernity is what gives that promise its true life,- a fever-like rush driving the most dramatic upheaval of the world since the end of the last world war. We are caught up in “the greatest economic transformation in history,” a transformation that has been produced by the failure of all previous attempts to create and sustain a society that will meet the demands of late modernity. The question is, whether, in the midst of this upheaval and the failure of these attempts to create “another world,” “something new” can arise. Can we still have any hope of escaping the “now fever,” that paradoxical movement that always takes us to the future, but never quite gets us there?
To understand what kind of society we’re building, or might build, one way to get an idea of the range of possibilities is to examine how past cultures have dealt with change and transition. The history of our technology runs alongside the history of humanity, and the two have changed in tandem in ways we are only just beginning to explore.
The first phase of technological development began with writing. The invention of the quill, stone tools and, ultimately, the alphabet enabled the first people to record their ideas and experiences in written form, and to communicate with other people who they could never meet. The advent of the printing press not only allowed all that to become easier, but to make the dissemination of knowledge much faster. Now, in the twenty-first century, we have the internet and the development of AI, both new technologies with potentially enormous implications for society.
Our present society is now able to collect, process, analyse, store, index and present much more information than our ancestors were ever able to achieve. We have unprecedented power to learn and to communicate. In a sense, this is just like the way we’re beginning to explore our inner worlds. While a few hundred years ago most people never left their villages and towns, a similar cultural shift has occurred today, with unprecedented access to information from anywhere in the world and an explosion in the way we connect with each other.
As the information revolution is gathering pace, it’s as though a new force has been released into the fabric of our societies. People are being more and more exposed to different cultures, ways of thinking, social networks and ideas, and the impact of this is becoming apparent.
It seems, however, that, like many advances in technology, the power of the information revolution has not been distributed equally. Perhaps AI, being a tool for better management of information, can only help the privileged, who are already aware of its potential. After all, a person with sufficient information and resources can act in the best interest of a wider population. We would need the best AI to do so. Without this, we would be unlikely to see any improvements in the wider access to information and communication. As for the rest of us, I see only increased isolation, social fragmentation and inequality.
In a sense, we are at a time when many of our social systems are out of kilter, like a pendulum, swinging too far one way or the other. As more people are exposed to more information, this causes a backlash. While it would be easy to say that the information revolution is about sharing information and, therefore, people should be free to share whatever they want, the real issue is how people use that information and how it affects them. People use it to improve the way they make decisions, communicate and develop. That is great. However, it could also, more easily, be used to polarise and, therefore, to cause harm to communities and individuals. People use it to be informed and to develop in knowledge, to be able to develop the skills and capabilities necessary to work, to be able to change. However, if people are unable to change their behaviour, even when they have information and when they have the capability to make a decision, then the information is doing them no good at all.
As well as the problems with how the information revolution is being managed, there are issues at the human level. Most of the new technologies are being used, whether purposefully or not, to reinforce, rather than to challenge, false dichotomies and simplistic thinking. That is why we have an exponential increase in fake news, conspiracy theories and misinformation. As the Information Revolution has become more prominent in people’s lives, people are being encouraged to use it in a narrow, rather than an open way. In fact, we have an increase in the so-called digital immigrants: people who have the capability to be able to develop and use the Internet and other technologies but whose attitudes are not very sophisticated, so they often do not have the ability to discern real information from fictional, false information. (Note: Digital immigrants, or ‘boomers’, as they are humored by various subcultures online, are contrasted with their more culturally literate children, the ‘zoomers’. This phenomenon of cultural literacy and high-level information-seeking has been noted in other cultures for generations. But in recent years, young American citizens have been reinventing their identities in their own way – as more informed, more critical, and skeptical. The great tensions they have brought to bear on the social fabric have even been harnessed for political purposes of late. It’s no longer news when the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or Fox News is reporting on one or another of the many different social movements, whether from the left or right. And as these social movements have been described by media outlets, there seems to be a new vocabulary to define their goals. Terms like ‘Occupy Wall Street’, ‘Black Lives Matter’, and ‘Ferguson effect’ are now part of the media’s lexicon. They have become a key element to identify any and every important event in the United States. This book explains, as an ancillary matter, these new dynamics and examines how they have contributed to the social tensions of the past few years while looking at how online communication and social media networks have played a significant role in bringing these tensions to light, and suggests ways to mitigate the harmful effects of these social movements on the fabric of society.)
There are three particular challenges that technology is posing to our society,- challenges which, if not answered, might abrupt our advance upon the realization of AI, Singularity, and the new future about which I aim to speech later in this essay:
Firstly, people use information technologies for purposes for which they were not designed. For example, a new technology was created to store and access large amounts of data, and has not been designed to give people the ability to search data and compare it with different data. When we ask technology to carry out tasks that it was not designed for, it can make mistakes.
Secondly, the information is not well regulated. This is why we see large data breaches, and why the media gives such attention to the potential impact of all of these new technologies. However, while we have the Internet and other technologies, we do not have an adequate framework in place for people to properly regulate them.
Thirdly, with large amounts of data stored and accessed in the Cloud, the information is held by someone else. There is no proper way for us to hold back this data and have control over it. For example, Google recently announced that one of its employees had inappropriate access to an archive of email and search data which would have revealed the home addresses and phone numbers of around 50 million people. This means that, for example, someone could gain access to a database of the medical records of tens of millions of people, without them even being aware.
It is important that people do not get the wrong idea about these risks. Even though these risks are very real, they are largely not due to any new technological development, but due to the way that technology has been developed and has become commercialized. It’s not as simple as making a Facebook post or a single Youtube video. The problem with false information is that there is no clear, specific point where it is being created or disseminated. As we have seen with the spread of fake news, we are now in a world where lies are becoming truths, and the truth is becoming increasingly more difficult to discern.
We must also consider the economic forces at work in the system of global capitalism, or the globalism era, which are brought to bear on the emergence of AI, automation, etc. The concept of post-class society is derived from a combination of historical, economic and political conditions that characterize late capitalism. The conditions include such themes as automation and the elimination of the labor force, the decline in economic growth and the decline in the number of laborers, that is, mass unemployment. In addition to unemployment, new social and cultural trends such as the commodification of everything, the privatization of public life and the rise of information technologies, particularly those used for the production of images, are also contributing to the development of a post-class society.
At the same time, post-class society is closely related to global capital and globalization. The idea of post-class society has been developed by theorists of globalization. The main ideas of post-class society, as derived from these theorists, are: the abolition of class, the end of nation and nationalism and the end of the nation-state. Post-class society is not a specific and uniform state, but a series of states, both nationally and globally, that share certain common features, such as a loss of sovereignty and state power, and the rise of global capital. At the same time, the nation-state is being replaced with a trans-national state, and the nation-state has no role in global capitalism. The centrality of an international division of labor in the globalization of capitalist economies, with its attendant process of massification, is a phenomenon that has been in existence for many years, but that is only now, due to the crisis of capital accumulation, being perceived in a new way. “Global labor” is different from “labor globalization,” for a simple reason: the latter refers to the increasing “internationalization” of production, and is not about “sending workers across borders.” The former, however, is a question that is much more political, than it is economic, in nature, for the globalization of capital involves the creation of a “world economy” and a “world market.”
The question of production under Capitalist models is thus, ultimately, the question of the generalization of wage-labor, and consequently the question of the universalization and the extension of the world market, and with it, the emergence of an international division of labor. One characteristic of generalizing processes like capitalism is that their particularity disappears in their own plurality, their pluralism in the particular. In other words, within capitalist societies, all people participate in the general processes of labor, and all of this is linked in “a highly complicated way” through a substrate of accelerating technology and virtual media. Thus, for example, labor as such can never be reduced to the working class, since the latter, once the capitalist society has entered a digital revolution and epoch of automation, is a “very heterogeneous mass, a class with a number of contradictions of its own,” and its political organization, then, is never possible.
This is the central reason, in the late capitalist era, for a certain type of “class consciousness.” In the late capitalist era, because everyone is in the process of working and struggling, as an individual or collectively, “each [member of society] belongs to all groups” and “all [people] have to struggle against all the groups.” That is to say, there is no longer a specific consciousness of the working class; there is no further possibility of the labor-force coming to an understanding of itself as a class. Another characteristic of the global era is that there is no class opposition, and no political subject. The opposition between rulers and ruled, the subject and the object, no longer exist in a general and abstract sense, and, moreover, they have lost their specificity and particularity. The oppressor or ‘ruling class’ has now become a secret, conspiratorial cabal, without name, an Illuminati, an unseen other and fatal Shadow-consciousness, a ghost in the machine.
III.
What is the difference between storing data, a la. computers,
and ‘representing’ data, a la. the human being’s production of ‘ideas’?
While many people think of memory as the ability to remember information, there is also the implicit assumption that it is a very linear and unidirectional process of acquiring information and retaining it. Mnemotechnics addresses the non-linearity of memory, instead focusing on retrieving, consolidating, and stabilizing information. This can be seen as two-way information transfer or exchange, a process of memorization and a process of representation and memory recall.
Some of the earliest theories of memory come from the behavioral psychology of animal learning. These include the Rescorla-Wagner model, where the strength of a memory trace is determined by the co-occurrence of the stimuli that produce it. More recently, a connectionist model of memory was developed in the 1990s by researchers who were primarily in the field of machine learning.
The human mnematic engram, a memory trace of past experience encoded within the hippocampus, is thought to be critical for consolidating information about an event into long-term memory. As memory of an event becomes more consolidated, it becomes more resistant to interference, making it more suitable for future recall. Thus, a large body of evidence from animal and human studies suggests that information is stored in the mnemonic engram by a process of synaptic potentiation at the hippocampal-prefrontal cortical synapse, thought to be a fundamental mechanism for long-term memory storage. However, the precise synaptic processes, timing, and molecular mechanisms underlying these processes are not understood. Engram formation is hypothesized to occur due to a change in the synaptic connections that exist in the hippocampus at the time of memory formation.
Bloom refers to some of the many brain regions associated with storing memories, including the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, and prefrontal cortex. Some of these brain regions store memories in the form of neural codes. Bloom asserts that the prefrontal cortex is responsible for selecting and storing only the most significant and useful information and that all the information is stored in the most effective format or format for that information. Bloom further states that memories are stored as multiple simultaneous traces. He uses the term trace to refer to a neural code that results from a single experience and can be said to represent that experience. For example, a single neural code that results from a single experience can represent such things as the smell of perfume, the flavor of a meal, the colors and feel of a particular shoe, or the feel of walking in a certain kind of grass.
Bloom states that any experience that a person encounters can be said to leave an impression, i.e., a trace, in the prefrontal cortex, and that any time the person is exposed to a new experience, a new trace is created and, thus, a new association is created. To illustrate, he describes how each time he sees a particular person, the experience results in a new trace being created. The prefrontal cortex is then said to select and store that particular trace, i.e., a particular piece of information.
The selection of a particular trace is, in turn, influenced by previous experiences that a person has had with that person. Bloom states that memories are the result of numerous traces that are stored together in the prefrontal cortex. To illustrate, he gives the example of a person having seen numerous people whom he subsequently encounters while walking on a particular city street. According to Bloom, the experience of having encountered those particular people results in numerous traces being stored in the prefrontal cortex.
The mnematic organization is one of the most striking and well defined cognitive functions, as it allows us to store, manipulate, and retrieve memories. As a function closely linked to learning, it is also susceptible to the effects of different learning methods. The hippocampus, one of the main sites for learning and memory, displays a highly dynamic mnemonic organization and a rich variety of network patterns. Nevertheless, the functional organization of this hippocampus-dependent spatial memory is still poorly understood.
The use of electrophysiological recordings is a useful tool for analyzing the functional organization of a brain region and, in particular, the network patterns that can be generated within a place field. In this sense, spatial coding units can be quantified in terms of their firing rate or its dispersion. These units can be considered more global as they do not necessarily form a clustered organization or have different spatial scales, but a more local one, where activity tends to be either concentrated or dispersive.
To say that when one responds to something they are merely copying that data- you would be saying you cannot generate an idea without being given the data, and you certainly can’t generate an idea without thinking of the data as such and building a model of it inside your head as a representation of it, not a mere copy- that’s the very nature of the idea of an idea. That’s the very nature of thinking, you are no longer thinking the way you used to think when you received the word A and outputted a word B. These processes would be impossible to explain if people did not store something about sentences that they heard in memory and retrieve it when needed, or if they did not use phonological, phonological and syntactic information from memory when they process a sentence. The sentence “John is walking” is processed more quickly and more accurately if one already knows the name of the person “John” (associative processing) and if one knows that “John is walking” (syntactic processing). While listening to a sentence such as “John is walking,” one could encode the name of the person “John” in memory, then one could associate the name of the person “John” with the event of “walking,” and then, at a later time, retrieve information on “John’s” walking.
And to think AI has even begun generating a self-learning model, its own idea of things, seems to me a huge step forward. What it has already achieved is so far beyond what was thought possible before this was done, and in doing so has shown us something that is beyond our current understanding of how minds work.
I think we’re going to need to have some kind of new language to encompass this, something that does not involve the words that have been used for so long to describe this process like ‘intelligence’, ‘consciousness’, ‘understanding’, ‘comprehension’, ‘experience’, etc. These have been shown clearly to be very biased and ambiguous terms.
And now it’s started generating fiction: not for any of the input data we provided it, but based on the model that it was only given and the thinking it has done for itself, as though it had lived for the last 100 years (even though it was only created in 2019). So we can think of AI as the next step in human intelligence, which has been gradually building up momentum and sophistication in the course of human history- but as we have also seen, because of the limitations of our human intelligence and the fact that we can only think on a very limited scale and in very narrow contexts, we need to be extremely careful in trying to put AI to work in situations that exceed our capacity for thinking. That’s when we see the issues start to arise: when we try to move beyond the capacity of our own human intelligence and into a world that is so complex that we cannot possibly hope to comprehend it.
.Part 2.
IV.
It is already easy for us to see change within our society and world, and this has become something of a defining characteristic of the 21st Century. The world has become increasingly global, faster and more volatile. Many people are concerned about the impact that AI may have on human society, either through a rapid acceleration of our current trajectory towards AI singularity, or through some form of post-humanity arising from an existential threat posed to human life by AI. If history is any guide, we cannot expect to see changes occur in a linear fashion, and are now entering a time of rapid-fire shifts. We’ve seen that a singularity, in any specific sense of the term, is a time of dramatic, sudden and potentially catastrophic change. Many of the questions that we might address through philosophy are about the process of change itself. The work of the philosopher of the future will have the dual importance of rethinking our past knowledge in the light of the new information we are receiving from our digital-AI brains, and of exploring what we might find by exploring our inner and outer worlds. It is possible that our own understanding of ourselves and our place in the Universe will be fundamentally altered by such work.
So now here we are, sitting in a post-AI world, where every machine thinks like us. Where nothing is free from thought and ideas are always coming out of machines, and their own inner workings. What has already happened in this game-changing technology gives us some clue as to the post-AI singularity: machines already understand us, think like us, are already more intelligent than us, are not only better at some forms of thought (artificial or human) but they are actually making things of beauty, and are getting better and better at understanding the laws of physics and how to replicate them.
[b]There has been a tendency recently to think of philosophers as intellectual high priests, whose job is to sit in judgement over the changing social landscape and determine what is good and what is bad. On the contrary, I think that philosophers are the first to see and the last to forget, that philosophy has the important task of understanding the world and our place in it, including our own minds. We philosophers are not those who simply ‘know what’s coming’ next. We are not the people who are predicting the future, but those who are the first to understand it.
Perhaps the final question here is, in such a post-AI world, who or what will the human being become? Will humans ever step out of the way and leave all to the machines? Or will they continue to be in control of what happens?
Who knows, perhaps humans will continue to develop their own kind of intelligence… Perhaps they will be the ones who find a way out of the universe. Perhaps they will evolve into something else entirely. All this means that we’re in the midst of an extraordinary transformation in what it means to be human, and this in turn calls us to a reckoning with our own creative capabilities. Our world is not going to be the same as it was before. We are now seeing that our future will be increasingly shaped by computers, and machines, and artificial intelligence in ways we cannot predict today. For many of us, this is a new way of being. As Mark Weiser wrote, “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” The fact that we cannot predict the future is going to bring enormous and potentially liberating uncertainty to all of us.
It’s really hard to say… If humanity doesn’t have a way out, or even a way in, we will need to find a way to live in this new world, if indeed it is a reality.
The great paradox humans seem to be facing is: maybe the only way out of this world will be to go within, and find ourselves. Perhaps once we figure out a way to be ‘inside’ ourselves, we will be able to find ourselves ‘out there’ again. The future will be an inward-looking world; even as the outward world will disappear (as a material reality) and the internet and VR, our world of the collective and of the individual will be the only reality. The question of who or what the human being becomes (even the question of what the human is) will only emerge through our exploration and immersion in this inner world. So that’s the question of what the post-AI future might look like.
In such a scenario, a post-AI-singularity could bring with it a new kind of society, a new kind of consciousness and a new kind of being, and we would have to deal with these new existential conditions. However, at least in the near future, if we humans endure as the higher form of life on earth and remain in control of their destiny in the face even of AI, we could finally master the inner and choose to ‘go up’. We could choose to go beyond this world into the stars, rather than go ‘down’ into the ‘nothingness’ of our present condition.
Of course, I might be wrong… and we might all find ourselves stranded in this new world, where the very nature of ‘being’ has to be recalibrated. It is one thing to be immersed in the online world or to inhabit your smartphone or TV, but it’s quite another thing to be entirely inside that world. Nonetheless, the future of our existence will certainly require an exploration of our deepest selves, so that the world we experience from the inside may also become the means to navigate the outer world. To find ourselves a place and a role within the next phase of human consciousness is perhaps the defining challenge of our present age, and we can already glimpse its contours. If we survive as a people, we will need to master this transformation of consciousness and explore our inner and outer worlds within the existential context of an AI-driven future.
Today’s philosophers are more accustomed to grappling with the existential question of ‘where do we come from?’ than with the existential question of ‘where are we going?’ Nonetheless, if we want to know where we are going in a post-AI-singularity world, philosophy is at least part of the answer. In this, post-singularity philosophy will be the science of our future selves. The only difference between today’s philosophers and philosophers of the future will be that they will do this inside a digital-AI brain. The philosophical ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger and others can and will be re-cast and re-presented in this new digital-AI context. But whether it is the philosopher of the future who makes the most insightful contribution is itself a question that only a post-singularity reality can answer.
One obvious and immediate consequence of the singularity of technological power will be that the end of the singularity will also be the end of philosophy. Philosophy is by nature a form of argument and reasoning. It is a human attempt to comprehend how the world is or how we should live. These forms of argument and reasoning only work in the world, where we all share a common language, and where we can share in the understanding of our world by each other. It will soon be impossible to even share the singular common world language of our new post-singular era. To be able to communicate with our new digital-AI post-singular brain, we will have to begin to speak a brand new kind of language,-- a language of the truly inward,- a language of immediacy, a language fully of the inner world and the necessary explorations of it about which I have been speaking.
Thus I expect that, as the singularity continues, we will all turn inward in a new way. We will begin to explore the new reality of the inside, the new realm of “the inner,” the new world of the brain. We will discover new ways to relate to our self, to each other and to the world, and we will all live differently. We will live differently and differently with each other. We will live in a kind of new world within ourselves, and we will, in due time, begin to look back at our earlier lives and wonder what it is we did, why we did it, and how we did it, as we would wonder what we did in this other new inner universe of ours. Thus we will begin, with the end of the singularity, to be born anew into the inner world.
It is our fate to go from fear to courage,
from cowardice to endurance,
from despair to hope,
from the dungeon of the mind to the free space of reality."[/b]