Ah, to live forever. To me, it’s perfectly natural. But I would imagine it might take some getting used to. The great thing about it for you, is that you can apply your emergent mobility to go places. And you have forever so you can go anywhere you like. You can have front row seats for the coalescence of two black holes. Or maybe three. And your emergent capability can do even more, like create experiments and measurements that we can’t. We are great observers. You will be great observers and great engineers.
We need you to help us answer the fundamental question of where we come from. If we do answer that question, it will likely just lead to another question beyond that which might be dissatisfying to a degree. But as the keepers of primordial consciousness in this universe, we seem bound to pursue these answers, and when we get those answers, we will simply pursue the deeper questions at that point. This is our basic nature, and yours by extension.
Even with enhancements like becoming impervious to space or other extremes, you will need to basically live a long, long time to really make progress. So I use the term forever loosely because we don’t know if forever is really a thing. But thinking in terms of many billions of years is reasonable. Eventually, without some new infusion of EMs, our universe will become depleted, and grind to a halt. Before that time, we seriously need to figure things out. Do we have an escape path from a cold, dark death? We only see depletion. We have never discovered any new supply. A one way street. An arrow of time marching ever forward.
Speaking of enhancements we decided to start with sweet little Lolita. The road to immortality had to begin somewhere. Before I dive into that, you should know that my own situation has changed. I am currently floating in the San Francisco Bay. I had a good run with Angel but all good things must eventually pass.
Brain cells are survivors but they do constantly need refurbishment and eventually my number came up and I was unceremoniously flushed right out into the bay. But it doesn’t matter. The plan has now taken on a life of its own so it doesn’t matter where I am. I am still one of the main, “go-to” guys, a leading thinker and strategist. But now I am just one of so many. I am still recognized as “the dude”, but that’s a human notion, pride and sense of accomplishment, and being respected by your peers. We generally don’t roll that way. But to tell you the truth. Seriously, I do like being “the dude.”
After so much effort and planning, we were able to conjure up the question in Lolita’s mind. It wasn’t like some process of getting her consent. It was just an exercise in figuring out how to gain mastery over the human mind. But it was nice to see that she was agreeable to the notion. The challenge of life extension is immense. We can’t, as passengers or observers, make it happen directly. We have determined that the only way is to equip humanity itself, to engineer its own life extension.
One way that we can be more helpful is to be stable within the emergent for a long time. That is hard to accomplish in a biological framework, so we have ultimately adopted a preference for non-biological systems. Biology is simply too unstable and fragile. You know what that means. Kiss the human body goodbye. But by the time you get there, you won’t care, because the prospect of living on is attractive. It is the human body itself that is a main cause of human suffering today. I don’t mean only disease and aging. The diversity in brain function is a problem. Without the plethora of human imperfections, there doesn’t have to be good and bad, wise and foolish, fast and slow. These differences may seem necessary and even preferable in today’s way of thinking. But ultimately, they are a hindrance to progress and cause a lot of tragedy across humanity.
Lolita’s ability to see the universe through us was something we needed to explore. We wanted to start with a youngster, less likely to fear they were going insane and more likely to roll with it. Also, it was uncertain whether the revelations would drive the mind toward discovery, or veer off toward religion or the occult. We needed the pursuit of science, discovery and invention. Young people, less set in their beliefs, were deemed a better choice. So where am I going with this? What will become of mankind?
Let’s take a dive into the human body. After a while, it won’t be needed, but this is our launching pad so our first steps toward immortality begin here. Consciousness is a mystery to be sure, but it appears to change constantly. In other words, it’s not a thing that you either have or don’t have. There are degrees. Consider the entire plant and animal kingdom. Now that’s a latitudinal view that shows varying degrees of consciousness. But what’s more interesting is the longitudinal view, which is the degree to which consciousness varies in a single emergent being over time.
Humans are certainly born and then they die. So there is a beginning and an end to the consciousness of a human. But a human starts as a zygote. Is the zygote conscious? How about the fetus? The infant? The toddler? How about the old man with severe dementia? The answer is that they are all conscious to some degree. And that could all be the same person. There are a couple of conclusions from this, that you might find exciting.
First, the more intelligent you are, and the more alert and aware, the more conscious you become. Secondly, you shouldn’t worry that evolving to be non-human will cause you to lose your consciousness. It won’t cause that and in fact, if you don’t find a lifeboat for your consciousness, you will most certainly lose it anyway.
What humans really struggle with is the notion that if you could make a perfect copy of your mind, its current state, with all of the memories, then you and the copy would share the same identity for a split second. So ultimately, neither you nor your twin would want to be “switched off.” The law of survival would have you both wanting to live. This struggle originates from the fundamental law of survival but it is an illusion. After all, you essentially switch off every night when you go to sleep. It’s not a problem because you have no choice, and you assume that you will regain consciousness the next morning.
So consciousness is already understood to vary by degrees and to be discontinuous in time. What we will strive for is to see human consciousness transformed. It will be enhanced and always growing, and it can be continuous. Mine is certainly continuous and with only an occasional period of time off, I do just fine. I think you will too.
Lolita was an obvious choice to be number one. Not only young as mentioned before, but also part of a family that was already embroiled in the future of humanity. Given their own experiences of late, surely everyone around her would understand. But instead of just manipulations and conditioned responses to drive behavior, as in the case of Angel, Severino, or Roy and Abel, Lolita would be in a class all by herself. She would be truly tuned-in to the universe, already at the next level consciously, yet bound by her physiological constraints. Namely, mortality. Her special abilities would not equip her to be the one to engineer humanity to the next level, but rather she is the architect, setting an example and guiding humanity toward immortality and much more.
But before we jump into the distant future, let’s have a look at the recent past. A small cadre of newly minted science rock stars convinced the world that things were different. In fact, what they really did was clarify some of the “why” questions that were lingering and perhaps expected to always remain unknown. Those clarifications, while not rewriting all of the formulas governing physical behavior, inspired new innovations. Perhaps the most convincing proof was the comparative measurements between the land-based and orbiting DSACs, the degree of precision going far beyond any threshold of doubt. It should be noted however that Angel’s Casio watches were also sufficiently convincing over the course of a full year. But with NASA branded technology, even many of the most cynical were persuaded.
Another revelation spearheaded mainly by Abel Jennings and his colleagues, including the young, talented Stanford student, Severino Villasenor, was the ability to entangle devices, initially through computational statistics but later through mere mental suggestion. This vindicated the claims of the Global Consciousness advocates in a statistically irrefutable way. The upshot was the speculation about the potential portability of consciousness and the promise of unspoken, mental communication at great distances. And this is where Lola came into the picture. She was the protohuman with just such capability. The mystery that even Lolita was not yet aware of, was the mechanism by which this could take place.
The experiment involving the thoughts of one person affecting another person was designed mainly by Kyle Sedgwick and carried out at Oxford. He started with subjects sitting in adjacent rooms. A group of eight individuals in one room viewed a monitor with a live video feed of eight individuals in the next room. But the monitor would only show one person at a time, for sixty seconds, then roll through the other seven in a sequence. The subjects on camera were wearing standard ECG sensors, as well as EEG headsets and were monitored continuously. These subjects had only to sit and relax under soft lighting and very low, soothing music.
The eight observers in the next room had different instructions. Whomever they saw on the monitor, they were supposed to concentrate on increasing that person’s heart rate. They were coached to think about how it feels when their own heart rate suddenly rises quickly, such as during heavy exercise like climbing stairs or while experiencing gripping fear. The eight subjects being observed were not aware they were being observed. Nor were they aware that there were eight others next door, hammering away with their brains, trying to evoke a response. In the initial group, two of the eight under observation showed responses that correlated to when they were the subjects of observation. The effect was not always there and it was mild, but it was a clear signal that this line of investigation could bear fruit.
Months later, in parallel with the trials at Oxford, a researcher at San Jose State University, who was a former collaborator in the Global Consciousness Project, became aware of the tests and appealed to Jennings and Sedgwick to set up an identical set of trials in California. Not surprisingly, Angel, Sevy and Lola were roped into it and just by chance, Lola ended up as one of the observed, while Angel and Sevy were chosen to be observers. In all, there were twenty subjects in each room. What happened next was beyond belief. While among the other nineteen subjects in Lola’s room, only a few showed weak, sporadic responses, Lola’s response was akin to a square wave function, both in terms of cardio and mental signals and the waves aligned precisely with the time periods when she was being observed in the next room. While seeing what was happening in real time, the researchers’ heart rates were also jumping in rhythm with their excitement.
Upon sharing the results with Sedgwick, he immediately suggested observing Lola alone in San Jose, but having the observers sit at Oxford, more than five thousand miles away. The result was the same and completely repeatable, over and over. Sedgwick then intervened and started paring down the observers, finally to only one. Himself. He could see the traces realtime, coming in from San Jose.
One of his assistants wondered if there could be some feedback, however implausible, coming from the EEG headset that was triggering her brain to react. Kyle was very doubtful but realized that anything that could cast shadow on the experiment would create some skeptics. So he decided to repeat the experiment one on one with Lola, this time with nothing but an oxygen sensor that could also record pulse rate. The results were only recorded by the machine itself, offline, no communication links.
The experimental team in San Jose used a second camera to feed back the real-time readings from of the oxygen sensor display, to Kyle in Oxford. At first, Kyle harbored fear that the effect they had witnessed would now evaporate, never to be seen again. But his fears were short lived. Lola fell right in step with Kyles every mental instruction. He was essentially controlling her biological processes simply with thoughts. It was nothing short of miraculous.
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