Do we have a purpose?

What is the biggest challenge of our time?

Do we have a purpose, or can we be replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI)? This is the schism we are unknowingly neck-deep in and I will offer three propositional questions that may help us see the problem, unravel it, and offer a way out.

It seems to me that in an age of political and social turmoil, the only thing that is clear, is that AI is progressing steadily and unrelentingly towards a singularity which does not include us, and may specifically exclude us. Take, for example, what most would call the biggest challenge of our time, Global Warming. The only issue with ascribing urgency to this problem is the glacial pace at which it proceeds. Politicians operate in terms of four year election cycles, and most, who need to put food on the table, operate on much shorter horizons. Now compare that to AI, which is already up and running, it’s total market value is estimated at nearly $100 billion and will exceed $1 trillion by 2028. The speed of AI is not just astronomical, (China already boasts the biggest quantum computer on the planet), it is exponential, and we all know Metcalf’s Law by now. So, clearly, AI is light years ahead of our biggest challenge, Global warming, and, ironically, it will be used as a tool to solve it.

Why do I say AI singularity would not include us, and would probably exclude us? Let us take UFO’s. It does not matter if you do not believe them or not, this is simply a thought-experiment. Let us assume they exist with alien technology that can travel across the stars. Do we conclude a) that they have advanced technology to us or b) they are themselves advanced, with a technology to match? If you conclude a) is true, then it is likely we can simply copy their technology. However, if you conclude that b) is true, then it is unlikely we can duplicate their technology until we ourselves are advanced culturally. In other words, there is no such thing as a stand-alone advanced technology, independent of it’s designer. Technology does not advance like a Swiss clock, one second at a time, it needs human inspiration, innovation and genius, and that only comes in ages of enlightenment and free expression, as opposed to dark-ages of disease, rumour, superstition and death. For example, one of the most advanced technologies we have is thermonuclear fission. However our first use of this technology was in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which means that whilst our technology has advanced, our culture has not advanced much beyond the murderous Genghis Khan or the blood thirsty Attila. Can anyone doubt what Hitler would have done had he access to nuclear weapons? Anybody who believes victory is in sight whilst sheltering in a bunker, with rubble all around, is clearly suffering mental illness. This is why we will never make contact with aliens, and why we will never advance beyond our current scientific paradigm, until we advance ourselves, culturally, intellectually and spiritually. There will be no Virgin Galactic Fleet, and Elon Musk will not save us, nor all the kings men and horses. It is a bootstrap Universe, where we have to pull ourselves up and do the hard work to of education and nurturing to reach the next spiritual and intellectual level, before we can think of Star Trek levels of technology, which this essay is about.

What must it take to reach the next spiritual and intellectual level? First we must know our purpose, which gives us meaning and through meaning fulfilment and progress. However there is a big problem, our prefrontal cortex is an insatiable and agnostic driver of purpose. Why do I say agnostic? This is a very important weakness. The brain is brilliant, but it is also a patchwork of evolutional serendipity, riddled with dead-ends, failures and successes. For example, 97% of our genome is non-coding. It does not code for proteins, it is a gigantic controller of Zombie genes, fossil viruses and epigenetic switches, which has nothing to do with creating, mending and fixing you. So the prefrontal cortex is a blindman, driving a vehicle locked in forward motion. If you want to be a doctor, nurse or fireman and have the social infrastructure, desire, hard-work and ambition, it will get you to where you want to go. But feed it Fentanyl, Cocaine or dope and it will take you somewhere else instead. The Chinese understood this from the Opium Wars, which is why their biggest exports to the West is Car-fentanyl and materialism. Do you see what I mean by culturally advanced? We must use our brains, but our brains cannot see when we are going wrong and being lead by charlatans and hucksters! Only our soul (which to Byron was his wife) is imbued with a moral compass, from the sacred gift of consciousness and even that requires a critical mass of cognitive skills, which, according to Harari, in his book Sapiens, we have had since crossing the Wallace barrier, 65,000 years ago, although others woud date it much later, to the cave paintings at Lacroix. Either way, it takes a village to raise a child, and ask yourself, how many such villages do we have? If we are to reach the next level we will need more villages with “dunbar numbers”, than megacities with social media.

At this point, you might be thinking that AI technology might solve global warming or even reach alien levels of advancement and take us with it, for example, quantum computers might solve the Alcubierre equation and send us off to the stars. This is unlikely. Could you tell me any technology in the last century that did not have a military use? Might I remind you that we are in the middle of a global pandemic who’s murky origins may well be more man than bat! Does gain-of-function sound familiar? Can anybody doubt that AI is a paid-up member of the Military Industrial Complex? If you doubt me, just look at the Chinese Surveillance State and it’s dystopian Social Credit System. Dissident poets have died in jail because of their low social credit scores, and there are more journalists in jail than drug-dealers. How long will it be before we will be asked to choose between the red and blue pill and “Just follow the white rabbit?” Even as AI reaches singularity it will either be controlled by itself or elite-controllers, and can you imaging a computer deciding when to use tactical nuclear weapons, or solve global warming by blocking the sun, seeding clouds, or removing oxygen from the atmosphere? That does not sound very human-centric, does it?

So here is our situation. We have global warming turning our planet into an angry weather system, gradually and relentlessly moving use into a chaotic, polluted, irradiated, fishless water-world, full of plastic, causing endless volcanic eruptions from vulcanism, not seen since the Deccan Traps, caused by isostatic rebound, with mile-high tsunamis and countless billions of refugees trying to migrate northwards, from their southern dust-bowls and locust swarms. Whilst people in the north are suffering endless plagues from the stochastic release of exotic pathogens from burnt down forests, reclaimed swamplands and endless land encroachments, like Nipah virus from the Indonesian forest or dengue from the Philippines ot Ebola from bats in the Congo jungles or Zika from clearing the Amazon. Paralyzing ticks migrate north along with an army of forest-eating beetles, and all this has already started, whilst humanity, much like their Neanderthal cousins, is slowing being sterilized from plastic endocrine disruptors infesting our immune compromised plague-ridden bodies, and radiation pouring into the planet from the gaping hole in the ozone layer.

Set against glacial human progress in global warming, AI is moving towards singularity at warp-speed using Metcalfe’s Law of exponential growth. It is moving in parallel with human society, with it’s own binary rules, limitations and opaque governance, accreting enough critical mass in the form of data, stripping everything of every morsel of digital information from every source to form it’s own metamorphosis as a self-sustaining black-hole which will suck in both humans and nature, in an ever expanding event-horizon, beyond which, we can see nothing. Meanwhile our on-line presence is taking over our social presence and we are relying on AI-technology to the point of dependence, without any promise of better governance, wellbeing or human progress. We are told that AI will relieve us of manual, mundane work, whilst at the same time sucking us into an alternate Metaverse. Mundal human sweat and toil has been the epicentre of human excellence since Jericho and we must now replace it with visionless, painless utopia of endless synthetic stimulation. To what end?

All of which brings me back, full circle, to my three questions that I believe, may help find our purpose and move, Socratically, to the next level of spiritual and intellectual advancement. The three questions are;

a) Why do we not have free-will?

b) Why do quantum systems work retroactively?

c) Are a) & b) connected?

All questions must be answered in accordance with Feynman Discourse Rules (FDR).

Let me begin by explaining the questions and the FDR and I will also answer the last and possibly the most important question.

a) Why do we not have free-will? To have free-will, actions must precede events. We cannot decide to kill someone after they are dead! The brain, however, does not work this way. Benjamin Libet discovered that the supplementary motor cortex, controlled by the subconscious, just behind the pre-frontal cortex, moves involuntary muscles 150 microseconds before we decide to do something. It’s as if our subconscious knows what we want to do before we want to do it. There as been many who criticize these results, but they have been repeated many times. So let us assume the correctness of this strange occurence and try to explain it in terms of free-will.

b) There is an experiment in quantum physics called the Quantum Eraser Experiment, where a beam of light is projected onto a screen with shows interference patterns like a wave or discrete dots where photons have hit the screen. In the Quantum Eraser Experiment there are four such detectors which the beam of light passes through sequentially, and always results in the first screen knowing the what happens on the fourth screen, no matter how the intermediate screens are changed or randomly rotated. How does the first screen always predict the end result? Put another way, how do you toss a coin and always know the outcome?

c) Are a) & b) connected? Are biological systems connected to quantum fields?

What are Feynman discourse rules? Richard Feynman was a Nobel prize winner for his work in uniting classical physics with quantum mechanics and producing Feynman Diagrams. He famously once said that “anyone who says they understand quantum mechanics does not understand quantum mechanics.” These rules derive from that statement and are an excellent exposition of transecndence. In order to transcend a system you must both be right in your assumption and wrong in the rules of the system you are transcending. In other words, your answer must be outside of the box, for example, Einsteins General Field Theory, Godel’s incompleteness theorem and, of course, Feynman diagrams.

Are a) & b) connected?

The Sanderling shorebirds fly 7000 miles in an almost straight line to their breeding grounds in the north-pole and back to it’s southerly winter nesting grounds before polar winter. The Bartailed Godwit travels from Alaska to New Zealand at the same time. How do they navigate the journey? Scientists now know the birds use specialized cells in their eyes called cryptochromes, that use an entangled pair of photons to “see” magnetics north, through magneto-reception.

Biological systems are not only capable of sensing quantum fields, they can use them on a regular basis for practical purposes. Does our next paradigm shift involve the use of consciousness to use quantum fields? I believe answers to a) and b) above, address this question.

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