The Singularity as Eschatological Archetype

(A Few Observations)

Heaven is not a different realm, but this world after we have improved it and ourselves. -- RCW Ettinger, Man into Superman

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Whether it is named the Singularity or the Spike, the Transcendental Object at the End of Time or the New Jerusalem, the vision of humankinds mass transcension into a hyperdimensional state of being is a millennia-old archetype whose depths obstinately refuse to be fully plumbed. Like all abiding memes, it is a motif whose representations can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic archetypal pattern.

Todays prophesized Singularity (as commonly publicized by Vinge, Drexler, and Kurzweil, among many others) is no different. Though first catalyzed by an unparalleled technological leap, this metahistorical Spike promises to comprehensively and irrevocably transmogrify every mode in which we relate to our selves, each other, and the phenomenal world at large. Our sphere of influence will vastly deepen -- not only outer space, but inner space as well will be laid bare to the penetrative stare of innumerable nanites and foglets. We shall at last see as we have been seen, and will then be, courtesy of superhumanly intelligent and benignly spiritual machines, summarily remolded in the image of our greatest and wildest expectations.

The only significant precedent to such a mind-bending warp in consensual reality would have to be the resultant Utopia often foreseen as the coda to the various end-times scenarios of pious apocalypticists. Peering at length through the symphonic perversity of their feverish visions, we touch upon several key intimations regarding the look and feel of a post-historical planetary renovation -- visions which until recently have been either faithfully reverenced as gospel truth in spite of (or perhaps because of ) their seeming improbability, or alternatively scorned as hallucinogenic pipe-dreams. But when set alongside the forecasts of our contemporary futurists, these ancient allusions are sometimes startlingly similar to those foreseen today, and occasionally appear to describe the technologies of tomorrow in bold detail.

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To sketch a brief example -- the Spirit of Healing as foreseen in Zoroastrian traditions, which appeared to its forecasters as a great stream of molten metal through which everyone will be made to pass, in order to be purified for the transition to a new life in a paradisiacal House of Song. This purgative has again been prophesized today, in the form of a nanotechnological swarm that, once properly interfaced with the user, will eradicate biological impurities and augment his or her perceptions with neuromorphic stimulators, thus preparing and reprogramming the user for a life of longevity and transhuman magnificence. Not only immortal, but eternally young, reads the Zoroastrian text, a passage which finds a much amplified echo in the contemporary assurances of the cryonics movement. Once more endowed with bodies, we continue to read, they will be able to experience the joys of the senses as well as those of the spirit. Is this not a vision of a full-immersion Cyberspace -- a virtual theme-park of sensuality as well as a central repository of all the earths accumulated wisdom?

The Singularity, with all its attendant technological innovations in tow, also looms large in the chiliastic foresights of the Christian apocalypse. Its central motif, the Holy City, New Jerusalem, which descends from Heaven in plain view of the entire human race; a City of pure gold, bright as clear glass, adorned with jewels of every kind; a City that has no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it, but is lit instead by the light" of a fully integrated Consciousness - what is this if not the premature vision of a supercooled solid state Hypercube, the glittering golden mobilia prophesized by FM-2030, our future perfect hyperspatial home? A mystical model of sacred geometry covertly expressing the known proportions of the planet itself, the New Jerusalem represents a measuring-out of Heaven on Earth, the architecture of a macrocosmic temple into which all humankind enters to receive its final transformative quickening. Crossing this final threshold into the numinous Light of the great Beyond, the many millions of humankind will disassemble into a metamorphic Omegon unshackled from the outmoded mores of space and time.

Our modern prescriptions for the Singularity thus form a significant -- and far more rewarding and technologically correct -- revision of the older eschatological models. These newer prototypes have their template in the earlier visions, however surcharged they may be with the theoretical promises of the mid twenty-first century. But whether seen through the blinders of tribal theism or through the google-eyed wonder of open source technology, the End promised by both the visionaries of yesterday and the futurists of today are one and the same -- a New Heaven and a New Earth.

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The fact that there is a Singularity of one type or another expected by every long-lived memetic structure in human history seems to indicate that humankind was hardwired with a Singularity code from the start -- that it is an integral product of our forward evolution, an inescapable eventuality designed to fire at a crucial crossroads in the forward advance of our Collective Consciousness. In both ancient and contemporary reports of the looming Spike, the doom prophesized by the teleological transition instead gives place to the penultimate consummation of an age-long metamorphosis -- no end at all, but rather a new beginning, a making wonderful, a second genesis. This new beginning, the most crucial phase of the unfolding Singularity, is akin to a running process long obscured by an encryption scheme almost supernatural in its complexity -- soon to be unraveled and fully deciphered and downloaded by one and all as a sparkling new metahistorical operating system whose relative omniscience and omnipotence converge joyously upon the Divine.

The Singularity is thus the quotient that the alchemical algorithm of Conscious evolution has all these millennia been struggling to resolve - which is, how best to explode base matter into a meta-dimensional bloom of fully conscious hyperspatial adventure?

Again, the much-expected and multi-faceted Singularity is the long-anticipated answer to lifes primary impulse -- it only remains for the technological and teleological prowess of the Gaian Minds leading prototype to unravel the remainder of the equation and, with these coordinates in hand, steer the Ark of Life to its transcendent destination in the sky.

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The coming Singularity brings with it the promise of a new, more masterly emergence of Consciousness, one that promises to unify our fragmented selves into a tightly-woven telesphere of ubiquitously wetwired, mutually reflecting minds. The human psyche itself -- own personal node of the One (or Total) Consciousness of planetary humankind -- now unshackled from the pains and pleasures of its carbon-based interface, shall fuse with its silicon panacea and populate the very air we breath with the sentient sparkle of hyper-dimensional joie de vivre.

The New Heaven (as prophesized by the ancient apocalypticists) is the opening of this final frontier, the interstellar depths of the cosmos brought nearer to us by our needful willingness to venture out from our increasingly crowded home-world via the establishment of a meta-

terrestrial Humankind, like so many branches spiraling out from a central seed. The New Earth is this very earth alchemically transmogrified into a crystalline Hub of hyperspatial OmniConsciousness, the brute coal of our sun-kissed sphere at long last compressed into diamond clarity, now sought out by cosmic denizens near and far for the precious treasure we have become.

In the end, evolution on this planet will have been the growth of an immortal spark of Divinity from an invisible evolutionary lever to a hyperspatial Entity with complete mastery of space and time, having the ability to traverse any distance of interstellar space and deploy any number of men and women and children as ambassadors (or avatars) to other worlds.

We shall be both flashing neurons in the unchained Gaian Mind as well as first class passengers on the grandest interstellar starship.

2005 Julian West