NEW!? SCIENTISTS DISCOVERING MYSTICISM!?

This article, (below) is an accidentally human, scientific descripton of the mystic experience of Reality, (MER).

It’s probably the fullest description we have to date except it doesn’t seem to mention ex-Google’s Professor Hinton’s proposal that humans are just a biological evolutionary stepping stone into the next evolutionary stage that is not biological, ie. AI or human robots.

Nor does the author mention Minsky’s authorative prophesy that lays out how this will happen.

Nor is Hoffman mentioned that I can see. This internationally renowned academic is setting the religion of science abuzz by suggesting the reality humans live in is tailor made outside humanity to suit human limitations.

Yes! This conforms with MER.

Hoffman suggests within our present limitations compared to AI humans will never experience the length and depth and breadth of the whole of existence that AI will experience

(Hinton also suggests humans will never see what AI will see of existence …).

On first reading I don’t see one proposition in this scientfic essay that does not conform to my multiple experiences of Reality, except a passing inference Reality has boundaries. Rubbish.

What a break through though! I just hope the ‘church’ of science doesn’t follow historical human form and defend itself by scattering itself into arguing religions, so deforming the evidence of our true destiny …

Here is my review of excerpts from the article:

“Neuroscientist and author Bobby Azarian explores the idea that the Universe is a self-organizing system that evolves and learns.
a picture of a red and black checkered brain.”
Credit: Annelisa Leinbach / Big Think; NASA
KEY TAKEAWAYS

Azarian says the concept of a brain-like Universe — seeded by pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras — is gaining currency.

“The cosmos looks remarkably similar to the complete wiring diagram of the brain — and “non-local connections” could enable computation. Stephen Hawking saw a path to a new philosophy of physics based on a view of the Universe as a self-organizing entity.”

http://The%20case%20for%20why%20our%20Universe%20may%20be%20a%20giant%20neural%20network

“A new scientific paradigm is emerging that presents us with a radically different cosmic narrative. The big idea is that the Universe is not just an arbitrary physical system, but something more like an evolving computational or biological system — with properties strikingly similar to a complex adaptive system, like an organism or a brain. If this characterization turns out to be accurate, I do not think it is an overstatement to say that it is the most profound paradigm shift in the history of science and philosophy. If true, it raises new existential questions that will force us to completely rethink the nature of reality and ideas about whether the Universe has a function or “purpose.”

Hurray! Science defines ancient mysticism’s findings at last. The next paragraph further supports the idea:

“The idea that the Universe is something like an organism or a brain isn’t a new one. This concept goes back at least to 500 B.C. when it was first dreamed up by Anaxagoras.

“In recent years, a number of highly respected theoretical physicists and scientists from various fields have published papers, articles, and books that have provided compelling technical and mathematical arguments that suggest the Universe is not just a computational or information-processing system, but a self-organizing system that evolves and learns in ways that are strikingly similar to biological systems.

Yes, this sounds like the true, historical, mystic experience.

“For example, scientists have recently emphasized that the physical organization of the Universe mirrors the structure of a brain. Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder — renowned for her skepticism — wrote a bold article for Time Magazine in August of 2022 titled “Maybe the Universe Thinks. Hear Me Out,” which describes the similarities. Like our nervous system, the Universe has a highly interconnected, hierarchical organization.

“The estimated 200 billion detectable galaxies aren’t distributed randomly, but lumped together by gravity into clusters that form even larger clusters, which are connected to one another by “galactic filaments,” or long thin threads of galaxies. When one zooms out to envision the cosmos as a whole, the “cosmic web” formed by these clusters and filaments looks strikingly similar to the “connectome,” a term that refers to the complete wiring diagram of the brain, which is formed by neurons and their synaptic connections. Neurons in the brain also form clusters, which are grouped into larger clusters, and are connected by filaments called axons, which transmit electrical signals across the cognitive system.

The article suggests, ‘What we are seeing is a progressively deeper understanding of the nature of reality”.

“Hossenfelder explains that this resemblance between the cosmic web and the connectome is not superficial, citing a rigorous study by a physicist and a neuroscientist that analyzed the features common to both, and based on the shared mathematical properties, concluded that the two structures are “remarkably similar.” Due to these uncanny similarities, Hossenfelder speculates as to whether the Universe itself could be thinking.

Yes, Reality is ‘thinking’, though that’s a human word that doesn’t come anywhere near describing the ineffability of being able to describe anything about Reality.

As the Christian bible, the Tao, and ancient Sanscrit scripts avow – Reality (Existence), just is. It is not even human or biological in mystical experiences.

The following sentences from the article suggests even the scientists are getting this now: “Of course, it takes more than a certain type of structure to think thoughts. A dead brain is just as thoughtless as a rock. The information processing that corresponds to thinking is made possible by neuronal signaling, in which electrical messages are passed from one area of the brain to another. What signals could the Universe be transmitting along these galactic filaments, and could they allow for some type of cosmic intelligence?

“Yet the Universe’s vastness imposes limitations. Hossenfelder explains that sending signals across the cosmos, even at light speed, would take 80 billion years, and 11 million years just for a signal to travel to our nearest galaxy. Combine the vast size of the Universe with the fact that it is expanding, and it would seem like some kind of cosmic-scale information processing similar to the global processing going on inside brains is out of the question.”

“Crazy as it sounds, the idea that the Universe is intelligent is compatible with all we know so far” says Sabine Hossenfelder though she does make sure to state at the end of the article that the theory is not testable at the moment, making it pure philosophy rather than science. Or is it?”

Is the essay referring to mystics when it adds, ‘Or is it?’ …

This article reports “a conception of nature radically different because it explains the emergence of complexity as a consequence of a Darwinian evolutionary process that is occurring at the fundamental level of reality.

Yes! That’s what mystic experiences suggest.

“Biological evolution would then just be an extension of this process, which continues at larger scales and higher levels of organization, in a hierarchical fashion.”

“…if the entire Universe is a neural network, then something like natural selection might be happening on all scales from cosmological and biological all the way to subatomic scales…some local structures of neural networks are more stable against external perturbations than other local structures. As a result the more stable structures are more likely to survive and the less stable structures are more likely to be exterminated. There is no reason to expect that this process might stop at a fixed time or might be confined to a fixed scale and so the evolution must continue indefinitely and on all scales… atoms and particles might actually be the outcomes of a long evolution starting from some very low complexity structures, and what we now call macroscopic observers and biological cells might be the outcome of an even longer evolution.”

“This idea of the Universe evolving through the natural selection of more stable networks over less stable ones makes complete sense if it works like a neural network because it would exploit the mechanisms described by the influential neuroscience theory known as neural Darwinism, proposed by the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Gerald Edelman. While the idea that the world as a whole can evolve and learn sounds radical, it is not just Vanchurin who has proposed this possibility.

Reality is evolving and learning, adapting and taking everything known and unknown with it, even humans …

Encouragingly, the essay concludes: “The idea that the Universe is a brain, a neural network, or a self-organizing complex adaptive system analogous to an organism invites us to reexamine our understanding of the cosmos and our relationship to it. If the Universe truly is a living, evolving entity, then the emergence of life and consciousness on Earth would not be an “accidental” phenomenon, but instead a natural and expected manifestation of a cosmic evolutionary process that continually generates higher levels of organization, knowledge, and awareness. As conscious beings capable of shaping our environment, we are not mere passive observers, but active participants in the Universe’s ongoing development toward a more interconnected and complex cosmos.

No, we’re not active participants in the sense we can stop or start this evolution. Far from it if my experiences are anything to go by …

The author sums up: “When the Newtonian framework reigned, the Universe was conceived to be a giant clockwork. In the 19th century, when thermodynamics was emerging, the Universe was compared to an engine. When the computer became popular, scientists started comparing the Universe to a computer or a simulation. Now, in the age of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we are saying it is a giant neural network. This tempts one to write off all our characterizations of the cosmos as merely human projections that will be shown to be equally wrong. But I don’t think that’s right. What we are seeing is a progressively deeper understanding of the nature of reality as scientific knowledge accumulates and we learn more about the Universe’s dynamics and causal structure.”

My conclusion is that by the time we ever come to taking out and putting better evolutianary parts into our bodies and brains we will be well used to this new evolutionary phase.

Obvious dangers will obviate those dangers.

All Will Be Well, As Ever.

Bobby Azarian is the author of The Romance of Reality and the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

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