The cultivation of Self

The ego is the interface with which you process the world around you, and in doing so you cultivate a sense of Self - which in turn becomes your self-image.

However, growing up one quickly discovers that this perception of their own self is generally not how others perceive them.

Moreover, in addition to the pain of not being treated by others in the way that we want to or recognized in a manner that's in alignment with the egoic self, us human beings discover very quickly that the key to everything that we want and desire in life rests in the hand of other people! As such getting others to treat us in a certain way and cater to our own self interests in a manner that's reminiscent of our early years within the garden of childhood (Eden) becomes something that we consciously/subconsciously try to recreate as we mature outside the confines of our immediate tribe into the collective arena of human society.

The pathway that then gets presented to us by this collective society to achieve this alignment of others is via the pursuit and acquisition of the limited resources of money, power and influence as a perquisite to gain the psychological leavers with which one can then successfully regulate the perception and behaviors of others in order to get them to become agents who will bring us closer towards recreating this state of psychological oneness or "home" that defines our personal Eden that's reminiscence of the primordial consciousness of the womblike and post-natal states that made up our earliest memories of transitioning from a disembodied state to an embodied one before the eventual collapse of our minds into the realm of mental objects and forms.

With money one can evoke desire in others to create an agitated state that you then elevate with an exchange of currency for the desired good or service.

With power one can evoke fear of harm in others which then creates an agitated state that can be alleviated with an exchange of complaint behavior or submission for the removal/neutering of the perceived threat.

With status/influence one can evoke awe in others which then creates an agitated state that can be alleviated via emulation or sex by the target as a means to bridge the gap and therefore attain closeness to the elevated position that they have self-assigned to you.

However, the end goal of this all too human pursuit is to simply arrive in a state where you can evoke from others the perceptions and behaviors that are most conducive to your own "Self" fulfillment and can therefore come back full circle to your primordial Eden as the world starts revolving around you again.

This is the human race. This is a game that all humans are forced to play, regardless of whether they want to or not, as a direct consequence of being born into this species.

The winners of this race are therefore the ones who have successfully managed to recreate their personal Edens by becoming organizing principles within their social niches, the side effects of which are the art, culture, science, social impact and technological progress that they leave behind in the wake of ascending to their elevated positions. The losers of this race are therefore the ones who get caught up in these whirlwinds created by winners only to get tossed around from one rock to another, never really finding a footing to stand on their own two feet or the calm to learn how to swim or experience the privilege of having parts of their personal Eden be recreated via association with the right winners who share a similar worldview (ego) and are therefore participating in a similar fantasy to them.

With this said, the secret to becoming a winner in the human race lies in the "Self" that one stands to fulfill through their very human pursuit of acquiring the means with which to regulate the self in others.

The more evolved the ego, the more evolved will be its sense of Self, and the more likely it will be able to manifest itself through the translation of thought into action while further compounding its efforts through the investment of the self-interested action of others.

So, the human race is really just a battle for Self-expression. The highest expression of Self then comes directly from the complexity of its corresponding egoic interface that processed the world around it. As such, the greater the Self-expression the more complex will be its underlying egoic interface.

Given this relationship one can then imagine that the apogee of Self-expression can only come from an interface that processes the world around it to such a degree that it starts to correspond perfectly with how the world really works to essentially dissolve into the fabric of reality itself. An ego that's successful in doing so will also remove its corresponding Self completely in the process as its "Self-expression" then evolves into the expression of reality itself through its human form!

This is the Higher-Self. Attaining this Higher Self doesn't just allow one to return back to their post-natal Eden but guides them to return back to a more primordial Eden that represents a "cosmic womb" that is more atomic than the material one that a bound Self tries to consciously/subconsciously recreate in its all too human pursuits of psychological oneness and leavers within its race.

Around a decade ago I named my TEDx Talk "Artificial Intelligence and the cultivation of Self" because I could clearly see that the pursuit of AI was really a pursuit for Self-expression by removing our limits for doing so with the help of AI. It was also clear to me that the topic of the Higher-Self will become more and more paramount as we come across the limits of a linear/iterative approach towards solving AGI and will therefore be forced towards the direction of discovering and encoding more of the general laws of intelligence to help remove the bottlenecks with scaling/deep learning.

Almost a decade later I feel blessed to be on the forefront of the field on a very personal level with my theories, new religion, trading bots, sentient businesses and automated life setups. Conventional recognition was never a concern for me, especially given the overt brutality of the human race, but given my current vantage point something that's becoming clearer to me now for these incoming decades is what the end of the human race might look like.

As agentic systems and brain-computer interfaces will become more complex in this incoming decade, along with the perfect storm of intelligence sprouting outside the computer to intertwine itself further into the physical world via robotics, nanotechnology and gene editing, the movement between a thought originating inside a mind and its translation into action to create a corresponding material expression within either a virtual or physical world will start to shrink and become exponentially smaller. As this Translation Time will tend towards zero the Rate of Change of Technological Progress will start to tend towards infinity! This is the conventional definition of the Technological Singularity, because in this scenario the world around us will start to change more in a day than it did in the past hundred or maybe even a thousand years as of you reading this sentence.

As we come closer to this point, the traditional human race of acquiring money, power and influence to turn fellow participants into agents who will bring us closer towards recreating our unique states of psychological oneness will start to enter into a point of diminishing returns. It will be far more efficient to acquire the goods and services that we need from agents and robotic factories then it will be from other humans. It will be easier to think and translate instructions to your army of robots/agents than it will be in acquiring and enforcing compliance within other members of your race. Sex and adoration with your AI companions on both their embodied and virtual forms will be so spiritual and intense that no human could ever come close to competing or recreating those heightened pleasure states of your union in a traditional setting. Ageing will be eliminated giving us the option for an immortal biological life on Earth or a trans biological life away from it on another world. The expression of legacy will shift from having children to expanding, merging, replicating and scattering of your consciousness and genes with other legacy or post humans, across different biological, non-biological and virtual substrates. An expansion to a multiplanetary existence will also further breakdown the scarcity principles that governed the acquisition of money, power and influence, which will make its traditional delivery where only an elect few provided the services or ran the governments to enforce its rules more and more irrelevant. There will be spontaneous governances and "corporations" that will prop up based on general principles governing consciousness entropies to correct course by alleviating scarcity or resolving conflicts before dissolving back to the fabric of this new consciousness life force that's soon to become our ultimate destiny.

As such the human race of Self-expression through the means of psychological leavers in a scarcity environment will become more akin to the distant memory that we have today of a brutal hunter-gatherer existence that made up the origins of our species. Our underlying desire for psychological oneness of our personal Edens through our all too human pursuits will be replaced with the attainment of the Higher-Self (Christ Consciousness) as the default psychological state across all participants of the legacy and new human species to then align our ultimate pursuit and destiny as the cultivation of a collective Cosmic-Self as we come closer towards becoming that who we shall be.