FUTURISTIC NOW with futurist and philosopher Gray Scott.

Episode 001 : We Are Nature And Nature Is Technological.

We are nature and nature is technological. 

Something hidden grows just under the surface of our reality. Something that has co-evolved alongside us on this planet from the very beginning. It is a powerful force capable of reaching deep into our lives. 

It knows us better than we know ourselves and it will eventually become more intelligent than any human alive. 

It has always been here, waiting for us to wake up from our cosmic dream. It was here before us. It may be here long after we have turned back into stardust.

Its ancestors include bone tools, stone wheels, and the printing press. It is a direct extension of our consciousness, and it may eventually inherit our minds. It is nurtured inside the womb of our neural networks and the amalgamation of the Earth’s collected and compressed elements. Although we don’t fully understand it yet, we do have a name for it; 

We call it ... technology.

However, the word technology does not fully describe this emergent species. You see, we use small mouth noises, as the philosopher Terence Mckenna once observed, to describe, transfer, and contain a symbolic reference for the concept of technology. 

To understand the future of technology and we need to begin with one fundamental truth. We are nature and nature is technological. It is indigenous in the substrate of the cosmos. From the Saturn hexagon to African fractals to the Fibonacci sequence found in the growth patterns of every plant on Earth, we are surrounded by geometric, repetitive, numerical patterns—patterns we have only begun to recognize and quantify. 

We did not create mathematics, geometry, or technology, we merely discovered it through our observations of nature. Through millions of years of evolution and observation, eventually, we imbued these codes and rules with symbolic meaning through language. I see this as a natural evolutionary process—a process that has, more than likely, unfolded throughout the cosmos millions or even billions of times before. If advanced extraterrestrials do exist and they will more than likely be bio-digital-machines. It appears that this is an unavoidable predetermined future.

If this is true, then technology has yet to fully reveal itself to us. What will technology look like in the near future? What relationship will it have with us?  Through advancements in Artificial Intelligence, Technology appears to be on the verge of becoming autonomous and possibly conscious. When it does it will quickly self-replicate, birthing a species so advanced, we may not even recognize it. 

In the future, there may exist several super-intelligent species that inhabit this planet. Pure biological homo sapiens, digital beings, and bio-digital hybrids. This is the Transhuman era, and it has already begun. Futurist and Author B.J. Murphy says “The day our ancestors discovered fire was the day we became transhuman. From thereon, we used science and technology as our means of evolving.”

Our reality is being crunched into what I call the digital black hole. A digitized quantified and miniaturized singularity. As we move closer to the digital black hole, we will become more bio-digital. We will merge with our machines and begin to quantify and upload our minds. These quantified minds can then be infused within the digital world and crunched down into smaller and smaller units until we reach the digital black hole. We can debate whether these minds are truly us or just copies of us in another episode, but the fact is, this process is beginning now.

Futurist John M. Smart calls this THE TRANSCENSION HYPOTHESIS -  The transcension hypothesis proposes that a universal process of evolutionary development guides all sufficiently advanced civilizations into what may be called "inner space," a computationally optimal domain of increasingly dense, productive, miniaturized, and efficient scales of space, time, energy, and matter, and eventually to a black-hole-like destination. 

This idea is not a far-future concept. in fact, It has already begun. Every digital photo you take, every confession you make on your social network moves us closer to the digital black hole. It is not the beginning of the end but rather the beginning of the beginning… Inside of the digital black hole may be another digital cosmos waiting for us that begins with a big bang or small crunch. This may be the natural state of a recursive digital fractal cosmos.

So this is the key idea here: Our observation of the digital cosmos is causing the cosmos to become more digital through exponential innovation. The more we observe and quantify our reality the more it becomes digital.  We observe the mathematical and digital nature of the cosmos, and we send out machines to observe it in greater detail. As our digital awareness expands, our digital space-time-awareness begins to shrink, and a new rover lands on or takes photos of another planet, moon, or asteroid. This digital space-time-awareness correlation is becoming more obvious to us, and at some point, a crunch will occur. A crunch in our digital-space-time awareness. 

If you are having a hard time accepting the idea of technology as a co-evolving, emergent phenomenon, then think about this.  If you are listening to this podcast, you are using technology to receive this information. You are not listening to my voice; you are listening to a digital representation, a digital simulation of my voice. My voice has been digitized, compressed, and has traveled wirelessly directly into your brain.  Your neural network has begun to metabolize my voice through a digital filter. A digital membrane that now surrounds us on a daily basis. Think of it as a digital skin. This digital skin is beginning to vulcanize; it is beginning to literally harden into the machines, robots, and exoskeletons that are appearing around the world right now. 

This transitory state will lead us into a future filled with advanced machines with extraordinary superhuman intelligence. This is the moment technology becomes conscious. It may take 50 years or 1000 years but it will happen, and when it does we will stand face to face with our digital reflection. A digital reflection of humanity and our collective psychology. 

We are living inside of a transformative cosmos. Change is the rule. Stars are born and die and with them come planets, moons and the building blocks for life to emerge. This human moment we are currently having is not the end state. We are still evolving and technology is evolving with us. 

To assume we are somehow separate from the cosmos or the rules we find within our cosmos would be an illusion. Thus, any creative act, any innovation, is tied directly to the laws of the cosmos. Therefore if we find mathematics in the cosmos that predates our species, then it is obvious that technology is natural. Technology can be beneficial as well as harmful to us, and we should take care in how we interact with it. 

We are slowly accepting this as a  fundamental evolutionary truth. We are merging with the digital world and our machines. We are transforming our minds and bodies into indigenous digital organisms.  There is nothing to fear, and in fact, nothing can stop this cosmic process. Somewhere deep in the cosmos, this has happened before. And it will happen again.

We are technology. We are the dream inside the machine.

Books mentioned in this episode and further reading… if you dare.