Ray Kurzweil is a brilliant inventor (from the first musical synthesis to the latest AI devices reading books to the blind), as well as author to books like The Age of Spiritual Machines. He is also the ‘father’ of the concept of The Law of Accelerated Returns which will soon ‘give birth’ to an event known as the‘singularity’. He is a highly respected man with great vision; appearing on media interviews and frequently mentioned in literature (as also in my book The Sleeper Must Awaken).
There is one of his visions however, that I do disagree with. He proposes, as in the title of his new book: live long enough – live forever. Basing his argument on his earlier thesis - The Law of Accelerated Returns – he states that, with current bio-technological advancement, one can live long enough to reach the Singularity, which in turn will enable one to live forever. Although he is probably correct in his predictions about how eternal physical life will be achieved, he fails to see one thing (in my humble opinion):
The reason for birth, life and death. In this regard, I believe him to be reductionist in his approach as seeing only this physical life as ‘real’, and wants to cling to it, probably due to a subcounscious level of fear of death. By this, he (as so many others) fail to see the beauty and workings of this universe we call ‘reality’.
If we take a look at our universe and our so called ‘reality’ through new eyes – through the synthesis of Superstring Theory, the fractal nature of Being, the concepts of a Holographic Universe as described by the physicist David Bohm and in turn, the first mentioned themes’ remarkable similarities to dreams, archetypes, the Monomyth and ancient mysticism such as Kabbalah and Tantra – will we realise the flaw in believing our universe and ourselves to be ‘real’; believing this ‘reality’ to be the only plane of existence. If we study these remarkable similarities, will we realise that this ‘life’, is only one of the archetypal expressions of the One Consciousness (known by many names).
Also, if humanity achieves eternal physical life, it poses some practical problems as well:
We are already an overpopulated species; exponentially growing in number, while we consume the earth’s resources at that same exponential rate. We are already so over populated in most areas of the world, creating an extremely high demand in basics such as nourishment and housing, that we irreparably damage natural resources in the process of trying to keep up with that demand. As a friend of mine mentioned: I know very little about economics – but when there are too many worms on a leaf, soon the leaf will be consumed, and the worms will die with that leaf.
If looking at our primate nature of fighting for survival, be it in the form of modern economics and capitalism, we will probably not be able to have the energy resources to comply with the energy demand for the eternal life technologies. We are already riddled with other forms of survival issues – dwindling resources (as mentioned), escalating natural catastrophes (probably secondary to global climate change) and overpopulation.
We also have to look beyond the reductionist approach to eternal life: If we can assume that this earthly life and plane is but one of the many ways of Universal Consciousness expressing itself, then there is no need to be trapped in this state for eternity. We need to learn to understand the purpose of our lives - cope with and learn from only this life, and then move on to explore others in the eternal fractal cycle of birth – life – death and re-birth.
(Comments welcome)
No comments:
Post a Comment