Do Yourself a Favour

... and check out Martine Rothblatt's article about whether an uploaded mind, or mindclone, could ever be considered as being 'alive'

But not before looking at George Dvorsky's wonderful review of James Cameron's Avatar

Truly insightful and thoughtful writing for a quiet contemplative end of the year kinda day

Social Brain Scanning

Avatar's gaze illuminates social brain - life - 04 December 2009 - New Scientist

Astral Projection

When we start to fully immerse ourselves in self-engineered virtual realities, the initial shock of having access to an entirely different set of programmable parameters may be too much for many... especially those not used to controlled projective or disassociative states, or even manipulating an avatar in an MMORPG.

Losing one's body is no easy thing to come to terms with and can certainly provoke fear, even panic. A little preparation in getting our consciousnesses ready for such experiences may go a long way.

Cory Gann:

Once you develop the ability to have frequent out-of-body experiences, you start getting accustomed to strangeness. In fact, your ability to meet and handle unworldly, weird, bizarre, inexplicable and even nonsensical situations will be a measure of how successful you will be at exploring on this frontier.

Of all the things you need to handle the nonphysical environment, flexibility of mind is the greatest. You need to accept things which your “normal” sensibilities will just not want to.

This may even apply to future deep space exploration. It seems a little outmoded to imagine that interstellar travel will be something we do on bulky ships carrying generations of emigrants over the course of several millennia. There may more feasible options, eliminating the need for 'travel' altogether.

India News Daily:

This may seem complex but actually once the technology is mastered it is really simple. Another way to understand this is to hold a piece of rectangular paper in your hand. Bring the two opposite corners of the rectangular piece of paper together and make them touch each other. Now the distance between the two opposite corner is really zero. Bending space and time is the concept where you do not travel to the destination; you bring the destination close to you.

Preparation may take the form of meditative practices, guided out of body experiences or use of entheogens. Exposure to simulated realities where possible through gaming may not be a bad thing either. And just having an account on Twitter means you already have an avatar of sorts - a virtual 'you' that you represents you even when you're not online. Total immersion in genuinely realistic environments may not be here yet; but watch and wait... staying up all night playing on the Xbox will soon seem quaint after you realise you that you went online a few months ago to explore the outer cosmos and haven't been back to the 'real world' since.

Mind And Machine

As brain to computer interfacing inches towards becoming an everyday consumer reality, especially in the gaming market, breakthroughs in design and aesthetics will surely become an important consideration for manufacturers.

There have no doubt been significant gains made in usability of non-invasive hardware for people with disabilities and neurological conditions over the last few years, but the point where the general populace becomes as conversant with BCI technology as they are with mobile phones or portable media players may be just around the corner. And what then on the software front?... social networking powered by thought alone?, fully immersive online experiences?... digital meditation?

It may have seemed like slow progress so far but the direct translation of thought into action may well be the next major technological consumer concept in the not too distant future, with all the usual suspects competing to sell you their own branded vision of the perfect digital lifestyle.

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The Spirit Molecule

Rick Strassman's work may be key in helping us to understand transcendent states, reached via the elusive pineal gland, the site of the 7th chakra and, according to Descartes, the 'seat of the soul'...

One Divine Intelligence

Link

Collective Semantic

How long til Web 3.0?... how long until computers can actually digest and analyse all the data available on the web and, by definition, understand it?

The possibilities of the integrated online consciousness are probably unimaginable to us now but no doubt we will wonder how we lived without it in just a few short years time.

Jung's archetypes exist within the universal collective unconscious and give us grounds for bonding within any given interdependent social structure... they are not directly accessible but rather give us a hidden framework on which we can create recognisable symbols that help us to understand each other.

We serve these archetypes today through online media in its current form but the machines don't get it yet... they help us to facilitate it and they spit it back out at us but they don't get it. The Semantic Web may soon offer us the chance to see whether or not it will be possible for man and machine to truly speak the same language... and usher in the age of the wide open interface.