Distortion -A Transhumanist Essay By Julian Shirley AKA Juji

Distortion — Human Transcendence As Catalyzed By Communication Technology’s Exponential Growth

By Julian Shirley AKA Juji
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https://medium.com/@rwkregime

In Egypt a few years ago the public was forced to replace the corruption of the original network which was being censored and manipulated or simply withheld by their state. They did this by creating a new network independent of the established World Wide Network. I predicted this when I first began to grasp the monolithic social and cultural implications of the infinitely exponentially expanding World Wide Network. I knew that there always has been and for the indefinite future will be human being that do not perceive the open communication of the public as advantageous or acceptable to them. These people historically have gone great lengths to sever our ties, why would our new and more powerful communication tool be any different in fact one would assume it would be more threatening to these types.
Of course many have predicted this. It is a natural concept. One that unfolds in your mind in a quite logically linear way when you think deeply on the nature of instant data transfer between all humans regardless of location. In Egypt we had a mass of people defying the state and rejecting its network as impure and unfit. This is because the networking of computers to exchange information is beginning to be seen as an inalienable right and extension of the right to free speech. It seems as natural and morally obvious as equality for all or freedom from being enslaved by another. The notion of the right to a free network made for the people, by the people and controlled by the people seems like obvious and patent morality. This is because it is such a pure and simple thing. Many would argue that the internet is anything but simple and I understand that but its core is something very basic and instinctively familiar to humanity. At its most simple level the internet is a forum or protocol for communication and transfer of data or knowledge between humans. People often forget how indivisible our humanity is from machines and I believe the internet blends these two even further because its very existence is purely reliant on human communication.
 As a species we have approached the internet like a new born deer approaching a still lake and seeing its own reflection for the first time. To clarify the metaphor, this water may be still and constant but the deer’s lack of relative intellectual maturity combined with the natural distortion created by light and the deer’s body’s perception of light will likely result in the deer failing to recognizing itself. The internet is a mirror of our humanity as a whole and of all humanities cultures but we tend not to think of it this way. This is because it is not an instinct or perceptual human default to view oneself as part of anything bigger than your immediate self and circumstance. This is the buffer of ego and the illusion of disconnection from reality and everything a distortion or filter we require as part of the framework required for individual consciousness. Enlightenment and spiritual maturity only come when we can see our self as connected to everything.
The technology, the internet and eventually more advanced forms of networking and communication are a natural and unavoidable product of the networking of sentient being through communication and it most likely occurs for any evolving species of higher intelligence at some point. The longer the internet exists and evolves, the more the line between humanity and machine will be blurred. The less we will insist on seeing these two concepts as incompatible or unsolvable. For this reason, a network free of the intentional and agenda biased dilution, that most corporate states will try to enforce will be the key to not only surviving but evolving for humanity.
With enough perfection of the efficiency of communication and technology eventually humans will reach a point where they are as close to the truth as a human can be in our current form. I phrase the previous sentence that way because of course as humans we can never see the full truth as it is always filtered by our perception, which is the cause of most reality distorting filters, the biggest being ego which is a distortion of the true reality which is confined to the impenetrable and inescapable cubical of our mind and relies on the crude inputs we call the human senses for its data intake.
Ego is at its most base conceptual and definitive level, a distortion or filter in our mind. A distortion that was perhaps at one time, compulsory for a evolution and an inescapable dependency, but is becoming less relevant and more hindering in its protocolistic antiquity. Change and the impermanent are systemic flaws in the seemingly perfect system of evolution as well as the system’s heart and core and another obvious human system dependency. Distortions are imperative for any species to survive because the full contrast of the true objective reality would simply be too powerful and almost definitely maddening for any sentient creature that has not yet evolved to process reality far more efficiently then humanity.
Generally speaking truth and enlightenment are synonyms.
I think of truth as our attempt to grasp small distorted pieces of the one true objective reality. A reality impossible to be seen or understood in any verbatim since by the consciousness of a sentient being because of the simple fact that consciousness is a processing and the one true reality would no longer be the one true reality if processed or perceived by anything consciousness. Yet is till exists. It is it’s own dimension. A constant, real, but not corporeal, intangible object. It may become more tangible to us after some extensive biological, philosophical and technological evolution on the part of man kind but will never be fully grasped. We can only hope to beg for scraps from the table of the one true objective reality even as an exponentially evolved species.
That is to say all we can ever hope to do is to lift the veil slightly higher, we can only move in finite ways in a consciously perceived reality and the true reality exists in pure and definite infinity. The veil of truth will, can and always will lift forever upward, infinitely fast and slow at the same time as is the outcome of trying to reach the end of any infinite.
 But even a tiny amount of truth can in the right place and context and minds can cause tangible and measurable change in our realities, perceived truth, and knowledge it divulges is finite in our minds. Our minds are not THE REALITY but rather A REALITY. A conceptually impure reality. THE REALITY, the objective reality, is the simple concept of the infinite and absolute truth.
For now we must work with the kind of knowledge, and truth that can be installed into our minds storage centers. This is because our minds have limited hardware and very crude and antiquated software that was methodically tailored by evolution to do very specific things in a very specific environment. Technologically is forcing a singularity effect on our evolution. It’s quick assimilation with our species exponentiates our volume like a snowball.
Technology also drastically increases the amount of art we are capable of creating and how many people we can share it with. Art can be thought of as a persons custom coded mental script which an individual creates to transfer meaning, concepts knowledge and most importantly emotion (which almost never adheres to an easily defined system or protocol set) from one sentient individual to another in a way that the individual feels is most efficient in that moment. Unlike computers Humans often have a tendency to see meaning when they are able to successfully transfer all of these things using abstract means, metaphor or allegory. Humans innately feel meaning in the decoding of one another’s communications and often the more cryptic the language it is written in the more meaning is perceived.
 Even direct communication between two sentient being of any kind is a philosophically jolting concept when dissected. It is the conversion of a thought originating in one brain into a format or media which can then be perceived by another conscious being and reinterpreted as a thought closely or even perfectly resembling the thought originating in the other being mind and only if done successfully. The reason this copy of data is not usually verbatim is the the distortion caused by its time not spent inside a sentient mind. To reach the other being it must first be converted to a format or to use current computer media terminology, a codec. Good artists are able to code their own codec which is often encrypted with metaphor or diluted by the abstract so that it can be uncompressed by the receiving sentient being. As humans we enjoy watching this compression and derive meaning from it yet often want the uncompressed file or in this case thought to be a verbatim copy. However, often times the tangible, protocolistic, and logical are not the most efficient way to explain an emotion or thought. If you think of our art or portrayed ideas as media containing on a thought or file bound by a codec, metaphorically speaking you can think of even the analog, such as cassettes, books or ancient writing on a wall in the same terms. The issue is with all media, once written or recorded they lose something in translation. A codec is defined in the dictionary as simply compression. When we transfer our thoughts to paper or a hard drive we are in a sense compressing them even when being literal, metaphor adds deeper compression. Compression can cause perceptional filters, which in turn can lead to data loss. Human’s have yet to create a lossless codec for their thoughts and they never will because there are no perfect copies of anything due, once again, to the nature of infinity and reality.
Copying thoughts or emotions is even more tricky. This is because the corporeal world is not nearly as an efficient data transfer link as an Ethernet cable. Reality and the corporeal world were not built to transfer information from one human brain to another with the deliberate intent and purpose that an Ethernet cable is created for networking, likewise through evolution and without deliberate intent or even conscious control or effort we adapted to our reality and the corporeal world.
As humans we have always attempted to transfer our thoughts using the environment and physics provided to us by reality as best we could with the vastly limiting factor of perception pushing against us. Eventually will enable us to build communication advanced enough to be described as a “trans-cerebral link” to a worldwide consciousness. We will not only merge our consciousness with machine but with each other. We will absorb each others consciousness evenly and in perfect symmetry.
I am writing this on software called notepad and although the medium for storage is still crude, being limited by an ancient written language composed of two dimensional characters, I can attach picture or video to help portray my point. This is only the start of our technological merging and metamorphosis and although I don’t believe a technological singularity is imminent, it may be necessary for this process to complete fully. Technology has and always will grow exponentially or at the least rapidly.
 Of course there are those that would slow this progress, the fundamentalist, the religious, those who cling to a false sense of permanence and illusion of a reality with easily digestible and deliberate order, like a scared toddler to their mother. They are those who fear above all else, change, progress, and evolution. Ironically, this fear was installed as a fail safe by the software called evolution. During our formation and inception as a species our formative years as a species so to speak, circumstances were much less safe and we were psychologically molded for a more violent and harsh world where evolution once ruled ruthlessly and tyrannically on our planet. At this time repetition and structure were necessary for survival. Repetition and structure can unfortunately lead to humans having a tragically distorted perception of reality. This distortion was helpful for basic survival but is now also bleeds its distortion into our ability to perceive the one true reality with at least some relative clarity.
 When I was much younger I identified as an atheist. This is because I had literally convinced myself, that my human brain which i was vastly overestimating in efficiency and power, undeveloped at a young age and most importantly filtered through the powerful dilution of truth caused by human perception, was undoubtedly reliable enough to take and convert an infinitely complicated concept and reduce it to a “Yes or No” answer. When I grew older i realized that this kind of simplistic binary thinking is almost never a satisfying or in my opinion correct answer to any profound philosophical question. All these questions must be answered on spectrum.
And this question that Socrates, Plato, and Descartes struggled with. A question that the all the great philosophers wrote about but never agreed upon among themselves or with themselves. I thought I was smarter than them. Or rather I convinced myself I thought this so as to shield myself from the profound existential confusion that was plaguing me before I had had the time to mentally process these profound concepts. As a defense mechanism my answer to the question is there a god, in any sense not just the local and contemporary christian notion of god, my answer was simply “NO”.
For me and many others this simplistic absolutist thinking is comforting when applied to a concept so mind-numingly complex as god. It could be compared to forcing a jigsaw puzzle together with glue in the incorrect sequence. This thinking is fundamentally flawed as most all absolutists statements are. They are equally flawed in logic for the the devout of faith and the adamant and confident atheist. Most answers to profound questions and perhaps any question at all, can be found somewhere on a spectrum. These spectrum are most assuredly not two dimensional spectrum but spectrum of infinite dimension.
Truth is gained by knowledge seeking. Knowledge seeking is accomplished internally but requires external input as a source or catalyst. At this time the most abundant source and therefore probably the biggest catalyst of knowledge seeking and by extension truth humanity has at its disposal, is the internet. As the internet evolves, which it will along side humanity while slowly merging like two parallel lines with the same destination, into one. First, truth will become exponentially accessible both in quantity and geography. Later, as the internet develops and most importantly the methods or mediums for transfer become more advanced and are able to convey data converted from one mind to another more efficiently. This will increase the human capacity for absorbing truth exponentially and most likely our brains biology and corporeal hardware which serves as the framework for our consciousness, will begin to adapt forming a consciousness with more storage capacity and a broader band for the transfer of ideas and knowledge.
A fairly simple theory but with huge implications. Our merge with technology has the potential to destroy us as a species and will undoubtedly damage us, but I believe this is only a phase for humanity. Another change to adapt to. The internet simply connects us all and we feverishly work to perfect its efficiency because we crave the transfer and/or communication of data and thoughts at a very primal and instinctual level. It was this drive for communication that allowed us to collaborate, which enabled technology and logic and finally enabled humans to examine our reality with an objectivity any species not as capable of efficient communication, would not be capable of. The internet, a mirror to a new born, will force us to finally look at ourselves as a whole, as a species, with increasing objectivity and a fading ego.
Ego and subjectivity are concepts that only exist in our mind and only effect the true reality through proxy. These concepts are buffers, they are our intellectual safety blankets that find relevance only in a contemporary reality that is fast dying at the hands of technology and scientific understanding.
The internet, not in its current form of course, but a future internet that has only in common the networking and recording of human thought among an entire race, will show us a clearer and clearer picture of ourselves as communication efficiency grows and ego dies in deliberate polar coloration. We have only been able to finally see humanities reflection very recently in a clear enough and distortion free definition that we understand that it is us who is staring back. We may become started by seeing our crude forming pockmarked and blemished face at first and in our insecurity we may stumble, but if I am right only for a time, because I have come to believe that humans, in general, want to be good. I believe our innate love and empathy that has both burdened and sustained us since the dawn of man, and has always fought against the lower instincts like greed and jealousy. When we are finally connected and merged in our consciousness and free of the illusion of self, we will be forced to evolve and those instincts will become unnecessary.
It’s the imperfect link between us, the lossy codec, the trans-cerebral communication, filtered by our greatest enemy; perception, that causes us to fear, and this fear causes us to destroy and hate one another. We once needed this fear, it was a fail-safe to protect us from incorrect or corrupted data that could harm us. Our instincts tell us to run away from incomplete data because the remaining data, in its absence, could turn out to be harmful. This is an ancient instinct, a lower instinct, left over from earlier forms of life. This instinct is necessary for a frog or a deer, however somewhere, at some point in history, arguably the exact point at which we became human, we began to develop an advanced instinct for exploration. An instinct pushing us to gain information, not hide from it, even if it could turn out to be dangerous information. This changed everything. It lead to tools, civilization, science and finally computers and the internet. Technology. Humanity’s greatest achievement and tool for understanding pieces of THE reality and not just OUR reality.
Once we are all connected and once we can gaze at our self as one single compounded entity in the mirror that technology, the internet and advanced communication provides us. We can finally process our identity as a species fully. The internet will enable us to remove the clinging useless tumors of distortion, fear and ego using the advanced communication the future internet will provide us, as our saber. The perceptions that are solely responsible for racism, homophobia, classism, for every war in human history and all forms of fear and oppression will finally be destroyed. And the human race will finally be free, a new being, no longer human but better than human. Transcended. Assimilated in comfortable and perfect union with our child. Our child technology, which our race and most likely all intelligent life throughout our universe has always been destined to create, misuse and if we are worthy, harness for transcendence and enlightenment.