The Endpoints and the Connections …
The traditional view of the “living” world is that of organisms inhabiting it, while they interact with each other and the environment to produce the “buzz” of life. Each organism is an entity and humans along with all other animals, understand the world around them from the perspective of the “me” or “I”. Every plant and every animal has a rudimentary consciousness and the greatest display of this consciousness is in us “humans”.
As humans have progressed over the times the conscious part became stronger and soon was able to overcome our animal selves. Our actions were determined more by our thoughts and less by our instincts. Although there has always been a glorification of the “instinctive” persona, the cogs and wheels of this world moved mostly to the tunes of “discussions” and “exchanges of thoughts”. Our corporate culture is the best example of an area where people with foresight and networking skills are preferred over the “raw” types.
However now the ways of the “living” will change. Before the advent of computers and the Internet our thoughts mostly lasted as long as we did. Except the charismatic leaders and people with “reputations”, almost every body along with their ideas were forgotten after a few years post their demise. But now our thoughts live – in hard-disks, Google accounts , Facebook , blogs and what not. The electronic media is rife with ideas and thoughts. Although mostly in a disorganised mass of digital information – our thoughts have finally found avenues to live longer than our bodies.
So let us examine this situation from a fresh perspective. We have always perceived thoughts as extensions of the person. That is because the person came first and then his thoughts. However now as our thoughts have learnt to survive beyond the individual – the thoughts are eventually going to come before the person. That is because as more of our thoughts get trapped by the immortality offered by our digital toys, they will eventually cluster and form strong “lines of thought”. And every new person born will more likely than not – fall on one of these lines. Thus we will come to this world – attach ourselves to the “thought”, work for the “thought” and then leave some of us in the “thought” as our physical selves dissolved in death.
Connections are Humans !
In the new world the thoughts will live and the people will die. The nerves in their brains will provide temporary vaults for these thoughts. Some of the minds may become the “labs” for a “line of thought”. Other minds may just help in making the “line” stronger. Eventually, if we have complete convergence of our mental and digital selves – the thoughts will become the “real” living beings more alive and longer lived than the mortal humans.
If we ever manage to produce artificial intelligence – we will make sure that we will become “unnecessary” in the long run. The beauty of artificial intelligence will be its exponential nature of evolution. Humans have had to evolve physically to become “more intelligent”. Our unit of “intelligence’ is our brain and its bound by the skull and the hardware inside it. There is really no such limit for an “artificially intelligent” being. It will be able to evolve exponentially from generation to generation. Eventually it might not need any “generations” to evolve.
If we combine the above concept with the the concept of immortal thought – we can start getting the picture of the new “way of life”. Our minds and brains will become the connections and the thoughts themselves will become the endpoints. The strongest “line of thought” will become the God of our existence. So omnipresent and inherently potent that no single human or “thought” can overcome it. Hopefully this “line of thought” will include the requirement of human existence even after the “artificial” life is created. Otherwise we may be headed for a slow but sure extinction !
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