The Human Individual Singularity

When I was a kid I always had ideas that I thought were great. Such as possibilities to build a "perpetuum mobile". Later I learned that these ideas were already expressed by other people, and often were already refuted. When I got older I still had ideas I considered profound, only to learn once more they were expressed in the past, and better than I did. I learned to not be disappointed by this, but rather see it as a way of a kind of connection, that some ideas are part of culture and maybe civilization, and get expressed time and time anew.
Of all thoughts I had there way only one that,  later in life, I never found expressed in any book, encyclopedia or other media. Needless to say, all my life is based on this one thought. It was something that occurred to me when I was 16 or 17 years old. I call it the "human individual singularity". What is the "human individual singularity? The (non-human) "singularity" is, apart from other things, a concept in computer science and artificial intelligence. I haven't read much about it, so what I know about it might be wrong, but, for this text, it doesn't have to be exact, because in this text only my interpretation of it is needed to illustrate a point that will follow.
The singularity, as I understand it, is the point when an computer programmed artificial intelligence (AI) reaches the point that it can make itself smarter or design programs that are smarter than itself; and these programs then design programs even smarter, or the AI  becomes smarter once more, setting off a chain reaction that enables AIs to become infinitely smart.

Now what is the human individual singularity?
For it you need to realise the following things:
1. As humans, we have sapience, intellect, reasoning: we are smart.
2. It is of (huge) advantage to be smart.
3. We can raise our intellect, knowledge, mind by several methods such as education, contemplation, reflection.
4. We can use these methods to think up even better methods of raising our intellect and reasoning abilities.
Thus:
5. If we educate ourselves, if we learn about things, If we use our intellect to improve our intellect, our rationality to improve our rationality, we will get on a path to almost infinite intelligence; at least we will always get higher and higher with our mind and reasoning capabilities.

So how does one improve one's intellect? The easiest way is education, learning about topics, reading science books and so on. But on its own it's also the least fruitful. Better is contemplation, reasoning and pondering on the things you learned. Also reflecting on things. The more abstract and rational your approach is, the farther you get; this brings us to
6. The best way is to reflect on reflecting; to contemplate and ponder on the ability to reason and think itself; reaching a type of "meta-intelligence"
Thus:
7. Coming to the realization its best to use reason and intelligence not just on common "intellectual" topics but on everything you encounter in life; reflecting on everything and pondering about it all day, and every day of the week.

This is the idea of the human individual singularity. It's your decision if you want to walk on this path.

No comments:

Post a Comment