Kickstarter underway for Essays From the Universe Experiencing Itself

 

Our Kickstarter is underway for our next collection: Essays From the Universe Experiencing Itself.

This is unlike any of our previous collections, as it is not explicitly about Pandeism (though it is explicitly about many other things).

Is Reality a Simulation?

Our brilliant friend Antonin Tuynman has recently put together a quite masterfully assembled anthology of articles on the question of Simulation Hypothesis -- the proposition that our Universe is in fact possibly simply a simulation being run on the system of somebody else's Universe.  With contributions from Dante Rosati, Tim Gross, Knuje Mapson, Eva Deli, Alex Vikoulov, Donald King, Sean Byrne, Dirk Bruere, Matt Swayne and, naturally, Antonin Tuynman -- it is available in print form via Lulu.com, and in electronic form via Amazon.com.

And here is the first page of the Pandeism chapter -- which chapter actually covers a great deal of ground beyond Pandeism -- love to see how it plays out across the printed page!!

Is Intelligence an Algorithm?

I've recently read Is Intelligence an Algorithm? by Antonin Tuynman -- an excellent book with many pandeistic overtones.

Tuynman brings two gifts to bear on this topic -- a creative mind capable of making insightful connections, and a facility with communicative language with which to explain these connections in the most fluid of terms. Combining these, this book does an outstanding job of introducing ideas like the progression of complexity through stages both observed and rationally projected to come in the future, of the cognitive processes which arise during these steps, and of the reasoning processes which arise from these cognitive processes. Notably, the idea of the fundamental physics of our Universe inevitably bringing forth these levels of complexity (and perhaps being intended to do so) is a key thought in Pandeism. 

He dives therefrom into straightening out dizzying further implications of how these might manifest in the coming technology of artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness (especially in a potential quantum computing environment). Throughout, the book ties together the ideas of a world class selection of theorists on the grounds of reality and consciousness, and rises up to be much greater than the sum of its parts.

Technovedanta 2.0 -- a review

Technically, this book is titled “Transcendental Metaphysics of Pancomputational Panpsychism,” but the top lip of the cover reads “Technovedanta 2.0.”

Firstly, I note that, after my own heart, author Antonin Tuynman suffuses his work with poetry -- I have especially fallen in love with one titled “The Quagmire of ontological disambiguation” -- this is a poem I intend to pursue, even!!

But moving to the heart of the work, the fundamental thought underlying this rich volume is the possible nature of our Universe as a sort of self-aware cosmic computer -- in a way that scientifically (if not strictly technologically) completes the circle of Vedic thought. The savvy reader might well wonder, by the way, why I am beginning with what is actually the second book in a series. This is Kismet. Pure chance. An arbitrary function of this title happening to appeal to me (as a pandeistic thinker) before I saw any others.

The author speaks with an expansive and lively vocabulary and conceptual fluency of thoughts that reflect what has rattled around in my own mind for some while -- of philosophizing, of mastery arising from the will to become a master, of the remarkable premise that Consciousness itself arises from a self-sustaining feedback loop. He gamely coins the term Infinityism to frame the conceptual boundaries of the inconceivable, preferring to refer to God as “transfinite,” a term which he notes was yet undefined when the religions were casting their conceptions of the Divine. He identifies the many (and growing) routes by which we are ever-increasingly bound by expressions of a collective subconscious, which is itself but one aspect of an all-encompassing underlying consciousness. To those familiar with the post-Enlightenment idea of Pandeism, I need not spell out the significance of this line of thought to that theory.

Tuynman draws from a diverse array of philosophical forbears, from Hegel to Alfred North Whitehead to Buckminster Fuller to Terrance McKenna -- not all of whom are recognized as philosophers (he titles Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, for example, as "contemporary technoprophets"), but all of whom can be recognized as such when their observations are set in Tuynman's grand context. His analysis of the autopoietic is auto-poetic (just as his poetry is profoundly analytic). It feels as if he is consistently pulling the covers of reality back to reveal intuitively realized mechanisms of our Universe from the most modern concepts of science, and then tying these back, again and again, to some of the most ancient philosophical ideas. He does not blur the lines between these frames of thought; he demonstrates that the lines are an illusion, a construct dissolved simply by turning to observe from a different angle.

Like the courses of an excellent meal, getting deeper and deeper into this book makes you feel fuller and fuller of useful information, and yet it is tasty enough that though you finish feeling satisfied, yet knowing you could have another plate of the same again tomorrow.