- Just as our technology is helping us to move beyond scarcity, we find a similar analogue in psychological growth to integral stages of consciousness: a momentous leap away from fear-based motivations, derived from perceptions of personal scarcity and lack, and toward motivations of increasing freedom, abundance, and fullness.
- The vision and values of integral consciousness are naturally inclined to seek a “bigger picture” view of the world, to include and defragment the entirety of our own interior experience, to embrace the totality of existence in a seamless union of opposites: subject and object, individual and collective, part and whole, emptiness and form, etc.
- It is interesting that, at a time when our technological achievements have never been greater, our understanding of consciousness remains a complete and total mystery to the vast majority of the world’s leading philosophers, scientists, and engineers, most of whom attempt to explain away our subjective consciousness as the epiphenomena of objective material processes.
- The spiritual traditions, meanwhile, have much to say about the nature of consciousness, but much of this understanding remains embedded in a pre-rational understanding of the universe and our place within it, and is overly laden with mythologies and metaphysics that cannot possibly survive modern and postmodern scrutiny.
- Thus, the conscious singularity refers to both the emergence of a new psychological stage of consciousness (integral consciousness) , as well as a more comprehensive understanding of consciousness itself, based on an elegant integration of science, psychology, and post-metaphysical spirituality.
Why is this important?
- For one, if we want to create a better future, we need to understand what motivates people — why we make the decisions that we make, and how we can be helped to make better, more compassionate, more sustainable decisions for the sake of us all.
- The world is currently facing a series of crises that only a truly global perspective can begin to respond to, and integral consciousness offers the most accurate global understanding of our world and the mess we currently find ourselves in.
- As we work on potentially revolutionary projects like artificial intelligence, it is usually taken for granted that these intelligent machines will somehow automagically achieve some degree of interior consciousness.
- But as it currently stands, while a computational intelligence may be able to beat me in chess, my laptop is not actually aware of the fact that it has beat me in chess.
- It is one thing to create artificial intelligence, and quite another to create digital consciousness.
- Are mathematical algorithms sufficient to produce the “inner light” of perceptions, impulses, emotions, symbols, and concepts that act as vehicles of interior consciousness?
- Perhaps, but first we need to know what consciousness actually is.
- Interior consciousness cannot be reduced to the chaotic commotion of exterior processes.
- Subjectivity is as fundamental to the universe as objective mathematics (which, interestingly, can only be seen through the medium of interior experience).
- It is not an accidental byproduct of evolution.
- It is not the fever dream fantasy of a twitchy nervous system.
- It is not a ghostly hallucination within the machinery of space/time.
- It is the empty and eternal expanse at the center of this and every other moment, where space and time slide effortlessly across its frictionless sheen.
- Consciousness is the ultimate and inescapable singularity at the beginning and end of all things — a singularity so fundamentally singular, its plural remains forever unknown.
Post-Metaphysics (The Future of Consciousness) was originally published in Extreme Life Goals on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.