Beyond the Material
March 23, 2008
I’ve been reading a book suggested to me by a Rabbi whose class I’ve been going to lately called World Mask. It’s very good and like any book describing a non-material view of the universe, it’s mind bending in the extreme.
I noticed an interesting parallel this afternoon with another mind-bender of a book I read a while back called The Singularity Is Near. Ray Kurzweil, the futurist author of Singularity who’s built quite a following for himself, describes a future based on the observation that technology increases at an exponential, rather than linear rate. Ultimately, he thinks that an upcoming burst of technological advancement (AI, plus nano technology etc) is going to, to paraphrase, “spread intelligence throughout the universe” by converting existences’ matter into a part of an intelligent uber-AI system where every bit of matter is part of the all-knowing whole.
The weird parallel? In many ways, one aspect of Judaism’s view of existence, the non-material aspects of which World Mask delves into, is that that’s already true.
Update: A lot of people think Kurz is drastically underestimating how tough it is to figure out the brain. Good summary of the argument in wired here.
