Here’s the video recording of the Terasem Colloquium on Saturday, December 14, 2024.

This video is also on YouTube. I added subtitles only here, because at this moment transcription seems to work better on Substack than YouTube.

Speakers

See this post for more information about the speakers.

Beth Singler starts at 00:07:20.

Weaver Weinbaum starts at 00:37:25.

William Sims Bainbridge starts at 01:14:56.

Lincoln Cannon starts at 01:45:03.

Robert Geraci starts at 02:17:23.

Commentary

Like other Terasem Colloquia, this one was a very intense three-hours thought stream, packed with insightful talks and discussions. We explored recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cyberconsciousness, with a focus on big picture and spiritual implications. Among other things, we discussed the intersections of AI and the world's religions, new religious movements, the nature of consciousness and intelligence, preliminary strategies for digitally capturing human personalities, the parallels between religion and imaginative theories of reality like the simulation hypothesis, and emerging visions in theology and eschatology.

We announced the relaunch of Terasem's Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness and the latest issue of the Journal, now online at the new website terasemjournals.net. We have great plans for Journal. The Journal will have an Editorial Committee chaired by William Sims Bainbridge, and a light form of peer review.

Alan Kazlev couldn’t give a talk at the recent Terasem Colloquium, so we recorded this conversation instead.

The video is on YouTube. Unfortunately the audio quality on Alan’s side is poor due to a poor internet connection. The transcript generated by Substack is better than the transcript generated by YouTube.

I first met Alan about 20 years ago when I wrote to him to discuss his awesome project Orion’s Arm and the idea to create a virtual world based on Orion’s Arm.

Here's what I say about Orion’s Arm in my book “Futurist spaceflight meditations” [Prisco, 2021]:

Orion’s Arm, a collaborative project to imagine plausible interstellar futures, has produced a really spectacular science fictional universe. Besides published collections of short stories e.g. [Orion’s Arm 2014] and a novel [Bowers 2012], the project maintains a sprawling website at orionsarm dot com. The website includes an “Encyclopaedia Galactica” with thousands of entries and counting.

The Orion’s Arm project was started in 2000 by Alan Kazlev and Donna Hirsekorn, who “wanted stories set in a future which might really happen” [Orion’s Arm 2014]. I was involved in a project to create a virtual world based on Orion’s Arm. This project eventually stalled, but I hope others will continue it.

The Orion’s Arm universe, set ten thousand years from now, spans thousands of light years with countless worlds and space habitats. People range from “near baseline” to heavily modified humans with all sorts of body plans and embedded technology, including superhumans with extremely advanced augmentations and AI subsystems. Most people are virtual beings living as pure software.

Engineered wormholes are used for long distance interstellar hauls, but wormhole physics doesn’t allow using wormholes for time travel. A few alien civilizations have been found, but none advanced as humans. There are, however, clues that suggest very advanced alien civilizations that existed in the past.

Directed superhuman evolution has produced vast God-like beings with mega brains, internally connected by instantaneous wormhole links, which span star systems and light years. Only these beings can understand and create some extremely advanced technologies used in Orion’s Arm.

This short outline doesn’t even begin to do justice to the vast complexity of Orion’s Arm. Visit orionsarm dot com for much more. Or even better, participate in the project. I can promise that Orion’s Arm will give you awesome dreams and a burning enthusiasm for our interstellar future.

All that started with Alan’s adventurous mind!

The current issue of Terasem’s “Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology” includes a sneak preview of Alan’s forthcoming book (perhaps a series of books) titled “Machines of Loving Grace.” I can’t wait to read the rest! This conversation is mostly about the book.

The title of the book is inspired by Richard Brautigan’s immortal poem.

“I like to think (andthe sooner the better!)of a cybernetic meadow….where we are free of our laborsand joined back to nature,returned to our mammalbrothers and sisters,and all watched overby machines of loving grace.”

Richard Brautigan - All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

The Terasem Colloquium on July 7, 2024 explored old and new radically optimistic futurisms including Italian futurism, Russian and modern cosmism, extropy, and e/acc (the new kid on the futurist block).

Speakers: Riccardo Campa, Ben Goertzel, Robin Hanson, James Pethokoukis, Max More. See this post for more about the speakers.

This video is also on YouTube, with links to individual talks.

Of course we also discussed the ongoing acceleration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology (see Ben’s last book “The Consciousness Explosion: A Mindful Human's Guide to the Coming Technological and Experiential Singularity”) and, needless to say, politics and culture.

Cultural issues are paramount. We must find ways to recover the wildly optimistic culture that we had, for example, in the 1990s. The AI explosion could bring that optimism back, and good science fiction can help. Max closed with a recommendation to read the writings of Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci on cultural engineering. This cross-partisan reference suggests to me that petty partisan left/right politics has outlived its utility and must go.

Screenshots

On Feb. 19 I gave an online talk for Space Renaissance. I’m republishing the audio of the talk, with permission.

The video is on Space Renaissance YouTube channel.

I wish to thank Adriano Autino and Sabine Heinz for a very interesting conversation, and I wish to invite all listeners to join Space Renaissance.

I elaborated on the cultural issues discussed in my book “Futurist spaceflight meditations” (2021). Then I discussed the long term future of space expansion and elaborated on its spiritual implications.

This was a blunt and provocative talk, with the gloves off. I guess I should apologize to the authors whose books I called BS, but the thing is, those books are well researched and written but the decel program they defend is really BS, and we must say so. Occupy Mars!

Here’s the slide presentation I used.

Now Substack podcasts have transcripts. I’m impressed by the advances in audio transcription that we have seen in the last couple of years. Today’s transcription systems can even understand my very thick foreign accent when I’m speaking in English! I guess the ongoing explosion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology must be involved. I think transcripts are important. Often I don’t have the patience to listen to a long episode, but I like the option of reading quickly through a transcript to know what was said.

We recorded this podcast using X Spaces. We used this tool to download the audio file from X. To use it, install the dependencies and you may have to change the name of the browser (Opera, in the script) to the name of the browser that you normally use for X.

Intro and summary written by Giulio Prisco :

Well, there’s no need to decentralize the cosmic operating system because it is already decentralized, but the title that I’ve given to this conversation is nice and puts together the two topics that we are discussing.

What is the cosmic operating system? It came out in a discussion that Stella R. Magnet and I had last year. The cosmic operating system is the main character of my new book titled “Irrational mechanics: Narrative sketch of a futurist science & a new religion”, which is still a draft.

I should summarize the book but I can’t do so because the book is already a summary. I’ll just highlight a few main points.

The cosmic operating system is another name for the fundamental laws of nature and also another name for what has been called Mind at Large, or God by any other name. If the fundamental laws of nature are simple, then the cosmic operating system is a simple little program. But if the fundamental laws of nature are very complex, and I think this is the case, then the cosmic operating system is a very complex program that thinks and acts with intelligence.

A good metaphor is that the cosmic operating system is like a superintelligent Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is solving a hugely complex optimization problem or playing a hugely complex game that requires sophisticated thinking. There are many solutions, and these solutions are multiple histories of the universe that exist in parallel.

We are part of the cosmic operating system. That is, you and I and everyone else, and animals and aliens and AIs and all that, are semi-autonomous agents of the cosmic operating system that communicate and act with free will within constraints. The cosmic operating system mostly acts through us in a decentralized way.

Irrational mechanics is a name for a new science that extends the science of today just like irrational numbers extend rational numbers into the much bigger set of real numbers. I’ll confess that I call this new science irrational mechanics also to annoy the ultra-rationalist bureaucrats of science and the politically correct crowd.

Irrational mechanics is big enough to deal with things like faster than light travel to the stars, time travel, the paranormal, cosmic evolution, and various concepts of life after death.

My book is not a treatise on science or philosophy, but a narrative sketch like those that explain the background world of a science fiction work.

In the last chapter, titled “Religion for Spaceship Earth,” I say that the cosmic operating system wants us (and our AI mind children) to expand first to the planets and moons of our solar system and then to the stars. This is our cosmic destiny and duty.

Stella brought up parallels with the simulation hypothesis in addition to The Kybalion, a Hermetic text published in 1912, by anonymous authors called the Three Initiates. We discussed these parallels (and differences) and other parts of Giulio’s book.

Then Stella told the story of our old Space Coop / Space Decentral project to build a decentralized space agency. We feel that this project can and should be revived, but should be based on decentralized, peer-to-peer, collaboration infrastructure — with lower emphasis on developing smart contracts.

Giulio mentioned the Secure Scuttlebutt project as a promising start that hasn’t yet achieved technical maturity. Unfortunately, one of the main developers has left the project.

Stella mentioned two interesting peer-to-peer projects in development: Keet and Radicle.

Ben Goertzel & friends have organized a Beneficial AGI Summit & Unconference (BGI24) in Panama City, Feb. 27 - Mar. 1 2024, + online. See Ben’s post.

I’m honored to be the second speaker in the pre-event series, after Ben. Listen to my conversation with Esther Galfalvi on the future of AI. The video is published in the SingularityNET YouTube channel.

Topics: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), whether machines can think and have subjective experiences, consciousness & self & superconsciousness, the future, space expansion, our duty to our mind children, cosmic evolution, and our duty to the universe. Also, why do people fear AI? But the real question is, who wants us to fear AI and why?

Quick answer: the bad guys want to fear AI (and many other things) so we are unhappy and desperate and they can grab our votes and our money. Say NO.

AI is part of my cosmist worldview. See my essay “Bats and bits” published in Terasem’s Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness (Vol. 11, Issue 1 - 2023), to be further edited and published as a chapter of my next book.

Here’s the first Turing Church podcast episode of 2024. Happy new year! 2024 promises to be a great year for spaceflight. In 2024 we could make important advances toward the cosmist dream of space expansion.

This podcast episode was first published in 2019. It was the pilot (and alas the last) episode of a media project called Maximum Jailbreak. I started the project with my friends Stellar Magnet, Patrick Donovan, and other participants in the Space Decentral project.

Maximum Jailbreak: We want to break free of Earth’s gravity and go out there among the stars. We want to start now. We want to go back to the Moon to stay, then to Mars and other planets and moons in the solar system, and then to the stars. We want, we can, and we must.

First we looked for a catchy, inspiring and unique name for our project. It was Stellar Magnet who thought of “Maximum Jailbreak,” the title of a perceptive 2013 essay by Benedict Singleton.

Singleton’s essay is also published in “#ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader” (2014), Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS Vol. 67, 2014), and “Outer Space as Extreme Scenario” by V2. See also the review “Benedict Singleton: The Accelerationist Cosmism of Nikolai Fedorov.”

Singleton’s essay starts with the Space Shuttle disasters “which understandably nixed enthusiasm for the enterprise as a whole” and a picture that shows pieces of Columbia debris. But then: “Now, though, it seems that the action just went underground for a while, a brief retreat to regroup and reassess.” Singleton goes on to present an open, inclusive narrative of spaceflight and cosmism.

I loved the “Maximum Jailbreak” name at first sight and wrote a review of Singleton’s essay.

Singleton elaborates on the ideas of Nikolai Fedorov and other Russian cosmists like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, noting that “cosmism’s foundational gesture was to conceive of the earth as a trap. Its duty was therefore to understand the duty of philosophy, economics and design to be the creation of means to escape it.”

“This could be regarded as a jailbreak at the maximum possible scale, a heist in which the human species could steal itself from the vault of the Earth.”

We contacted Singleton, who graciously gave his blessing to the project and agreed to participate as a guest in this episode.

Our old Maximum Jailbreak website has disappeared. This episode is still online on Soundcloud, but I thought to republish it here in case it disappears.

The original description of the episode is: “In the pilot episode, our hosts Patrick Donovan and Giulio Prisco talk with Dr. Benedict Singleton about breaking free of Earth’s gravity to go out there among the stars, in a philosophical journey through design history, space history, and more!”

The Terasem Colloquium on December 14, 2023, explored recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine consciousness.

Speakers: Ben Goertzel, Stefano Vaj, Mika Johnson, Blake Lemoine, Bill Bainbridge, Vitaly Vanchurin.

This video is also on YouTube.

Ben Goertzel’s talk starts at 00:07:06.

Stefano Vaj’s talk starts at 00:36:45.

Mika Johnson’s talk starts at 01:00:48.

Blake Lemoine’s talk starts at 01:28:50.

Bill Bainbridge’s talk starts at 01:58:20.

Vitaly Vanchurin’s talk starts at 02:30:16.

A related issue of Terasem’s Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness (Vol. 11, Issue 1 - 2023) has been published, with articles by Bill Bainbridge, Mika Johnson / Theta Noir, Stefano Vaj, and myself.

This episode of the Turing Church podcast is a conversation between Giulio Prisco and co-host Derik Schwalen on Elon Musk and his recent biography by Walter Isaacson.

Summary: we unrepentantly, unapologetically praise Elon Musk for his relentless effort to make humanity multi-planetary and develop enabling technology along the way. We realize that, of course, he can only be a flawed person like everyone else, but what Elon is doing is more important than other things. Occupy Mars!

See also Giulio’s recent post with thoughts on Elon Musk and a review of Isaacson’s biography.

We recorded this episode from Discord using Craig, a voice channel recording bot for Discord. If you want to participate in future episodes, join our Discord if you haven’t joined already, and stay tuned for the date/time.

This episode comes with a raw transcript generated automatically by Substack, unedited. I (Giulio) was reluctant to use automatic transcription because I have a thick foreign accent and I thought the system wouldn’t transcribe my words well, but this transcript seems almost good enough.

This episode of the Turing Church podcast is a conversation between Giulio Prisco and Stellar Magnet.

We start with UFOs/UAPs. See “ET, please come and teach us irrational mechanics. And may UAPs save our culture from terminal boredom and senility.”

Perhaps UFOs/UAPs are operated by aliens, time travelers, visitors from other planes of reality? Or something like that?

Then we discuss all sorts of weird things from otherwordly physics to the need for new religions.

Giulio thinks Stellar, born on the same day a few years after the death of Philip K. Dick, might well be the reincarnation of PKD.

In the picture below we are represented by two rhinos, our totem animals. To Giulio, rhinos are ancient, mysterious, spiritual, powerful, beautiful. He’s been in love with rhinos since he can remember. Now the universe is encouraging Stellar to become another rhino lover.

We recorded this episode from Discord using Craig, a voice channel recording bot for Discord. If you want to participate in future episodes, join our Discord if you haven’t joined already, and stay tuned for the date/time.