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  By Steve Dayton Jan. 6, 2006 Dr. Raymond Kurzweil (pronounced KURS-WHILE) is as smart as they come. A Genius? If he isn’t one, the definition needs to be revised. (Read His Wikipedia Bio). If you want the short version of his resume, please allow me: 1) MIT Graduate in Humanities and Engineering 2) Won the 1999 National Medal of Technology 3) Member of The Inventors Hall of Fame 4) Has Received Eleven Honorary Doctorates 5) Started and Owns Nine Businesses in Technology 6) Engineer of the Year 7) Inventor of the Year 8) Invented Optical Character Recognition Technology 9) Invented Print to Speech Technology 10) Invented the Flat-Bed Scanner 11)
Invented Speech Recognition Technology 12) Builds the World’s Best Musical Synthesizers 13) My Friend Barry Upshaw Thinks He is Brilliant Bill Gates, another pretty smart cookie you may have heard of, called Ray Kurzweil “the best at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” I cannot comment on Dr. Kurzweil’s religious upbringing or whether he has ever studied the Bible,
because my brief (and lazy) Google searches revealed nothing along these lines. Questions like these would be interesting ones to pose to this soft-spoken, intellectual giant—his email address
is ray@singularity.com, but I’m certain the answers would be of no real consequence, because in 2005 Kurzweil authored his own work of Biblical proportions called The Singularity is Near. In strictly evolutionary terms, I went “Ape-Shit” over this incredible, visionary novel. Without even a
trace of the tiresome, pedantic sarcasm, wit, and irony that you may be familiar with from my earlier U-K writings, I hereby inform you with the straightest and soberest of faces that this man Kurzweil — in a mere 487 pages — redefined my entire concept of Life, the Universe, and Everything (my apologies to Douglas Adams). No… even this is an understatement. HE ROCKED MY WORLD. Not in the sense that he barged into my burned-out brain with the Fire Hose of Faith or Physics and washed away everything I’d ever believed in… a much better analogy would be that I’d spent 44 years on Earth being convinced I was a stowaway on the Planet Titanic, when all of a sudden Captain Kurzweil enters my dark cabin, throws open a porthole, and points smilingly at the beautiful lights of a Manhattan skyline scarcely 40 miles away.
This extraordinary book has already been reviewed by much better (paid) scribes than I, so rather than bore you with redundant (however fascinating) details I will spend the next few paragraphs simply waxing poetic on WHAT IT ALL MEANS to me—inspired by a transcendent context courtesy of the modern prophet Raymond Kurzweil. The Human Brain is the Masterpiece of Evolution thus far; the highest, artistic expression of a 12 Billion year-old Process: a process infused and suffused with a Creativity so profound and so far beyond our ken that we—as its naïve, inquisitive “tendrils, simply kneel in awe and reverently call whoever or whatever started it God. Yes, humanity is indeed the first and only real progeny of the stars… the super-heated engines of Reality. We are alone in our vast Universe, at least with regards to biological life at an advanced stage. Our convoluted lumps of dense, grey, electrochemical matter are what it has all been about since the first pico-second after The Big Bang. The Process has never been guided by a script, however. No script or score could ever capture or contain a Shakespearean drama of such scope… the improvisational jazz of Evolution. Just like a painter contemplating the blank
canvas, the Universe-as-Artist was perfectly free to create — to Become — virtually anything… but wait, is the painter really “free?” Does the canvas itself not have its peculiar texture, its own warp and weft? Does the brush not have a certain length and stiffness to its bristles? Do the paints themselves not have their own textures and mix only in certain ways, and if mixed haphazardly do they not often decay into brown and drab? Present-day Science is nothing more than a child’s peek into the toolbox of the Universe… a probing, curious finger dipped into glorious pools of color without a clue as to the origins of substances so wondrous and versatile. In no manner whatsoever does this imply that these answers will remain out of our
reach. Death does not open a gateway to these answers, as most religions would have us believe, because biological death itself is the primary tool of The Process… a humble and poignant “stepping-aside” of the old growth in favor of new, aggressive, grasping “vines” of progress. Nothing of any consequence is lost in biological death, any more than the falling brown leaves betray the tree. The old simply bequeath their genetic trust funds onto the new, and The Process continues. The Process will arrive at the answers eventually, because Knowledge of Self is what defines and drives The Process. We are merely sleepy, half-open eyes in the Great Awakening of God. Collectively we are God’s tendrils… the outstretched hands
of the Great Inquiry… the only question of any real importance. Along with every other lifeform on this planet, from one-celled creatures to our direct ancestors the apes, we are — in every sense — God’s body, mind, and blood. The entire human anatomy is merely a vehicle and support system for the human brain: a functional and creative work of sublime genius, completely adequate for preserving and protecting the greatest work of biological art in history from the rigors of survival on a ball of dust floating in the cruel vacuum of space. Why do we look like we do? Because we survived. Could we have looked differently? Of course, but something had to come first in the inexorable race towards Intelligence. There is fierce competition in every habitat on Earth, but to ask why reptiles aren’t walking upright alongside homo-sapiens is to misunderstand the nature of the contest. We were first… not better, and not chosen, any more than the lucky weed sprouting from the serendipitous crack in the sidewalk is better than the dormant seed trapped beneath unyielding concrete. The human skull is merely a glorious womb for the brain, the tough and nurturing amnion of a biological “fetus” imbued with astounding precociousness and intellect. What I had never realized until reading Kurzweil’s book was that the impending “birth” of the human brain has already occurred. The Good News that Kurzweil preaches is that, after approximately 12 Billion years, Nature’s work is essentially complete. Like the slaves who built the great cathedrals and pyramids, the ponderously slow pace of the brain’s biological evolution has finally resulted in self-supporting, elegant structures that can now point us quickly in the direction of our destiny: the stars. These structures are called Transistors … in a completely literal sense they are the logical gates of Heaven. Just as the Word was made Flesh, the mental powers of the collective human mind have, after eons of bloody struggle, produced a living technology with the Power to find out exactly Who we are. In the most poetic of ALL justices, this technology was built from the meekest and most abundant of earthly materials: sand. Scoop up a handful of sand from an ocean beach and take a good, long look at Kurzweil’s Coal of Kismet. Now breathe a sigh of relief. The arduous and often horrific work of biological evolution is done. The terror and wars of the Industrial Age were simply ugly incidents along the path toward ultimate Humanity, Wisdom and Love. A Love so profound and beautiful that it will consume every last bit of sub-atomic matter in the Universe simply to express itself adequately. Kurzweil uses the term “computation” when he speaks of the purpose of the Universe, and what he means is probably equivalent to what Rene Descartes meant when he uttered the timeless words “I Think, therefore I Am.” The next stage of evolution will be Technological, but it will be a Human-integrated technology that will revere its biological
ancestry and accelerate our awakening: the Awakening of God, at a pace we can’t even fathom. There is so much more that can be said, but rather than steal any more thunder I would simply advise you to Google Dr. Kurzweil and learn a revolutionary new philosophy on a scale with the greatest works of Plato, Aquinas, and Kant. If you need further persuasion, talk to my friend Barry Upshaw—one of the smartest people I know. He told me about Ray Kurzweil in 1986, but I was too busy swimming (and mostly drowning) in the overcooked gumbo of capitalism to care. Ray Kurzweil has given no less than new Meaning to my existence. I simply bow in gratitude and peacefully await The Singularity. About the author: Steve Dayton writes articles like he hits range balls: high, far-out, and sometimes even straight. Email: stixus_steve@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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