Evolutionary Cybernetics: Questioning Carbon Chauvinism

Adapted from The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution by Alex M. Vikoulov

“Carbon appears to be the chemical element best suited to act as the building block for the type of complex molecular systems that develop lifelike qualities… However, it is carbon chauvinism to assume that only carbon life is possible.” -Victor J. Stenger

For most pantheists and idealists, the Mind is not in the Universe. Rather, the Universe is in the Mind. Some would immediately see this idea as solipsistic but, it can be elegantly reconcilable by what I came to call “Multi-Ego Pantheistic Solipsism.” Universal consciousness is the sole ontological primitive and we are fragments of it: We all are low-dimensional avatars of the greater cosmic mind, if you will.

Today, many intellectuals rightly suspect that the material world is an illusion — and that the only real thing is consciousness and information. In fact, in my ontology, information is “modus operandi” of consciousness, it is a distinction between phenomenal states, qualia computing in a certain context. The basic idea is that the physical universe exists because we perceive it. While universal consciousness is Nature’s ontological source, reality is fundamentally experiential.