The Context S03E05: Singularities
Channel: David Orban
Date: 2020-10-17

The names and labels that we give to things, allow us to concentrate our attention on their nature, guided by the intuition and the associations that the name elicits, as every name represents an analogy, or a metaphor to another object or a concept. In reality, it is an interesting chain of cultural heritage. And of course, it accelerates our understanding as we leapfrog through those intuitions into better gathering the meaning behind the words, but it also represents a little bit of a trap. Because we are pushed to take the analogy, represented by the label to an extreme, rather than using it, just as a reference pointer.

The analogies between the nature of a physical singularity inside a black hole, and that of the world after the technological singularity are tricky.

We were supposed to stop even trying to understand what could happen after the technological singularity. But today, that is not the case anymore. We are starting to formulate all kinds of theories, and we are starting to experiment, at least on paper with what are the parameters that could lead to different kinds of technological singularity. We are now starting to look at what a postsingularitarian world is going to look like.

The matter is our Universe is a black hole maximizer. What if intelligence, across the Universe, were a technological singularity maximizer?

#blackhole #singularity #space