CYBERFUNK
By: Michael Woronko
Tags: Philosophy, Science, Future, Technology, Life

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On an existential level, technology offers something to us that we’ve never even dared dream about — complete subjective autonomy in regards to the way we interact with our surrounding reality.

The ‘liberation’ of consciousness (depending on how you’d like to define it) can be achieved through innumerable mechanisms of escape. Online poker, Reddit, Facebook, Medium, Candy Crush, Wikipedia, AskJeeves, (he’s still around, you know). Limitless distractions, boundless modes of entertainment, endless opportunities for escaping reality.

It’s more than safe to say that technology, in infiltrating the very core of our human existence, has bumped our evolutionary trajectory in a different direction, one that many would, without hesitation, argue to be far more beneficial than not.

It may not seem like it now, but this bump is going to be a major chapter in the tale of the human epoch, especially over the coming generations. For us, here and now, it’s all relative. But for those born into an immediate immersivity of digitalized existence, life itself is going to mean something totally different.

I had the chance of asking Rizwan Virk, a popular name in discussions surrounding simulation theory, what he makes of our head-first dive into a pretty deep relationship with technology, on an existential level. His words to me: “simulation theory may become the first real new religion of the twenty first century”, leaning on the assertion that the nature of technological immersivity is going to elevate our fascination with a digitalized existence.

It’s certainly understandable. We want to digitize our existence because it allows for more control than we’ve ever assumed we can have. It is a form of liberation that we didn’t necessarily see coming, one that is only going to continue to become as captivating as it will extricating.

From God smiting us, to science belittling us, we now hold the capability for self-empowerment in our very own hands — thanks to technological breakthroughs which create entirely new and accommodating dimensions to our reality.

While we can drone on about the damage being done to our sense of self-reliance and self-actualization, our psycho-spiritual development, our imaginations and our self-awareness, such heeds usually fall on deaf ears, as it could very well be that technology will actually empower such faculties in ways that we can’t currently consider possible.

Rather, the point to be made about our rampant technological evolution is that, like any previous revolution that we’ve experienced, we can’t necessarily anticipate what will happen as we stare into the face of a wavefront rather than the side of a line graph, except that we know that we’re heading in certain guaranteed directions which time takes us, directions that we can use as guideposts in deciphering what to expect.

Such directions must abide by certain laws of how our reality is structured — notably through the rules of thermodynamics, and it is from these understandings that we can frame a picture, if not a glimpse of a picture, of where it is we’re really going.