The fourth dimension is a line which can join the universe as it was one minute ago to the universe as it is right now, joining the big bang to the end of the universe.

I was going to write an entire post about this, which I thought I could wrap my head around, but my brain just oozed out of my ear.

The information age.

What’s next?

When we try to look into the eye of the future how do we realize what we see?

Do we realize the future because we imagine what it will be?

So what’s coming?

If you think about it you already know.

You just have to realize what you are imagining and turn it into reality.

The future exist because we have the ability to create it.

but…

How do we realize ourselves?

How do WE realize the future together?

This is the way our world ends, and how the future begins.

The age of enhanced intelligence.

More to come.

The human intellect is a funny thing. It has evolved in time through the different environments we have created to serve it while its physical structure has remained relatively unchanged for the past 10,000 years or so. This new type of evolution is driven by the human minds ability to create, to imagine and then implement those imaginations on the physical and conceptual world around it. New ideas are constantly being generated but how? it seems that through all of our time on the earth that the amount of ideas that we could come up with would slow or become less interesting as time went on. This is far from the truth however.

We as humans have continued to drive our intellectual progress to greater and greater heights throughout history and the device mainly to blame for this is that of abstraction. Abstraction is the ability of the human mind to take a concept, a physical thing (or at least the perception of that physical thing) and to create a associated concept containing only the necessary information. Abstraction allows for the human mind to take in an enormous amount of complex information and to process it on a reasonable time scale.

What does this have to do with intellectual development however? Well as humans have continued to produce new ideas the level of humans ability to abstract thought has gone up as well. Ideas about the nature of the world as well technology created by these new ideas have created a new environment for humans in which more highly abstracted thought could be possible. Just think of how hard it it would be to imagine the idea that our brains are like the software being implemented on the hardware of our physical brains without any idea that something like a computer could exist. The creation of the computer has allowed us to think these higher level abstract thoughts without which we could not understand that the functions of human brain are something that can be studied in a systematic scientific manner, an important part in the next step in our intellectual development.

The human intellect because of its ability to continually abstract information will continue to develop through history as technology and scientific discovery continually provide more and more information for our brains to process. Since each generation’s intellectual development is based upon the environment in which they were raised the levels of abstraction will continue to increase as we begin to have a better understanding of the universe and ways of exploring it conceptually (think of the internet).

As the sea of concepts we as humans have to swim in get larger and larger we must find the most efficient ways of swimming. Abstraction as flippers, what a weird metaphor.

Sounds crazy but in many ways it is true.

We produce prejudice and bias on a daily basis just based upon the sensory information that we receive every day. These prejudices are made in order to help us determine how the world will play out in the future and consequently how we should act presently. This ability to act in a way that takes into account the consequences of our actions in the future. Our ability of abstraction is based upon prejudice in that for a limited set of information provided our brains will “fill in the blanks” to fit into preconceived notions of how things should look, feel ect. this is how we can recognize a person from seeing the back of their head or part of their face. We cannot see the rest of the person, but we can abstract that the rest of the person is there from biases which we have accumulated.

This may be the basis of intelligence, the ground floor if you will, but is by no means the end all description of intelligence. Higher level intelligence I believe is based upon how we interact with our base level intelligence, what we do with the biases that we have undoubtedly learned and if we are able to recognize and use how our brains have been structured. In this process we must learn that the prejudices we have built up have not been built up for a purpose other then as a function to help us survive in the environment we have been placed. The creation of bias is what allows humans to adapt to the enormous amount of environmental situations we see in the world with ease. However it is often what separates people and creates all the human problems we see in the world.

Such is the nature of our “intelligence.” A word that even we cannot even define with certainty and never will until we understand its true nature. This understanding we will find is the true nature of intelligence to come.

Top-down brain function refers to the ability of higher functions of the brain being able to control/ effect the lower functions of our brain.

This is probably the easiest way to distinguish why humans are fundamentally different then animals in terms of brain function. Animals in general are almost entirely slaves to classical conditioning. The environment effects them, they produce conditioned responses to their environment based on need and that is pretty much the end of it. Humans, while still very much susceptible to conditioning, as is seen particularly in casinos that condition people with constant positive reinforcement by displaying people winning money, yet we are not entirely slaves to our environment. Humans have the ability to use higher brain functions as a way of potentially determining what they want to do with the environmental information they receive. In addition to this we have the ability to use our brains to entirely create totally internal conditioning processes. This higher brain function is what allows us in the end to shape our minds (with a few restrictions perhaps) into what we want them to be.

Commonly referred to as metaprograming this process is the essential process to human progress in the future. The only problem with this process is that it requires a tremendous amount of discipline to take full advantages of such features of our brain. Because of this I believe that next step in intelligent evolution revolves around this concept. The next step being that of our brain becoming more susceptible to internal conditioning making it easier for a brain to mold itself quickly and effectively.

These types of recursive processes is what is essential in the universe. The advent of the ability for an object to learn and eventually change the very nature of itself seems to be in some way or another to be the purpose of existence and even suggests that anything, large or small could gain this ability or has some intrinsic ability to do this already. Perhaps this is the essence of will or even the essence of the universe.

More study on this is needed for sure.