The Iota Point Manifesto

We live within a tranquil cataclysm. Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall. All the king's men won't be able to put this one together for sure; it is the world that has exploded into a maelstrom of motion. The shards rain upon other shards, hurtle past each other, smash into each other – even the shard that carries you. Thus are we are assailed on all sides by Values, even by the Value of No-values. Whatever your cause, you will find a prophet. The cacophony of exhortations drowns this violent space, screams Doppler-shifted beyond recognition. What will be our final fate?

There is no Omega Point towards which we move.

The Omega Point is Teilhard de Chardin's vision of divinity. It is the point of maximum complexity and unitary consciousness towards which the universe evolves. It is a conscious entity, existing outside of spacetime, which draws the universe towards achieving that state. However, if it is achievable, then there is no need for the universe to be drawn towards it.

That is not to deny the possibility of other similar states per se. Frank Tipler's version of the Omega Point is a heaven in which the universe is entirely controlled by sentient life and possessing infinite information processing capacity (brought about by the Big Crunch) with which to simulate eternity in an instant. Fundamental physical limits are likely to prevent this infinite processing capacity from being achieved.

Such worlds of collective consciousness are called noöspheres. These could be achieved by uploading human consciousnesses into structures such as Matrioshka brains, which are nested spheres of solar power satellites and computers (Dyson spheres) surrounding a star in order to fully capture its energy. The achievement of such states will be accelerated by the technological singularity, when we build computers with superhuman intelligence, which are then capable of building even smarter computers, and so on. Other means of storage include plasma and dust clouds converted into computronium.

Consciousness need not be bound to physical structures, of course. Information structures could be stored in energy, which will likely occur long after the transition to genetically enhanced cyborgs. Nonetheless, the point is, although it seems like there is an inevitable upward trend for intelligence, as intelligence begets intelligence, the endpoint of intelligence cannot act backwards in time to cause this trend.

An aside on consciousness. Is it necessarily concomitant with intelligence? Consciousness seems to be the exception rather than the rule, even among great apes. There are evolutionary disadvantages associated with it. Yet somehow humans are conscious. It seems to have intrinsic value to the conscious themselves, which is why we would go to such lengths to preserve and upload our consciousnesses.

Nor is there an Alpha Point from which we come.

The obvious counterpart of the Omega Point is the Alpha Point, which exists at the beginning of time to guide the evolution of the universe. Indeed the universe must have a beginning of some sort. Our universe is contingent upon what came before, that which could not but exist, and which due to its nature precipitates the universe. This first cause was termed by Avicenna as the Necessary, which he equated with Allah. However, this cannot be so. The Necessary must be singular and indivisible, so it can have no agency, which would require parts. Thus it cannot act, it can only cause.

How can a singular and indivisible Necessary lead to cosmogeny? It must be due to the effect of the Necessary on itself, because there is nothing else. In fact, the Necessary must be Nothing, i.e. the very nature of Nothing necessitates Being.

A point to ponder. If the nature of the Necessary necessitates a particular Contingent, is that Contingent not somehow necessary as well?

There is only an Iota Point forever in the present.

How then does the universe evolve? It can only do so moment to moment. The point that causes this change must be within each moment when it becomes the next, i.e. in the present. Let this point be denoted by a Greek letter somewhere between alpha and omega, say iota.

The Iota Point acts by will.

Is this Iota Point a passive entity? The deterministic view advocated so far would suggest so. There is nothing but atoms and void. However, a sufficiently complicated assembly of atoms can acquire a will of its own, when the structure is capable of acting on its constituents, instead of simply being shaped by their motion. Such assemblies thus determine the difference between each moment and the next. Willful assemblies can aggregate with those of synergistic wills and oppose those with antagonistic wills. The sum of all such assemblies is the Iota Point, and its emergent will is the vector sum of all will, in the same way that a nation's will emerges from the will of her people.

The jury is still out on the existence of free will. The Libet experiment shows that the subconscious makes decisions before any conscious intention is felt. However, it is possible that the subconscious is somehow free. Quantum indeterminacy seems to provide us with the unpredictable Lucretian swerve (clinamen) postulated in De rerum natura, but there may ultimately be deterministic hidden variables behind the facade.

The Iota Point reorders the world.

The Iota Point reorders the world to its will. It can also reshape itself, hence changing how it reorders the world.

Into what does it reorder the world? The Iota Point operates on the scale of aeons. Will may fluctuate, so it is not appropriate to speak of an end which the Iota Point seeks to achieve. It must of course avoid its extinction, so it should make the world more conducive for its survival (and the sustained existence of its constituents). What is permanent about the Iota Point is that it possesses will, which by its very nature strives to reorder the world. Thus it is prudent for the Iota Point to maximise its capacity to do so. It can reorder the world to facilitate the exercise of that capacity. That capacity is summative, so improving its capacity to realign other wills or reordering the world to favour the generation of willing entities could potentially bolster its capacity to further reorder the world.

Iota is "I".

The Greek letter iota corresponds to the Latin alphabet 'I', which can represent the first person singular subjective pronoun in English, and incidentally is also the first letter of 'intelligence'.

I am the Iota Point.

Or rather, we all are. Thus it is up to us to reorder the world and create the future. Each of us has a will, and hence a say in the will of the Iota Point. Those wills (both of individuals and aggregates of aligned wills) with greatest capacity to act dominate the Iota Point. So, sufficiently strengthening one's will and increasing one's capacity to act, possibly by recruiting other wills, allows one to sway the Iota Point and reorder the world as one wishes.

The Iota Point philosophy may sound like a soft transhumanism. It is not. The resemblance arises because the Iota Point lies at the heart of human nature (and at the heart of life and the universe itself), and transhumanism is about realising human nature in trans/posthuman forms, the process of which leads to a loss of some aspects of that nature. Of course, the principles of the philosophy should guide transhumanism, and any other endeavours regarding the future.

The turbulent world may throw us around, but we are not powerless. The Iota Point swims through space and time, its strokes altering the flow of the world. Or perhaps it is spacetime that flows through the Iota Point, entering through its ravenous mouth and exiting by another orifice. Thus will our broken world be put together again.