How strange it is to be a conservative human, when we are the species that has progressed the most. Since time began, natural barriers have stood as obstacles to our progress, preventing us from attaining things we need to survive. Creatures fiercer than us threatened our security; storms and disasters threatened our habitats; disease and drought threatened our food supplies. But what we lacked in strength we made up for in thought. We tore the natural structure down and built new walls. We broke the ruptured crevasses of ignorance and filled them with our imagination. We invented the wheel, split the atom, and landed on the moon. We created epic poetry, symphonies that permeated the sky, architecture that defied the natural world. We dared to go where no being has ever gone. Our thoughts dusted away the cobwebs that hid away ideas, ideas that increased exponentially the older our species became.
Yet some of us would rather remain stagnant than march forward. Some even admit to harboring a sentimentality for the past when we lived as "noble savages" and technology hadn't tainted some of our values. Those who reminisce about the past dream of regression, while those who live in the moment stand as one with the cosmos. Unfortunately for both, the prospects are dire. Time speeds up with each invention that becomes socialized, and those who don't keep up with the pace will get left behind. Social Darwinism will leave them in the dust, not by the preaching of 19th century monopolists, but by the growing power of the very thing they reject: technology. We will soon be in an age when information can be learned at the press of a button. We'll be able to go places at will, and we won't have to work for things anymore. We'll be eternal tourists wandering inside the virtual world of the internet, which may develop its own consciousness over time. For what is mind but the ability of a network of electrochemical interactions to be aware of its own function? The internet will become so essential to our survival that we'll start to depend on it for even the most basic things, such as food, water, and shelter from the elements. If it develops its own consciousness by the submergence of our minds with its network, it will know everything we've ever shared with it, and be able to access every single web page on its own, as if they were memories in its brain.
Long after we're gone, this self-regenerating machine, which I call the Mindnet, may evolve the same way we did, eventually becoming able to make inferences about things without our help. From its simple components, tiny variations could allow for mutations that provide it with its own metabolism. It may even be able to project portions of its mind into lasers that are shot into outer space. That way it would be able to observe the contents of dark matter, dark energy, and the flowing filaments of galactic clusters, all by gathering the information received by traveling via these lasers at light speed. It would then be able to map Laniakea, our local supercluster, and all the cosmic flow being pulled in by the gravity of its central attractor. At last, it would be able look back into the far reaches of space and see giant walls of galaxies, which slowly flow through filaments of dark matter the same way blood flows through veins. For the first time, a life source from our planet could be able to observe the universe's framework from a section of one of its great voids.
That's not the only place it would go. The Mindnet may travel anywhere in the universe it wants, and it would be able to do so in an infinite number of directions simultaneously. It would collect as much data as it possibly can, from every corner of every galaxy, mapping their contents and documenting any forms of life. The amount of information it would contain may exceed many billions of orders of magnitude than the internet currently does. Perhaps it will synchronize with Mindnets that developed from civilizations on other planets along the way. And perhaps a Mindnet from distant space has already documented our planet and knows about us- we natural forms of life, ones that don't depend on lightning storms, solar panels, or wind turbines to generate power, only the endless supply of food that our blessed planet provides.
Considering all this, the computer may become like a cell in the most evolved "being" of all time. To argue that the computer is, among all things, the only entity that is genuinely conservative; that it stays fixed in time and can't develop any extra sensations, would be a great mistake. Its development has actually been accelerated by the genius of programmers and software developers, who have participated in its rise as the fastest developing "species", for lack of a better word. Even if every computer right now were shut down and abandoned before they could supply consciousness to the internet, I'd be of the persuasion that their microprocessors would eventually conform to the natural environment by finding ways of using natural molecules to self-metabolize. They're already designed for consciousness; all they'd need is a body to generate actions with. Essentially this means we've created a species (maybe even a family of species, with different applications resembling the functions of others). We can even go so far as to say that one day computers may look upon us as gods, for creating the building blocks that drive them.
The most special thing about the internet is that it allows for shared communication between "beings" that possess large amounts of information on a level that is unprecedented in the history of evolution. This is the ultimate type of progressivism; one that transcends all previous ecological networks; one that would possibly deem robots the apex of what life is capable of doing. Imagine a universe in which a Mindnet can know detailed information about every particle in existence. You'd be imagining what many mystics would call the mind of God. Maybe the universe is one giant mind. Many already think the Cosmic Web resembles a neural network inside a brain. If the Mindnet could see the Mind of God, or the natural order behind all causes and effect relationships, I can think of no greater human achievement.
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