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| The Brain Ontology project provides a controlled vocabulary to describe brain structure, function, and organization.
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| [ via BrainMeta ]
The '''Consciousness Singularity''' refers to a hypothetical point of time in the future when human consciousness, at both the personal and species level, experiences an abrupt transition, a phase transition of sorts, into a collective state of transcendence that is conceptually impossible for us to imagine "what it's like" with our current limited cognitive abilities.
The term "Singularity", as used in this article's context, is an analogy to the well-known singularity in physics, the black hole, where you cannot see beyond the event horizon because light cannot escape from it. In a similar manner, we cannot see (or imagine) what's beyond the Consciousness Singularity because it is beyond our cognitive and imaginative capabilities.
The Consciousness Singularity bears no relation to the Technological Singularity, which involves the creation of smarter-than-human machines. Nor is it synonymous with Tielhard de Chardin's Omega Point.
To get a better intuition for the Consciousness Singularity, imagine, if you will, what a monkey or a rat would experience if suddenly its consciousness became like that of a human. Before the transition, it would be incapable of imagining what it's like to have human consciousness simply because it's beyond its limited cognitive capabilities. In the same manner, our species will undergo such abrupt transitions in consciousness of such magnitude that we cannot even begin to fathom what these new states of consciousness are like.
At the Consciousness Singularity, history as we know it, will cease. The universe, as we experience it now, will cease. Consider the most transcendent and mystical states of consciousness that have yet been experienced by mankind: these will pale in comparison with what's to come.
At the Consciousness Singularity, our consciousness will be expanded beyond the confines of an egocentric sense of self to include transpersonal experiences and transcendent self-identity. This new existence will be both a form of collective consciousness and a form of expanded individual consciousness. Though sounding like a contradiction, these two descriptions of transcendent consciousness are really flip sides of the same coin. The Consciousness Singularity is so far beyond our normal consciousness, that we cannot even begin to comprehend it, much less imagine what it's like to experience directly, unless we ourselves experience or have experienced transcendent states of consciousness. | | |
| [ via BrainTechSci ]
Google Maps and related geomapping services provide high-resolution satellite maps to anyone with an internet connection and have set the standard for online digital mapping. We are now beginning to witness similar digital mapping technologies spilling over into other non-related fields, one of the more interesting of which is neuroscience and the collaborative digital mapping of the brain.
Launched less than a year ago, BrainMaps.org has rapidly developed to lead the field in digital brain mapping technologies. With several terabytes of ultra high-resolution brain image data, consisting of several dozen mouse, monkey, and human brains, its online brain image database is the largest and most diverse currently available. This massive image data is integrated with structural information regarding spatial locations of different brain areas and markers, and the relations between them. And in the collaborative spirit, online users are free to add their own labels and annotations, and to place landmarks throughout the digital brains they explore. Users may even share their images, landmarks, and other annotations with other users in the BrainMaps Forum, which in many ways parallels the Google Maps Community, but on a smaller scale.
The U.S.-sponsored 'Decade of the Brain' has come and gone; it officially ended in the year 2000. It would take another five years before BrainMaps.org came onto the scene, and in a way, it encapulates what the Decade of the Brain should have been about: Collaborative digital brain mapping and a resource available to everyone with an internet connection. | | |
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