#perceptuo

Shock Level 5: Epistemology and Future Shock (part 6 of 6)

The following article is part of a six-part Transhumanity.net series, comprising a single, previously unpublished paper delivered at the 2010 Humanity+ UK conference in London. The presentation was originally titled “Shock Level Five: Augmented Perception, Perceptuo-Centrism, and Reality”.

Future Shock Levels (abbreviated to Shock Levels, or simply “SL”) are a classification system introduced by…

The following article is part of a six-part Transhumanity.net series, comprising a single, previously unpublished paper delivered at the 2010 Humanity+ UK conference in London. The presentation was originally titled “Shock Level Five: Augmented Perception, Perceptuo-Centrism, and Reality”.

Future Shock Levels (abbreviated to Shock Levels, or simply “SL”) are a classification system introduced by Eliezer Yudkowsky (1999), intended to categorize degrees of familiarity with technological concepts and developments. The system is comprised of five Shock Levels (SL0-SL4) describing various technologies, or attitudes to technology, and a person may be considered as having reached a specific SL if they are not particularly surprised, impressed, or worried by the technologies typical of that level. Shock Level Zero (SL0) is included in the scheme to describe the “average person” of 1999. At each SL, a few examples of representative technologies are given, followed by the kinds of people who one might typically expect to be comfortable with the concepts at that level. For the sake of clarity in further discussion, it is worth including Yudkowsky’s full description of the scheme here:

SL0: The legendary average person is comfortable with modern technology – not so much the frontiers of modern technology, but the technology used in everyday life. Most people, TV anchors, journalists, politicians.

SL1: Virtual Reality, living to be a hundred, “The Road Ahead”, “To Renew America”, “Future Shock”, the frontiers of modern technology as seen by Wired Magazine. Scientists, novelty-seekers, early-adopters, programmers, technophiles.

SL2: Medical immortality, planetary exploration, major genetic engineering, and new (“alien”) cultures. The average SF fan.

SL3: Nanotechnology, human-equivalent AI, minor intelligence enhancement, uploading, total body revision, intergalactic exploration. Extropians and transhumanists.

SL4: The Singularity, Jupiter Brains, Powers, complete mental revision, ultraintelligence, posthumanity, Alpha-Point computing, Apotheosis, the total evaporation of “life as we know it”. Singularitarians and not much else.

As we have already seen, the concept of a technological Singularity is associated with the idea that unmodified humans are unable to predict what will happen beyond a certain point in the acceleration of technological development. In other words, the Singularity represents an epistemological threshold which can only be transcended by becoming posthuman. “Singularitarians” are unmodified humans who consider the possible nature and implications of a technological Singularity, and such activity is clearly defined by Yudkowsky as being typical of SL4.

The Shock Level system is concerned with describing human reactions to technological concepts, and it explicitly places contemplation of a Singularity at the top of the hierarchy. For the reasons already discussed, Singularitarians who accept the idea of an epistemic “event horizon” must consider any contemplation of post-Singularity technologies by unmodified humans to be of little or no more worth than guesswork. Yudkowsky himself mentions in passing that “if there’s a Shock Level Five, I’m not sure I want to know about it!” (Yudkowsky, 1999), but one might reasonably argue that if there is a Shock Level Five, unmodified humans cannot know about it, in any meaningful sense.

We can now clearly see strong similarities between the “posthuman perceptual threshold” of perceptuo-centrism and the implied tier beyond Yudkowsky’s SL4, where human prediction and understanding are stymied by the sheer scale, complexity, pace, and strangeness of technological development. For this reason I suggest that there is indeed a Shock Level Five, constituted by phenomena which by their very nature cannot be perceived or predicted by unmodified humans. This profound epistemological barrier can only be overcome by modifying one’s own physical structure in ways which facilitate new modes of perception or cognition.

  References:

Bostrom, N. (2002). Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. Routledge.

Bostrom N (2003) Transhumanist FAQ: What is Transhumanism? In Transhumanist FAQ. Humanity Plus. http://humanityplus.org/learn/philosophy/faq#answer_19 Cited 15 Jan 2010

Carter, B. (1973). Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology. IAU Symposium 63: Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, pp. 291–298. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Davis, J. (2009, October 29). Peoria’s first cochlear implant surgery has grandfather rediscovering life. Peoria Journal Star.

Dicke, R.H. (1961). “Dirac’s Cosmology and Mach’s Principle”. Nature 192: 440–441.

Gibbs, J.W. (1901). Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Good, I. J. (1965). Speculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine. In F.L. Alt and M. Rubinoff (Eds.) Advances in Computers, vol 6 (pp31-88). Academic.

Kurzweil, R. (2005). The singularity is near. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co.

Leary, T. (1983). Flashbacks. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Loizou, P.C. (2006). Speech processing in vocoder-centric

cochlear implants. In Møller A (Ed.), Cochlear and Brainstem Implants, vol 64 (pp 109–143). Basel: Karger.

Moravec, H. (1999). Robot: Mere machine to transcendent mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

More, Max. (1993). Technological self-transformation: Expanding personal extropy. Extropy 10, vol.4 (no.2).

Stavenga, D.G. and Arikawa, K. (2006). Evolution of color and vision of butterflies. Arthropod Structure & Development, 35, 307-318.

Stenger, V.J. (2000). Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes. Prometheus.

U.S. Department of Energy (2010) Office of Science. In: Artificial Retina Project. http://artificialretina.energy.gov/ Cited 15 Jan 2010

Vinge, V (1993). Technological singularity. Paper presented at theVISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993.

Weinberg, S. (1987). Anthropic bound on the cosmological constant. Physical Review Letters, 59, 2607–2610.

Yudkowsky E S (1999) Future Shock Levels. SL4.org. http://www.sl4.org/shocklevels.html Cited 15 Jan 2010

Shock Level 5: Epistemology and Future Shock (part 5 of 6)

The following article is part of a six-part Transhumanity.net series, comprising a single, previously unpublished paper delivered at the 2010 Humanity+ UK conference in London. The presentation was originally titled “Shock Level Five: Augmented Perception, Perceptuo-Centrism, and Reality”.

In the previous sections, we considered the possibility that perceptual technologies intended for helping…

The following article is part of a six-part Transhumanity.net series, comprising a single, previously unpublished paper delivered at the 2010 Humanity+ UK conference in London. The presentation was originally titled “Shock Level Five: Augmented Perception, Perceptuo-Centrism, and Reality”.

In the previous sections, we considered the possibility that perceptual technologies intended for helping people with disabilities, and those originally designed for military or industrial applications, might converge and lead to a general augmentation of perceptual capabilities beyond human limitations. The perceptuo-centrist position is that such a technological development might eventually allow us to demonstrate the existence of a threshold between qualitatively different modes of human and posthuman perception. The identification of such a threshold, based as it would be on differences been unmodified and technologically enhanced persons, would arguably be as valid or real as any distinction between humans and posthumans.

Any such perceptual threshold would be epistemological in nature, because it would demarcate the division between those aspects of physical existence which can be known (i.e. perceived directly) by unmodified human beings, and those which cannot. The equation of direct (personal) perception with knowledge is in this case justified, on the grounds that any unmodified human with true information about the nature of existence beyond the perceptual threshold would have to be inferring it in some way, or simply trusting in the truth of information supplied by others. Although these indirect forms may be considered knowledge with validity, they are qualitatively different to the experiential knowledge held by those able to cross the perceptual threshold themselves.

The idea of an epistemological threshold, beyond which lies a form of knowledge unaccessible to humans, is one with precedent in transhumanist thought. I refer to Vernor Vinge’s (1993) description of the “event horizon” associated with his concept of a technological Singularity, which drew upon earlier forms of the idea considered by Stanislaw Ulam in 1958 (unpublished) and I.J. Good (1965). Although the concept of a technological Singularity (henceforth simply “Singularity”) has since been broadened by thinkers such as Ray Kurzweil (2005), Vinge’s version was intended as a specific illustration of the accelerating availability of computational power, and its implications for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Intelligence Amplification or Augmentation (IA) technologies. Vinge suggested that once such accelerating technological development were to reach a critical pace, it would lead to an event (the Singularity) which is best described by an analogy with the gravitational singularities known to physicists.

Gravitational singularities each have associated event horizons, popularly known as “black holes”. A black hole is caused by the inability of light to escape from the gravitational attraction caused by the tiny (and yet effectively infinitely dense) singularity. Vinge’s technological Singularity is, in this analogy, the point at which rates of technological development are expected to reach incalculable levels (by human standards), and the associated “event horizon” represents a profound human inability to predict what is going to happen after the Singularity occurs. The breakdown of reliable forecasting represented by the event horizon is said to be caused by human inability to cope with an extraordinary and accelerating pace of change, in the face of which “old models must be discarded” (Vinge, 1993).

Although agreement with such “Singularitarian” (Kurzweil, 2005) expectations is not required by the arguments being made here, the idea of an epistemological “event horizon” may provide an extant transhumanist terminology for thinking about perceptuo-centrism. An attempt to relate the perceptuo-centrist conception of a posthuman perceptual threshold to Singularitarian ideas may be made possible by using the language of Future Shock.

  References:

Bostrom, N. (2002). Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. Routledge.

Bostrom N (2003) Transhumanist FAQ: What is Transhumanism? In Transhumanist FAQ. Humanity Plus. http://humanityplus.org/learn/philosophy/faq#answer_19 Cited 15 Jan 2010

Carter, B. (1973). Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology. IAU Symposium 63: Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, pp. 291–298. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Davis, J. (2009, October 29). Peoria’s first cochlear implant surgery has grandfather rediscovering life. Peoria Journal Star.

Dicke, R.H. (1961). “Dirac’s Cosmology and Mach’s Principle”. Nature 192: 440–441.

Gibbs, J.W. (1901). Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Good, I. J. (1965). Speculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine. In F.L. Alt and M. Rubinoff (Eds.) Advances in Computers, vol 6 (pp31-88). Academic.

Kurzweil, R. (2005). The singularity is near. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co.

Leary, T. (1983). Flashbacks. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Loizou, P.C. (2006). Speech processing in vocoder-centric

cochlear implants. In Møller A (Ed.), Cochlear and Brainstem Implants, vol 64 (pp 109–143). Basel: Karger.

Moravec, H. (1999). Robot: Mere machine to transcendent mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

More, Max. (1993). Technological self-transformation: Expanding personal extropy. Extropy 10, vol.4 (no.2).

Stavenga, D.G. and Arikawa, K. (2006). Evolution of color and vision of butterflies. Arthropod Structure & Development, 35, 307-318.

Stenger, V.J. (2000). Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes. Prometheus.

U.S. Department of Energy (2010) Office of Science. In: Artificial Retina Project. http://artificialretina.energy.gov/ Cited 15 Jan 2010

Vinge, V (1993). Technological singularity. Paper presented at theVISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993.

Weinberg, S. (1987). Anthropic bound on the cosmological constant. Physical Review Letters, 59, 2607–2610.

Yudkowsky E S (1999) Future Shock Levels. SL4.org. http://www.sl4.org/shocklevels.html Cited 15 Jan 2010

Shock Level 5: Anthropic Implications (part 4 of 6)

The following article is part of a six-part Transhumanity.net series, comprising a single, previously unpublished paper delivered at the 2010 Humanity+ UK conference in London. The presentation was originally titled “Shock Level Five: Augmented Perception, Perceptuo-Centrism, and Reality”.

If the preceding characterization of the universe offends one’s intuition, then we might consider an…

The following article is part of a six-part Transhumanity.net series, comprising a single, previously unpublished paper delivered at the 2010 Humanity+ UK conference in London. The presentation was originally titled “Shock Level Five: Augmented Perception, Perceptuo-Centrism, and Reality”.

If the preceding characterization of the universe offends one’s intuition, then we might consider an equivalent gestalt or metaverse which simultaneously manifests all possible values for all possible variables, and which has our observable universe (with its specific values for observed variables) embedded within it. The difference between this metaverse scenario and the idea of multiple universes is that we have no need to assume that there could be no communication between the observable universe and the “outside” metaverse. We do, however, need to consider the question of whether the only threshold between these two zones of existence would be perceptual, or if there might be some more fundamental form of boundary.

One might reasonably object that the difference between universe and metaverse could not be merely perceptual, because if things in the metaverse were “real” in any valuable sense, then we should be able to interact or engage with them despite not being able to perceive them. What evidence do we have of such invisible phenomena? Of course, these are exactly the kind of thing discussed in the previous section, such as patterns only observable in the ultraviolet spectrum (by butterflies or humans with special equipment) or astronomical phenomena explicated by false-colour imaging.

Moreover, some conditions within the observed universe are not vital to our existence (e.g. the structure of snowflakes), while other, normally imperceptible conditions may be critical to the development of life (e.g. dark matter). The picture beginning to emerge here is that of three qualitatively different zones of existence: (1) The observable universe, (2) a “deep” metaverse of (potentially all) physical values incompatible with our human existence, and (3) a “penumbra” composed of phenomena physically compatible with our existence, yet imperceptible under normal circumstances.

The universe/metaverse model described above is what physicists would refer to as a phase space (Gibbs, 1901), because we are envisaging a hypothetical “space” (the metaverse) in which all possible states of a system are simultaneously represented. A phase space depicted as a graph usually describes a system with two or three dimensions, whereas our metaverse would be better called multi- or n-dimensional. Within this n-dimensional phase space, then, human beings would only exist within a subset of those points where their existence is physically possible. Our observable universe would be a second, nested subset of “conditions we are capable of perceiving”.

“Travelling” from the observable universe into the penumbra would simply be a matter of adjusting one’s perceptual capabilities until specific imperceptible phenomena may be perceived. As discussed in the previous section, humans have taken the first tentative forays in this direction over the last century or so. Travelling further into the deep metaverse may not be possible (even if such a thing as a metaverse exists), since to do so would require us in some sense to leave behind the space defined by physical phenomena supportive of human existence, to see if there exist real physical phenomena supportive of other forms of life.

To a transhumanist (albeit a radical one), such a transition is not necessarily impossible. “Leaving the space defined by physical phenomena supportive of human existence” does not mean dying, but transforming oneself into a form of life other than human by technological means. Hans Moravec (1999) has speculated about ways in which such a transition might take place, describing a process of transferring minds into bodies capable of existing in universes with (for example) speeds of light slightly different to our own.

On that speculative note, let us conclude the arguments in this section. The interpretation of the anthropic principle described above suggests that we find ourselves in a reality with particular characteristics because they are the characteristics we are equipped to perceive. Hypothetical differently equipped beings would, by this account, be expected to perceive the universe as having different characteristics. Therefore, we should not consider this to be a solely human-centric or “anthropic bias” (as suggested by Nick Bostrom), but rather more broadly as a perceptuo-centric bias. If we consider the observations underlying the anthropic principle to be caused by perceptuo-centric bias, we may refer to this interpretation of the principle as perceptuo-centrism.

Perceptually augmented trans- or posthumans would be in a position to take advantage of aspects of reality beyond those readily apparent to unmodified humans. Examples of posthuman perceptual abilities might run from the mundane (e.g. night vision, hearing radio signals or unencrypted digital communications) to the relatively radical (e.g. combining online information, pattern recognition systems and augmented reality, in order to see clouds of biographical data following people around, among other applications). A perceptuo-centrist interpretation of the anthropic principle, however, suggests that such abilities may represent the mundane end of a much more exotic set of possibilities. Perceptually augmented posthumans may indeed find that some of the apparently immutable aspects of the universe are in fact merely markers of the perimeter of human perceptual capability.

  References:

Bostrom, N. (2002). Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. Routledge.

Bostrom N (2003) Transhumanist FAQ: What is Transhumanism? In Transhumanist FAQ. Humanity Plus. http://humanityplus.org/learn/philosophy/faq#answer_19 Cited 15 Jan 2010

Carter, B. (1973). Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology. IAU Symposium 63: Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, pp. 291–298. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Davis, J. (2009, October 29). Peoria’s first cochlear implant surgery has grandfather rediscovering life. Peoria Journal Star.

Dicke, R.H. (1961). “Dirac’s Cosmology and Mach’s Principle”. Nature 192: 440–441.

Gibbs, J.W. (1901). Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Good, I. J. (1965). Speculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine. In F.L. Alt and M. Rubinoff (Eds.) Advances in Computers, vol 6 (pp31-88). Academic.

Kurzweil, R. (2005). The singularity is near. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co.

Leary, T. (1983). Flashbacks. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Loizou, P.C. (2006). Speech processing in vocoder-centric

cochlear implants. In Møller A (Ed.), Cochlear and Brainstem Implants, vol 64 (pp 109–143). Basel: Karger.

Moravec, H. (1999). Robot: Mere machine to transcendent mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

More, Max. (1993). Technological self-transformation: Expanding personal extropy. Extropy 10, vol.4 (no.2).

Stavenga, D.G. and Arikawa, K. (2006). Evolution of color and vision of butterflies. Arthropod Structure & Development, 35, 307-318.

Stenger, V.J. (2000). Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes. Prometheus.

U.S. Department of Energy (2010) Office of Science. In: Artificial Retina Project. http://artificialretina.energy.gov/ Cited 15 Jan 2010

Vinge, V (1993). Technological singularity. Paper presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993.

Weinberg, S. (1987). Anthropic bound on the cosmological constant. Physical Review Letters, 59, 2607–2610.

Yudkowsky E S (1999) Future Shock Levels. SL4.org. http://www.sl4.org/shocklevels.html Cited 15 Jan 2010

Shock Level 5: Anthropic Implications (part 3 of 6)

The following article is part of a six-part Transhumanity.net series, comprising a single, previously unpublished paper delivered at the 2010 Humanity+ UK conference in London. The presentation was originally titled “Shock Level Five: Augmented Perception, Perceptuo-Centrism, and Reality”.

The anthropic principle (Carter, 1973) is based upon the observation that conditions in the universe as we…

The following article is part of a six-part Transhumanity.net series, comprising a single, previously unpublished paper delivered at the 2010 Humanity+ UK conference in London. The presentation was originally titled “Shock Level Five: Augmented Perception, Perceptuo-Centrism, and Reality”.

The anthropic principle (Carter, 1973) is based upon the observation that conditions in the universe as we observe it are exactly what they need to be in order for us to exist. That is to say, there are a number of ways in which the universe might be described or measured, and in every case where such a measurement would need to fall within extremely narrow parameters in order for human beings to exist, it does. Let us momentarily leave aside objections to this kind of reasoning or consideration of its value, and take a brief look at a few illustrative observations.

Dicke (1961) noted that if the universe were one order of magnitude (i.e. ten times) younger or older than it is understood to be, then human life could not exist. One order of magnitude younger, and there would not have been sufficient time to build up requisite levels of vital elements (such as carbon) by nucleosynthesis, meaning that small rocky planets like Earth would not exist. One order of magnitude older, and most stars (other than the dimmest red dwarfs) would have turned into white dwarfs, and stable planetary systems would have ceased to exist.

Dicke also argued that the density of matter in the universe is observed as having almost exactly the critical value required to prevent a Big Crunch (i.e. a future return to Big Bang conditions). Weinberg (1987) has additionally noted that if the cosmological constant (which appears to be the primary contributor to the critical density of matter in the universe) were one order of magnitude larger, then the universe would suffer catastrophic inflation (precluding the formation of stars).

Similarly, the dimensionless physical constants (also known as fundamental physical constants), such as the “fine-structure constant” which describes the strength of electromagnetic interactions, are observed as having exactly the values required to balance the four fundamental interactions (electromagnetism, strong interaction, weak interaction, and gravitation), thus permitting the formation of the commonly-observed matter from which life has emerged. Small changes in the relative strengths of the four fundamental interactions would also have implications for our understanding of the universe’s age and structure, in turn making it all the more remarkable that their observed values fall within the narrow range compatible with human existence.

A “weak” form of the anthropic principle asserts that our location in the spacetime continuum is in some way privileged, in that it can support our kind of life. Whereas the weak form allows for the possibility that the universe may have spacetime regions inhospitable to human life (such as periods in the very early or late life of the universe), the “strong” form asserts that the fundamental physical parameters of the entire universe must be such as to allow for the existence of observers at some point during its existence. Alternative interpretations of the principle have been proposed, including the possibility of multiple universes, only some of which are capable of supporting observers (Stenger, 2000).

Perhaps the most common objection to the anthropic principle (in either form) is that it is merely a tautology. In other words, one might object that it is unsurprising that the universe should have exactly the characteristics required to support human existence, since if it were otherwise then we would not be here to observe it. It may be the case that the anthropic principle is indeed merely a tautology, requiring no special explanation of the observed state of affairs (such as the existence of alternative universes, or that we live in a simulation of some kind), but if that is so then we must accept one of three corollaries.

The first corollary is that sentient observers could (and would) exist in a universe radically different to our own, in which there may be little matter recognizable to us, and therefore no small rocky planets or stable star systems. Second corollary: That the presence of sentient observers is in no way a special or “privileged” situation, and our universe has no greater intrinsic value than one in which no life can exist. Third corollary: That life is in some way valuable and requires recognizable conditions to exist, and therefore the very existence of our observed universe represents an extraordinary statistical unlikelihood.

Nick Bostrom (2002) has noted an alternative to such possibilities; that a selection effect or “anthropic bias” appears to be behind the anthropic principle. It may be the case that a statistically remarkable “just right” universe (as ours appears to be), or any of the other explanations mentioned above, are not required to explain our observations. It could be the case that our universe simultaneously manifests all possible values for every potentially observable parameter (only some of which we are capable of perceiving or even existing within, by virtue of our physical structure), or at least that it manifests a wider range of values than the very small set we are capable of observing or existing within.

  References:

Bostrom, N. (2002). Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. Routledge.

Bostrom N (2003) Transhumanist FAQ: What is Transhumanism? In Transhumanist FAQ. Humanity Plus. http://humanityplus.org/learn/philosophy/faq#answer_19 Cited 15 Jan 2010

Carter, B. (1973). Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology. IAU Symposium 63: Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, pp. 291–298. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Davis, J. (2009, October 29). Peoria’s first cochlear implant surgery has grandfather rediscovering life. Peoria Journal Star.

Dicke, R.H. (1961). “Dirac’s Cosmology and Mach’s Principle”. Nature 192: 440–441.

Gibbs, J.W. (1901). Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Good, I. J. (1965). Speculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine. In F.L. Alt and M. Rubinoff (Eds.) Advances in Computers, vol 6 (pp31-88). Academic.

Kurzweil, R. (2005). The singularity is near. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co.

Leary, T. (1983). Flashbacks. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Loizou, P.C. (2006). Speech processing in vocoder-centric

cochlear implants. In Møller A (Ed.), Cochlear and Brainstem Implants, vol 64 (pp 109–143). Basel: Karger.

Moravec, H. (1999). Robot: Mere machine to transcendent mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

More, Max. (1993). Technological self-transformation: Expanding personal extropy. Extropy 10, vol.4 (no.2).

Stavenga, D.G. and Arikawa, K. (2006). Evolution of color and vision of butterflies. Arthropod Structure & Development, 35, 307-318.

Stenger, V.J. (2000). Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes. Prometheus.

U.S. Department of Energy (2010) Office of Science. In: Artificial Retina Project. http://artificialretina.energy.gov/ Cited 15 Jan 2010

Vinge, V (1993). Technological singularity. Paper presented at theVISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993.

Weinberg, S. (1987). Anthropic bound on the cosmological constant. Physical Review Letters, 59, 2607–2610.

Yudkowsky E S (1999) Future Shock Levels. SL4.org. http://www.sl4.org/shocklevels.html Cited 15 Jan 2010