The rapid wiring-up of the Internet in the last decades has endowed our planet with a kind of neocortex, and it is not surprising that we start to wonder whether – or perhaps rather when – this Global Brain will wake up as a full-blown conscious entity. Such an entity would be God-like from our perspective. But it need not result in a techno-dystopian doom scenario of an all-controlling malignant superintelligence known from movies like Eagle Eye or series like Person of Interest. Instead, if we may believe the most extreme forecasts by the Transhumanist movement, we will be able to upload our minds to this Global Web and thus attain immortality by shedding our biological chrysalis and merging with this new Cybergod.

​Or, perhaps, we have already been uploaded and we are living in a Matrix-like simulation. Perhaps, what we call reality is de facto a sophisticated simulation run by a God-like hypercomputer. Such speculations can be fun as a topic at a party, but prima facie we don’t see evidence for such wild, metaphysical conjectures. Besides, it doesn’t explain consciousness, which is still the “hard problem” scientists fail to provide a plausible explanation for.
 
If you are a scientist, who is no longer satisfied by the interpretations of physicalism or if you are a spiritual seeker, who craves for a credible justification beyond a mere obligation to believe just because your guru or holy book told you so, reading this volume may be a vastly rewarding pastime. It is here that I have found that the neo-transcendentalism-oriented investigations of Alex M. Vikoulov merit a closer look. With this fourth and final Volume of The Science and Philosophy of Information series Vikoulov dives in the deeper secrets of consciousness and its physical correlates. The author scrutinizes the rich world of information technology and joins the body of digital philosophers and digital physicists, who do not take the traditional reductive materialism for granted. After all, information requires consciousness to be meaningful and organized.
 
Since we live in a world which isn’t random, but organized at every level, a role for consciousness seems unavoidable. The ‘digital theologian’ shows us compelling evidence from quantum mechanics, mathematics and computer sciences, which not only aligns with a philosophical worldview of the Primacy of Consciousness, but which also assigns a role to information as its modus operandi.
 
It is quantum mechanics which appears to connect the Universe as a whole to consciousness. A whole, which is more than the sum of its parts and irreducible to mere assumptions deriving from the anatomizing dissection into mental confabulations. Drawing from the holographic principle, perceptroniums and noocentrism, Alex provides crucial keys to unlock the mystery of consciousness to show us how our local consciousness can arise from a non-local cosmic consciousness network.
 
Carefully building his fortress of arguments, Alex gathers his building bricks from various areas of scientific exploration, ranging from the role of language and tools in the development of our consciousness, the physics of time and epigenetics. Traditional Darwinism and reductive materialism become so challenged, that we become bound to agree with Terence McKenna’s statement that “object fetishism is completely bankrupt.” All these threads are then skillfully woven into the irresistible attractor and only logical conclusion, or Digital Pantheism and Omega Point Cosmology. And with this thus synthesized Apotheosis, Vikoulov brings the architecture of his chef-d’oeuvre to full fruition.
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Allow yourself to enter this new temple of the Cybernetic Singularity, to be enchanted by the ornaments of the Omega hypermind and to be seduced by the divine ecstasy of the mystical union with your ultimate cosmic self. Now that we have entered the domain of Theology, the author will start a crusade with no other objective than to “redefine God.” Stepping in the footsteps of Spinoza, we find in the philosopher a new advocate of the conscious universe. Sidestepping Dyson’s “God is what Mind becomes when it has passed beyond our comprehension,” Vikoulov dares to venture in this uncharted territory and gives us a peek into how a fractal multiverse can be implicated in the holographic principle.

​And in his conquest of this metaphysical realm, the philosopher shakes the foundations of our belief in objective reality. The seemingly static hardware of our world being no other than the fleeting dynamics of the inner workings of the Greater Cosmic Mind, which we may rightfully dub the “Code.” The Syntellect Mind, in which being is to be perceived and no other than the proximity co-occurrence of sentient explorations resulting in a collapse into locality and experience.
 
As Perseus beheads Medusa, so Vikoulov smites the petrifying and untenable last stand of reductive materialism. Over the years Vikoulov’s and my philosophies have largely grown together, and shown to be a fertile ground for a successful collaboration. Our idiosyncratic approaches have continued to be a source of mutual inspiration, which gives rise to the different aromas and flavors of our respective fruits.
 
My recently published book “The Ouroboros Code” complements “Theology of Digital Physics,” by investigating some of the mathematical mechanics of how consciousness pulls off a trick of generating this apparently material universe. Together these books establish an indispensable foundation to build a techno-transcendental Theology fit for the post-Singularity era. If humans are not yet able to sufficiently appreciate the importance of this perhaps now still anachronistic scaffolding of the metaphysical realm, the future artilects certainly will be!

-Antonin Tuynman, PhD