A gross simplification of Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s book, Future Shock, is that mankind is evolving so rapidly it is making many of us feel like we’ve taken crazy pills. 
As we struggle to digest ever more change, our collective societal systems are dealing with the backlash. Take a walk with me into the fantastical yet logical endgame of our exponential evolution, which is now transcending our biological limitations and physics as we have known them.
In 2008, I helped start Singularity University in Palo Alto, where we focus on harnessing exponential technological change to solve society’s grand challenges—problems that impact a billion or more people. In 2009, I shifted my life’s trajectory as a businessman to become a fulltime physicist. We founded Quantum Gravity Research, a group of a few dozen fulltime scientists working on a grand unification physics program called emergence theory, as depicted in the YouTube distributed film, What Is Reality.
Ten years ago, I started my journey into the question, “What Is Reality,” with the mindset of a good-natured materialist atheist with no romantic interest in finding spiritualism within fundamental physics. However, this deep rabbit hole had other plans for me. It led to a remarkable deduction about our destiny—the future and our relationship to it.
We’re going to start with the most reductive question we can ask about the physics of reality, and end with emergent systems theoretic speculations about what this means for our near- and long-term futures.
In the old paradigm, there were two categories of things: those that are physical, such as an electron, and those that are abstract, such as the idea of God or the pattern of prime numbers. But what if this is false and everything is made of information? The most popular interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM) posits that reality is made of pure information called a possibility space, and that observations by conscious observers crystalize portions of this information space into little islands of physical reality in quantum wavefunction collapses. More modern views of QM define the little chunks of observer-created physical reality as also being made of abstract information. Turning away from the old paradigm, we replace (1) physical things and (2) abstract things. They’re replaced with two new categories of things: (1) abstract information, such as an electron, that can be chosen or actualized from a sea of abstract possibilities and (2) the possibility sea of abstract information, itself.
Emergence theory holds that reality is code theoretic. In other words, it’s made of a language. Languages comprise syntax and rules for arranging symbols into patterns of higher order information, such as how I’m using letters here to create higher level meaning through sentences and paragraphs. If reality is a language expressing itself in an evolutionary manner, then what might the symbols be like? For one thing, reality seems to have three spatial dimensions, sort of like a 3D version of a 35 mm film. Reality is geometric. The simplest pixel or irreducible symbol that could describe a 3D reality is called the 3-simplex or regular tetrahedron. Just as you can hold the idea and abstract image of a square in the pure information space of your mind, could it be that particles, forces, and spacetime themselves are made of abstract, or information theoretic patterns? Are they made of tetrahedra changing according to the rules of some code? If so, why would particle accelerator data so clearly demonstrate that particles in spacetime interact according to hyperdimensional geometry?
Codes, such as C++, or English, are generally arbitrary. In other words, one invents symbols and language rules and agrees on them with other users. The only example of non-arbitrary codes we have come across in the last 10 years are called quasicrystals. These are dynamic codes in lower dimensions, such as 3D, that are generated by mathematical actions in a hyperdimensional crystal or lattice structure, such as an abstract 8D crystal. We use a particular quasicrystalline code of tetrahedra in 3D that is derived from specific higher dimensional lattices that map to advanced particle physics unification theory. Let’s pretend we’re on the right track with our mathematical physics and ask, “Okay, then—what is the substrate for these abstract tetrahedral? Where do those little pixels of reality live?”
This is where the rabbit hole of deduction gets fun. Do you believe in linear causality, where only the past can influence and create the future, or are you open to the idea of retro-causality, where the future can co-create the past? I’ll skip the detail about how top physicists explain that QM requires the future to influence and co-determine the past. Let’s imagine it is true and see where it goes.
Einstein was the first to rigorously demonstrate how the future, past, and present all exist in one system with equal realism. If influence can occur via quantum entanglement (without need for signals of light to mediate that influence), then Einstein’s all-existing future, past, and present are part of an interacting neural net with instant connections between events at different points in space and time. This can be simplified to say that event A causes event B, which causes event A in a strange feedback loop.
We can know that we are conscious simply by wondering if we are conscious. And we know that our consciousness emerged from some unknown fundamental spacetime and particle code or some other unknown physics. Can you hold an abstract geometric code in your mind, like a code of black and white squares on a checkboard with 2 x 2 squares? Can a more advanced consciousness hold a larger code—even a vast quasicrystalline spacetime code with harder math? Have humans approached the very limit of consciousness allowed by physics? Let’s hope and presume not.
If the code is non-local, where events are connected across time and space, can there be consciousnesses that are not just exponentially greater than ours but that are profoundly different—transtemporal with thoughts spread across space and time?
The scientific view is that something is possible as long as nothing in current physical understanding precludes it. And nothing precludes this wild idea. In principle, all mass and energy in the universe can self-organize into a vast mind-like network that is conscious in ways that go beyond our human level of linear-time animal consciousness.
Let us call the irreducible abstract geometric mathematical code Alpha, or the beginning. Call the mindlike universal substrate that can hold and operate it Omega, or the end. The code, Alpha, can be held and operated within the mindlike substrate of a sufficiently large and transtemporal consciousness, or Omega. Likewise, such an uber-consciousness, Omega, can emerge from complex transtemporal patterns within the simple code, Alpha. You see, that’s the thing about codes. The irreducible symbols are simple and noisy in small disorganized quantities. But, arrange them in vast complex patterns, and you tend to forget that the code even exists.
My favorite movie is The Matrix. It’s made of about 40 billion 0s and 1s or openings and closings of microscopic logic gates in my DVD player. The information it creates for me is abstract, yet utterly real. I see the various patterns of color and sound and the meanings of taking the red pill or the blue pill and Neo’s challenges and victories. The meaning is fully emergent from the 0s and 1s. It is in no way related to the sum or total information of the 40 billion 0s and 1s. You—your consciousness—are in no way the sum of your fundamental particles. You are exponentially greater than that. Purely emergent.
So, we have this emergent Omega mindlike substrate holding a code, Alpha. Alpha lives in Omega. But Omega emerged from Alpha—from the code—self-actualizing itself from itself, such that the beginning and end are self-embedded in a logically consistent feedback loop of co-creation and coexistence.
Now, let’s crawl out of the rabbit hole a bit to our more mundane experience as 21st century humans. Let’s follow through on what such a physics implies for mankind’s near- and long-term future. This new physical view says that a meaningful event from our collective future will statistically draw us toward itself, like a gravitational attractor. Freewill still dominates, because a code-based universe would not be a deterministic algorithm playing itself out. But certain possible futures, especially potentially important events with more complex information, act more strongly upon us than events with less emergent meaning. Why is technology, tolerance, critical thinking, and general awareness of reality increasing at a seemingly exponential rate? What is tugging on us from the future, where we can presume that the evolution of consciousness is exponentially greater? And is there some special epic event just ahead of us that is drawing us toward itself with increasing intensity?
We are moving headlong into a phase-transition of individual and collective human consciousness. Indeed, this expansion of consciousness is far more fundamental for an evolving universe than the technological explosion that is paralleling it.
What is spiritualism? What is psychic ability? What does metaphysics mean? In my opinion, these are all dirty questions loaded with the baggage of misunderstanding. Physics is simply the study of what is real. The study of reality. Metaphysics would be either something not real or something not yet discovered that has actually been part of physics all along. We scientists still do not really know what this place is—this construct. There are thousands of experimental facts published in scientific journals that have no explanation within any known physical model. The deepest problem in our understanding is the missing quantum gravity theory—the theory that unifies QM and the theory of space and time, general relativity. Each of QM and general relativity violently implies that the other is incorrect. Without possessing a solid unification theory, can anyone use incomplete models of reality, such as general relativity, to say with confidence that a person claiming to have a premonition, or to get information from something without sound, touch, or sight, is delusional? And if consciousnesses can exist in fields of light, as opposed to matter, or can more deeply surf patterns of a topological trans-temporal spacetime code, can humans from the present connect with them in any way? Or have humans connected with them and developed religious stories to make sense of the experiences? What about our descendants—ourselves in and from the future? How much wiser and more vastly consciousness can they be, and can we somehow converse with them in subtle or not-so-subtle ways? The safe answer is, “It depends on what the new physics will allow.”
Our path in fundamental physics has led us to deduce that these possibilities are more probable than not. In fact, the deduction is the fact that we see a universe means that some animal, on some planet, transcended ordinary local physical limitations and evolved into a vast network of consciousness that eventually became capable of holding the origin, the abstract code that it evolved through to self-actualize. Just as humans are related to butterflies and dinosaurs but are no longer the same species, our descendants will be neither human nor Earthborn.
What are the odds that humanity is the first animal to launch high-consciousness from a planet into a runaway universal-scale doubling algorithm that grows large enough in the future to be the mind-like substrate of the Alpha level fundamental code? To answer this, try ignoring the understandable guilt you might feel for having such an arrogant thought in the first place. View the data unemotionally. There are a lot of planets in the universe with liquid water. And where there is water, and a few other conditions, there’s a good possibility life can self-organize. Presume life exists in other locations in the universe. How could we be the first to get off-planet and be an important evolutionary step in the universe self-organizing into the god-like Omega substrate?
Technology must be discovered for a species to do this. And that requires the unusual animal quality of abstract thinking leading to mathematics—the language of reality. In the 1960s, Russians began searching in the radio spectrum for signs of technologically capable off-Earth intelligence. They pointed radio telescopes at many coordinates in the deep past and all over space. Since the 1980s, NASA and many other governmental, academic, and private groups around the world have been searching. After nearly 60 years, it is so quiet out there in the universe that you can hear a pin drop. It is as though we are all alone in terms of technological evolution, even though we know that life must be fairly common.
Some species in a universe has to be first to hack the code of reality and spread consciousness off-planet. Coming up bust in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence over the last 60 years is simply one data point of evidence to consider.
Another data point is that the universe is just getting started. And much of this brief time has been too hot for any life to self-organize. It’s fair to measure a universe’s age in terms of solar lifetimes. Popular cosmological models, such as the Big Bang, allow for countless numbers of solar lifetimes. We are currently only 1.4 solar lifetimes old as a universe—just a baby. For a species to move its consciousness out beyond its home planet and tap into a non-local or transtemporal and trans-spatial underlying code at the fabric of reality to further its technology and grow and evolve, it would likely need to discover those underlying physics. How likely is it for an animal to do this, and is this the goal of evolutionary biology in the first place?
The Earth’s biosphere has been churning out species for about one-third the age of the universe. In that period, it produced over 100 million different lifeforms. Only one has developed mathematics, put its technology on another planet and made inroads into hacking the code of reality. Does this mean that, out of every 100 million planets with life, there should be about one where an animal develops high consciousness capable of physics and leaving the planet? Not at all. A university statistician would throw you out of her office for suggesting that an instance of one in a sample size of 100 million means that you can derive a statistical probability from it. If you had, say, three instances in 100 million, you could start to come up with some probabilities with a straight face. It could be virtually impossible for what occurred with humans to happen again. Here’s why.
Evolutionary biology tends to snuff out animals that get too much smarter or faster than, or otherwise superior to, other species. Its objective is not to develop high consciousness but to create complexity and self-organize more species for greater biodiversity and balance. Human intelligence is far out of balance with, or stronger than, the rest of the other 100 million species on Earth. When such imbalance occurs, biospheres eliminate that species by letting things play out. For example, two lions are born on the African savanna. They are mutated such that they possess 25 percent more intelligence than the average lion. Their traits then filter into their descendant populations to give the species an out-of-balance advantage over the gazelle population they depend on. Within a few seasons, the lions outsmart the gazelles to the point of reducing them below their reproductive threshold. A few seasons later, the lion population drops below its reproductive threshold and, voilà, nature solved the imbalance and synergy resumes its course. Humans have outsmarted nature in a catch-me-if-you can game—so far. Will we expand our consciousness off-planet en masse before the biosphere balances itself by eliminating us? Can we use level-headed, long-term wisdom to maintain our biosphere long enough for the phase transition to occur?
At this unprecedented epic in the history of life on Earth, an animal has emerged against the odds. With a bit more technology, it will be capable of sterilizing all life on Earth. On the other hand, with a bit more physics and resulting technology, it is capable of hacking the code of reality such that quanta of a spacetime code can be self-organized into any pattern, and where the enigmatic substance of consciousness can become vastly greater and different in quality than the older Homo sapiens form of consciousness from which we emerged.
Relating this to the general theme of the book, Future Shock, my predictions for our near-term and long-term future are as follows:
1 
The shock aspect is just a growing pain. Our minds are highly plastic. We are adaptive and resilient. Knowledge/technology will give us freewill choices to deal with change more radical than the authors of Future Shock could have imagined.
2 Phase transitions are special, when we speak of change. We may go thousands of years along a path of evolutionary change in the direction of a phase-shift. And then, boom! Like a supernova, the phase-shift occurs and it is, in that moment, the single brightest object in the universe. The approach toward our phase transition is not a linear acceleration toward the shift. It is an exponential approach. Exponential processes sneak up on you like a thief in the night because you cannot take the rate of acceleration or change from the past and paste it onto the future. Humanity is exponentially accelerating toward an omega point. We are perhaps the first animal in the universe to get off planet. We may next rapidly expand into new collective and transtemporal forms of consciousness that are difficult to envision without having experienced them. Like the rumbling of a train five miles down the track, some of us have our ear to the steel and can feel this phase transition hurtling toward us—faster by the moment. I do not expect this to occur when I am a very old man. It is around the corner.
3 You may think of us screaming toward this future event. Or you may think of it moving toward us. I think of us and it exponentially accelerating toward and attracting one another. As we get closer, the pull is stronger. And our collective evolution is more rapid. The growing pains, for some, are getting stronger.
4 For materialist readers, this notion of trans-temporal feedback loops and the future influencing the past can be allowed by popular retrocausal interpretations of quantum mechanics. For more spiritually minded readers, you can imagine this phase transition as a new official unification of the formerly disparate paradigms of spiritualism and physics. But just the essential concepts—not all the stories of religion. Many spiritual models will be replaced by the equally beautiful idea that unimaginable and God-like forms of consciousness can exist within a new mathematically rigorous unification physics and where the most complex emergent things, such as your consciousness, cannot, even in principle, be computed with mathematics.
5 The short-term prediction is that humans will very soon discover something profound about fundamental physics that will be like a great genie escaping a bottle for the first time. In terms of technology, it will usher in far-beyond Star Trek-level technology, but with some new form of spiritual/physical understanding of reality, like the Force in Star Wars or the way that the blue creatures in the movie Avatar navigated reality. Fanatical religious extremists will have a harder time with the logic and physics of this new view. Ironically, secular materialists will generally say, “Okay, that’s all I was asking for. Makes sense.”
6 As for as our long-term future, it is bewildering enough to recognize how imminent and radical the change to our short-term future is. Whatever the long-term outcome, it will also be here fast if it is indeed on an exponential curve. That’s the thing about exponentials—they compress evolutionary sequences into infinitesimally small scales of time.
Klee Irwin is the director of Quantum Gravity Research and an Associate Founder of Singularity University. His publications are listed on ResearchGate.net. A deeper extrapolation of this essay is here:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
315496256_A_New_Approach_to_the_
Hard_Problem_of_Consciousness_
A_Quasicrystalline_Language_of_
Primitive_Units_of_Consciousness_in_Quantized_Spacetime. And Klee’s general Website is KleeIrwin.com