Stages of Consciousness
Despite this, it's stunning to see Ray Kurzweil has no problem continuing to announce the coming Singularity. He claims computers will reach the processing power of the human brain by somewhere between 2030-2060, at which point there will be an explosion of "artificial intelligence" and human history as we know it will be over - like a technological version of a well organised Biblical armaggedon - except the good people don't go to heaven, they get digitised - or maybe just blown away by their new robot masters.
Hmmmmmmm. Really? Thing is - we have had the processing power of the human brain for around about the last 100,000 years. One of the things we very do know about human consciousness - the actual sapience of Homo sapiens - is that it has evolved over a very very very long period of time.
I think this is a fascinating way of looking at our history. It is the history of the evolution of self-reflective consciousness. I outlined this in a previous article called an introduction to Stages of Consciousness, which is a perspective that has been stumbled upon by numerous academics across a range of fields. Essentially we have created and moved through at least 5 to 6 major stages of consciousness and culture over the last 100,000 years. In terms of this discussion, the most important thing I can say on this is that it seems our subjective experience - that of this "hard problem", develops greater and greater depth in each of these stages.
In summary:
100,000ya Survival
50-35,000ya Tribal
~10,000ya Warrior/Barbarian
~3000ya Mythic/Absolutistic
450ya Scientific/rational
150ya Pluralistic/Integrative
Each of these stages has carried distinctly new capacities for cognition, moral and value formation, relationships and subsequent political/religious and social systems and cultural artifacts. As we grapple with new global issues in the 21st century, these stages are still emerging as we speak. We are always in the midst of and contributors to this evolution of culture and consciousness.
Meanwhile, work by Piaget, Kohlberg, Kegan and most prominently Ken Wilber's sythesis of these theories in his in books (e.g Theory of Everything) strongly indicate that an individual moves through very similar stages of capacity for cognition, moral and value formation, etc. For example, it seems an individual moves through Stages 1-4 (which as a species has taken us about 100,000 years to move through) in just 16 years. How is that possible? To the best of my knowledge we don't know. It's really not clear how this happens to the extent that Wilber (in 1995) suggested that Rupert Sheldrake's theories of morphic resonance may explain this capacity!