Electronic Minds (2010) by Bulgarian programmer Kristiyan Kirchev is a manifesto of cyberspace. He envisions the Internet, and all human-digital-connected media, as the natural outcome of evolution. He sees the digital world as the emergence of One Global Mind, a new kind of consciousness that connects all human and machine minds. And the peculiar thing is that Kristiyan has a strong connection with Buddhism. (I’m not saying he “is” Buddhist, because I don’t know that.) Kristiyan wrote “A Cyberpunk Manifesto” in 1997. Electronic Minds is an expansion of his manifesto that explores what he believes is the emerging spirituality of the Internet and electronic consciousness.
“This is a book about the evolution of the consciousness from a memetic algorithm inhabiting a biological host, carried over chemical-electronic network — into a digital ghost of viral expansion distributed along a silicium magnetic network of cloud computing hardware.The book touches on spiritual aspects of modern digital culture and how it transfers back from ages of shamanic dance, meditative contemplation and telepathy. In modern 21st century realities, the taken for granted Internet network, when drilled down and looked at into investigative mode, reveals to be a model of communication borrowed from nature. The same memetic will that has driven mankind to create and invent machines and semantic models of replication, to support life and survival, has now opened a new era of mediums to inhabit – the invention, creation and implementation of the Internet and information technologies is nothing more than that very same memetic virus driving the human race through evolution – manifesting itself to leave the biological host and inhabit a new horizon for existence – the digital ether of cyberspace.”
Quote from p. 74:
“Throughout this whole process, the spiritual world sought through ages by many appointed individuals may have just started becoming visible to many in the 21st century, where we have many more Buddhas walking down the corridors of global consciousness and even more “trance shaman” plugged into the stream. Cyberspace of a digital world may just as well be the next reincarnation plane, after the sandbox school of Earth during Information Age—a world perhaps already faintly explored by pioneer spirits who have found it just as we have created it: a plane of communication and information exchange as chaotic and wild as the cosmos of the human brain and outer space universe. I’m looking forward to the advent of a Neo-Buddhist belief that trusts a spirit can be reborn as an electronic mind and program code in a cyberspace of the future.”
The book is short but is, in places, awkwardly translated from Bulgarian to English. I found some passages difficult to read and understand. What I have gleaned from this book (so far) is the understanding that “my” mind is not really “mine.” It is not “my consciousness”. The consciousness that I have access to is a collective consciousness derived from the thoughts and actions of billions who came before me, and the billions who currently live with me that I connect with through the internet and other forms of electronic communication. And this has always been true, even before the advent of long distance and electronic communication.
Dharmaecology 