Reality Bytes

Everything seems to be going digital, and everything seems to be integrating with the physical. But what if this duality isn't about what we actually experience in terms of bytes?

                                                     [the most detailed image of a human cell to date]

Bioconvergence is an emerging phenomenon that seems to be gathering steam amid all the buzz around a technological singularity.

As a practice, bioconvergence is described as a transdisciplinary field in which researchers from various scientific disciplines in areas such as medicine, nanotechnology and biology work closely together and across usual silos, to create significant breakthroughs in the development of new medical treatments.

In a broader context, this involves subdomains such as neurogenesis (brain and nervous system optimization), abiogenesis (origination of living organisms from lifeless matter) and various forms of quantum engineering (processing, computation, entanglement and superpositional states).

And, not surprisingly, there's this.

There's a lot to understand, a lot to define, and a lot to sort through as we consider what our existence as humanity looks like heading into a very uncertain future.

My personal belief/vision for our continued existence - one that is peaceful and synchronistic - is something along the lines of what I described in self-simulating nature. In this scenario, bioecological protocols guide their technological counterparts in providing a distinct and ever-evolving balance between humans and the environment.

This also has a distinct connection to how math, geometry and language are returning to fractal first principles. In many ways we are discovering that science itself might just have things "upside down".

A great example of this operating paradox is the future city prototype of Shenzhen Biennale, which is described as a kind of "post-industrial urbanism".

The irony here is that this version of urban life is far from post-industrial - in fact, it lives by the very ethos of the 4th industrial revolution. Meaning that where industrial silos break down, so too do human and natural elements in their current forms. The new descriptor given to this transitory concept is cyber-physical.

So where exactly do we strike a supposed balance between human existence and nature with technological acceleration?

This we cannot know for sure, but what we can speculate on is that where there is bioconvergence, there is also a potentially deeper awareness of what is synthetic and what is organic, simply by way of our senses and our intuition. In other words, no amount of holographic imaging or digital trickery can manipulate us out of a relationship with nature, or our true selves.

That assertion might seem lofty given that we live in a giant disinformation matrix, but we are no less seeking "other truths" by way of our exhaustion with all the lies and all the deceptions we are currently exposed to.

In this way, the bits and bytes we seek will inevitably represent what we discover in terms of newer questions, and in unanswered inquiries which become the mysteries of life worth pursuing.

Only time will tell... That, or we will bypass our perceptions of time altogether.