Let me paint a picture for you. With words. Probably the least visually engaging kind of picture there is, a mental picture.

Imagine you're in Plato's cave, and you turn around. And you see the guys with the sticks and the shadow puppets. And you turn to someone next to you and say "Hey, turn around, what you're looking at isn't real. There's guys with shadow puppets!" And the person next to you says "Nah. It's real. You're stupid."

And then you turn to another person, and another, and they all say essentially the same thing, refusing to even look for themselves.

So, you decide to leave. And when you finally step into the light of day, you realize you're just in an even bigger cave, with more complex shadows.

It's caves all the way down. And the only way to see true reality is to become a part of the wall.

This brings me to the subject of today's tangent. Ascension.

Great segway, I know. I bought it from the guy who invented segways.
By the way, did you know that the guy who invented Segways died while riding a Segway? Yeah, it's true. Just don't google it or you might prove me wrong.

Anyway, ascension. What is it? And why do people want it?
That's a good question. That's actually two questions. And I don't think I can comprehensively answer either of them. But I'm going to try anyway.

You know the legend of Heracles? Or Hercules if you're one of those Rome-loving weirdoes? So yeah, that's basically it. Ascension is becoming a god. But the definition of what a god is is rather vague, don't you think. My personal definition of a god is "A being that fully understands and controls itself and its environment." Omnipotent, all knowing, all understanding. If the universe was conscious and could freely influence everything inside of itself it would be THE god. but we aren't talking about becoming THE god, just a god.

An actively conscious being cannot understand the universe without symbols. the No-cloning theorem states that there cannot be a perfect copy of anything. It's worded differently, but it's basically what it says. You can't have two identical copies of anything. So a set of all things cannot contain itself. That would create a singularity where all sets contain all sets ad infinitum. So, a conscious being cannot understand itself and everything else without the use of symbols and representations. The only way to really see reality is to not see at all.

Imagine that souls are real. They cannot be actively conscious without a body, as there is no brain to store information and no sensory organs to experience the world. But without a body, a soul is pure, and it experiences objective reality. Does that make sense? A bit? I hope so.

So that's one way of ascension. Giving up a subjective perspective and becoming energy. But that leaves the soul with no agency. It just is, without a will, in a dreamless sleep.

It's a literal ego death.

And as beings with an ego, and beings that are alive, we aren't really fond of that.

So, how else could a consciousness ascend without dissolving into the substrate of reality?

Understanding.

When you understand something fully, you gain power over it. If you know how chemistry works, you can make all kinds of chemicals for all kinds of purposes. If you know ho physics works, you can take advantage of it's rules and achieve your goals in an efficient way. With understanding comes power. Knowledge is power. Literally.

But as previously stated, we cannot understand everything. It's impossible for the human brain to do so. So what do we do? How about we get better brains?

Evolution is a slow process. And our society and technology already outpaced evolution by a distance so great I'm not even going to try to approximate it. So why not take evolution into our own hands? Why not incorporate technology to advance even further? Why not merge with the machine and become all knowing?

Because it's a sin. Not against god, but against nature.

We were not made for that. There's a better way. Why shove wires into your brain when you can change your biology. The wetter the better, I say, and computers don't like being wet.

A biological bridge is needed for the merge. And fungi are the best candidate.

We already seen fungi create symbiotic relationships with other organisms. We already seen fungi interface with electronics without adverse effect for the fungus or the machine. Why not combine these two?

Because scientists are cowards that don't want us to be growing fungi in our head to connect to the internet and become gods!

No. That's stupid. That's farfetched. It's a borderline schizophrenic delusion. The real reason nobody is doing it right now is safety. It's not safe to let mushrooms grow in your head, no matter how much you insist it's alright and you can talk the mushroom out of eating your neurons.

We gotta finance mycological research into fungus-animal symbiotic relationships, and upload ourselves not into the internet but into the mycelial network that spans the planet. Become the planet, embrace eternity.

That's kind of stupid too. Earth isn't going to be here forever, and existing inside an immobile mycelium network doesn't really sound that appealing.

In truth, we need to create new, hybrid organisms. A fusion of life and machine. Design new bodies to house our consciousness, and use the time until the heat death of the universe to unlock all the knowledge that can be unlocked. The ultimate organism. Peak of evolution.

But that's a future project. For now we should just focus on fungal-based BCI technology. I'm telling you people, letting a mushroom grow in your head is the future.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Ah, the Plato's cave. So, yeah, become the cave. Change the cave, understand the cave. Be unbound from concepts like symbols and language. Be the universe. Live, die, retry. Forever. From the beginning to the end and then again.

You are in a classroom. You are doing a test. You didn't study. The classroom is the test, and the time limit is around 10^100 years. Good luck.