How Singular? How singular is the Singularity? Will it happen in an instant? Lets consider again the derivation of the word. In mathematics a singularity is a value that is beyond any limit - in essence, infinity. The Singularity as we have discussed it in this book, does not achieve infinite levels of computation, memory, as any other other measurable attribute. But it certainly achieves vast levels of all these qualities, including intelligence. With the reverse engineering of the human brain we will be able to apply the parallel, self-organizing, chaotic, algorithms of human intelligence to enormously powerful computational substrates. This intelligence will then be in a position to improve its own design, both hardware and software, in a rapidly accelerating iterative process.

In this remarkable book by one of the great psychologists and neurologists of the early twentieth century, Kurt Goldstein presents a summation of his “holistic” theory of the human organism. In the course of his studies on brain-damaged soldiers during the First World War, Goldstein became aware of the failure of contemporary biology and medicine to genuinely understand both the impact of such injuries and the astonishing adjustments that patients made to them. He challenged reductivist approaches that dealt with “localized” symptoms, insisting instead that an organism be analyzed in terms of the totality of its behavior and interaction with its surrounding milieu. He was especially concerned with the breakdown of organization and the failure of central cerebral controls that take place in catastrophic responses to situations such as physical or mental illness. But Goldstein was equally attuned to the amazing powers of the organism to readjust to such devastating losses, if only by withdrawal to a more limited range of activity that it could manage by a redistribution of its reduced energies, thus reclaiming as much wholeness as new circumstances allowed. Goldstein’s concepts in The Organism have had a major impact on philosophical and psychological thought throughout this century, as can be seen in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, Ernst Cassirer, Ludwig Binswanger, and Roman Jakobson, not to mention the wide-ranging field of Gestalt psychology.