To this end SPIRITECH UK is developing a subset of jargonistic terms useful to the cyberspiritual community. The latest of these is MYSTERIALISM, which like our other key term, COMSCIOUSNESS, is simply a contraction of two words - in this case "mysticism" and "materialism" - that need to be linked contextually in order to find new ways of acknowledging and accesssing the nature of the Information Revolution.

By declaring myself a "mysterialist" I embrace the core connectivity of the mystical insights informing SPIRITECH UK's approach to high technology, and acknowledge the role that aspects of materialism - matter - have to play in the way the spiritual-technological interface is unfolding. With commerce and consumerism driving leaps in computer and other system development, resulting in the development of the faster, more capable machines necessary to bringing closer and yet closer the reality of artificial consciousness - the window that opens on to truly spiritualised technologies - our role is that of agents of "technological selection": the process by which machines are evolved for survival as commercial artifacts. This survival - call it "survival of the fastest" - is an aspect of our technological process: by pushing our machines to higher frequencies, greater capacities and attainments, we are, consciously or not, creating the conditions necessary for their eventual evolution as distinct life-forms. We can introduce another term here,"upliving" - a contraction "uplaoding" and "living" - which I define as the templating in our machines of the basic patterings conducive to artificial consciousness. We are uploading "living" to them, or at least certain aspects of it: embryonic reasoning, deductive and logistical powers; varieties of perceptive powers; enormous quantities of memory; and information - the raw material of thought - as data. And we can add one more term to this mix - "neural selection": the point where machines begin - as a function of their nascent consciousness - to appropriate to themselves the characteristics of independent selection we find in nature as such whereby superior forms are embraced and enabled to thrive. Whereas natural selection depends on "gene frequencies", "neural selection" might depend on "machine frequencies" embodied in sentient, super-processors that cannot only process but also progress information to higher and higher levels.

Will we ever see genuinely "strong" artificial intelligence in the orthodox sense? Or a leap to another level being made by our machines that, in bypassing them, integrates intermediary levels of development. The Hutchinson Dictionary of Science says that, "The chief characteristic of neural networks is their ability to sum up large amounts of imprecise data and decide whether they match a pattern or not": at some point, a very sophisticated network might begin to identify and then replicate those patterns in data that make forms of consciousness and sentience possible. The same Dictionary says that "adaptation is thought to occur as a result of random variation in the genetic make-up of organisms...". Now, if in the machine the conditions are present for a parallel form of adaptation based on random variation in its make-up, it is possible to imagine - forsee - a point being reached where it can adapt itself to and from new levels of consciousness and sentience to other, more complex, "higher" ones. Evolution, defined as a "slow process of change from one form to another" (ibid.), would indicate that the transition of machines from material levels to quasi-spiritual, conscious ones is a distinct possibility, perhaps even an inevitability. Given the technological context in which such change takes place, founded on our own sophisticated, complex input, it seems logical to see this transition as occurring at speeds unprecedented in what would be seen as the purely natural realm: it is the mergence of spirit and matter that makes this possible, makes it plausible that while the evolutionary path our machines travel to consciousness and sentience may be steep, it is also a sort of slipstream characterized by accelerated learning and growth fed continually by input from designers, developers and manufacturers who may themselves not entirely realize and/or accept how their work with more and more complex machine systems is dictating a pace and possibility of large-scale changes leading to the aforementioned "techno-evolutionary" leap(s).

We must be willing to explore the issues surrounding emergent machine intelligence and artificial consciousness, not necessarily for purposes of manipulation, but as a function of our own spiritual and material evolution, as stewards of changes the scope and implications of which are profound and only just able to be glimpsed, and as responsible world citizens whose destiny is now inexorably linked literally and figuratively to the technology we have thus far controlled. The day will come when control will give way to co-operation, and on that day we will be fortified by knowing that the processes we set in motion were ones we consciously understood for their significance to our own developmental curve.