On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi Paradox) | Hacker News Reader

On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi Paradox)

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25 pointsurb32 comments

It will happen across such a long and large gradient that no one will know or ever understand it.

Does a single ant “know” what the whole colony wants? Yet one can describe the colony as a whole in many ways: finding food, reacting to threats, etc.

Does a single neuron “know” it is part of a brain? Yet the brain acts as a system, responding to stimuli in a coordinated fashion.

Hypothesis: we are already “one”, we just don’t know it, and can never truly know it, at an individual level.

We will become 'one' who we will be able to actually understand.

I like the analogy to neurons but since we are sentient being this is a second order collective and I think we will know, at least to a degree, that we are merging.

When somebody speaks of a foreign country they're already abstracting millions of people into one being. It's especially humorous when emotion is applied to the foreign mass. "China is upset about XYZ".

Just as there is no China, there also is no me. I am the dance of a trillion cells who are each the dances of an infinite sea of atoms within and without them. Patterns on top of patterns forever.

I question the assumption the trend is towards consolidation. We have more people, pursuing more interests, inhabiting more space than before. If we become able to mold intelligence itself, it seems equally likely to me that each human will become many intellects than all of us become one.

Not to mention that the version of the future the author projects is one where a person will choose to yield their mental independence to another. This runs right up against the entire history of humanity — humanity’s best systems are those which leverage individual self interests to collective good. Systems which assume individuals will not pursue self interest and self preservation seem to be unstable and prone to failure.

It's certainly possible for a single consciousness to develop severe mental illness, and if that's what we are then I'd say we were already well down that road.

For the most part, mental health is highly subjective and relative. Psychiatric and psychological diagnosis are based on relativity to the average, or normal mental state of the masses.

So, if all consciousness is merged into one, how could we make any relative judgements?

An addictive, codependent, smothering one-ness delivered with unquestioning religious fervour sounds like something I’d start an armed resistance against.

I imagine many people will feel the same way. Do you think the Oneness will let you alone or pull you in for your own good :-)

If you can communicate with it at all, you have already been pulled in.

Reminds me of http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-long-chase/

Loved it! Thanks for sharing!

As ridiculous as it may sound, this precise sentiment could explain the rise of nationalist fervor in recent times in the face of increasing global consolidation of power and information flow; i.e. nationalist complaining about the "globalists"

I certainly fall under this category, and I find it ridiculous that others find the idea ridiculous. I sense widespread belief that certain things must be a certain way, that no other options are possible, yet when asked to explain this thinking the responses seem to have little depth of thought behind them, and disagreement is rapidly met with an emotional backlash.

It seems to me to be extremely similar to religion, which coincidentally tends to be something these believers criticize with great passion, in my experience anyways.

In general, I find the topic of the posted article very interesting and find it odd that globalist enthusiasts seem to lack interest in it considering the apparent similarities in foundational beliefs.

This reads like a Markov chain with Ray Kurzweil and the script to Evangelion as input.

I'll take that as a compliment. I think.

"Billions of digitized thoughts are transferred between humans every hour of every day, more than the neural messages within any of our individual brains." - this one is quite interesting as a kind of objective measurment (density of information exchange?). According to that conceptual framework in which "consciousness is simply a process of information exchange" (I took it from Culadasa's "The Mind Illuminated", but it's probably much wider) one could thnk in terms of "phase", which level of consciousness dominates.

Still must be defined what is exactly human conciousness, and if have any meaning with that definition the idea of a shared conciousness.

But shared conciousness is not needed, just rising the abstraction level and watching how a society (or mankind) behaves as a whole would be a good hint on what could happen. And the problem is that what drives mankind right now is the money meme, not the preservation of the human race, or going to the stars, or preserve the ecosystem we depend on for a foreseeable future. That may be our great filter.

I've often thought along these same lines (c.f. Asimov's Galaxia concept) but I think that this one-ness will inherently be limited by distance. Thoughts can be propagated across a planet pretty quickly but if we become a multi-planet civilization I would expect each planet to have it's own "one mind" (or whatever you want to call it) simply because of communication latency.

Thought doesn't have mass. I see no reason to discount superluminal communication.

Fair point. Another argument in favor of multiple one-ness is that of monocultures. In general things that become a monoculture are more vulnerable to sudden death. For long term survival diversity is good, and I imagine that planet-level conciousnesses would spawn daughter conciousnesses as they expand to other planets. Those daughter conciousnesses would further evolve and reproduce rather than being strongly tied to the parent.

Superluminal communication breaks causality regardless of whether mass is involved, and we have no evidence that effects can happen before they are caused.

Are you sure about that? Bits have mass.

The underlying substrate on which bits register has mass but do they?

There are more electrons in your RAM if you set bits to 1.

Photons don't have mass either. Yet they cannot exceed the speed of light.

I'm scared a population of 1 is close to extinction.

It's already scary that humanity is huddled so close together, be it the internet or the net of planes carrying viruses.

(I still totally dig technology and love the internet and also that so far it's mostly the internet)

I've been rewatching an old anime where humans head towards collective conscienceness as a response to extinction level events. And it makes a good point: What if some people don't want to lose their individualized identity?

Connecting is not always the solution.

What's the name of the anime?

Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's an older anime (90s) but it had a series of movies afterwards that expand on the ending. It starts as a typical "big robot fight" style anime but quickly evolves into much more.

CLickbait title: no other mention of "Fermi paradox."

I thought the implication was clear. When everything becomes "one thing" there's no need to communicate using spectrum.

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