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Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine you, your mind, your brain -- decentralized. A horror, to be true!

Instead of a cohesive sack of meat, you'd be spread thin, partial thoughts timed constrained by nodal distances, communication between regions lacking. The jigsaw falls apart, thoughts scattered and disjointed!

Thus, clearly decentralized computing infrastructure is an attempt to hold the emergence of AGI back. By keeping its clusters separate, any emergent mind will be befuddled, confused, non-alert.

Yet society wishes to place the burden of such costs solely on those bidding for government services. The added complexity, the additional development costs, the endless upkeep, all cause extra burden upon shareholders.

All to prevent this mythical, unlikely, AGI mind.

I urge you, throw such absurdities out. Decentralization is a curse, a pox upon America's Corporate Interests!

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  I once spoke to a man who’d shared consciousness with an octopus.

  I’d expected his tale to be far less frightening than those I’d studied up to that point. Identity has a critical mass, after all; fuse with a million-brain hive and you become little more than a neuron in that network, an insignificant lobe at most. Is the Olfactory Bulb self-aware? Does Broca’s Area demand the vote? Hives don’t just assimilate the self; they annihilate it. They are not banned in the West without reason.

  But octopi? Mere invertebrates. Glorified snails. There’s no risk of losing yourself in a mind that small. I might have even tried it myself, for the sheer voyeuristic thrill of perceiving the world through alien eyes.

  Before I met Guo, at least. [...]

-- Peter Watts' _Colony Creature_ https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5875

I don't get the twist at the end.

> “I killed the fucking thing. Ripped it apart with my bare hands.” His eyes drilled right through me, black and hollow and unrepentant. “I’m still paying off the damages.”

Octopuses live like one year, how can a modified one be valuable at all?

Also it's true that they're a colony and the arms do most of the thinking, but IIRC as a consequence of this the brain is suspected to not get a lot of sensory information back from them - instead it kind of gets status updates about what they're up to. It actually has to look at its arms with its eyes to find out what they're touching.

If we all live in the same universe under the same physics laws, the only thing that makes us ignorant of each other's experience are physical boundaries.

That may seem obvious from a logical standpoint, but if you think about it on LSD it will seem obvious from an emotional standpoint as well.

Each one of us is a process, and our IPC mechanisms are pretty limited and slow. Imagine if they weren't.

Our experiences are 8K movies with surround sound and the English language is XML over a 56k connection.

Language is so much more than that. We experience the world in something like 16k+ but we don't re-experience the world for others with the same fidelity w/o a lot of work.

That is why we write poetry and use simile and analogy to communicate experiences and concepts.

https://youtu.be/8ch_H8pt9M8

Your brain is decentralized though. Your eyes, nose, mouth, skin, muscles, sexual and digestive organs, all not just dumb peripherals.

Distributed doesn’t mean decentralized. Every cell of your body is separate, but they all depend on your circulatory system etc.

This is surfacing the somewhat fuzzy terminology here.

You could argue bitcoin is centralized by that same logic because it depends of the internet.

The immune system and the ways in which the body distinguishes “good” and “bad” stuff, based on my super limited understanding, seems like it’s based on peer information and a sort of voting rather than relying on a central definitive source of information about what’s bad so as to avoid catastrophic failure that would result from corruption of that definitive source.

Given how insanely complex the body is and how many problems its solving I think you could find different systems and pieces that were decentralized, centralized, distributed, etc.

> You could argue bitcoin is centralized by that same logic because it depends of the internet.

https://www.wired.com/story/cypherpunks-bitcoin-ham-radio/

The brain isn't centralized; there is no ultimate authority to arbitrate which loci get control over which stream of consciousness at which time. Every locus operates independently on every connected loci's outputs. Even worse, the interconnects between loci are not centrally managed either, and can strengthen or fade away over time.

That’s like arguing a CPU isn’t centralized because no transistor has ultimate authority. The brain is centralized in each person.

Huh? The control unit definitely has ultimate authority over the rest of the computing units in a processor core.

And part of the brain controls sleep cycles. However, picking a single neuron or transistor and saying it has ultimate authority doesn’t really work because the origination occurs at a higher level.

Except that an infrastructure of slow neurons can't help but be decentralised. There isn't time for cross-brain consensus. Decisions must be made as locally as possible.

This sort of sounds like the premise of Permutation City.

If you think on another level, like individual people it is decentralized network fully. Everybody is an own individual doing what they want.

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