Do we really want to fuse our minds together? | Hacker News Reader

Do we really want to fuse our minds together?

aeon.co

59 pointsddandd21 comments

> ‘the biological brain cannot support multiple separate conscious attentional processes in the same brain medium’.

And that is probably because consciousness just is awareness of attention, as Graziano suggests: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3223025/

So if so, we should be able to run conscious awareness on a much faster silicon substrate (technology permitting) having it sequentially processing (becoming aware of) the memories of conscious experience of many biological brains absorbed in parallel. The hive mind then is just thinking and experiencing faster.

My questions are these:

If there are two minds, and they come in to this form of contact, which survives?

Would they be combined, leaving behind a new one which encompasses the qualities of both? Would they be combined at random?

Would they fight for dominance, leaving only the victor?

What would it feel like to have your consciousness do battle against another, become a new merged product, or for all intents and purposes dissolved?

And potentially, most importantly: What happens not to the consciousness of the other, but the memories? Will the new consciousness (formed via whichever method) have access to both?

Reading a whole lot into fabricated memories, I imagine the new entities might have an entirely new set of memories of things that never happened.

>If there are two minds, and they come in to this form of contact, which survives?

Neither? Both?

You get a bunch of new memories and some shifts in your personality. If the new memories and personality shift come suddenly, I think a lot of people would consider that a 'death'. If they come gradually, I suppose it is not a death. But either way, the new mind is going to have the memories of both, is going to 'think' that it is both, so if you want to claim that this new mind is actually one or the other of the original minds, you're probably going to find yourself arguing against the very subject you're making the claims about.

I am 100% for a hivemind. I am 100% fervently against a hivemind that enforces a personality or even a network of connections. Fuck that shit. You can actually hear all the sociopaths wringing their hands in unison at the prospect of forcing a compliant Borg hivemind onto humanity and bending it to their will. Before something like this is implemented, we're going to very much first require a purge of all sociopaths from the species. Or use the hivemind somehow to change or destroy sociopaths. But even here, you can see where this is going. Nobody said the revolution was going to be easy, that's for sure.

Another use for this: fixing afflictions with brain connections issues in healthy people. HOWEVER this should be done as an infant. At later age this could cause a personality shift !

What's so inherently horrible about an adult experiencing a personality shift? What makes that worse than performing the same procedure on an infant, who's unable to comprehend or consent to the procedure?

I was more thinking practically: infants don't have a life / lot of expectations yet. Ethically: very good questions!

Well it's mainly something to beware of I suppose. I also don't know if infants have a personality, it's still developing?

I really wonder how one could establish the required parallel connection. You need quite the wide connection interface ... (If I recall correctly brains work in a parallel fashion.)

"This thing you think of as you: it spreads across two cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum, a fat meaty pipe more than 200 million axons thick."

From the article.

It's interesting because, compared to the massive parallelism in each hemisphere, the connection between the two doesn't seem all that large.

Individual neurons also seem to have to have a fairly slow response time, on the order of milliseconds from what I've read. IANANeuroscientist, but that could be a manageable amount of data?

I wasn't clear in the original post. Not the bandwidth, but the physical connection required to connect the brain. Unless they invent something that can communicate effectively remotely.

Those interested in both mind fusion and science fiction would probably enjoy Ramez Naam's Nexus trilogy, which was just completed this month.

The world didn't really need yet another example to contribute to Betteridge's law of headlines.

For me personally, that might actually be a counterexample to Betteridge's law. I'd love to have a chance to fuse with other people, if only for a short time.

It's an example because the question asked is an obviously and inherently sarcastic one. Betteridge's law's default answer only applies to questions that at least appear to be earnest, and inverts on sarcasm.

I don't even do social media, I can't imagine having thoughts as they happen shared with others.

I think the entire point of the article is that it may not be temporary. If the connection between the two minds has enough bandwidth they will become one and at best only one of them will still exist. The consciousness of the other person will be for all intents and purposes gone.

That's a strange extrapolation. I'd rather assume that neither will survive the transition, and a new personality will result. At best. Which is not so bad, if the new one is better than both that came before.

It would make sense to me if both parties experienced the same thing while connected, and when seperated afterwards, contain partial memories of the experience (since memories seem to be distributed throughout the brain, they would be distributed throughout the super brain, leaving only partial fragments to any one part). I bet the individual brains would have different stories to explain the previous connected experience, due to the different memory fragments they have access to.

You can only have so drastic of a change in how you think from ten minutes of experience.

Just make sure to find someone who's drift-compatible, and don't xhase the rabbit!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com