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>What if instead of worrying about uploading brains for individual survival, we started turning into a connected colony organism? Many (maybe most, maybe even
by meowface 11y ago
>What if instead of worrying about uploading brains for individual survival, we started turning into a connected colony organism?
Many (maybe most, maybe even all) agents will still desire fundamental autonomy and privilege/consciousness separation, though. Perhaps humans may eventually all be set up with a "dual-homed" network, but there will be many humans who won't want to disconnect from their original LAN. And to do that, there needs to be a way of uploading what they were initially given and subjectively "switching" to that upload.
At the least, the option needs to be there, I think. I think entirely merging your mind into a "hivemind" is a form of death, even if it's something less bad than conventional death. People can choose to do that if they wish it, but those who do not want to to should still have other alternatives.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoI don't think they will. Firstly our perceived autonomy and freedom of choice is an illusion. Humans are more similar than different, and if we were genuinely individualistic we wouldn't be nearly as primed to create collaborative social structures such as countries and corporations - which can be so anti-individualistic they regularly create significant individual harm or death. Secondly, there seems to be a trend in evolution towards greater collaborative complexity at the expense of individual organisms. So I think we're at the pre-Cambrian soup phase of consciousness, with a few random and not very coherent evolutionary structures emerging from a mess of interactions and acting in rather blind and unsentient ways. A conscious network would be a reasonable extrapolation, and if it was stable it would have the potential to be self-aware at a higher level.