
Do we really want to fuse our minds together? - ddandd
http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/do-we-really-want-to-fuse-our-minds-together/
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woodchuck64
> ‘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/](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.

------
EFruit
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?

~~~
deciplex
>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.

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fapjacks
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.

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Qantourisc
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 !

~~~
teraflop
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?

~~~
Qantourisc
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?

------
Qantourisc
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.)

~~~
lamacase
"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?

~~~
Qantourisc
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.

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

------
justin66
The world didn't really need yet another example to contribute to Betteridge's
law of headlines.

~~~
cousin_it
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.

~~~
NathanKP
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.

~~~
ZeroFries
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.

