
On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi Paradox) - urb
https://medium.com/@ubrison/on-becoming-one-fb34e85fbbfd
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cobbzilla
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.

~~~
Lambdanaut
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.

------
gfodor
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.

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dreamcompiler
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.

~~~
bantheads
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?

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

~~~
urb
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 :-)

~~~
didgeoridoo
Reminds me of [http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-long-
chase/](http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-long-chase/)

~~~
ricc
Loved it! Thanks for sharing!

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0705638875
This reads like a Markov chain with Ray Kurzweil and the script to Evangelion
as input.

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

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r34
"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.

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gmuslera
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.

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staktrace
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.

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

~~~
the-dude
Are you sure about that? Bits have mass.

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

~~~
the-dude
There are more electrons in your RAM if you set bits to 1.

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anotheryou
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)

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vorpalhex
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.

~~~
urb
What's the name of the anime?

~~~
vorpalhex
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.

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

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

