On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi Paradox) (opens in new tab)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

"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.

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.

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)