[extropy-chat] I keep asking myself...

[Robert Bradbury]

Commenting on the separate-but-one mind integration of copies problem...

One way to think about this is the two halves of ones brain.  I'm reasonably
sure there are a number of documented cases where people have survived
following the removal of one half of the brain.  Under normal operation your
right & left halves have to communicate through a gatekeeper in the middle.
Due to the way various senses are delivered (e.g. left ear and right ear)
there obviously has to be some integration between the signals taking place
-- but there is a time delay involved in this integration.

In the multiple copy scenario it is going to depend upon how separated the
mind's subcomponents are and how much communication bandwidth there is
between them.  Obviously one could develop interesting shorthand methods to
allow the part of your mind on a moon of Jupiter to effectively keep itself
in-sync with the part of your mind on Venus, etc.

If you have distinct instantiations of ones mind gathering widely different
experience sets one would expect them to slowly become distinct individuals
(kind of like identical twins).  But if you allow frequent resyncing then
the entity is effectively a distributed mega-mind.  This is very nearly a
requirement for indefinite longevity as it is the only way to trump the
local impacts of the hazard function that would destroy subsets of your
mind.  (I pointed this out at Extro-3 back in '97 -- that if one wanted to
live a very long time one had to become a "distributed replicated
intelligence".)

Robert
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