[extropy-chat] Will we all choose to become one mind only?

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 4/26/07, TheMan <mabranu at yahoo.com> wrote:

Are we all going to become one, when singularity
> comes, so that there will be no political and moral
> issues anymore, just one mind, a mind that always
> knows what it wants, goes for what it wants and
> nothing else, and never fights with itself?


Individuals are always "fighting" with themselves. Every single decision
that is made involves a weighing up of multiple alternatives, multiple
outcomes, multiple utilities for each outcome. If multiple minds were
integrated into one person the behaviour of that person would reflect some
sort of average of the individual minds. Two careful conservatives + one
reckless radical = one mostly careful, sometimes radical joined person. The
difference would be that this person could not harm, punish or reward some
selected part of himself because all the parts experience what the whole
experiences.

I'm thinking we might all choose to become something
> like one of those clusters of human minds called "the
> joined", described in Clarke/Baxter: "The light of
> other days", joined also with AI of course (and why
> not with the minds of all the animals as well!).
>
> Is there a danger in all individuals becoming one? Can
> there be a survival value, for the human species, in
> such diversity of opinions that exists today, where
> people can't accept each other's ways of thinking,
> where people even kill each other because they have
> different beliefs etc?


The collective decisions of the joined mind would, over time, resemble the
collective decisions of the individuals making up the collective. The
equivalent of killing each other might be a decision to edit out some
undesirable aspect of the collective personality, which has the advantage
that no-one actually gets hurt.

Stathis Papaioannou
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