Some food for thought: What if all of the minds of the world fused?

Those are my opinions on this matter.

UN JOUR JE SERAI DE RETOUR PRÈS DE TOI

What, I think my last post was on the second page?

Oh well.

The thing about the internet, is that there's quite a degree of separation between you and it. There's a common meme that things on the internet are the most meaningless and disregardable at all. Much less so than opinions on television. In fact, the Serious Business meme has grown to such a degree, it is almost as if internet materials are treated as half fictional. Of course this is stupid. But it's surprising to hear it compared to a real approach of a hivemind.

Also, the internet doesn't agree on a lot of things. What if two people fused at a time? Wouldn't those two battle opinions until they became nigh identical?

Now that I think about it, it is stupid how unseriously people treat the internet. What is wrong with people? I am not a fictional character in a text simulation game. I am an actual person on the other side putting out text that might last hundreds of years in a shared information network.

In a way, that might be good, in a way, it might be worse. Such an event, might be thousands of times worse than an individual rape, because it would be like raping the entire world. I'm obviously not trivializing rape, I'm thinking, wow, there might actually be worse things, there might be an entire world suffering though the trauma of it and every other possible negative event. And if this literally included the entire world, that would include children. Talking about breaking the cutie. The machine that would do this would essentially become the biggest child predator of all time.

On the other hand, if this isn't the case, rapists and rapees could start to understand each other, maybe. And rape could die out altogether. People could understand all of the motivations of rape and how to stop it, and possible rapists could understand the feelings of those raped, and the wrong of their actions, and lose the desire to rape.

On a slightly lesser scale, pedophile non-rapists and non-pedophile non-rapists could have their brains fused. And the result would either be that the pedophile sees the error of their ways and desires, or pedophilia spreads from one person to another.

Obviously this is all a hypothetical and a thought experiment. I'm not saying this is a feasible, likely future event. It doesn't sound particularly moral at all. But it is an interesting thought. I do think some people might try such a thing with people who are considered to have brain problems. Because we as a society believe the moral status quo is the logically correct answer. So people would either want to stay away from, say, a pedophile's brain, out of it being some Hannibal Lecture virus of utter evil insanity that cannot be defeated and would break their mind, or that they are these pathetic illogical creatures, leading them to their immoral conclusions. And as soon as they stuck their mind in, say, the pedophile's mind, the pedophile would go "oops! I'm stupid! You're right! What was I thinking being attracted to children". Due to this, I almost wonder if such a thing would ever happen, if in just an attempt to cure people like pedophiles.

I think there's enough people who think "if only pedophiles saw what I was thinking, they wouldn't be attracted to children at all", that some people might really want to try this.

edited 1st Jun '11 7:06:19 PM by Ukonkivi

Genkidama for Japan, even if you don't have money, you can help![1]

Ukonkivi, do you work with a bunch of monoliths?

But seriously, Instrumentality is a really, really bad idea.

Maybe it's not such a bad idea. If all minds were connected as one it would result in one individual rather than several minds tangled together.

Therefore, it would be one near-omnicient mind controlling all human bodies like puppets.

However, you run into the problem of two completely clashing personalities. They would either change to fit the new system or they would cancel each other out.

Really, it would be similar to mixing all the colors of paint together. They would change to fit each other and the end result would not be the sum of all humanity, but something new and different entirely.

I want to join a hive mind. I'd prefer to join a bunch of extremely happy supergeniuses and psychonauts.

Personality I find the idea of unifying all of humanity very appealing too.

edited 1st Jun '11 9:07:51 PM by LoveHappiness

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

I find the idea very unappealing. For an example, let's look at tropers - can you see a hypothetical hivemind consisting of me, Savage Heathen, Drunk Scriblerian, and Rottweiler coexisting well with our minds fused?

Be not afraid...

Can you say "clinical insanity?"

edited 1st Jun '11 9:09:50 PM by mailedbypostman

No but it sounds like a good concept for a comedy, Loni.

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

See, proper unification would also cure all nodes of all psychiatric issues and greatly enhance intelligence by subsuming all individual thought into the cyber-enhanced collective mind.

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

Somebody would murder somebody, and then everyone else would probably be a vegetable due to the mindlink dragging us down into death or something.

And at that point everybody ceases to exist. No thanks.

edited 1st Jun '11 9:15:13 PM by LoniJay

Be not afraid...

See! Best comedy ever!

If someone wants to accuse us of eating coconut shells, then that's their business. We know what we're doing. - Achaan Chah

Constant threat of total annihilation does make a good punchline every now and then.

Your loss.

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

Or proper unification might enhance all psychiatric issues in a feedback loop.

No, I don't know any actual basis behind this, I just think it sounds cool and dystopian.

If we all merged minds, there would no longer a Rotweiller or a Love Happiness-everyone would be merged together to create a brand new conciosness.

No it doesn't. It just clones every single psychiatric issue in the population a billionfold, then vomits it full force onto the rest of it. It's not the kind of thing that could be diffused — since you personally share the thoughts of every nutjob out there, you personally would have everything on this list and then some.

Keep in mind psychiatric disorders tend to involve some pretty fucked up brain chemistry that would make a healthy person's outlook just not process.

edited 2nd Jun '11 8:35:20 AM by Pykrete

As Pykrete sorta kinda hinted at, this only works if you have some image of a mind-brain dichotomy. If your mind is just a projection/function of your brain, this is not only even more impossible than it would initially seem (what new brain structure holds all the old ones?) but, since many disorders are actually a product of imbalanced or damaged brains, would result in you having an incredible amount of disorders.

Alcohol damage. Heroin damage. Genetic brain disorders and defects. And yes, many psychological issues. All of them, in fact.

You'd end up with something that really, really would be better off dead.

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

Heh, I bet that if you described facebook to people 100 years ago they would have freaked out the same way people in this thread did :D

On one hand it would probably give rise to peace and efficient cooperation; on the other hand it might be the end of a lot of human culture as we know it - the end of romance, courtship, privacy, negotiations, mystery, crime, debate .... heck, probably the end of spoken language!

Sounds like a nice scheme for a Utopia Justifies the Means guy!

Point that somewhere else, or I'll reengage the harmonic tachyon modulator.

I'd be weakly in favour of such a thing.

I think hive minds are both inevitable and desirable, but to be honest would rather go for smaller ones... including everybody in the same one would probably be way too impractical trying to merge people who are too different. And there's probably a point of diminishing returns for whatever practical benefits it would have. Bear in mind that if you can have telepathy between individuals, it stands to reason that you can also have it between groups on an on-and-off basis, so they'd presumably be able to empathise with one another well enough to avert war.

I'd also favour a setup with at least a little individuality. So I would be strongly in favour of smaller, looser hive minds, or possibly ones with a disconnect/reconnect option.

edited 4th Jun '11 1:48:32 PM by Jinren

I see two really big problems with this mind meld - mental malware and entropy.

As noted by most posters, psychological and genetic issues could create destructive thought processes and if we all had the same psyches, either everyone is immune to them or no-one is. It's the equivalent of everyone running Windows and Norton Antivirus. Keeping the mental Antivirus up-to-date and limiting thought transmission while culling the sources of these bad thoughts would help a little. Much better still would be dividing groups back up into people running 'Windows, Linux and Mac'. And hoping they don't go to war.

Entropy-wise, imagine beehives that grow old and die out every year. You couldn't keep a single giant human beehive going for long before things started to go wrong. But like beehives you could tackle this by having separate groups of assimilated beings that grow old at different rates, and from time to time they send out tiny parties of folks to start new, isolated colonies.

Uh huh. I was saying that psychiatric disorders would literally be cured directly, not suggesting a hivemind set-up would cure them.

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

I imagine the only way a Hive Mind would be accepted in Real Life is if we find a way to keep our individuality while simultaneously being connected. I have no clue on how that would work, but this is just a guess on my part.

Facebook 2.0

The thing about this is if our minds were all fused into one Gestalt entity we would instantly know all the view points and likely understand them. Also the amount of knowledge and history that would be available to everyone would be enormous. There would be no more secrets. Lieing, cheating, stealing, corruption. etc would become impossible. As well as knowing of every problem and possible solutions from every point of view.

We would all likely loose our unique individuality but we would still have some differences because of differing biological occurrences ie being physically human. As we go on we would likely rapidly adapt and expand or improve our conditions.

Who watches the watchmen?

No thanks, Evangelion turned me off from Instrumentality of any kind, and this Gestalted minds thing...it just repels me. See, I am a person driven by independence and free will. And if possible, I would wreck any attempt at instrumentality, because it just screams "bad idea."