Re: Serial consciousness

Anders Sandberg (nv91-asa@nada.kth.se)
Mon, 30 Sep 1996 11:25:57 +0100 (MET)


On Sat, 28 Sep 1996, Crosby_M wrote:

> But, it's not clear whether complex ideas or data streams could be
> exchanged in either of these ways without ultimately passing through a
> sequencing routine in the person's mind where relevant information would
> be time-stamped, categorized and sorted.

Most information in our minds never pass through our serial consciousness
(it cannot - our conscious minds have a bandwidth on the order of 40
bits/s, while we deal with megabits/s in the rest of the CNS). Actually,
almost everything we do and think is done unconsciously, but our
conscious levels are good at taking credit for what happens.

My guess is that datastreaming will be a very subconscious "sense" - you
"just know" that there are dangerous people up ahead, that Alex has a
bright new idea for a nanointernet that fits with your theory of
Beethoven or that the stocks in wormhole transport just soared.

> But, it's a good question
> whether some type of hypertext-like or 'mind-mapping' approach might
> work just as well.

I think we should try to find ways of communicating that are flexible
enough to allow many different modes. I'm thinking of some kind of
standardized mind-map with serial nodes linked by parallel/divergent
arcs, which could automatically turn into hypertext, plaintext or other
structures.

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Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
nv91-asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/main.html
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