From: Matt Gingell (mjg223@nyu.edu)
Date: Tue Aug 29 2000 - 22:00:20 MDT
Dan Fabulich writes:
> The answer is borganization, in which one or more intelligent people
> get their heads together and think as a single entity of unified
> intelligence. (Some cybernetics are probably required, but certainly
> not the clunky stuff you saw on Star Trek.)
(I assume you've read Vernor Vinge's 'A Fire Upon The Deep.' If not,
it's a particularly interesting / entertaining exploration of the type
of composite consciousness you describe. )
How much new sophistication would we need to start playing with these
ideas? We can build tiny electric stimulators. We can build tiny,
sensitive, EMF meters. We can build tiny radio transceivers. One would
think we could put the three together and build a smallish (micro,
rather than nanoscale) brain implant. Two sets could be then
engineered, each listening to a member of the other and firing when
its counterpart detects some threshold signal.
I imagine an experiment with two infant chimps: you inject maybe 500
or 1000 such devices to corresponding sites scattered around the
visual, motor, etc, areas. Don't do any sophisticated wiring - just
let them sit, acting on medium-scale neural groups, and see what
happens. Do the chimps just go into seizure, do their brains learn to
ignore the affected groups, or are the self-organizing properties of
the developing brain powerful enough that something interesting
happens? (Has someone already written this story?)
Anyway - the general idea you raise is attractive. I'm sick of being
the sole generator of my own thoughts, stuck listening to the same
stack of patterns all day. Being locked behind a single pair of eyes
is claustrophobic, and squeezing one's inner life through inadequate
language skills feels like dropping message bottles off a desert
island. I can't imagine what poor eye-sight must have been like before
glasses. Maybe one day we'll look back at existential loneliness the
same way.
-matt
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