From: Paul Hughes (planet_p@rocketmail.com)
Date: Wed Sep 03 1997 - 20:22:30 MDT
To recap:
Hall Finney:
It may be that a super-mind does find it convenient or necessary to
give
its sub-parts a certain amount of autonomy, similar to Minsky's model
of our minds as a society of interacting subsystems. There could still
be disagreement or conflict among the parts as to the best division of
resources, just as we in our own minds sometimes have trouble making
choices between conflicting possibilities.
Forrest:
I am not convinced that a Jupiter Brain style SI can retain a single
identity over its extended structure. If its 'seat of consciousness'
is
distributed over a volume of space (perhaps in the interest of
redundancy), a 'center' (C1) at one point will diverge by deltaC in
time deltaT from a 'center' (C2) at another point.
If the signal propagation delay (deltaT) is long enough, C2 might have
evolved a will and outlook too different from C1's to be considered
the same SI. I think this effect make the development of a
planet-wide, single identity SI very complicated, a Solar System-wide
SI very unlikely, and a star-spanning SI impossible.
-----------------------------------------------------
I have to agree with Forrest on this point. I find a Jupiter Size
SI
unlikely from an economic sense. An appropriate analogy might be to
compare a decentralized market (ours) vs a centralized market (old
Soviet Union). If you have two jupiter size brains, one that is an SI
and the other that is a vast decentralized network of smaller
identities (a communidentity, sociodentity?), the decentralized
network will more likely yield greater complexity and memetic
evolution from a much greater diversity of identity viewpoints.
The interesting thing here, is that as an in(dividual) who has the
ability to cut and paste any part of their self with any other in this
network - what becomes of our definition of identity? Are we
then liquidenties (liquid + entity/identity)?
:-)
Paul Hughes
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