What if we all become one big brain?

1 point by itry 10 years ago | 7 comments
Thinking about privacy, today it ocurred to me, that this concept might get completely abandoned in the future. What would happen, if we all become one big brain, where everybody has full access to everybody elses information? Apart from feeling weird at first, would there be any serious downsides?
  • dragonbonheur 10 years ago
    If there is only one big brain, "WE" won't exist anymore. There will only be "I". In Richard Dawkins'book, The Selfish Gene, he explains how organisms are only vehicles for the genomes within them and how genomes tend to compete for resources and how they could be described as essentially "selfish". For that reason alone, it is very unlikely that "we" could turn into an "I". On the other hand, genomes are just another way to transmit information, and mankind has created other kinds of information, entirely separate from biological processes. Maybe it will be that information that may give rise to "One big brain" but it will be a whole new species, if it is allowed to exist, unless we learn to live along symbiotically. Even then, once an artificial species emerges, others may emerge too (see Tom Ray's Tierra experiments) and those may exist entirely separate lives from the symbiosis.
    • itry 10 years ago
      > it is very unlikely that "we" could turn into an "I".

      We share more and more every day. And the ones who participate in the sharing benefit. I remember when some people said "i will never own a mobile phone. i don't want to be reachable all the time.". They all have smartphones now. Todays kids not only have mobile phones, they have internet connected phones with cameras. And share their experiences online. Tomorrows kids will have google glass or an antenna implemented in their head. Realtime streaming their experiences into the heads of others.

      What will stop this process in your opinion?

      • dragonbonheur 10 years ago
        Humans just can't get along. There are wars and conflicts all the time. Racial hatred, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, wars, misandry, misogyny, economic inequality, religious fundamentalism, ideological fundamentalism, nationalism, political fanaticism, etc... (Writing this list makes me very depressed.) All of those can be explained by the selfish gene theory. Hate and greed are in our DNA. People do share everything, but there are crackers who disclose private information, people who disseminate revenge porn, fat-shamers, "slut"-shamers, online bullies, critics and cynics. That is the world we have today.

        Sure, we have recently developed ways to transfer thoughts brain-to-brain, but the issues that may arise in the short term if we were to link separate consciences directly are more likely to be classified under the "disorder" category than under the "superpower" category. What if you woke up and had thoughts that weren't yours but from the other person you linked to. Imagine having memories of their past trauma, their first kiss, memories from the pain from the people they lost, memories from the abuses they suffered, the names they were called, the shame they felt. Will you be mentally strong enough to be able to compartmentalize those foreign memories as actually being not part of your lifetime?

        Try this: try to remember the last time you checked out a place on Google street view. Have you ever tried clicking along a road so that you could get to see what was in the surrounding area?

        Now as you are remembering this, do you remember only the scenery or can you also remember actually looking at a monitor and using your pointing device and keyboard? I'm willing to bet that you only remember the scenery and that those memories you have of those street views could be very similar to memories of places you actually visited, minus the sounds and smells, but you do have to make a conscious effort to differentiate between virtual memories of a scenery and memories of the places that you last visited.

        Just visit a few foreign cities (Taipei, Seoul, Akihabara, Lima in Peru ) on Google Street view to try it out and think about what I wrote in a few days, you'll see what I mean.

        • itry 10 years ago
          > Imagine having memories of their past trauma, their first kiss, memories from the pain.

          By that logic you would have predicted that the internet will not happen because "who wants to read all that shit".

    • andrewchambers 10 years ago
      I personally like to think of the human race as a giant super computer with local caches in brains and quite slow information transfer. It even has bad/malfunctioning cores.