Would You Join a Cybernetic Hive Mind?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

46 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Your perception of individuality is an illusion,  a product of many different instinctive and autonomous functions warring against each other with a rationalization engine on top justifying whatever action you ended up doing.

When you can prove that I, and you, don't really exist as independent conscious beings I'll think about joining the collective.  Until then, I'd rather die first.

[Fez]

Only if I get to be functionally immortal and get to download myself into different awesome robot bodies that remain in constant instant contact with the main me.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

Your perception of individuality is an illusion,  a product of many different instinctive and autonomous functions warring against each other with a rationalization engine on top justifying whatever action you ended up doing.

EAMD

[Kalbear]

46 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

When you can prove that I, and you, don't really exist as independent conscious beings I'll think about joining the collective.  Until then, I'd rather die first.

As I've said before, easiest way to prove it to you is for you to do acid. 

[all swedes are racist]

56 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

When you can prove that I, and you, don't really exist as independent conscious beings I'll think about joining the collective.  Until then, I'd rather die first.

That's what I keep telling the demons in my head too

[KiDisaster]

23 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

As I've said before, easiest way to prove it to you is for you to do acid. 

I've done acid, I still believe that I am an individual. Clearly I have not done enough acid.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Kalbear,

So, use a drug to alter your perception of reality to "prove" your aren't really an individual?

Yeeeeeaaaaaaaah...

[DunderMifflin]

I think it would be just constant chastising. How dare you react that way! That thought is offensive!

[The Anti-Targ]

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Your perception of individuality is an illusion,  a product of many different instinctive and autonomous functions warring against each other with a rationalization engine on top justifying whatever action you ended up doing.

That sounds like an argument against free will not an argument against individuality. All those processes you describe are still individual experiences and decisions that while influenced by external collective factors are still not made as an act of collective consciousness.

[Altherion]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

When you can prove that I, and you, don't really exist as independent conscious beings I'll think about joining the collective.  Until then, I'd rather die first.

It's a matter of how you define consciousness. If you accept the materialist view, "you" (or "I" or any other "person") are actually a set of elementary particles which arranged themselves into atoms, the atoms then arranging themselves into molecules, the molecules into neurons (and all the other cells of your body) and the neurons into a very complicated network. Somewhere along the line this arrangement becomes conscious even though individual components of it are not. Modifying it with psychotropic substances or describing individual processes at any stage does not make it an illusion: it can either be defined as such (because it is not indivisible) or not. Most people do not consider it an illusion.

Of course, the whole thing could be a scam. Materialism may be wrong and "you" could be something entirely different -- the neural network might be merely an interface.

On a different note, I'm not sure how independent we are. To take an extreme example that you might have seen in real life, consider the case of two individuals who spent a substantial fraction of their lives together (spouses, siblings, etc.). Sometimes when one of them dies, the other one is never quite the same. A more common example: people taken from their society become homesick for a time (sometimes it never goes away).

Regarding the original question: no, I would not join. It's pretty much a form of death. I think Ancillary Justice does a good job of analyzing this issue.

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Kalbear,

So, use a drug to alter your perception of reality to "prove" your aren't really an individual?

Yeeeeeaaaaaaaah...

Yes. Why wouldn't this make sense? Put it another way: if I can simply change your brain chemistry and thus change your entire persona, what does being an individual actually mean? What do your choices, your thoughts, your very being mean when they can be easily and quickly altered by something as simple as a commonly occurring chemical? 

Why should you fear losing your self when your self doesn't actually exist and is an illusion?

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

That sounds like an argument against free will not an argument against individuality. All those processes you describe are still individual experiences and decisions that while influenced by external collective factors are still not made as an act of collective consciousness.

No, they're not. There are no decisions - at least conscious ones. There are things you do, and then rationalizations for those actions after you have done them. For the most part you're not deciding on things. 

And those things you do are a combination of a number of autonomous and conscious systems that override each other in the blink of an eye. Those systems are decidedly part of a collective. Without any specific one you can still be 'you' but be altered in weird ways, and (here's the important thing) will almost certainly not believe that you are missing anything.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

2 hours ago, KiDisaster said:

I've done acid, I still believe that I am an individual. Clearly I have not done enough acid.

It's a temporary thing (unless you do too much, but I know guys who've done a ton, and turned out fine). You experience ego death, and understand that your soul is but a small piece of the collective universe, and boundaries and and identities are meaningless. Then you come down and go back to your normal life.

But that was just my experience.

[Kalbear]

I'm not saying everyone will have the same experience or whatnot; I'm saying that for someone like Scot, who has deep convictions based on his personal experience, feeling experiences that he knows are not happening but will also know are absolutely happening will cause him to have something of a crisis of faith. 

For others, it won't be likely as profoundly worrisome. 

[Larry of the Lawn]

Thinking about starting a GoFundMe where the idea is to raise a sum that is significant enough to convince Scot to drop acid.  I'm in for $100.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Altherion,

I'm not a Materialist.  

LTI,

It would need to be a sum that would set me and my family up for the remainer of our natural lives in ultimate comfort were we could travel where and whenever we wished in comfort to even get me to consider taking LSD.

[KiDisaster]

1 hour ago, White Walker Texas Ranger said:

It's a temporary thing (unless you do too much, but I know guys who've done a ton, and turned out fine). You experience ego death, and understand that your soul is but a small piece of the collective universe, and boundaries and and identities are meaningless. Then you come down and go back to your normal life.

But that was just my experience.

I definitely never did enough to experience ego death. I was always still aware of who I was and what was happening around me for the most part. Haven't touched any psychedelics in years as roughly half of my experiences with them were negative and I decided it wasn't worth the coin flip anymore. Just wasn't for me. But when it was good it was damn good. 

I have a couple of friends who've done DMT (I never had any interest in fucking with anything that crazy) and "broke through" but they both ended up pretty normal again after. 

[The Anti-Targ]

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

No, they're not. There are no decisions - at least conscious ones. There are things you do, and then rationalizations for those actions after you have done them. For the most part you're not deciding on things. 

And those things you do are a combination of a number of autonomous and conscious systems that override each other in the blink of an eye. Those systems are decidedly part of a collective. Without any specific one you can still be 'you' but be altered in weird ways, and (here's the important thing) will almost certainly not believe that you are missing anything.

Right, that all describes the non-existence of free will. There's no collective Borg or Geth-like thing going on. If you want to call the collection of all the internal sub-conscious processes going on as a "hive" then that's one way of looking at it. All those processes belong to the individual in the self contained unit that is the individual human body. External factors, including the actions and words of other individuals only influence, they don't directly act on the decision-making processes.

 

[Altherion]

3 hours ago, Kalbear said:

No, they're not. There are no decisions - at least conscious ones. There are things you do, and then rationalizations for those actions after you have done them. For the most part you're not deciding on things.

I'm pretty confident it doesn't work this way, at least not for most things we think of as decisions. It is true that many of our actions are automated, but we're also capable of long-term planning. Think about a good player playing chess: one has to think several moves ahead and analyzing the resulting positions before actually doing anything at all. Similarly, any sort of construction, engineering, craftsmanship, etc. requires making the design decisions ahead of time, refining them into a coherent whole, evaluating the result, iterating until the required criteria are satisfied and only then proceeding with actions.

And yes, it is certainly possible to alter the neural network in various ways both chemically and physically and both in ways it can notice and ways it cannot. In fact, even without any interventions, it alters itself from moment to moment and, more perceptibly, from year to year. However, despite the fact that it is literally never the same twice, we refer to the resulting consciousness as a single, continuous entity even when it is obvious that it has changed (e.g. mind of the same human being at ages 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 is different in ways that are noticeable both that this human being and to others).

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Altherion,

I'm not a Materialist.

Then you can safely ignore Kalbear's arguments as they're predicated on materialism.   I'm not sure how a hive mind would work in a non-materialist reality.

[DireWolfSpirit]

I'd prefer to remain a single celled organism, so to speak. One of my major goals in life is to not be able to see a single neighbor in any direction. It goes without saying I dont want to know or hear what some field mob is contemplating 24/7.

Anyways we have the internet for this and we can logout when we want to. Who would willingly want to be chained to the hive, or "all in" as it was put? Hell to da No for that noise.