FYI, this sentence doesn't make sense to me Doubling the length of jail sentences will substantially reduce the rate of criminal of theft.
-Is there one too many "of"'s in there?Given that we can only understand most subjects obliquely and incompletely, it shouldn’t be at all surprising that few of us have exactly the same beliefs. Each of us has a different set of incomplete and problematic data from which to wrest his or her tenuous conclusions. Watch any economics talk show on television and you will see any number of “experts” with any number of substantially different views. All that they make clear, collectively, is the chronically tentative state of their field. The same is true for politicians, psychologists, or anyone else who deals in the murky territory of human interaction.
-Let's say we get to a point as a species that we are fully integrated with one another in some sort of post singularity grid. We have access to all information and data at all times. Do you think this eliminates a sense of self? Will we all have the same conclusions? Eventually, will there be no more anomalies of thought because we are all sharing the same data with which to draw our conclusions? What do you think theadvancedapes?
One could perhaps call it a... global brain. MMmMmMMmmm... all the information in our brainssszzzz... I think higher types of consciousness will start to emerge. I still think you will have your own consciousness. But discussions between different collections of "people" will include mergers of "brain spaces", Ben Goertzel has called them "mindspheres". The best way to imagine this is by comparing your state of consciousness when you're alone to when you are a room full of people having a conversation. Your consciousness (or state of mind) is much different in these two situations... you might even say that there is a "feeling" in the room... a collection of the feelings/thoughts of all those taking part in the conversation. However, with digital minds that conversation could take place without language... we could actually subjectively feel each others thought patterns, or collection of thought patterns of multiple people. This would be a qualitatively different type of experience than the types of conversations we have today... just like explaining language to an australopithecine would be impossible... explaining this completely may be impossible. I highly doubt it (because I think information and knowledge are different things - and having the same information doesn't mean having the same opinion about that information), although I feel like our collective opinions will get closer and closer. You can imagine this with a simple thought experiment. Imagine we were to have four people from 1500 (say from Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia) magically teleported into the same room and forced to discuss their thoughts on the world. If they could eventually understand each other, their opinions on reality would undoubtedly be radical divergent. If we continually ran this experiment every century (i..e, 1600, 1700, 1800, 1900, 2000, and so on) our global conversation would be becoming more and more coherent with more and more agreement and less and less disagreement. This would just be a function of globalization and the rate of cultural information transfer in the system. We should expect this to continue - but I doubt it will continue to the point where all agents in our collective global brain system agree on everything. I think we will largely have discarded with notions connected to our hunter-gatherer and agricultural past, but we will still disagree about bleeding edge scientific theory or perhaps even spirituality.Let's say we get to a point as a species that we are fully integrated with one another in some sort of post singularity grid.
We have access to all information and data at all times.
Do you think this eliminates a sense of self?
Will we all have the same conclusions?
On average, your four people from 1500 would all be farmers or hunters and, apart from religion and customs, would probably understand one another’s lives. I’m not convinced we are coming to anything like a global consensus. While there is a sort of global pop culture and a common understanding of technology, individually we are more specialized than we have ever been. I would probably have an easier time talking to an aborigine than I would a hedge fund manager. Beyond that, it’s an interesting conjecture. My personal experience with internet conversations is that they are still prone to all sorts of misunderstandings, particularly emotional ones – bereft as they are of facial expressions, body language, etc. :) The “feeling in the room” is something I cannot know that other people have. I infer what you feel based on your words, my prejudices, and my inductions. If other people really feel one another’s qualia I have been left out. For clarity sake (because I think it’s necessary) I’m being playful here – not sarcastic. Thanks for the comment.