SoylentRox t1_j62djjq wrote on January 27, 2023 at 5:28 AM

Reply to comment by TheSecretAgenda in If given the chance in your life time, will join a theoretical transhumanist hive mind? by YobaiYamete

The advantage is the shared experience could make it possible for your memories to survive the death of any one or multiple members. Because each of you has pieces of all the other's experiences and memories.

I don't know precisely how it would work. But you can imagine with syncing done a clever way, you would wake up in the morning and remember the member of your collective who just did something awesome, and it will be your memory too - it feels just as real even if this body didn't experience it.

Some mornings you would even sync to the memories of a member who is in another star - you're receiving each 'day' sent by laser as it happened to them however many light years they are away.

Again, the memories will feel just as rich as if you really were there.

trappingsofignorance t1_j62ifra wrote on January 27, 2023 at 6:20 AM

I don’t mind inflicting myself on other people for eternity. I think they’ll regret it inside a decade

SoylentRox t1_j62l8qh wrote on January 27, 2023 at 6:52 AM

It would be bilateral. Any annoying you inflict becomes part of YOUR memories after each sync. So if you annoy 10 group members, after sync (I assume it's during sleep) you remember being annoyed 10 times over and also have 1 set of memories of you gleefully being annoying.

So it would be self limiting I suspect.

YobaiYamete OP t1_j62p0oc wrote on January 27, 2023 at 7:39 AM

Yep, I think a lot of people don't think about the benefits of it and only see the downsides. With a shared experience you would suddenly have a whole lot more empathy and understanding for each other

Many negative traits would be squashed pretty much instantly because you would experience how annoying they are first hand, and being annoying to others would rebound right back to you too

SoylentRox t1_j62p803 wrote on January 27, 2023 at 7:42 AM

The downside is you can see how your personalities would converge. Over time each of you would become almost identical to everyone else in the group.

YobaiYamete OP t1_j62ppg6 wrote on January 27, 2023 at 7:48 AM

I'm not sure that would really be a bad thing in a sense, but you would also be able to regain identity by being separate from the gestalt for a while then coming back to bring back your experiences and adding them to the greater whole.

You could likely also just chose not to fully sync with the entire collective since that would probably be way beyond a single brain anyway.

In most Sci-fi the collective as a whole form up a greater collective that is kind of the overmind, where as the individual members can still be fairly separate and make their own choices etc, and will only sync when they are in emotional distress or need advice or assistance beyond their own experiences