On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi Paradox)

Re:On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi P... by cobbzilla on Sunday November 24, 2019 @10:35AM (#21620972)

It will happen across such a long and large gradient that no one will know or ever understand it.

Does a single ant “know” what the whole colony wants? Yet one can describe the colony as a whole in many ways: finding food, reacting to threats, etc.

Does a single neuron “know” it is part of a brain? Yet the brain acts as a system, responding to stimuli in a coordinated fashion.

Hypothesis: we are already “one”, we just don’t know it, and can never truly know it, at an individual level.

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Re:On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi P... by Lambdanaut on Sunday November 24, 2019 @11:14AM (#21621272)

When somebody speaks of a foreign country they're already abstracting millions of people into one being. It's especially humorous when emotion is applied to the foreign mass. "China is upset about XYZ".

Just as there is no China, there also is no me. I am the dance of a trillion cells who are each the dances of an infinite sea of atoms within and without them. Patterns on top of patterns forever.

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Re:On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi P... by urb on Sunday November 24, 2019 @10:39AM (#21620994)

I like the analogy to neurons but since we are sentient being this is a second order collective and I think we will know, at least to a degree, that we are merging.

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Re:On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi P... by UnbugMe on Sunday November 24, 2019 @10:36AM (#21620981)

We will become 'one' who we will be able to actually understand.

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