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Re:On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi P... by staktrace on Sunday November 24, 2019 @10:49AM (#21621060)
I've often thought along these same lines (c.f. Asimov's Galaxia concept) but I think that this one-ness will inherently be limited by distance. Thoughts can be propagated across a planet pretty quickly but if we become a multi-planet civilization I would expect each planet to have it's own "one mind" (or whatever you want to call it) simply because of communication latency.
Re:On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi P... by urb on Sunday November 24, 2019 @10:51AM (#21621080)
Thought doesn't have mass. I see no reason to discount superluminal communication.
Re:On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi P... by mrob on Sunday November 24, 2019 @10:58AM (#21621135)
Superluminal communication breaks causality regardless of whether mass is involved, and we have no evidence that effects can happen before they are caused.
Re:On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi P... by staktrace on Sunday November 24, 2019 @10:56AM (#21621116)
Fair point. Another argument in favor of multiple one-ness is that of monocultures. In general things that become a monoculture are more vulnerable to sudden death. For long term survival diversity is good, and I imagine that planet-level conciousnesses would spawn daughter conciousnesses as they expand to other planets. Those daughter conciousnesses would further evolve and reproduce rather than being strongly tied to the parent.
Re:On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi P... by dreamcompiler on Sunday November 24, 2019 @11:02AM (#21621181)
Photons don't have mass either. Yet they cannot exceed the speed of light.
Re:On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi P... by the-dude on Sunday November 24, 2019 @10:58AM (#21621137)
Are you sure about that? Bits have mass.
Re:On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi P... by urb on Sunday November 24, 2019 @11:06AM (#21621211)
The underlying substrate on which bits register has mass but do they?
Re:On Becoming One (Collective Consciousness and the Fermi P... by the-dude on Sunday November 24, 2019 @04:14PM (#21623471)
There are more electrons in your RAM if you set bits to 1.