This following is a series of comments that I made to Athena walker’s posts, integrated together for your convenience. You can read her stuff here:
Look at our closest living relative. Chimpanzees are known for their lack of restraint in the use of violence. They compete for territory and resources. During the Gonbe chimpanzee war, one troop wiped out another and took all of that territory for itself.
These are the conditions under which both empathy and tribalism evolved in our ancestors. It was useful for our ancestors to have empathy for those who are related or who are part of your tribe and thus useful against the others. On that same token, the desire to destroy the outsiders was useful as it could secure resources for the tribe. And so, both the empathetic and the violent genes were passed on. From the perspective of survival, a tribe should be tolerant enough to trade with other tribes and use them to their advantage, but still intolerant enough to murder them all if there was a benefit in doing so.
Skip forward to today. Our science and our economy are so interconnected that basically all nations and ethnic groups are useful to our ultimate expansion. But we aren't wired for perpetual peace.
The internet was supposed to connect us, but many online spaces serve as echo chambers that amplify tribal fervor. Google and other tech giants send you recommendations based on what you've previously viewed, something that keeps people in their echo chambers.
Extending our identities and our tribe to encompass all of humanity is the only way I see to move past this, and due to the rapid rate of cultural exchange, we've made some progress towards this. There will probably always be an "other," but we can at least move closer to that goal.
There is one genuinely useful aspect of tribalism, that being that it can serve as a motivator to band together and fight back when the other tribe decides come to wipe you out.
The paradox of intolerance states "if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant." I fear this may come to pass.
Whenever the opposing group specifically wants to eliminate you as a group and is using the levers of power to do so, well, at that point you are no longer required to tolerate them, and should do whatever is necessary to stop them. Though, acting out of emotions that were developed for ancient tribal warfare are not likely to yield the desired results, so this should be done in a more intelligent way. Which unfortunately just isn't what's happening.
We’re going to keep going. From the present and soon into the future where we can only speculate about what will become of human consciousness.
Consider smartphones. Almost everyone carries around a device that records their locations, their behaviors, and probably their conversations. Why? Because they are not only extremely convenient, but they’ve become nearly indispensable for anyone living in society.
A few months ago I interviewed with a company that was creating virtual reality office software for the Oculus Rift. Imagine that employers begin implementing virtual office spaces for their remote employees. Now you risk your job if you don’t join the metaverse.
And like our phones, the metaverse will become integrated with our other technology to the point that we can hardly function without it.
If you use a smartphone now (as I do) don’t fool yourself. You will use the metaverse. We will grumble about it. We will be exploited by it. But we will use it anyway.
But the metaverse is really only the tip of the iceberg of what is coming.
Nine months ago Elon Musk gave a demonstration of a monkey playing a video game with only signals from its mind. You can watch this here:
Musk eventually plans to put these into human brains. If everything goes as planned, we would not only be able to interface brain-to-ai but also with others directly through the brain.
Imagine getting ads directly in your brain. Imagine a data-grubbing company taking your data directly from your brain.
Having a company work out for you while you enjoy dinner with friends may be one of the more benign uses of this technology, but what I’m describing here is mind control technology. I don’t even need to lay out all of the ways this could go wrong.
And guess what? Remember how I mentioned telepathy? Elon’s device is able to transmit as well as receive. If such a thing as mind control is possible, it will eventually be able to do it.
There’s another possible outcome of our brains directly transmitting data between computers and each other that should be brought up.
Now Consider ants. An ant has 250,000 neurons in its brain. There are 100,000 to 500,000 ants in an average ant colony. That means a colony has 25-125 billion neurons. This is comparable to the human brain. Indeed, ant colonies not only use tools, but last year an experiment demonstrated that they are capable of novel and flexible tool usage, something seen only in the most intelligent animals such as chimps and corvids.
Information flows much more slowly from ant to ant than it does between the neurons in their brains, yet they are still capable of this. How? I believe they send simple signals that trigger more complex processes in the brains of each ant. In computing, some complex processes can be broken into “threads.” Each thread is processed independently by a different processor (which in a supercomputer means a different computer) yet in the end this collective is able to produce the results that they individually could not.
Humans also have mechanisms similar to this. Language is one. But There’s another that is more pertinent. Humans, or at least most humans, have a mechanism that, unlike language, can be executed from outside in order to trigger very specific processes.
In Shin Seki Yori (which is a brilliant anime) humans have been genetically modified with bonobo dna to increase their empathy to the point where if they were to take a human life, their brains will kill them as well.
So, empathy is the process triggered when a human receives a specific signal, whether that human is willing or not. Having an identical mechanism built into our amygdalae allows for seamless communication. It's like entering a command into a command line. You can enter it onto any computer and run the same process (of course it's not quite that uniform).
If we look at the march of science, we might be led to believe that humanity also possesses a collective consciousness.
If we look at all of the problems with our society, it seems doubtful that we collectively form anything of intelligence.
But if we think of each human like a neuron, and we think of the structure of the ways that they share information like brain structure, science and, say politics, are using two very different collective processes.
Getting to the point, what happens when all of our brains are directly communicating with each other?
In split-brain patients, none of them felt much different, but they experienced different degrees of split consciousness, once the main bundle of nerves between their two halves was served.
At what point would your brain become aware of merging into a single consciousness? And How much connectivity is required? Would you even be aware at all, or as it happens gradually, would it feel like you’ve always existed as part of this?
We don’t fully understand how consciousness works. This could be the end of our individuality, or the end our collective’s stupidity when it is no longer has to rely on slow signals.
There’s a very good anime called Serial Experiments Lain that explores this idea.
At the very least, you might experience emotions you’ve never felt before when they stream into your prefrontal cortex from an AI or someone else’s amygdala. Or criminal psychopaths may be forced to experience such things after committing a crime.
Empathy is a control mechanism created by evolution that we sometimes over-glorify. Empathy is a good thing, but its primitive. Process your emotions with reason; don’t let them rule you. Find the core thing they are trying to tell you and be pragmatic about how you achieve it.