Do we really want to fuse our minds together? (opens in new tab)

> ‘the biological brain cannot support multiple separate conscious attentional processes in the same brain medium’.

And that is probably because consciousness just is awareness of attention, as Graziano suggests: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3223025/

So if so, we should be able to run conscious awareness on a much faster silicon substrate (technology permitting) having it sequentially processing (becoming aware of) the memories of conscious experience of many biological brains absorbed in parallel. The hive mind then is just thinking and experiencing faster.

My questions are these:

If there are two minds, and they come in to this form of contact, which survives?

Would they be combined, leaving behind a new one which encompasses the qualities of both? Would they be combined at random?

Would they fight for dominance, leaving only the victor?

What would it feel like to have your consciousness do battle against another, become a new merged product, or for all intents and purposes dissolved?

And potentially, most importantly: What happens not to the consciousness of the other, but the memories? Will the new consciousness (formed via whichever method) have access to both?

I am 100% for a hivemind. I am 100% fervently against a hivemind that enforces a personality or even a network of connections. Fuck that shit. You can actually hear all the sociopaths wringing their hands in unison at the prospect of forcing a compliant Borg hivemind onto humanity and bending it to their will. Before something like this is implemented, we're going to very much first require a purge of all sociopaths from the species. Or use the hivemind somehow to change or destroy sociopaths. But even here, you can see where this is going. Nobody said the revolution was going to be easy, that's for sure.

Another use for this: fixing afflictions with brain connections issues in healthy people. HOWEVER this should be done as an infant. At later age this could cause a personality shift !

I really wonder how one could establish the required parallel connection. You need quite the wide connection interface ... (If I recall correctly brains work in a parallel fashion.)

Those interested in both mind fusion and science fiction would probably enjoy Ramez Naam's Nexus trilogy, which was just completed this month.

The world didn't really need yet another example to contribute to Betteridge's law of headlines.