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.
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?
Neither? Both?
You get a bunch of new memories and some shifts in your personality. If the new memories and personality shift come suddenly, I think a lot of people would consider that a 'death'. If they come gradually, I suppose it is not a death. But either way, the new mind is going to have the memories of both, is going to 'think' that it is both, so if you want to claim that this new mind is actually one or the other of the original minds, you're probably going to find yourself arguing against the very subject you're making the claims about.
Well it's mainly something to beware of I suppose. I also don't know if infants have a personality, it's still developing?
From the article.
It's interesting because, compared to the massive parallelism in each hemisphere, the connection between the two doesn't seem all that large.
Individual neurons also seem to have to have a fairly slow response time, on the order of milliseconds from what I've read. IANANeuroscientist, but that could be a manageable amount of data?