anotherfailure

I recently read an article by Peter Drucker that proclaimed that the information age was upon us. This would imply that the knowledge and innovation of new technologies would take precedence over the measurement of mere material goods when considering the status of a business or worker. In this knowledge based economy, the goal would be to have a collective of workers who would be able to share information at the speed of thought, thus increasing the efficiency of the business.
This coincides with a discussion I was having with a friend about emotional awareness; in order to feel the same emotions as someone else, you would have to have experienced everything that that person had perceived up to that point in his or her life. In effect this would constitute the only way of truly understanding your fellow human being. Therefore, the next step in our evolution, we concluded, may be the conglomeration of human minds into a single organism. This would, in effect, be the expected human conclusion when inspecting the way that things of this nature have occured before. Single celled organisms joined into larger, more complex animals, and maybe humans will begin to do the same, on a mental level. Is there anyone out there who has heard this theory before, and would anyone like to critique it? I would appreciate all feedback.

Philosoft

Welcome to the boards, anotherfailure. This topic, while extremely interesting, is not strictly about philosophy and might get more play in another forum. I'm going to think about where best to send it before I do anything.

That said, this topic holds a great deal of interest for me, if only because I am a budding fan of sci-fi novels. In one of my favorite series, The Reality Dysfunction, by Peter Hamilton, there are various levels of personal interconnection - from the datanets facilitated by neural implants to the populations genetically engineered with "affinity" genes that allow a form of psychic connection. What was clear, at least from the author's point-of-view in that series, is that the machinistic-type transhumanism and interconnectedness doesn't substantially affect individuality as people are still able to isolate themselves when they wish. But the latter, developmental/genetic interconnectedness, was very much a personality-unifying phenomenon, to the point that a dying person's memories were extracted and stored in a collective intelligence unit within the habitats where they lived.

Hugo Holbling

I'd say that the combinatorial explosion of numbers would be enough to warrant caution when supposing that such a future as you describe could come about; i.e. even a small number of factors would quickly overwhelm whatever limit was set by available technology - although, as you say, the ants and bees found a way. However, i'm speaking as a mathematician and don't know enough about information theory, alas.

Here is a book that may interest you.

Adrian Selby

As a budding project manager in software development, I'm reading a book on Agile Software Development Methodology by Alistair Cockburn, and I recommend it to anybody here as it really goes into the basics of communication, more interestingly with regard to knowledge and information, it says that the most effective communications take place between people with the closest 'oral tradition' or 'tribal knowledge' within a group of people, i.e. with the strongest common frames of reference, because they've reduced their vocabulary required for the communication of ideas through being able to refer efficiently to quite complex ideas, e.g. "In solving this software problem, I'm reminded of Steve's light rendering tool from the last one" "Yes, it would only need tweaking."

Here of course they've communicated an enormous amount of information which, if one were an outsider, would require loads of exposition to explain what this tool was. As they have the frames of reference, this one sentence has communicated all the information about how to proceed with solving the problem by referring to memory and the phrase 'Steve's light rendering tool' is a shorthand phrase for all of those weeks of work and experience they have stored.

Of course, this increases the efficiency of business regardless of whether we're in an information age, but the more familiar a group of people are with regard to a shared business function, the closer to pure thought communication is because of the shared languages of common experience, shorthand phrases with custom meanings, and body language and other nuances that they've learned from each other.

anotherfailure

Indeed, I am not sure how applicable this is to philosophy, per se, but I did not see any better place to put it. Please move it if you think it will get better attention somewhere else.

Also, I would like to point out that I am not so much suggesting this as a practical future for humankind; I am simply trying to draw a conclusion on the area into which we will travel, through evolution, in the future. Things will obviously not always be like they are right now, and I think this is the next paradigm we will be thrust into.

Philosoft

I'll send this to Sci & Skep and see what happens...

fando

I would call such a system the Gaia collective. The reason is that I don't think Humans will be the only nodes: the environment in which Humans live will be factored in to this mega organism out of necessity. What good is communal awareness without a reciprocal awareness of the environment? The ultimate evolution of such a system is something which sci-fi authors like to call Gaia.

These themes are highly conjectural, I don't think we possess enough understanding of complex biological systems to fully predict the possible outcomes. It's all sci-fi for now. I think Asimov covered it fairly well in his chief epic story arc in the Foundation and Caves of Steel serieses.