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21 Apr 13
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Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes (1651)
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This, of course, was impossible until the social cohesion of individuals within the world-community has become as closeknit as the integration of the elements of a nervous system.
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As the bandwidth is increased they can not only communicate intentions but their deeper causes; at higher bandwidths the mental chains leading to decisions become communicable and hence shareable. This may allow collaborative refinement of goals and plans in a much more efficient way than low-bandwidth discussion and the borders between individuals gradually fade away. Note that the units still can be specialised and have different memories, values and personalities.
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In many cases of human psychology social processes can interfere with this and decrease the performance; this might be possible to circumvent in a borganism.
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"I bring order into chaos".
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A borganism may consist of two different kinds of units, one basic general purpose unit that makes up most of the population, implementing the collective will, and one or a few organising units optimising the internal structure (possibly acting as arbitrators in internal conflicts or a supervisory B-brain (see Minsky 1988).
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where each individual is at the same time a part of the planetary mind and an independent individual.
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the individual must willingly give up some of its individuality in exchange for the positive effects of being part of the borganism (extended mental capacity, transhuman support etc), the individual is involuntarily borganised, or the individual is created as a part of the borganism.
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If units remain relatively unchanged when they are integrated into the collective, unwilling units are likely to be highly disturbing and more trouble than the extra mental capacity is worth.
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This transmission is important since without functional emotional communication many humans have a hard time functioning socially.
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But in a borganism emotions need not be expressed through body language and expression, since they can be expressed much more clearly through the intranet communication.
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spread of virulent information patterns such as memes
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Memes thrive in environments with intense communication (Bjarneskans et al. 1997), and would likely spread extremely quickly inside a borganism, infecting both collective and unit schemata.
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group becomes divorced from reality due to its internal consensus
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likely it will directly or indirectly counteract dissent,
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If the units can present not only their views but the mental processes which reached these views it may become easier to judge the relative merit of the different positions.
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In human groups this can be observed as the diffusion of responsibility (the more people involved in a task the less intensely they tend to work if their results cannot be traced back to them) and forms of social parasitism.
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there is no immense discontinuity between current humanity and borganisms.
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This is usually enough to ensure that at least some borganisms will eventually be implemented by some group for some reason.
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15 Mar 12
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03 Jan 10
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10 Dec 08
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16 Apr 08
Alexander HayesSpeculations on Hive Minds as a Posthuman State
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