Bri: your concept is intriguing, but personally, right now, I feel like a “single” person: AFAIK, no parts of me want to break off. Or do you think parts of our current “selves” might, if given the chance – splitting off multiple selves like Dr. Manhattan, so one can do the vacuuming while another reads breaking tech news? Or will evolving beyond either/or conceptions like this be the necessary psychological step before the more technical components of the singularity can really take effect?

Hopefully we’ll all converge on common interpretations, and it seems we’ll all have to think about this stuff with a new priority, as if all these huge questions are moving out of the realm of metaphysics and into the realm of actual practical concerns.

The original gangsta, Volvox carteri, may have lead the way.
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/8/1460.short

I agree that the selfish/selfless point of view is rather cyclical, and maybe futile. Once we assimilate, we can argue together with ourself haha.

The transition into singularity will either destroy us or save us, yet another point of view toss up.

Hopefully in time we will all have cell phones the size of Derrick Zoolander’s.

Even from the meat-eater’s perspective, it’s just illogical to speak of giving rights of freedom and bodily integrity to insentient plants while causing sentient animals to suffer and die by the billion!

Plants—unlike animals—are insentient beings void of central nervous systems, lungs, hearts, kidneys, intestines, blood, ears and eyes. They do not defecate or urinate either. Nobody screams in horror when their neighbors are mowing the lawn (grass is a plant, too). But if neighbors were slicing pigs into pieces on the front lawn, there would be tears, physical interventions and the proper authorities would be summoned to stop the bloodshed. Plus, if people honestly believe it’s wrong to eat plants, they could always choose the ultra-vegan lifestyle of fruitarianism (eating the fruits and nuts that fall from trees). From a Judeo-Christian-Islamic perspective, the Garden of Eden was a fruitarian haven. From a physiological angle, humans are actually fruitarians/frugivores.

The epigrammatic philosopher Voltaire once said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” When it comes to pain and suffering, the screams, the blood, the writhing, and the fear that animals exhibit trump the so called “waves” of plants.

But just to show how thoroughly disingenuous this so-called “plant-killing argument” really is, let’s suppose for the moment that the meat-eaters who invoke it really believe that their vegan counterparts cause plants to suffer and die. Even if that were the case, these meat-eaters would be logically committed to switching to veganism right away! Carnivorous societies destroy many more plants than the vegan ones do. In America, 70 to 80 percent of our corn, wheat, oats and soy are fed to the 10 billion land animals killed annually. Globally, 35 to 65 percent of the world’s plants are fed to 60 billion land animals killed annually. If humans stopped eating animals, fewer plants would be harvested; remember, a single vegan directly consumes about one-tenth of the plant material that is either directly or indirectly consumed by a single carnivorous human. Veganism is still the ONLY solution to this problem, because fewer beings—sentient and insentient—would die if humans, who are physiologically herbivorous anyway, ate plants directly. Even the Council for Science, Technology and Agriculture, a group of animal agriculture people, stated in the early ’90s that all the crops in America could feed every human on this planet twice-over! However, there had to be one stipulation; everyone would have to be vegan!

Sadly, these facts make little or no impression on meat-eaters who seek refuge in the plant-killing argument because they really don’t give a shit about plants any more than they give a shit about the suffering of animals. They’re just groping desperately for yet another lame excuse to eat meat.

Some meat-eaters claim that vegans indirectly kill animals because tractors that harvest crops unintentionally kill some animals. The worldwide premeditated killings of 60 billion land animals in slaughterhouses and 90 billion marine animals in the waterways are diametrically opposed to the accidental tractor-killings in a field. Even our unjust legal system recognizes the difference between a premeditated murder and an accidental killing. Since farmers don’t use their John Deeres to intentionally crush gophers and snakes, you never know when, where, or whether it’s going to happen. Slaughterhouses INTENTIONALLY kill animals for meat-eaters. No one intentionally kills gophers for vegans. When we use machines, accidental killings of animals and people will occur. Isn’t it conveniently hypocritical that the meat-eaters who bring up the animal-tractor issue still drive a car or truck, even though those machines kill millions of humans annually worldwide? These accidental killings are okay with meat-eaters because meat-eaters aren’t human-killing addicts. They’re animal-killing addicts. And addicts are the most insane, illogical, excuse-filled people to ever deface this earth. Addicts are ALWAYS irrational when it comes to their habits. Have you ever known an alcoholic, a cigarette smoker or a heroin user to be rational or ethical when it came to alcohol, cigarettes or heroin? Of course not. And there is NO such thing as a rational—or ethical—meat, dairy, and egg-eater when it comes to animal issues and whether humans should be enslaving, murdering and eating animals.

Vegans tread lightly and cause the absolute minimal amount of unintentional suffering to this planet and its inhabitants. Meat-eaters cause the MAXIMUM amount of intentional and unintentional suffering to this planet and its inhabitants because it is unreasonable to intentionally starve millions of humans to death by feeding around 50 percent of the world’s grains to 60 billion land animals, to murder 60 billion land animals and 90 billion marine animals with premeditation, and then accidentally kill wild animals with tractors. With veganism, we could eliminate two problems instead of living with three!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21604005

All the same, would you not say that “being” a multicellular organism is more interesting than “being” any one of those unicells? (Of course, just asking the question causes all sorts of philosophical problems – “how many of them do you get to “be”? – unless you subscribe to the general view that there’s only one person in this universe: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html )

Also, I found this just recently, which seems to be the inverse of what you’re describing – http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080213133350.htm

>FROM THE ABOVE LINK: Though little understood, social cooperation among microbes causes major medical and industrial problems. Medically, cooperation underlies conditions as mundane as tooth decay to more serious conditions like chronic infections associated with medical implants. Industrially, slimy colonies of bacteria also foul filters at water treatment plants and other facilities, causing millions of dollars of damage each year.

>YOU: If we all assimilate into one, then only “one” will matter. The ultimate selfishness.

Interesting point – yet, if there were nothing outside this “one”, with respect to whom could there be “selfishness”? It seems, just on a logical level (and now, potentially, on an engineering level?), that it’s always possible to imagine merging with any other consciousness, simultaneously fulfilling/negating any feelings of love/empathy – but also … if you divided yourself into two people right now, say by separating your brain’s two hemispheres, would you “love” your alternate personality? Would you be willing to sacrifice yourself for them? If not, would you wish you could?

Assume, instead of “you” being the left hemisphere and the “other” being the right (or vice versa), that the split-off personality was genuinely half of you, split evenly down the middle along every possible axis – would you sacrifice yourself for them, then? Would you expect them to sacrifice themself for you? Genuine question. I honestly don’t know the answer, myself – when I try to imagine the situation, I just find myself arguing with them as to why it’s to our mutual self interest to merge, and agreeing, from both angles. If you did sacrifice selfA for selfB, wouldn’t you … just be selfish-by-proxy? If you both sacrificed yourselves for the other, like Romeo and Juliet (spoiler), wouldn’t that be kind of a …waste? And if this isn’t a genuine moral scenario – why not? If “merging” doesn’t constitute a third option, “morally better” than both of the two previous options – why not?

Conversely – would you merge with your lover, and be “alone in both bodies”? It’s completely crazy, but we seem dizzyingly close to living in a world where these are actual lifestyle options, not just philosophical speculations.

Having thought about it a bit more, it does seem more probable that linkages will appear amongst families/lovers first, instead of snowballing into one literal global organism right away. Still, who knows? Maybe a soft takeoff of this capability would be assimilated into our cultural “norms” with a reassuring name like “identimixing” or “crosssouling” or just “merging”, and what we’re writing now will soon seem as quaint as Johnny Mnemonic’s memory capacity (“nearly eighty gigs”) – or maybe a “hard takeoff” wouldn’t leave any options, and every living thing would be caught in the nuclear fusion explosion of the one final earthly intelligence – a unitary superAGI comprising every living thing, achieving infinite “friendliness” simply by being *beyond any possible conflict of interest*.

Exciting times, either way.

Or hey, maybe this news story is vaporware, and thirty years from now we’ll just have slightly smaller cellphones and still have to screw in low-energy lightbulbs. Still good to consider the options.

A short story by Vinge about an enhanced Chimp with a direct connection to the resources of a Pentagon mainframe – 1966.

>Maybe the “SINGULarity” will be the moment we create a brain-to-brain communications network that can collect/gather all the separate centres of consciousness that want to sign up for the service, like separate pools of water forming a greater ocean, like an internet of souls – a literal, physical instantiation of nondual mystical ideas, we-are-all-one etc. All our separate little cups of water being collected in one hugely powerful, hugely intelligent tank.

>Of course, this is just science fiction speculation till one thing or another really happens (or we just blow ourselves up), but whether one thinks its possible/desirable or not, I think it would have a clear adaptive value for all those who signed up for it, and the recent rat brain-to-brain communication points to its being an amazingly plausible engineering achievement. It would certainly end all moral concerns, since altruism and selfishness would become the same thing. It would also mirror the past historical shift from single to multicelled organisms. Calling such an event “impossible to see beyond” would also not be much of an overstatement, so it would fit most definitions of the technological singularity while also fitting various religious interpretations (“physical, global enlightenment”?). Certainly it would be a more interesting “rapture of the nerds” than some boring “upload as separate selves” scenario where we all play really advanced MMORPGs (I never really saw the appeal of that one).