Archons, Dominions and Thoughts that Run Wild

Archons, Dominions and Thoughts that Run Wild

 

By Julian Websdale

There is a simple premise in esoteric literature: thoughts have power. Even modern science accepts that behind the structure we know as the material world is a web of energy, and the interactions between different types of energy create the semblance of solidity we call matter. Thought, then, as a form of energy, has the same power. This is why in so many traditions there are admonitions about controlling the thought process, while thinking and doing are still different things, thinking does have its effects.

Clairvoyants of many persuasions have seen and documented the shapes and forms produced by various types of thought; witness the work of Charles Leadbeater. While many of these forms are fleeting, when empowered by the emotions and by memory they become more than just thoughts, they become thought forms.

These thoughtforms exist beyond simply when they are thought – they take on an independent existence within the mind of the thinker. They then influence memory and condition our perceptions of everyday life. We may want to see these thoughtforms as only existing within the psyche of the neurotic or unstable, and yet all of us have our lives conditioned by the thoughtforms we have created in the past. For most people they never see the present unfiltered, all experience is sieved through thoughtforms created from childhood, and even beyond through past lives.


“Meme: (pron. ‘meem’) A contagious idea that replicates like a virus, passed on from mind to mind. Memes function the same way genes and viruses do, propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact between people.”

– David S. Bennahum.

Thoughts however go much further. As documented in much modern research on Memes, thoughtforms can become like viruses of the mind. They can spread throughout groups, families, nations and indeed the world and are passed through the deeper levels of the unconscious we all experience. Rumours, tales and urban myths are all memes or thoughtforms. While they may be primarily passed by the printed word, internet, media, etc., there is a time when they reach a certain “saturation point” and then become part of the collective unconscious. This is exceptionally dangerous as negative and violent forms can control groups and crowds creating mob violence and aggression. These group-minds are really thoughtforms out of control, and are known in the Gnostic Tradition as Archons. There are multitudes of Archons dwelling both within our minds and within the collective unconscious.

Not only can Archons exist in the unconscious collective mind, they can create a breach into the astral worlds through which fallen spiritual entities can then move into the earthly spheres and control the thoughtforms created. The Archons are the products of mankind enlivened by fallen spirits and fed by our own emotions. They can control and influence individuals, collectives, even nations and governments.

In Gnostic literature these Archons can so increase in power that they become Dominions, forces which control whole groups of people; even races and countries. People of many religions think that they are worshipping the I-AM; however they are actually feeding a false god, an Archon they have created from their own ignorance. This happens all too often and is why the esoteric tradition is imperative.

Without the guidance of esotericism, many will be caught within the web of exoteric (outer) religion. Fundamentalism, cults, literalism, extremism are all products of incorrect readings of the spiritual tradition. When these groups develop, their thoughtforms take on a life of their own and, not being connected to the “real” energies of the Great Chain of Being, they soon sour and become a nexus for the manifestation of fallen entities from the astral worlds.

These fallen spirits work out of step with the universe and invigorate these forms so that they become independent, discrete fields of energy within the astral world (Archons). They grow from Archons to Dominions and rule from their astral kingdoms. Their poor and unfortunate worshippers think they are following the “true god” but are actually feeding monsters created from mans suffering and ignorance. Many of these forms feed on suffering, while others feed on pleasure, and they amplify the emotions of their members to gain more and more sustenance. In some sense they are truly “spiritual vampires”, and without esotericism, all religions and traditions succumb.


“(They took…) The name of those that are good and gave it to those that are not good, so that through the names they might deceive him (mankind) and bind those to those that are not good.”

– Nag Hammadi Gospel of Phillip 54:18-25.

The imagery of Archons is very strong in Gnostic literature, and because it has become mixed with tales of cosmological dualism, many have come to believe that the Archons are the result of a cosmic error or fall. The reality is that there was no cosmic error, just a misinterpretation caused by ignorance. Yet at the same time this ignorance has created a doorway through which fallen forms can enter and it is these Archons, or whatever we call them, which keep us from appreciating our own misperceptions. Indeed, it is through our own permission that they enter the earth sphere. This is the idea which gave birth to the “fall of man” tradition. Since man in his ignorance created fallen thought forms and allowed fallen entities to enter into the earth stream, then ultimately man is responsible for the present condition of his planet, his culture and his soul.

The issue of Archons is complex for there is an interaction between our own thoughtforms and real fallen astral entities. The thoughtforms allow these entities to interface with our own unconscious. They can change form according to the language of the culture through which they communicate and, being a mixture of our own thoughtforms and “fallen” spirits, can mimic our own hidden desires and needs. While in Medieval periods we may have had demons, incubus and succubus, in the present we have aliens, UFO abductions and medical experiments by creatures we cannot see. In the modern mode, these Archons are sometimes called “ultraterrestrials”. However we must realize that these forms are spiritual in origin. Although there are many other races within our universe, it does seem that a percentage of UFO sightings and experiences reflect our own fears, terrors, needs and desires and hence have an Archontic origin.

“The world is the work of lowly powers which, though they may mediately be descended from Him, do not know the true God and obstruct the knowledge of Him in the cosmos over which they rule. The genesis of these lower powers, the Archons, and in general that of all the Orders of being outside God, including the world itself, is the main theme of Gnostic speculation … The universe, the domain of the Archons, is like a vast prison whose innermost dungeon is the earth, the scene of man’s life. Around and above it the cosmic spheres are arranged like concentric enclosing shells. Most frequently there are seven spheres of the planets surrounded by the eighth and of the fixed stars…

The religious significance of this cosmic architecture lies in the idea that everything which intervenes between here and the beyond serves to separate from God, not merely by spatial distance but by active demonic force. Thus the vastness and multiplicity of the cosmic system express the degree to which man is removed from God…

The Archons collectively rule over the world and each individually in his sphere is a warder of the cosmic prison. Their tyrannical world-rule is called Hiemarmene, universal Fate … [This universal fate] aims at the enslavement of man. As guardians of his sphere each Archon bars the passage to the souls that seek to ascend after death, in order to prevent their escape from the world and their return to God.” – The Gnostic Religion, Hans Jonas.

So when we read a description of Gnosticism such as that found in the classic text The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas, we must appreciate that the seeming cosmic dualism is actually a dualism between the real and the unreal, between the light of the higher worlds and forces which have been created through ignorance. They are like “monsters from the Id”, they seem real enough and since the physical world is shaped and formed by our perceptions, they are for all intents and purposes real. The only way for us to escape Hiemarmene (universal fate) is to realize that we have created the prison bars ourselves.


“What a tragic world this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don’t know it; they think they are free because they never have been free, and do not understand what it means. This is a prison, and few men have guessed. But I know, he said to himself. Because that is why I am here. To burn the walls, to tear down the metal gates, to break each chain. Thou shalt not muzzle the Ox as he treadeth out the corn, he thought, remembering the Torah.”

– The Divine Invasion, Phillip K. Dick. HarperCollins 1981.

“For we contend not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness.”

– Ephesians 6:12.

While the Archons and the Demiurge are creations of man’s ignorance, they are used by the fallen spirits as a source of power. This is one of the major problems with the Archons we create – they attract forms and spirits which are themselves in ignorance and hence follow them.

 

Reference:

The Institute for Gnostic Studies. (1997-2000). The Gnostic Handbook. [e-book].

From Julian Websdale @ http://julianwebsdale.tumblr.com/post/91483272614/archons-dominions-and-thoughts-that-run-wild

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Hive Consciousness: Do We Really Want to Fuse Our Brains Together?

Hive Consciousness

Do We Really Want to Fuse Our Brains Together?

Illustration by Richard Wilkinson

New research places us on the cusp of brain-to-brain communication. Could the next step spell the end of individual minds?

 

 

by Peter Watts

You already know that we can run machines with our brainwaves. That’s been old news for almost a decade, ever since the first monkey fed himself using a robot arm and the power of positive thinking. Nowadays, even reports of human neuroprostheses barely raise an eyebrow. Brain-computer interfaces have become commonplace in everything from prosthetic vision to video games (a lot of video games; Emotiv and NeuroSky are perhaps the best-known purveyors of Mind Control to the gaming crowd) to novelty cat ears that perk up on your head when you get horny.

But we’ve moved beyond merely thinking orders at machinery. Now we’re using that machinery to wire living brains together. Last year, a team of European neuroscientists headed by Carles Grau of the University of Barcelona reported a kind of – let’s call it mail-order telepathy – in which the recorded brainwaves of someone thinking a salutation in India were emailed, decoded and implanted into the brains of recipients in Spain and France (where they were perceived as flashes of light).

You might also remember breathless reports of a hive mind emerging from the depths of Duke University in North Carolina during the winter of 2013. Miguel Pais-Vieira and his colleagues had wired together the brains of two rats. Present a stimulus to one, and the other would press a lever. The headlines evoked images of one mind reaching into another, commandeering its motor systems in a fit of Alien Paw Syndrome.

Of course, the press goes overboard sometimes. Once you look past those headlines you notice that Reaction Rat had been pre-trained to press his lever whenever he felt a particular itch in his motor cortex (in exactly the same way you’d train him to respond to a flashing light, for example). There was no fused consciousness. It was a step forward, but you don’t get to claim membership in the Borg Collective just because a stimulus happens to tickle you from the inside.

And yet, more recently, Rajesh Rao (of the University of Washington's Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering) reported what appears to be a real Alien Hand Network – and going Pais-Vieira one better, he built it out of people. Someone thinks a command; downstream, someone else responds by pushing a button without conscious intent. Now we're getting somewhere.

There’s a machine in a lab in Berkeley, California, that can read the voxels right off your visual cortex and figure out what you’re looking at based solely on brain activity. One of its creators, Kendrick Kay, suggested back in 2008 that we’d eventually be able to read dreams (also, that we might want to take a closer look at certain privacy issues before that happened). His best guess was that this might happen a few decades down the road – but it took only four years for a computer in a Japanese lab to predict the content of hypnagogic hallucinations (essentially, dreams without REM) at 60 per cent accuracy, based entirely on fMRI data.

When Moore’s Law shaves that much time off the predictions of experts, it’s not too early to start wondering about consequences. What are the implications of a technology that seems to be converging on the sharing of consciousness?

It would be a lot easier to answer that question if anyone knew what consciousness is. There’s no shortage of theories. The neuroscientist Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin-Madison claims that consciousness reflects the integration of distributed brain functions. A model developed by Ezequiel Morsella, of San Francisco State University, describes it as a mediator between conflicting motor commands. The panpsychics regard it as a basic property of matter – like charge, or mass – and believe that our brains don’t generate the stuff so much as filter it from the ether like some kind of organic spirit-catchers. Neuroscience superstar V S Ramachandran (University of California in San Diego) blames everything on mirror neurons; Princeton’s Michael Graziano – right here in Aeon – describes it as an experiential map.

I think they’re all running a game on us. Their models – right or wrong – describe computation, not awareness. There’s no great mystery to intelligence; it’s easy to see how natural selection would promote flexible problem-solving, the triage of sensory input, the high-grading of relevant data (aka attention).

But why would any of that be self-aware?

If physics is right – if everything ultimately comes down to matter, energy and numbers – then any sufficiently accurate copy of a thing will manifest the characteristics of that thing. Sapience should therefore emerge from any physical structure that replicates the relevant properties of the brain.

We might be about to find out. SyNAPSE – a collaboration between the US Defense Advances Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the IT industry – is even now working on a hardware reconstruction of a human brain. They’re hoping to have it running by 2019, although if physics is right, ‘awake’ might be a better term.

Then again, if physics is right, we shouldn’t exist. You can watch ions hop across synapses, follow nerve impulses from nose to toes; nothing in any of those processes would lead you to expect the emergence of subjective awareness. Physics describes a world of intelligent zombies who do everything we do, except understand that they’re doing it. That’s what we should be, that’s all we should be: meat and computation. Somehow the meat woke up. How the hell does that even work?

"They sat down over beers and took a show of hands on whether to admit bonobos to the Sapients Club"

What we can get a handle on are the correlates of sapience, the neural signatures that accompany the conscious state. In humans at least, consciousness occurs when a bunch of subcortical structures – the brain stem, the thalamus and hypothalamus, the anterior cingulate cortex – talk to the frontal lobes. Integration is key. Neurons in all these far-flung regions have to be firing in sync, a co‑ordinated call-and-response with a signal lag of no more than 400 milliseconds. Tononi is using that insight to derive an integration metric he calls ɸ. It is designed not merely to detect consciousness but to quantify it: to hang a hard number on the level of self-awareness flickering in everything from roundworms to humans.

If it does all come down to neural integration – if self-awareness is a matter of degree, flickering at some rudimentary level even in the ganglia of nematodes – then the specific architecture of the conscious brain might be open to negotiation. This, at least, is the position of the so-called ‘Cambridge Declaration’ unveiled at the 2012 Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness. Its signatories – ‘cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists’ – attribute self-awareness to a wide variety of non-human species.

I’m not sure how seriously to take this. Not that I find the claim implausible – I’ve always believed that we humans tend to underestimate the cognitive complexity of other creatures – but it’s not as though the declaration announced the results of some ground-breaking new experiment that settled the issue once and for all. Rather, its signatories basically sat down over beers and took a show of hands on whether to publicly admit bonobos to the Sapients Club. (Something else that seems a bit iffy is all the fuss raised over the signing of the declaration ‘in the presence of Stephen Hawking’, even though he is neither a neuroscientist nor a signatory.)

Still, we are talking about a cadre of renowned neuroscientists, the least of whom is far more qualified than I to make assertions on the subject. One of the things they assert is that self-awareness does not depend on specific brain structures. The declaration grants ‘near-human levels of consciousness’ to parrots (who lack a neocortex) and to octopuses (whose brains – basically a bagel of neurons encircling the esophagus – don't have any anatomical resemblance to ours at all). It’s neurological complexity that’s essential to the conscious state, they tell us. The motherboard can take any shape so long as it’s got enough synapses on board.

This is all preamble, though, a set‑up to the question posed at the outset: what are the implications of a technology that wires brains together, that in theory at least permits the existence of hive minds? In fact, you know a lot more about that than you might think.

You already are a hive mind. You always have been.

This thing you think of as you: it spreads across two cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum, a fat meaty pipe more than 200 million axons thick. Suppose I took a cleaver to that pipe, split it down the middle. (That’s no mere thought experiment: severing the corpus callosum is a last-ditch measure against certain forms of epilepsy.) In the wake of such violent separation, each hemisphere would go its own way. It would develop its own tastes in clothes, music, even its own religious beliefs. Ramachandran tells of a split-brain patient with a Christian hemisphere and an atheist one. You’ve probably heard of Alien Hand Syndrome, or at least seen the movie Dr Strangelove: try to put on a certain shirt, your evil hand rips it off. Try to pick up a favourite pen, your evil hand knocks it away and picks up a Sharpie instead.

Except it’s not your hand at all any more, of course. It belongs to that other self living across the hall, the one that used to be part of you before the break‑up.

A shy introvert morphs into a flirtatious jokester. A pleasant woman turns sarcastic. But when the other half wakes up, the new entity vanishes

You’re still talking, at least. Still friends of a sort. Even when the corpus callosum is severed, the hemispheres can communicate via the brainstem. It’s a longer route, though, and a much thinner pipe: think dial-up versus broadband. The essential variables, once again, are latency and bandwidth. When the pipe is intact, signals pass back and forth across the whole brain fast enough for the system to act as an integrated whole, to think of itself as I. But when you force those signals to take the scenic route – worse, squeeze them through a straw – the halves fall out of sync, lose their coherence. I shatters into we.

You might expect that an established personality, built over a lifetime and then split down the middle, might take some time to develop into distinct entities. Yet hemispheric isolation can also be induced chemically, by anaesthetising half the brain – and the undrugged hemisphere, unshackled from its counterpart, sometimes manifests a whole new suite of personality traits right on the spot. A shy, whole-brained introvert morphs into a wise-cracking flirtatious jokester. A pleasant, well-adjusted woman turns sarcastic and hostile. When the other half wakes up the new entity vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

So while the thing that calls itself I typically runs on a dual-core engine, it’s perfectly capable of running on a single core. Take you, for example. Chances are you’re running on two cores right now. Does each contain its own distinct sub-personality? Are there two of you in there, each thinking: Hey, I’m part of something bigger?

Not likely. Rather, the local personae are obliterated, absorbed into a greater whole; as the Finnish computer scientists Kaj Sotala (at the University of Helsinki) and Harri Valpola (Aalto University) recently declared in the International Journal of Machine Consciousness, ‘the biological brain cannot support multiple separate conscious attentional processes in the same brain medium’.

Remember that. It could end up biting us in the ass a few years down the road.

Krista and Tatiana Hogan of the city of Vernon in British Columbia are seven-year-old sisters fused at the head. Craniopagus twins are extremely rare in any event, but the Hogans appear to be utterly unique in that they aren’t just fused at the skull or the vascular system. They are fused at the brain – more specifically at the thalamus, which acts as (among other things) a sensory relay.

They share a common set of sensory inputs. Tickle one, the other laughs. Each sees through the other’s eyes; each tastes what’s on the other’s tongue. They smile and cry in sync. There’s anecdotal evidence that they share thoughts and, although they have distinct personalities, each uses the word ‘I’ when referring to the other. The Hogan twins are two souls with one sensorium. All because they’re fused at a sensory relay.

But the thalamus is lower-brain circuitry. Dial-up, not broadband. Suppose the twins were fused at the prefrontal cortex instead?

If two hemispheres can each run separate, standalone programs – yet fuse to form a single coherent entity – what about the fusion of complete brains, a single contiguous porridge of neurons spread across two heads? Given a slight developmental tweak to the left, would we still be talking about two souls, or a single conscious being with twice the neuronal mass of a normal human brain?

"Whether you instil sights, sounds, political opinions or a craving for a certain brand of beer might come down to where you aim the beam"

There are other ways to put our heads together. Neurosilicon interfaces, for example. We’ve had those for more than a decade now. In labs around the world, neuron cultures put robot bodies through their paces; puddles of brain tissue drive flight simulators. At Clemson University in South Carolina, Ganesh Venayagamoorthy is busy teaching tame neurons to run everything from power grids to stock markets. DARPA has thrown its weight behind the development of a ‘cortical modem’, a direct neural interface wired right into your gray matter (we’re already using implants to reprogram specific neurons in other primates). But DARPA may have already been scooped by Theodore Berger, down at the University of Southern California. Way back in 2011, he unveiled a kind of artificial, memory-forming hippocampus for rats. The memories encoded in that device can be accessed by the organic rat brain; they can also be ported to other rats. It won't be long before such prostheses scale up to our own species (that is in fact the explicit goal of Berger's research).

If the prospect of surgery squicks you out, Sony has registered blue-sky patents for technology that plants sensory input directly into the brain using radio waves and compressed ultrasound. They’re selling it as a great leap forward for everything from gaming to telesurgery. (For my part, I can’t help remembering that neurons fire pretty much the same way whether they’re processing sensory input or religious belief. The difference between instilling sights, sounds, political opinions – why not an irresistible craving for a certain brand of beer? – might come down to little more than where you aim the beam.)

None of these efforts are explicitly designed to connect one human mind to another. What they’re pioneering is an interface, the ability to translate thoughts from meat into mech and back again. What we are seeing, in other words, is the genesis of a new kind of corpus callosum that extends beyond the confines of a single skull.

We’re still in the Precambrian. Grau’s emailed brainwaves amount to a fancy kind of semaphore that happens to bypass the eyeballs. Pais-Vieira’s hive mind was a pair of distinct rat brains, pimped out so that a spark in one would trigger a poke in the other – a stimulus that would have been meaningless to the recipient if he hadn’t already been trained to respond in a certain way. That’s not integrated awareness, or even telepathy. It’s the difference between experiencing an orgasm and watching a signal light on a distant hill spell out oh-god-oh-god-yes in Morse Code.

So it’s early days yet. But it may be later than you think.

Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003) describes a near future in which everyone is wired into the internet, 24/7, via cortical link. It’s not far-fetched, given recent developments. And the idea of hooking a bunch of brains into a common network has a certain appeal. Split-brain patients outperform normal folks on visual-search and pattern-recognition tasks, for one thing: two minds are better than one, even when they’re in the same head, even when limited to dial-up speeds. So if the future consists of myriad minds in high-speed contact with each other, you might say: Yay, bring it on.

I’m not sure that’s the way it’s going to happen, though.

I don’t necessarily buy into the hokey old trope of an internet that ‘wakes up’. Then again, I don’t reject it out of hand, either. Google’s ‘DeepMind’, a general-purpose AI explicitly designed to mimic the brain, is a bit too close to SyNAPSE for comfort (and a lot more imminent: its first incarnations are already poised to enter the market). The bandwidth of your cell phone is already comparable to that of your corpus callosum, once noise and synaptic redundancy are taken into account. We’re still a few theoretical advances away from an honest-to-God mind meld – still waiting for the ultrasonic ‘Neural Dust’ interface proposed by Berkley’s Dongjin Seo, or for researchers at Rice University to perfect their carbon-nanotube electrodes – but the pipes are already fat enough to handle that load when it arrives.

And those advances may come easier than you'd expect. Brains do a lot of their own heavy lifting when it comes to plugging unfamiliar parts together. A blind rat, wired into a geomagnetic sensor via a simple pair of electrodes, can use magnetic fields to navigate a maze just as well as her sighted siblings. If a rat can teach herself to use a completely new sensory modality – something the species has never experienced throughout the course of its evolutionary history – is there any cause to believe our own brains will prove any less capable of integrating novel forms of input?

Not even skeptics necessarily deny the likelihood of ‘thought-stealing technology’. They only protest that it won’t be here for decades (which, given the number of us who expect to be alive and kicking 30 years from now, is not an especially strong objection). If we do stop short of a hive mind, it’s unlikely to be because we lack the tech; it’ll only be because we lack the nerve.

So I don’t think it unreasonable to wonder if one day, not too far from now, Netflix might change its name to Mindflix and offer streaming first-person experience directly into the sensory cortex. I suspect people would sign up in droves for such a service. Moore’s Law will work its magic.

What might that mean to us as individuals?

Ask one-half of the supersized self that the Hogan twins might have been, if their brains had fused just a little further up. Ask the poor bastard who awakened into a single hemisphere and had a few minutes to live some fraction of a life before the drugs wore off and his other half swallowed him whole. Oh, but you can’t ask him. He doesn’t exist any more. Right now he has as much individuality as your parietal lobe.

Consciousness remains mysterious. But there’s no reason to regard it as magical, no evidence of spectral bonds that hold a soul in one head and keep it from leaking into another. And one of the things we do know is that consciousness spreads to fill the space available. Smaller selves disappear into larger; two hemispheres integrate into one. The architectural specifics aren’t even all that important if Tononi is right, if the Cambridge Declaration is anything to go on. You don’t need a neocortex or a hypothalamus. All you need is complexity and a sufficiently fat pipe.

Does a thought know to turn back at the edge of one skull when the paths lead into another? Does an electron know the difference between a corpus callosum and a brain-computer interface? Titles in the popular press – ‘Google Search Will Be Your Next Brain’ – might not be so much ominous as childishly naive; they assume, after all, that ‘you’ will continue to exist as a distinct entity. They assume that brains can support multiple separate conscious attentional processes in the same medium.

"Keep the bandwidth too low and you lose the experience; edge it too high and you lose yourself"

Throughout history we’ve communicated via the equivalent of dial‑up, through speech and writing and images on screens. A fat enough neural interface could turn everything broadband, act as a next-gen corpus callosum that fuses we into some new kind of I that’s never existed before.

Of course they’ll put safeguards in place, take every measure to ensure that nothing goes wrong. Maybe nothing will. Keep your baud rate dialled back far enough and you’ll be fine. But there are always those who push the envelope, who might actively embrace the prospect of union with another mind. They’re not all that uncommon in transhumanist circles. Some regard it as an inevitable step in abandoning the flesh, uploading consciousness into a gleaming new chassis with a longer warranty. To others it’s a way to commune with the souls of other species, to share consciousness with cats and octopuses. It’s a fine line, though. Keep the bandwidth too low and you lose the experience; edge it too high and you lose yourself.

Even if you’re not into that kind of thing, you use the internet – which neuroscientists and game developers, even now, are reshaping into an explicit embodiment of neural intelligence. The web’s ɸ score isn’t going anywhere but up. And servers hiccup sometimes. Floodgates fail. Shit happens, and – as Batman’s butler once pointed out – some men just want to watch the world burn. Given the option, those folks might get tired of distributed denial-of-service attacks and leaked celebrity emails, they might try hacking Mindflix for Allah or the lulz. God help anyone who’s streaming the latest Marvel Total-Immersion Extravaganza when that happens.

These are some of the things we might want to start thinking about now – because they won’t matter that much to you after some failsafe has failed, or you’ve been talked into trying the whole mind-meld thing by someone who figured out how to disable the bottleneck. You might not care about the potential of an emergent consciousness built from silicon or a network of 1,000 brains, or whether logging out of a freshly integrated hive mind should be defined as murder or mere lobotomy.

Immersed in that pool – reduced from standalone soul down to neural subroutine – there might not be enough of you left to even want to get out again.


Peter Watts is a Canadian science-fiction author and former marine biologist. His latest novel is Echopraxia (2014). Edited by Ed Lake
@ejklake

From Aeon @ http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/do-we-really-want-to-fuse-our-minds-together/

For more information about telepathy see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/telepathy

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