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Coalescing Personal Identity

The document discusses the possibility of merging human consciousnesses through artificial means using an "exocortex", a prosthetic extension of the brain. It proposes that an exocortex could connect multiple brains together in a way that either merges them into a single shared consciousness or allows them to maintain separate conscious processes while still sharing information and memories. This would raise interesting questions about personal identity, as two people may merge their consciousnesses and later separate, or remain connected with access to each other's knowledge but maintain some separation. With exocortices, individuality would become more of a matter of degree as people could meld themselves together to varying extents.

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42 views1 page

Coalescing Personal Identity

The document discusses the possibility of merging human consciousnesses through artificial means using an "exocortex", a prosthetic extension of the brain. It proposes that an exocortex could connect multiple brains together in a way that either merges them into a single shared consciousness or allows them to maintain separate conscious processes while still sharing information and memories. This would raise interesting questions about personal identity, as two people may merge their consciousnesses and later separate, or remain connected with access to each other's knowledge but maintain some separation. With exocortices, individuality would become more of a matter of degree as people could meld themselves together to varying extents.

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Coalescing Minds and Personal Identity

Harri Valpola & Kaj Sotala

Accepted as contributed paper to the Toward a Science of Consciousness 2015 conference.

Recent work has discussed the possibility of merging human consciousnesses together by artificial
means. Hirstein (2012; Mindmelding: Consciousness, Neuroscience, and the Mind's Privacy)
argued that it is possible in principle for the subjective experience of one person to be experienced
by another, and Grau et al. (2014; Conscious Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans Using
Non-Invasive Technologies. PLoS ONE) demonstrated a simple case of direct brain-to-brain
communication over a great distance.

We focus on elaborating on Sotala & Valpola (2012; Coalescing minds: brain uploading-related
group mind scenarios. International Journal of Machine Consciousness), who argued for the
possibility for melding two consciousnesses together in a “reverse split-brain operation”. They
started by reviewing evidence for three properties of the brain that are related to consciousness:

1. to first approximation, the whole human neocortex is based on the same underlying
algorithm which can learn to process many different kinds of input
2. global attention emerges from and the contents of consciousness is determined by biased
competition, a distributed process in which representations compete locally for the right to
broadcast information to other parts of the brain and where the competition in each area is
biased according to information received from other areas
3. the cortical algorithm has an inbuilt ability to transfer information such as memories
between cortical areas

From these premises, they proposed an exocortex, a prosthetic extension of the brain which
employed the general cortical algorithm and which would integrate with a user’s existing brain by
using the same kinds of rules of biased competition and cortical memory transfer. Critically, the
exocortex could then interface with other exocortices, connecting several brains together.

These could either meld together into a single mind with single conscious process, or have the
exocortex filter the connections, so that both biological brains maintained their own global
workspace (and thus consciousness) while still sharing information. Although the consciousnesses
might not be capable of directly communicating with each other, memory formation would still
work normally. In several mammal species, one of the cortical hemispheres is capable of sleeping
while the other is awake, and the memories of what happened while the other hemisphere was
asleep become available when both hemispheres are awake at the same time. As both conscious
processes could have access to the synaptic weights storing the different memories, both could
make use of the memories of what either processes had done earlier.

An exocortex would give rise to a number of scenarios touching upon personal identity, which had
so far remained mere thought experiments. Two previously separate people could merge into a
single consciousness for a while, then disconnect and split back into two. Possibly the more
interesting question, however, would be the identity of a connected mind that shared two separate
consciousnesses that could access each other’s knowledge and memories, but would still remain
somewhat separate. In a world with exocortices, individuality would become (even more of a)
matter of degree, with two or more people having the possibility to meld themselves to varying
extents.

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