[peterwwillis]

But how useful is it? Pascal's Mugging was submitted to HN and discussed 8 years ago. If the collective consciousness keeps needing reminders of what it once knew, this is probably still inferior to a single intelligent person who reads a lot and remembers it all.

[ncmncm]

The population using HN takes in new members continuously, and the fraction who read everything posted eight years ago is very small.

[Erlich_Bachman]

As a somewhat intelligent person, I still also do need reminders often. The trick is to forget mostly the unneeded stuff and maximally retain the useful stuff, and accurately discern between the two. The goal is not to remember everything.

Also it would be strange to expect this group consciousness to never need reminders when it continuously has new people added to it, who are unfamiliar with old things.

I think consciousness is more about active living rehashing of information and reupdating it, reupdating the worldview to adjust to constantly changing environment - not so much about building one single model that would somehow know everything. Such models tend to be stale or abstract and philosophical to the point of uselessness.

[brian_herman__]

It’s new to me :)