| basically one could ask oneself: given that our brain is composed of many neurons and given that a company is composed of many employees or a nation state composed of many agents; why then is our subjective experience (which we can not prove to others, but of which most of us are convinced that everyone has) such that I perceive my environment at the level of a single brain, and not at the level of a single neuron and not at the level of a nation state aware of all the state secrets etc. Why don't I subjectively experience as if I were a single neuron, with neighbor neurons in this brain? Why don't I perceive as if I am a nation state? Natural selection feeds back at the level of a genome, so it has evolved to optimize information transfer primarily within a single organism, not constrained within a single neuron, and more private than sharing all knowledge across brains. To another extent one could say it's an illusion due to historically biological feedback, but phrased differently due to a lack of technology to clone mental states, pause them, fork, rewind to an earlier state etc. Once technology becomes capable of preserving, digitizing and emulating brain states, this concept of identity will blur, 2 forked instances of the same mental state would remember the same PIN code and other credentials. It will become possible to merge (say with consent) 2 digitized brain states, smoothly by adding connections between the neurons of one and the other, increasing data bandwidth, and making memories a shared concept. 2 mental states could talk over a low bandwidth for ages to communicate what things they have observed during a separation (say spies catching up), or they could do this near instantaneously by merging their mental state, drastically increasing survival rates because situational awareness can advance immediately. a digital mental state could encounter a fork in a road, decide to fork into A and B, each explore one leg of the fork, and then meet up again and merge the experiences. |