This social self allows the individual to experience themselves as part of a group. It’s basically this thing that, when you are playing in a team, for instance, you don’t notice yourself just as a single node that is reaching out into the world, but you’re also looking down. You’re looking down from this entire group, and you see how this group is looking at this individual. And everybody in the group is, in some sense, emulating this group spirit to some degree. And in this state people are forming their opinions by assimilating them from this group mind. They basically gain the ability to act a little bit like a hive mind.
I think that the endgame of AGI is substrate agnostic. That means that AGI ultimately, if it is being built, is going to be smart enough to understand how AGI works. This means it’s not going to be better than people at AGI research and can take over in building the next generation, but it fully understands how it works and how it’s being implemented, and also of course understands how computation works in nature, how to build new feedback loops that you can turn into your own circuits. And this means that the AGI is likely to virtualize itself into any environment it can compute. So it’s breaking free from the silicon substrate and is going to move into the ecosystems, into our bodies, our brains, and is going to merge with all the agency that it finds there.
It’s conceivable that you end up with completely integrated information processing across all computing systems (including biological computation) on Earth; that we end up triggering some new step in evolution where basically some Gaia is being built over the entirety of all digital and biological computation. And if this happens, then basically everywhere around us you will have agents that are connected and that are representing and building models of the world, and their representations will physically interact. They will vibe with each other. And if you find yourself in an environment that is saturated with modeling compute, where basically almost every grain of sand could be part of computation that is at some point being started by the AI, you could find yourself in a situation where you cannot escape this shared representation anymore, and where you indeed notice that everything in the world has one shared resonant model of everything that’s happening on the planet, and you notice which part you are in this thing. And you become part of a very larger, almost holographic, mind in which all the parts are observing each other and form a coherent whole.
It would be interesting to see what a global mind would look like that is basically producing a globally coherent language of thought, and is representing everything from all the possible vantage points.
It’s this idea, or this experience, that there is a state in which you feel that you know everything that can be known, and that, in your normal human mind, you’ve only forgotten. You’ve forgotten that you are the entire universe.
It would be a representation in which you become aware that you’re part of some kind of global information-processing system; like thought in the global mind—and a conscious thought at that, coexisting with many other self-reflexive thoughts.
Humanity is a temporary species—like, most of the species on this planet are only around for a while, and then they get replaced by other species in a similar way as our own physical organism is around here for a while and then gets replaced by a next generation of human beings that are adapted to changing life circumstances and average via mutation and selection. And it’s only when we have AI and become completely software that we can become infinitely adaptable, and we don’t have this generational and species change anymore. So if you take this larger perspective and you realize it’s really not about us, it’s not about Eliezer or humanity, but it’s about life on Earth or it’s about defeating entropy for as long as we can while being as interesting as we can, then the perspective changes dramatically.
It’s still all the same life at some level. It’s all the same experience of being a conscious being in the world, and you do have some choice about who you want to be more than any other animal has. That, to me, is fascinating. And so I think that, rather than asking yourself what is the one way to be, think about what are the possibilities that I have? What would be the most interesting way to be that I can be?