Whenever I watch Jane Goodall documentaries (the lady who lived with chimps), I'm reminded of how barely removed we are from the primates. They have social groups and favorites too, along with awkward and sometimes murderous behaviors towards outsiders.

Theory of mind is a fascinating thing, and we aren't born with that ability, and even through adulthood we can't always easily understand someone else's mental state. At the end of the day we're still communicating through a very limited subset of our thoughts (verbally, through writing, or even rich media like videos and games). But most of the time our communications in real life never even get to THAT limited subset, instead just hovering around the surface discussing weather and sports and whatnot. It's hard to really get to know someone else.

I think the internet has allowed new forms of interaction that were previously difficult to find (deep discussions on a niche topics, pseudonymously) -- for better or worse, as we've come to see.

But fundamentally we're still the same social apes whose population exploded after agriculture and industrialization, but whose evolution has not fundamentally changed since before the stone age. Our brains have very limited output bandwidth compared to its input processing abilities.

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Slight segue here, but part of the reason I'm excited about AI and technologies like Neuralink is because they present possibilities by which consciousness might exceed our biological/neurological limitations. Even current LLMs have (I would argue) superior reasoning and moral ability compared to most non-expert humans, and a much broader theory of mind (if not necessarily deeper, but even that's debatable) that can encompass characters from so many walks of life, both real/historical and imagined. Very few writers, much less average people, have such an extensive understanding of different personalities and behaviors. One of the uses I hope LLMs come to encompass is psychotherapy, an infinitely patient yet hyper-trained therapist for every troubled human.

And if we can really start to export "brain stuff" for external observation and processing, sure, that's the end of privacy (but let's face it: it's already dead), but way more exciting to me is the possibility that we can then really start to study and maybe even inhabit the mindspace of other individuals unfettered by the limits of verbal/written communication. It's like loading their consciousness into your host as a VM, or at least dual-booting into it. It'd be a whole new level of empathy (and probably manipulation and abuse), and probably the start of commodified consciousnesses that you can rent to truly roleplay someone else for a few days/decades/whatever. It's a tired sci-fi trope, but who knows, we might begin to actually breach its frontiers in our lifetimes. That's pretty exciting/terrifying to me... not only the end of awkwardness, but the potential start of a true Borg-like hive mind. (Yeah, I'm a collectivist at heart, and that seems like a wonderful goal to me.)

There will always be individuals who don't want to be, eh, "assimilated". But even that in and of itself is something that we will probably begin to understand better with these technologies... why some organisms are more community-minded and others more individualistic. We might be able to map out a "tree of thoughts", similar to how we have a "tree of life" that documents evolution between species. We can trace certain thought patterns back to biological origins, predict how they're likely going to evolve in given habitats/situations, and probably chemically guide them toward a desired outcome. It would be the end of even the illusion of agency.

For a system like that to make sense, you'd probably have to not believe in free will to begin with (I don't), but it would mean a fundamental upset in how we perceive other organisms, with the consciousness-to-consciousness barrier broken. If we could apply the same systems to other species (animals, sea jellies, siphonophores...) at a neuronal level, we might even discover novel thought techniques that primates and mammals never evolved, opening up entire new modalities of consciousness. If you think talking to teenagers is awkward, what about singing with siphonophores? Comedy with dolphins?

It's all really fascinating to me, but anyway... this is just a sci-fi rant by this point, lol. I'll shut up now.