Will Humanity Eventually Become a Collective Mind?

[bmcnicho]

I've been thinking about how a single human is made out of a colony of trillions of cells with specialized roles that act together to form a single organism.  There are many advantages to this, as they form highly adapted organ systems allowing each individual cell to benefit from the collective structure and intelligence of the whole.  However, this comes at the cost of the cells giving up their ability to survive independently.  If it turns out that the multicellular organism isn't well adapted and is likely to die, its individual cells aren't able to leave the organism and must die with it.  It's also true that individual bacteria and other single celled organisms can survive just as well on their own with more limited interactions with surrounding cells.  Based on biomass distribution, it's not obvious whether the single celled or multicellular survival strategy is best from the perspective of an individual cell.

Relating this to humans, being able to socially cooperate with other people has given us a considerable advantage over other mammal species.  Our forms of social organization have become more complex with time, and the culture we're brought up in has come to have a large impact on the people we become.  I see this process continuing, especially with rapidly increasing technology.  As of now, individual humans are still able to operate with some degree of autonomy, but in the future it will most likely be possible to directly link minds together using technology. 

My intuition regarding this is that the risks could easily outweigh the potential benefits.  Whoever initially controls this technology will have immense power, and I fear the possibility of humanity becoming a hive-mind, where one ideology is forced on everyone with no possible recourse.  Even if such a nightmare scenario doesn't occur, there's still the problem of how this collective system would be organized.  There would need to be some sense of coherence to it, so that it wouldn't become an incomprehensible noise of everyone's contradictory thoughts and feelings.  But it would also need to preserve unique perspectives and allow for creativity and change.

Such an endeavor seems like it could so easily become a disaster, so the main thing I'm wondering is if a collective mind is inevitable given our current trajectory?  Even today it seems like the common person isn't highly valued and doesn't have a meaningful ability to affect their circumstances.  Ideology and culture already seems to induct people uncritically into it.  So it seems to me like we're heading for a totalitarian future.  Is there anything that can be done about it at this point?       

[blankisomeone]

It’s always been the case that we are a collective mind. 99% of your thoughts aren’t yours (I almost wanna say 100%). Kinda spooky isn’t it

Edited April 29, 2021 by blankisomeone