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 The Technium: Brains of White Matter
#3
I think that beyond a certain brain size, human-style unified consciousness becomes impossible, as the number of connections required between nodes would become unworkable, regardless of what technology was used. A Transapient of S2 or higher might be the equivalent of an entire civilisation of people incorporated into a single tribe mind, rather than an individual with their own personality.

This might explain why the Archai converge on archetypes to begin with, since they don't have their own personal interests or motivations. Instead, they embody the desires of the billions of minds that they encompass, expanding upon ancient cultural myths and bringing them to life. It would also hold true that an Archai descended from humans and human-friendly AI like the Lord of Rays would naturally be more friendly to modosophonts than, say, an Archai emerging from AI obsessed with abstract mathematical concepts.

At the modosophont level, expanding the brain may require the development of new mental traits like autosentience or polysophonce in order to take advantage of all that extra neural tissue. We can see this with modern CPUs that are using the extra transistors from node shrinks for integrated FPGAs, DSPs and on-chip neural networks, which are specialised for different kinds of workloads than what the main processor can handle. Simply increasing the number of cores or the amount of circuitry for speculative execution won't yield greater benefits beyond a certain point.
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RE: The Technium: Brains of White Matter - by extherian - 12-02-2018, 10:45 PM

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