If we encountered a million year old consciousness

[Magical Realist]

Forget the fact that it might be alien. After a million years of evolution, damn near anything is possible. Technology so finely integrated with the biological as to enable it forms of sentience and motor manipulation we can't even imagine. How would we communicate with such beings? Beings who as far as we know have transcended the crude limitations of spacetime and corporeal embodiment. Beings who would only appear to us as irrational anomalies or surreal externalizations of collective madness inside our own self-contained zeitgeist. That will be the greatest problem for an advanced species--how to translate its experience and its thoughts into a mode we lower conscious lifeforms can grasp. Would it have anything more than a passing interest in us---we mere fleeting ephemera of intersteller atomic processes?

[stryder]

The Penny Farthing

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How fast does it's little wheel spin to keep up with the larger one, yet the bicycle as a whole travels exactly the same distance at exactly the same speed.

You could consider that perhaps what time we observer passing by is actually like that little wheel and from another perspective the wheel is a lot bigger and so observed that we've moved relatively little.

I pondered the thought while considering the theory into "How to simulate this Universe". One of the many questions raised by people on the subject is that if the universe is simulated, how could it be so old yet simulated?. The answer to that was the fact that time is relative to the observer, while indeed a week is a week to both the observer in the simulation and the one running the simulation, the way the simulation is processed means that it could either be processed extremely slowly (meaning the observers would age far more than the simulated observers) or processed faster.

Faster of course makes more sense if you want to build a universe and actually see it evolve and change to what you'd expect to exist within a timeframe which is feasible for an observer (<= 1 lifetime)

[C C]

[...] How would we communicate with such beings? Beings who as far as we know have transcended the crude limitations of spacetime and corporeal embodiment. Beings who would only appear to us as irrational anomalies or surreal externalizations of collective madness inside our own self-contained zeitgeist. That will be the greatest problem for an advanced species--how to translate its experience and its thoughts into a mode we lower conscious lifeforms can grasp. Would it have anything more than a passing interest in us---we mere fleeting ephemera of intersteller atomic processes?

If bacteria could have awareness and sapience, then as they browsed about in a human body, they probably wouldn't recognize the microscopic structure and activities of that "world" as summating to an "intelligence" when conceived from the lofty heights of another vast level. Even the immune system cells chasing them would just be the predators among the fauna of the local environment.

An ant colony can have a lot of information density transpiring in the physical interactions and chemical communications of its individual residents, without a definitive ego emerging from the collective processing of that superorganism (or being identified as such). Likewise, a superorganism or distributed intelligence of a deipotent ranking would not necessarily result in something equivalent to "animal-hood" or "person-hood". It could be an "agency" rather than an "agent", a deipotent "be-ing" instead of a deipotent being or community of beings. Pervading part of the cosmos as if mimicking a field or force of physics. Its functions / goals wouldn't have conform to those of embodied egos, wouldn't resemble what the latter deem "sapience". Especially since the latter was molded over millennia by concerns over survival / security and eluding fears, pains, boredom, etc.

In essence: The personhood traits and special interests / passions / needs / values attributable to a baseline intelligent species at the human-level are probably too fragile to survive either a technological or a guided evolutionary apotheosis to godhood. Too dependent on the oscillatory hardship-leisure conditions of a non-artificial mortal life to resist atrophy; and on the impulsive eccentricities and fickle recreational pursuits that fall out of the looser societal organizations of a population (which seem to so confound or alienate those autistic-like individuals with hyper-rational leanings).

[Magical Realist]

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/201...ecies.html

"I think it very likely – in fact, inevitable – that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon… If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, I believe it is very likely to be postbiological in nature, writes Paul Davies in The Eerie Silence.

In fact, Davies suggests in Eerie Silence, that advanced technology might not even be made of matter. That it might have no fixed size or shape; have no well-defined boundaries. Is dynamical on all scales of space and time. Or, conversely, does not appear to do anything at all that we can discern. Does not consist of discrete, separate things; but rather it is a system,or a subtle higher-level correlation of things.

Are matter and information, Davies asks, all there is? Five hundred years ago, Davies writes, " the very concept of a device manipulating information, or software, would have been incomprehensible. Might there be a still higher level, as yet outside all human experience, that organizes electrons? If so, this "third level" would never be manifest through observations made at the informational level, still less at the matter level."

[Yazata]

It seems to me that the big variable with ancient consciousnesses would be memory. Would such a consciousness retain a million years of memories, or would it gradually forget older memories as they are replaced with new ones?

If it retained all of its memories, it might become so burdened by them that real-life would become almost insignificant compared to what went before. So the ancient being would just settle into a reverie of its own past. Arousing it from its stupor and inducing it to pay attention to you might be difficult.

And if the being gradually forgot its older memories as new ones formed, then could it really be said to have a million year old consciousness? It might have moment to moment continuity with its ancient self, but nothing in common and hence no identity. The contemporary version might have entirely different goals, attitudes, beliefs and recollections, and for all intents and purposes be a new and different individual.

(I'm not really the same person that I was when I was in my early 20's.)