…what happens?
The question about whether AI could have blankouts got me thinking…could Specimen 6b experience a blankout? And on a larger scale, what are the ramifications of putting a colloid into an 11,000 year old, 5,000 sq. km fungus?
[The substantial backing of Zhupao enabled an adapted neural colloid to be introduced to Specimen 6b/35-N8, described as a way of gathering data and allow for the tracking of electrical signals.](Specimen 6b/35-N8 | Omnipedia)
So Zhupao helps the EHE put a colloid into Specimen 6b, and we know it stayed there because, among other reasons, the recent attack was a collocidal. Plus, Rowan Xu leaked those documents that “revealed a known consequence of the experiment that resulted in Specimen 6b/35-N8 interacting with the EHE colloid in a way that made the colloid an extension of itself.” (Since some version of that sentence is consistent across both factions editing the 6b page, I’m inclined to trust it.)
The citation for Rowan Xu’s leak is about extended cognition theory, which I think is basically the idea that the mind extends beyond the brain or body into the physical world. So if 6b has a “mind,” it’s (maybe) extended into that colloid. Could it extend into the network beyond that?
Unless Clement really is communicating with it, I don’t think we’d have a way to know directly if 6b experienced a blankout. Does anyone know if there’s any connection between blankouts themselves? As in, do they ever occur in more than one person simultaneously, or if there’s ever some kind of chain reaction or order from one to the next? Depending on what exactly 6b’s neural colloid is connected to, having an entity like that connected to a network that’s shared by a huge chunk of humanity’s colloids could trigger all kinds of unforeseen effects. Maybe blankouts are triggered by the fungal equivalent of a hiccup, who knows?
What would happened if an AI were trained on a data set that included the data from this fungus? My feeling has always been that Zhupao got in, got and did what they needed, and got out. It seems likely that the data - at LEAST from the original span of the experiment - is part of what they wanted.
I guess I’m just full of fungus questions today. Must be a side effect of watching Team Clement and Team Xu battle it out in the 6b page edits.