# Distributed Sentience **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 2, 2021, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795 "2021-10-02T23:41:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Tusculan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecd19e/32.png) [@Tusculan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tusculan)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/21 "2021-10-04T14:10:09Z")
No, [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wlsd9mljiU) more precisely. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/22 "2021-10-04T14:48:30Z")
I was thinking Harlan Ellison’s short stories, but you get the idea. And I’m sure there’s no reason at all to worry when the [DoD is talking about deploying missiles with artificial intelligence capability](https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/10/7/pentagon-contemplating-role-of-ai-in-missile-defense). ---
**Author:** ![Horseflesh](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/horseflesh/32/7502_2.png) [@Horseflesh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horseflesh)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/23 "2021-10-04T16:51:34Z")
You might check out [The Adolescence of P-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adolescence_of_P-1). The distribution is used mainly as redundancy, although eventually the AI can’t find any one system that can hold it completely. IIRC, the various versions on various systems all had the same original goal of its creation, to take over computer systems (“hunger”) but to also “fear” and develop ways to remain undetectable. Depending on the resources of a system a version could improve its own code and submit it to others for consideration into their own code. Pretty interesting book. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/24 "2021-10-04T17:27:02Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > And I’m sure there’s no reason at all to worry when the [DoD is talking about deploying missiles with artificial intelligence capability](https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/10/7/pentagon-contemplating-role-of-ai-in-missile-defense). For all of my life, cruise missiles have been among the most advanced AIs in the world. I’m sure that the current missiles are much smarter than the ones in the 80s, but that’s not exactly news. And reading up on Roko’s Basilisk, it sounds like basically just Pascal’s Wager, but with the added assumption that God is evil, and so therefore we ought to be evil, too, to please God. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/25 "2021-10-04T18:53:22Z")
> [@naita](#): > > You are a distributed sentience. You arise out of a brain that has non-zero dimensions. That’s what I was thinking - seems like clumping our distributed intelligence into a contiguous roughly sphereical shape helps with bandwidth between the various parts, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a given that the internal bandwidth our brain happens to have developed is either the only way to do things, or anything like the best way to do _this_ thing. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/26 "2021-10-04T19:06:49Z")
> [@DorkVader](#): > > Is it, or would it be possible to have distributed sentience? […] Something self-aware […] distributed over a network, with parts dropping in and out? I’m having difficulty imagining the alternative - as far as I am aware, all known sentient life forms have multicellular nervous systems. ETA: Sponges may be the outlier, I don’t think they have nervous tissue but they still coordinate movement and react to stimulus, I don’t know how that works. But you don’t normally hear people refer to sponges as sentient. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![Francis\_Vaughan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/francis_vaughan/32/3093_2.png) [@Francis\_Vaughan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Francis_Vaughan)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/27 "2021-10-04T19:47:42Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > seems like clumping our distributed intelligence into a contiguous roughly sphereical shape helps with bandwidth Curiously our brain doesn’t operate as a sphere. That is just a packing mechanism. The brain is much closer to a plane that is then wrinkled up, folded, and then squashed into a spherical container. The plane of the brain is a six layered thing, mostly made of interconnections. It couples to the thalmus that gets us the IO. But the brain is more of a 2D plane, and that morphology drives quite a bit about the oddities of how we operate. Supercomputers have the same problems. As they get bigger the interconnections can start to dominate, and the 3D nature of the world starts to limit what you can do. There comes a point where you can’t physically perform a full interconnection. Moreover, we don’t do the vertical direction nearly as well as sideways ones, so we end up with a similar problem as the brain. [https://www.math.fsu.edu/~mhurdal/research/visualizemaps.html](https://www.math.fsu.edu/~mhurdal/research/visualizemaps.html) ---
**Author:** ![peccavi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peccavi/32/388_2.png) [@peccavi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/peccavi)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2021, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/28 "2021-10-04T23:09:47Z")
> Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser. Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.““ > — John Brunner, _Stand on Zanzibar_ ---
**Author:** ![DorkVader](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/73ab20/32.png) [@DorkVader](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DorkVader)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2021, 12:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/29 "2021-10-05T00:25:55Z")
> [@Max\_S](#): > > I’m having difficulty imagining the alternative - as far as I am aware, all known sentient life forms have multicellular nervous systems Yes, but I was thinking more along the lines of geographically distributed. Your frontal lobe isn’t in Wichita while your parietal and occipital lobes are in London and Tokyo respectively(at least I don’t think they are🙂 ) @Chronos, I should have said Google’s Basilisk. Still seems fitting somehow regardless, some days. ---
**Author:** ![naita](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naita/32/5862_2.png) [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2021, 1:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/30 "2021-10-05T13:00:31Z")
> [@DorkVader](#): > > Yes, but I was thinking more along the lines of geographically distributed. Everything is geography if your map has enough resolution. ---
**Author:** ![DorkVader](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/73ab20/32.png) [@DorkVader](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DorkVader)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2021, 1:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/31 "2021-10-05T13:17:17Z")
true enough, I suppose 🙄 ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2021, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/32 "2021-10-05T15:29:22Z")
Good point - I hadn’t even thought of the folded nature of the brain. I guess it’s all still fairly local in terms of comms though. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2021, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/33 "2021-10-05T17:44:08Z")
I think the closest concept is the “hive mind” collective consciousness (decision making, not necessarily sentience) of certain ant, bee, and termite colonies. I have a book, _Honeybee Democracy_, which I recommend on that subject. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2021, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/34 "2021-10-05T20:55:24Z")
There’s nearly as much latency from one side of the brain to the other as there is for Internet traffic from Wichita to London. Neural impulses are slow. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [October 5, 2021, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795/35 "2021-10-05T22:10:29Z")
In both cases, there will be a comparable amount of relay action and ECC-type-things going on. But in many cases, a single signal over here gets delivered to multiple locations over there, which sometimes happens with TCP packets, but not as much as with brain noises. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/distributed-sentience/951795.md?page=1)