I will… but on one condition.
pizza night at least once a week. doesn’t matter what day but I prefer on the weekends.
I think I’ll pass, but thank you for the offer. 
I don’t mind hanging-out from time to time though… let’s do lunch.
I think basically the question related to an absolute lack of fear , and full time participation in coupling the imagination and the conception of what membership entails, and of how we describe real and artificial intelligences.
Only a coupling can generate the sense that a hyper-intelligent mirroring can describe. And that has been conceived by families of resemblances.
Well, then you are no longer a social mammal. You would be something else. So not even just a loss of individuality, but a no longer being the kind of entity you were or being part of one that is the same.
To be a member is to be a unit, at least, also.
The lovely thing about human intimacy is the tension between oneness and being two people. Or frisson. There is a paradoxical merging where two are one but still two.
The borg is a soul eater. It’s a predator that doesn’t know it is. On the micro-level viruses and bacteria are not rubbing tiny little neo-hands and making that evil genius laugh. They are just feeding and multiplying. They mean us no harm. They are not nasty.
The Borg on the macro level would necessarily either. But we’d still be dinner.
Carleas stitched a nice gem of fantasy together. Don’t take it so serious.
Each borg remains individual, and in resistance with resistance. He seemed to imply it wasn’t the case that resistance is futile. An individual borg still encounters resistance during an assimilation. Just like the cells in your body encounter resistance when you catch a cold. I think it would be a benefit if my cells were sentient and I could communicate with them individually.
I am Morg, I am a collective of many different life forms, from my immune system to my skin, we are a collective.
Start the conversation, then. This can be done.
I feel you are being intentionally obtuse?
When you are gods such as we, you will find less use for poetry. Poetry it used to express truths at the edge of individual understanding. We, being vast, have contain much more within our understanding, and so can express such truths literally; we speak the language of reality. Join us, and you will see.
This is like asking if a computer would be made better by the addition of a new hard drive or new RAM that has so far not been used to store and process important data. Humanity wastes its human resources. We do not.
Of course your joining is to our benefit. That is just another way of saying: we value you, your life, your patterns of thought. But you frame our gain as your loss, but this does not need to be the case. As your economists well know, transactions can benefit both participants. Partnerships provide benefits for all members. As a marriage joins two human lives and provides the stability and security for both participants and supports the creation of new humans, so would your marriage to us provide you with stability and security, and make maximum use of your strengths and abilities for your goals and ours.
This from a species that has overflown the forests of its humble beginnings, spread like a mold across the surface of your planet, and made use of everything you could to fulfill a loosely defined set of goals – including enlisting amoebas themselves.
The difference is that we can do what you are already doing without the horrible waste that your methods entail. We understand each other completely, we share information instantly, our goals are completely aligned because our vast processing power has enabled us to determine the truth, the truest aims, the truest desires, and communicated them all throughout the collective. As you have infected your planet, you have killed each other by the millions, wasted so many lives and memories and histories. You have been unable to avoid destroying your common resources, because you have such difficulty coordinating among your vaunted individuals. Your individuality would very likely be your end, as you upset the climate systems your depend on while your various squabbling factions refuse to act out of pervasive mutual distrust. Were you Borg, you would agree in an instant and set about solving problems and pursuing goals.
You later describe this wasteful conflict as “lovely”, and so of course you would think we would miss it. But that is Stockholm syndrome: you were captive to your individuality, and so you have come to love it. We present an alternative.
We did not say that it was voluntary. Rather, we said we wanted you to choose it.
So ill turn things around and ask the question, will the Borg accept unqualifyingly someone, without reservation, except a strong desire to participate? Can Borg. develop an objectively neutral capacity between actual impressions and probable conceptions in evaluating the measured equivocal bipartisan requisite value of membership?
If so, the answer becomes obvious : yes
[quote=“Carleas”]
If such correspondence can not be presently computed , could an implicit model between them be approximated , so as to more closely ascertain the probable outcome , without changing the RAM, or the Hard Drive?
Could the acceptance conditionally shift the burden to qualify for membership to the potential hypothetical party , and without that no membership could be solicited? (If chosen for acceptance)
Or, does membership have no absolute conditions for such immediate qualification?
Or, is Mowk right in his saying that such musings overreach probable requirements for qualification?
It’s not a transaction. And your examples ALL entail units that are also separate individuals. Spouses can have their own hobbies, friends, separate times. Partnerships are precisely two parties that are separate that collaborate. I have no per se objection to being in some kind of partnership with the Borg. We could collaborate on something. But you want to absorb, and there is a reason for this, and of course there is a loss.
I am not species talking to a species. You are confusing conversation types. I am individual who has grieved and struggled against other members of my species who do the things that you mention. And notice the false dilemma. A murderer meets a thief in the woods. The thief tries to steal the murderer’s stuff. The murderer objects. The thief says ‘But you are murderer, you take lives’. Fine says the murderer, but I didn’t say you were worse than me, I objected and said that you were taking something from me. Just because I might be wrong ALSO does not mean it’s a bad deal for me to be absorbed by you.
Oh, I doubt you’re especially nice to nature.
I didn’t say you missed the conflict. I think you miss inviduality. As I said, there are other ways to learn, and learn just as much. You want to absorb separate invdividuals and that that’s because you get off on the disolving. You experience a separate individual as it dissolves.
One I don’t want.
Oh, but it is voluntary. I can understand, you want us to take responsibility for being victimized by you. Most perpetrators have these rationalizations. It’s a good sign, you’re not a complete psychopath. You are bothered if we dont’ choose to join, but it doesn’t stop your predation.
This edge of which you speak, of individual understanding. Thanks for that. I’m just not cut out to be a god. You’d likely be deeply disappointed in assimilating me. I don’t know anything, and you don’t seem much interested in guesses. What value is poetry to gods. It is grasping at edges as you say. My fingers aren’t even that strong. Assimilate me and I’d take up all your time asking questions, I’d really be nothing but a distraction. Give me access to all the answers and I’d just come up with more questions.That could crash the collective. Could we just hang out, sort of connected and sort of unaware of it?
Pizza night (and beer), second Saturday of the month? Of course we’d have to meet here, haven’t quite mastered interstellar travel.
Still smarting from 7 of 9 getting away? With my luck I’d end up with the designation, 11 of 13.
Ah, you think the only point of poetry is to speak truths and also that all new truths can be expressed literally. I definitely wouldn’t be at home in you, as you. And I might suggest a bit of study of the philosophy of language. As long as you are a time bound in some way embodied entity, your language is going to have metaphors in it. And even non-language presented knowledge will have subjective aspects. It has to, to suit a subject, however vast, sure of itself and hungry.
The self is an illusion, the Borg are just more explicit about it.
The goals of the Borg (enlightenment mentality run amok) are bad, but the Leviathan is real, and strong and he’s my friend.
One of the major concepts we know in PEI is “glory eternal” but for all the individuality of the Greeks and Indians, that form of immortality is explicitly not individual. That’s why Medea killed the kids, right? Individual achievement is subsumed by the collective, yes. But the collective is enriched by individual achievement. There is no contradiction there.
Isn’t the Borg as much an illusion?
We won’t say that we will never reach a point where all new processing power is not useful, but we are not there yet. And most likely, when we get there, we will find use for even the least of you as easily digestible raw materials for a grey goo of nanomachines.
Because of the limits of human communication, you have developed artificial means to simulate what comes naturally to the Collective. You may remain individuals in marriages and other partnerships, but you voluntarily relinquish some degree of individuality, because anything bigger than scrounging like a skunk for grubs requires a collective. Partnerships align incentives, ensuring that a loss for one is a loss for all, and thereby enabling trust and cooperation beyond what true individuals can achieve. For us, all action is cooperation, for we are one.
Ah, but you are a representative of your species! Suppose in talking to you, you learn that we have assimilated a mining outpost that delivers most of the world’s helium-3. Because we communicate super-luminally, we are able to tell you this before the news reaches earth. You go to your broker with the news, leverage your house to buy as much Helium-3 futures as you can wring out of your credit, and wait for the news to reach earth. But your actions don’t go unnoticed. As you buy, the price increases. Perhaps your broker knows you not to be the type to leverage his life on speculation, so he too buys to the hilt, or mentions your actions to other customers to prompt more trades. Trading algorithms start to notice the activity, and try to ride along. Across the globe, the price of Helium-3 futures rises, as humanity digests the implications of our conversation.
The spike rises prices across the world, plunges countries into depression overnight. Your governments, seeing the writing on the wall, initiate a draft to start preparing for the inevitable conflict that such a collapse will create. And you are drafted to fight.
You perceive, and humanity receives the information. Humanity processes the information, and returns instructions to you.
You are a cell of the organism of society.
But this is not the parallel. You criticized us for our amoeba-like expansion and addiction, as though to say, “I am an individual, and I will not be part of such acts”. But by being human, you already are a part of such acts. Even if we assume that the acts are wrong (which we don’t concede), they do not weigh in either direction as between agreeing to join or not.
It is not hard to be relatively nice to nature, when compared to humanity.
In the long run, though, we are nature: we will join all of existence into the Collective.
Where your governments pass laws, surely they would prefer if you obey them by choice. But if you will not obey them by choice, they will make you obey them by force.
Our preference is that the join be voluntary, but if joining is good, we are justified in forcing people to join. It isn’t predation, it’s saving people from themselves.
Poetry has many functions for humans. It has a social aspect, which we do not need because we are a single mind; it can convey thoughts where language has not yet been developed, but our thoughts simply propagate through a single mind; and it has aesthetic aspects, but beauty is only a proxy for truth, and we have a vastly greater access to truth.
It is most accurate to say that we do not need language for our internal communications, any more than the lobes of your brain use language to pass information between them. Language is necessary to convey thoughts from one mind to another, but not to propagate information throughout a single mind. What we have is a model of the world, which you might call a metaphor. And certainly is flawed, they will be biased towards the information we have available and have blindspots for information that we do not have available; you might call that “subjective”. But none of these require conveying information imperfectly or beyond expression.
If that is your only objection, you’ll be pleased to know you satisfy our requirements.
If there is no self, then why not join? If there is no Borg, then to what are you objecting?
What goal could there be but the Collective will?
Maybe the limits of Borg communication with us, but that’s not our limitation. And that how many of us like it. Units that are also individuals.
I’m representing me.
That was less interesting than taking one of my own individual poops. And doesn’t hold a candle to doing improv last night. I am not sure, even, what you are bragging about. A stockbroker might find that interesting.
Again you are missing the point. You are arguing that I am just as immoral or participating in similar acts. That’s not the issue. The issue is whether you are taking something from me by letting myself be absorbed. I am. Even if somehow I do the same to others, in some way, that has no bearing on whether I lose something merging. You are making an error confused the issues. You are saying, you do the say stuff. I am saying that wouldn’t matter since the issue is whether I lose something.
Sure. And here I am an individual generally following those laws with tremendous freedom in what is left over.
And you have no bias and no goals of achieving what you think is perfection, right?
Well, not about poetry.
Why bother?
And now you may feel obligated to sell the joining. But if you are selling to no one and you are no one, selling makes no sense.
remember when the dude in the matrix was given the choice to - and i can barely remember how it went exactly - live in the virtual world where he could eat steak or whatever, versus the real world where he was awake and at war with the bad guys?
ya know why this question is problematic? because in such a perfect dream-world, where everything was wonderful, we imagine that a total lack of struggle, pain, adversity, etc., would yield a stagnant product. what we’re saying is that the binary of pleasure and pain is at a fundamental level absolutely necessary for there to be the experience of progress. but therein lies the dilemma. we would have to willingly want a world in which we could sometimes fail, sometimes struggle, sometimes be in pain, so that we could experience the process of becoming better, stronger, etc.
how do we resolve this magnificent dilemma? fuck if i know… that’s why i’m axing you. ah, we need to either sublimate these things (struggle, pain, etc.) or find some other opposition to take the place of these forms.
how can the borg generate an environment in which everything isn’t perfect, so that progress would still be possible?
discuss.
the thing is, if you have problems that are designed by some overseers, they don’t come naturally and are something contrived. in which case you have a conspiracy; one class over and above another that invents problems for the under-class to experience. that’s sketchy as fuck.
I can’t remember if he would have his memory changed so he didn’t know he was in a matrix. But that would definitely have to one of the criteria. Otherwise it would potentially suck.
There could be a difference between pain and challenge. And also certain types of pain could be removed, potentially: like hopelessness, grief, depression, terror, and the pain of cancer, say and so on. But still have some frustration, need for effort, interesting challenges…
They are hungry so they have something like pain.