Even if we define consciousness as a mechanism for information compression, there’s no reason why telepathic individuals wouldn’t use it as well. Larger bandwidth doesn’t mean individuals would just waste it all by sending through whatever noise goes through their brain, they would still filter out their thoughts, they’d just be able to send out more at once.
Why? There would need to be some kind of pressure one way or another unless it is totally inconsequential.
One pressure would be that organisms would be fitter with the ability to conceal and deceive. That would lend credence to what you’re suggesting; process and compress locally, filter locally, send only when advantageous.
But the opposite pressure might be social exclusion which makes individual members of a cohort weaker.
The real question is: what does an organism gain one way or the other? There’s only tradeoffs in evolution. Is the mental and physical tax of local processing worth it, or is the hive-mind style survival benefits more beneficial to reproduction and expansion?
Deception isn’t the only reason to filter information, it’s just wasteful and redundant to constantly be transmitting the entirety of all of the input processes of an individual. If individuals are similar within a species to a certain point, they don’t all need to constantly be reporting to eachother all of the similarities. We also don’t only make use of our own consciousness or filter for language purposes, there’s a million different processes that exist subconsciously not because we’ve blocked them out but just because there’s no reason for our self to be aware of them.
My comment was saying that telepathics could still benefit from local processing and compression. Not that they must use those processes. I’m refuting the comic’s implication that telepathics would not have “consciousness”. Though your comment was interesting nonetheless!
But they wouldn’t have to compress it all into one signal. Even having two signals is disastrous for humans, cause they have to compete. It doesn’t fit our theory of mind. A telepathic species can live instinctually combining signals of all agents that are close enough.
Telepathic species might get away with just re-ranking and lossy compression. Doesn’t require consciousness if the re-rank and compression are cheap enough. Eg: jpeg images
![Consciousness [SMBC]](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1780787893-20260607.png){kind=link}
Even if we define consciousness as a mechanism for information compression, there’s no reason why telepathic individuals wouldn’t use it as well. Larger bandwidth doesn’t mean individuals would just waste it all by sending through whatever noise goes through their brain, they would still filter out their thoughts, they’d just be able to send out more at once.
Why? There would need to be some kind of pressure one way or another unless it is totally inconsequential. One pressure would be that organisms would be fitter with the ability to conceal and deceive. That would lend credence to what you’re suggesting; process and compress locally, filter locally, send only when advantageous.
But the opposite pressure might be social exclusion which makes individual members of a cohort weaker.
The real question is: what does an organism gain one way or the other? There’s only tradeoffs in evolution. Is the mental and physical tax of local processing worth it, or is the hive-mind style survival benefits more beneficial to reproduction and expansion?
Deception isn’t the only reason to filter information, it’s just wasteful and redundant to constantly be transmitting the entirety of all of the input processes of an individual. If individuals are similar within a species to a certain point, they don’t all need to constantly be reporting to eachother all of the similarities. We also don’t only make use of our own consciousness or filter for language purposes, there’s a million different processes that exist subconsciously not because we’ve blocked them out but just because there’s no reason for our self to be aware of them.
My comment was saying that telepathics could still benefit from local processing and compression. Not that they must use those processes. I’m refuting the comic’s implication that telepathics would not have “consciousness”. Though your comment was interesting nonetheless!
But they wouldn’t have to compress it all into one signal. Even having two signals is disastrous for humans, cause they have to compete. It doesn’t fit our theory of mind. A telepathic species can live instinctually combining signals of all agents that are close enough.
Why do it yourself when you can offload it?
Telepathic species might get away with just re-ranking and lossy compression. Doesn’t require consciousness if the re-rank and compression are cheap enough. Eg: jpeg images
then that compression would be their “consciousness”