This is another article restored from my old blog. It was written on 24 October 2014, and from the vantage point of 2016 I am astonished by where this led. I played with the idea a bit in Tempting in Shade. Then in 2020 I used the idea in a short story called Forgetting the Echidna’s Lair, which went on to come second in an Australian military science fiction competition run by the Department of Defence. The main character of this short story then morphed into Gorgoth in my novel Shade Out Beyond.
In the mid‑1990s I read a book with an idea that captured my imagination. In Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep I read of a canine gestalt‑sentient species called the Tine. A gestalt‑sentient species, as portrayed in that novel, was one that had a sort of group mind or group consciousness. So an “individual” might be made up of five or six beings who shared a consciousness.
What really intrigued me was that if one of these five or six died, then the dynamics of the consciousness changed — its very psychology. Likewise, if a new creature entered into this group mind. So if a creature with genetic traits that made it aggressive died and a new passive creature entered the consciousness, then this would impact the overall being’s thinking and behaviour. Also, as components of the whole could die and be replaced, such a consciousness had the potential to live on as long as it could find component creatures to subsume.
In originally writing Tempting in Shade I had a vague concept of this in one of my characters but had decided to wait and explore it in the sequel. However, feedback from my beta‑readers suggested that in some cases I was providing insufficient information about certain characters. So the rewritten novel is being expanded to include full disclosure of many things formerly hinted at (or even ignored).
In this rewritten version of Tempting in Shade I am experimenting fully with this concept of gestalt‑sentience, but on humans and not some alien race. I figure that humans will increasingly integrate themselves with technology, including artificial intelligences. The traditional science‑fiction extrapolation of this idea has been cyborgs. But how would a cyborg think if it not only has the human component but several AI components? It can either be a master‑slave model with one consciousness dominating the others, or it would be some sort of gestalt‑sentience.
Given the latter, what mechanisms would be in place to facilitate it? What happens when new “self‑aware” components are added or old ones are removed? Even still, what would happen if such a consciousness was split and prevented from reforming? Or if one component lost its sanity while the others remained sane?
Yes, a worthy idea to elaborate upon.
Greg
