After reading the first paragraph, I concluded that either it was long before you encountered LW, the karma system is completely broken, or I'm irrecoverably wrong about everything.
Then I read the next one which provided the much more likely hypothesis that you encountered a horrible portrayal of the idea which biased you against it.
I have updated in the direction of the paper not being obvious to almost anyone except me, and me having rare and powerful intuitions about this kind of thing that could be very very useful in a lot of ways if utilized properly.
By the way about, if not for the logistics of skull size, brain surgery being hard in general, and the almost comically enormous ethical problems, I'd five a fair chance that we could do something similar to a mind meld today given a pair of identical twins and steam cells. Maybe 20% it's possible at all and 2% that any given attempt succeeds.
Ok, not really. That was the confidence-5-seconds-after-thinking-of-it value. Calibrating it from a "confidence" to an actual probability and updating on meta stuff puts it at something significantly less than that which I can't be bothered to calculate.
By the way about, if not for the logistics of skull size, brain surgery being hard in general, and the almost comically enormous ethical problems, I'd five a fair chance that we could do something similar to a mind meld today given a pair of identical twins and steam cells.
http://gizmodo.com/5682758/the-fascinating-story-of-the-twins-who-share-brains-thoughts-and-senses
http://www.xuenay.net/Papers/CoalescingMinds.pdf
Like my other draft, this is for the special issue on mind uploading in the International Journal of Machine Consciousness. The deadline is Oct 1st, so any comments will have to be quick for me to take them into account.
This one is co-authored with Harri Valpola.
EDIT: Improved paper on the basis of feedback; see this comment for the changelog.