I asked this question on IRC before and got some surprising answers.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, you get cryo-preserved and eventually wake up as an upload. Maybe meat->sim transfer ends up being much easier than sim->meat or meat->meat, or something. Further suppose that you are not particularly averse to a digital-only existence, at least not enough to specifically prohibit reviving you if this is the only option. Yet further suppose that sim-you is identical to meat-you for all purposes that meat-you cared about (including all your hidden desires and character faults). Let's also preemptively assume that any other attempts to fight this hypothetical have been satisfactorily resolved, just to get this out of the way.
Now, in the "real world", or at least in the simulation level we are at, there is no evidence that telepathy of any kind exists or is even possible. However, in the sim-world there is no technological reason it cannot be implemented in some way, for just thoughts, or just feelings, or both. There is a lot to be said for having this kind of connection between people (or sims). It gets rid of or marginalizes deception, status games, mis-communication-based biases and fallacies. On the other hand, your privacy disappears completely and so do any advantages over others the meat-you might want to retain in the digital world. And what you perceive as your faults are out there for everyone to see and feel.
As a new upload, you are informed that many "people" decided to get integrated into the telepathic society and appear to be happy about it, with few, if any, defections. There is also the group of those who opted out, and it looks basically like your "normal" mundane human society. There is only a limited and strictly monitored interaction between the two worlds to prevent exploitation/manipulation.
Would you choose to get fully integrated or stay as human-like as possible? Feel free to suggest any other alternative (suicide, start a partially integrated society, etc.).
P.S. This topic has been rather extensively covered in science fiction, but I could not find a quality online discussion anywhere.
FWIW, I agree that rationality (or any other value) can benefit from being densely concentrated rather than diffuse, which seems to be what you're getting at here.
To say that a little differently: consider a cognitive system S, comprising various cognitive agents. Let us label Sv the set of agents that are aligned with value V, and Snv the set of agents that oppose V. If I draw a graph of all the agents in S, how they interact with one another, and how strong the connections between them are, and I find that Sv has strong intra-set connections and weak inter-set connections with Snv, I expect S's judgments and behaviors to be more aligned with V than if Sv has weak intra-set connections and strong inter-set connections with Snv.
I just don't think it matters very much whether those connections are between-mind connections or within-mind connections. It matters enormously in the real world, because within-mind connections are much, much stronger than between-mind connections. But the whole point of telepathy is to make that less true.
And I think it matters even less where the label "Dave" gets attached within S, though in practice in the real world I tend to attach that label to a "virtual node" that represents the consensus view of the set of agents instantiated in my brain, thanks to that same within/between distinction. And again, telepathy makes that distinction less important, so where "Dave" gets attached within S is less clearly defined... and continues not to matter much.
Yes, it's about concentration. I imagine that some things are multiplicative, for example traits like "learns a lot about X" and "spends a lot of time doing X" give better output if they happen to be the traits of the same person (as opposed to one person who learns a lot but does nothing, and another person who does it a lot but doesn't understand it).
It's not just about agents, but about resources like memory. I don't know how well and how fast could the telepaths use each other's memory, or habits, or mental associations, or things l... (read more)