If All human brains can share knowledge in one second, then they should do it
The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.
After 3 votes and with 9 points ahead, the winner is...
- Publication date
- Last updated date
- Type
- Standard
- Number of rounds
- 3
- Time for argument
- Two days
- Max argument characters
- 10,000
- Voting period
- Two weeks
- Point system
- Multiple criterions
- Voting system
- Open
let there be some magic that allows all humans to share knowledge in a telepathic manner, occurring within one second. The other person can memorize this instantly and understand the concept as well as the sharer. Knowledge: facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. I support this magic.
- In the resolution, “All human brains” is the subject. “They” means “all of them.” By omitting a qualifying word before the word “knowledge,” PRO implies that we are speaking of all knowledge. His constructive confirms this sentiment. Thus, the resolution roughly means “If all human brains can share all their knowledge in one second, all of them should do it.”
- If even one person should not share all of their knowledge, then the resolution fails.
- WORLD SECURITY
- MENTAL HEALTH
- PERSONAL CONFLICT
- GENIUS COMPLEX
- POINTLESSNESS
“With all human knowledge able to be shared within one second, you would know how to solve all the problems in the world that can be solved.”
“All the criminals would be known and likely caught. Any secrets kept by corrupt politicians would be open to the public.”
“Con's article points out a huge weakness in his argument: "The brain’s exact storage capacity for memories is difficult to calculate. First, we do not know how to measure the size of a memory. Second, certain memories involve more details and thus take up more space; other memories are forgotten and thus free up space. Additionally, some information is just not worth remembering in the first place."
“because this is magic, there is no guarantee that it won't be compact enough to fit your brain size. Next, even with 2.5 PB limitation of knowledge, that is still incredible and you can choose to remember the stuff that is most important and significant to yourself. This is not a problem.”
“Secondly, con assumes the worst in any situation, would your personality and motivation be completely changed by having all human knowledge? The people who would still somehow be petty enough to do crime would be also wide exposed (as knowledge of them being a criminal is shared),”
“He thinks that we are sharing traumatic experiences, but we are only sharing *knowledge* that something occurred, not the feelings and the tragedy that occurred with it.”
“He assumes that knowledge is the only thing we strive for, but there are countless things that even all humans combined do not know, such as how the universe begun, the solution to the millennial math problems, so on and so forth.”
“He also assumes that being a genius makes you arrogant, but everyone is on an equal footing, and hence no one would have this advantage”
“He states that the vulnerabilities would be known, but the ways to improve it would also be known.”
“I shall also bring up that educated people commit less crimes and thus will make the world a better place if everyone is "educated”
Even if this is the case, the potential effects of cyberattacks, nuclear Armageddon, and the inevitable breakdowns in diplomacy, and many other impacts outweigh.
Also consider that PRO will not be able to access his impacts as stated in the 1st Contention of CON’s case.
“ Remember that human motivation is a key factor, and having all the knowledge shared by everyone would lead to greater understanding among people and less likelihood that people would commit crimes and exposing people who are unwilling to change. “
“Firstly, in my opinion, because the title claims "share", it would seem logical for the storage space to now be expanded to 7 billion people's worth of storage space. Since each person can easily retrieve information like 7 billion computers in a cloud system (which exists in real life), this new system seems highly plausible within this scenario.”
“Secondly, experiences are indeed, not facts, nor information. You may know that "this person got abused", but you won't have to experience the pain and the suffering that they went through.”
“Thirdly, con continuously asserts that terrorists will still somehow hold motivation enough to take down the government and cause a massive slippery slope, but this is pure speculation.”
“Fourthly, just because you have all human knowledge does not mean you cannot explore more. Consider how experts and geniuses in their field think they might know everything there is to know, only to explore new ideals every single day.”
Again, PRO misses the point here. This isn’t about “research.” “Growing and improving and accumulating wisdom are integral parts of living. Giving people all knowledge known to man at once bypasses the process entirely.”
“Consider the idea that all diseases could be cured. World hunger could be ended. And reasoning for war would drop severely as now everyone knows how to create a good reasonable government system.”
Finally, even if these impacts WOULD happen, consider that PRO cannot access them because of Contention 1.
“The hackers themselves would unfortunately have to reveal their location and information, as well as the fact that they want to hack the system. “
In R1 once the "all humans knowledge" point was raised, my mind went to the overload problem. I do not consider this twisting anything, due to pro bringing up the all secrets instantly revealed bit.
CAPACITY
The Scientific America source had a huge impact. Limited storage space, and too many people in the world. Pro defends that not all memory is import to us to be worth storing, and the storage usage is variable, so declares the limited storage is not a problem... Suffice to say, I don't buy that; even more since we don't know the consequences of overload, but when applied to the whole human race, I don't need to wait for anyone to tell me that's scary. Let's see, con defends, calls pro's arguments that the magic would make it all fine special pleading...
HARMFUL EXCEPTIONS
Very good point, highlighted with the nuke codes (some secrets are best kept secret... as much as I don't for even a moment believe there would be success at using nuclear weapons, it still raises a point of the types of dangers). Pro has a good defense here that access to all human knowledge would change people, but my mind jumps to the problem of loss of autonomy. Pro then undermines his own point by declaring we would not get the feelings, which if true would mean terrorists would have the knowledge without changed feelings to tamper them (note, I fail to see how you would get the skills without the related feelings, PTSD is a learned skill more than anything, an awful one, but still a skill; anyway no feelings are only hoped for, not assured). Pro does get to a really good point that more educated people commit less crime, to which con basically insults the point, then goes back to his cybercriminals point since not all crime would end.
PRO's thesis is gigantic, untestable, unknowable. He assumes universal knowledge sharing would beget wisdom and solve problems without really explaining why.
CON does a nice job of demonstrating the impracticality of the proposal- capacity, exploitation of secrets, the dissemination of trauma, the incitement of conflicts. This voter is less persuaded by the arrogance and dullness of perfect knowledge arguments (after all there is plenty more of the universe to discover and be humbled by) but PRO never challenges these so let's push these two.
PRO counters capacity arguments with undefined magic, which CON correctly trashes as special pleading.
PRO counters exploitation and conflict with an interesting argument linking education to less crime. Unfortunately, CON has already discussed nuclear launch codes which takes us right to CON's test- if there's even one person who (even on some mentally ill impulse) could use that knowledge to end the world then the universality of PRO's program fails.
For this voter, trauma is the most persuasive argument although neither side gets down to whether two year olds are ready to experience the memories of holocaust survivors or relive the memories of the actresses in two girls, one cup. PRO argues that EXPERIENCE is somehow separate from INFORMATION but that is both absurd and moving the goalposts substantially.
Whether or not experience is emotional it is nevertheless information. PRO now wants to separate experience to segregate out trauma but his terms clearly stated experience as included in the share and in truth, I don't think separating learning from associated emotion is possible.
PRO never really why universal sharing automatically solves problems like world hunger. 1 in 8 Americans went hungry this past summer but that wasn't due to any lack of food or information. The principles deciding to escalate WW1 or Viet-Nam generally understood that they were making a terrible mistake but made that mistake anyway. Oppenheimer believed that the end of the world was one small probability outcome of the first nuclear test but he took that chance anyway. Trump understood that COVID was the worst epidemic in American's memory but deliberately exacerbated the spread in the hopes of improving his election chances. Information is not wisdom or good judgement, those characteristics require deep empathy, a quality that PRO wishes to exclude from his hypothetical.
Args to CON.
It is made clear who won.
R1-P1:
PRO lists possible benefits to sharing knowledge: catching crime, and solving big problems.
R1-C1:
CON brings up how the human mind does not have memory to store that much information, thus somehow overloading the brain, which is obviously detrimental. CON also brings up how it is detrimental to world security, a very valid point. Then CON brings up traumatic experiences also a valid point. I don't believe that any of the other points were going to benefit CON as much as these, it is lucky that CON spread his attention to these contentions in the later rounds.
R2-P2:
All of PRO's rebuttals to CON's memory argument are based off the special pleading fallacy, thus making it invalid. PRO attempts to refute the traumatic experiences point, and mainly ignores the world security. His refute towards traumatic experiences is that feelings aren't knowledge, which is false. His other refute against world security is that just because people know something doesn't mean that there are going to do it. That may be true in some cases, but because there is still murder, genocide, and robbery in this world, we know for a fact that there are exceptions.
At this point, all of PRO's refutes that he tries to make are invalid. It is a lost cause for PRO as his rebuttal is not solid enough, leading to an argument by CON
Thanks for your votes! I agree with Oromagi I should've pushed the trauma point a lot more.
Thanks for vote and analysis
vote bump
So, are you collecting this topic from I can I BB too?
Well there is something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious
You responded in 30 minutes... Now that's speed
This was really fun to research
I heard that this is what aliens do. They have telepathic abilities and only learn these abilities. At least this is what they say in the stories. I think the education system is pretty much useless after this considering you can just learn everything by thinking and there is no effort needed.
Good luck.