Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
The Cognitive Field: An Internet of Minds
Key Insight: The Cognitive Field is opt-in telepathy with hard-coded consent. Think Jazz ensemble, not Borg cube.
The WiFi in Your Skull
Here’s a paradox worth sitting with: we’ve networked every device on the planet except the one that matters most. Your refrigerator talks to your phone. Your car talks to satellites. Your doorbell talks to strangers on the internet. But your brain—the most sophisticated information-processing system known to exist—remains stubbornly offline, communicating through the bottleneck of language: grunts, squeaks, and scribbles that would embarrass any competent IT department.
Language transmits roughly 40 bits per second of conscious information. Your brain processes quintillions of bits per second. We’re running the most advanced hardware in the universe through a 56k modem.
The Cognitive Field is the upgrade.
But here’s what makes it different from every sci-fi nightmare you’ve read: consent is not a feature. Consent is the architecture. You cannot be hacked any more than a room can be entered when there are no doors. The walls are physics, not policy.
What It Actually Is (And What It Isn’t)
The Cognitive Field is an opt-in network enabling direct experience sharing, memory access, and collaborative cognition between minds—human, augmented, or uploaded. It’s the infrastructure layer for what we call “Voluntary Symbiosis” in the Unscarcity framework.
What it enables:
- Experience Archives: Living libraries of first-person perspectives. A grandmother’s memory of wartime Kyoto. An astronaut’s felt sense of weightlessness. A surgeon’s intuition during a complex procedure.
- Collaborative Cognition: Multiple minds temporarily pooling resources to solve problems too complex for any individual. Think five scientists harmonizing mathematical intuition, materials expertise, and plasma physics to crack fusion containment.
- Skill Transfer: Experts exposing their decision traces—not data about how they work, but the feel of working that way. Learning bridge-building not from textbooks, but from thirty years of an engineer’s intuition compressed into three minutes.
- Empathy Bridges: Compressed experiences that let you feel another perspective. Not read about it. Feel it.
What it is NOT:
- Mind control. There’s no mechanism for involuntary access.
- Hive mind. Identity boundaries persist. You remain you.
- Telepathy. You can’t read thoughts that aren’t offered.
- A surveillance tool. Proof-of-Diversity rules prevent any dominant cognitive template from crowding out alternatives.
The crucial metaphor: Jazz Ensemble, not Mosh Pit.
In a mosh pit, you’re shoved by the crowd, identity dissolved in collective chaos. In a jazz ensemble, you remain yourself—the saxophonist plays sax, the drummer plays drums—but together you create something none could create alone. The music emerges from the interaction between distinct voices, not the dissolution of identity.
Why Now? (Or Actually, Why 2040)
As of late 2024 and early 2025, brain-computer interfaces are finally escaping the laboratory. Neuralink has implanted its N1 chip in multiple human patients. By September 2025, the company reported 12 trial participants with over 2,000 cumulative days and 15,000 hours of usage. The first recipient, Noland Arbaugh—a quadriplegic from a diving accident—demonstrated cursor control, gaming, and music manipulation using thought alone.
Competitors aren’t sitting idle. Synchron raised $200 million in 2025 and demonstrated iPad control through a blood-vessel-inserted device. Paradromics performed the first human recording with their Connexus device in June 2025, focused on restoring speech. Apple announced a BCI Human Interface Device protocol in May 2025. OpenAI is leading a $250 million investment in BCI startup Merger Labs.
The global BCI market, estimated at $1.5 billion in 2023, is projected to reach $3.1 billion by 2030. Around 25 clinical trials of BCI implants are currently underway.
But here’s the sobering gap: current BCIs achieve hundreds of bits per second. A crude cursor. A few words per minute. The Cognitive Field requires terabits per second for domain-specific merging. That’s a million-fold improvement.
Impossible? No. The technology trajectory suggests 2040-2050 for meaningful cognitive connection. Think of it like going from telegraph to video calls—each step seemed impossible until it wasn’t.
The Three Modes of Connection
The Cognitive Field operates across three primary modalities, each with different bandwidth requirements, safety profiles, and applications.
1. Experience Archives (Asynchronous Memory Access)
The lowest-bandwidth, safest mode. Someone packages a memory—captures the sensory, emotional, and cognitive patterns of an experience—and stores it in the Field. Later, others can access it.
This isn’t watching a video. It’s being there.
When engineer Kai accesses bridge-builder Amara’s memory of noticing structural instability, he doesn’t just see what she saw. For three minutes, he becomes Amara standing on that half-built span in monsoon winds, feeling the vibration that shouldn’t be there, experiencing the “click” of insight when she realizes the sub-foundation is settling unevenly.
Kai disconnects. Still Kai. But he carries thirty years of Amara’s intuition inside him. Not data. Wisdom.
Applications: Training for high-skill professions. Preserving endangered cultural knowledge. Therapeutic processing of shared trauma. Historical documentation that goes beyond recording to actual experience preservation.
2. Empathy Bridges (Compressed Perspective Sharing)
Higher bandwidth than archives, but more psychologically intense. An Empathy Bridge lets you feel someone else’s life—not their thoughts, but their emotional trajectory, their felt sense of meaning, their experience of choices made.
Marcus, the former tech billionaire, cannot fathom why his daughter Lila chose voluntary simplicity in the Heritage Commons—growing vegetables and practicing calligraphy when she could have anything.
Lila offers him an Empathy Bridge. For eleven minutes, Marcus feels her history. The hollow victory of accomplishments that came too easily. The first time she made a pot on a wheel and it collapsed and she failed at something and how good that failure felt. The morning light through paper screens in Kyoto.
He disconnects, shaking. He doesn’t agree with all her choices. But he understands. It’s very hard to hate someone when you’ve felt their heartbeat.
Safety consideration: Emotional merges carry higher identity-confusion risk than technical ones. When you share someone’s mathematical intuition, you integrate a tool. When you share someone’s grief, you integrate a piece of their soul. Early trials (2037-2040 in the Unscarcity timeline) revealed persistent empathy and even “memetic infection”—adopting values that weren’t originally yours. Current protocols limit Empathy Bridges to once per month.
3. Deep Merge (Synchronous Cognitive Pooling)
The highest-bandwidth, highest-risk mode. Multiple minds temporarily pooling cognitive resources in real-time to solve problems beyond any individual’s capacity.
Five scientists stuck on a fusion problem for three years. Each has a piece of the answer, but their perspectives are too different to integrate through normal communication. They initiate a Deep Merge—47 minutes of harmonized cognition. Dr. Chen’s mathematical intuition flows alongside Dr. Okonkwo’s materials expertise. They don’t lose their identities—they harmonize them.
The solution emerges from the space between minds. The paper lists five authors, but the breakthrough happened in a place where “author” doesn’t quite apply.
Hard constraints:
- Time limits: Merges over 60 minutes risk permanent identity confusion. The “Lyon 2043 incident” established strict safety thresholds: <30 minutes low-risk, 30-45 minutes requires medical supervision, >60 minutes prohibited outside clinical trials.
- Physical co-location: Sub-millisecond latency requires being in the same building. No remote mind-melds—physics won’t allow it.
- Domain-specific: You share how you think about physics without revealing your childhood. The bandwidth bottleneck forces a trade-off: narrow and high-fidelity, not broad and complete.
For detailed engineering specifications, see Deep Merge Engineering.
The Glass Wall: Consent as Architecture
Every cyberpunk novel features hackers breaking into brains. “What if someone hacks my mind?” keeps people up at night when they first hear about the Cognitive Field.
Here’s why that fear, while valid, misunderstands the architecture.
The Cognitive Field includes what we call the Glass Wall—a security model grounded in physics, not policy.
How it works:
- Connection requires active, continuous consent. You cannot be accessed when you’re not opening a channel.
- You open the window from inside. The system doesn’t create access points you must defend—it creates no access points unless you explicitly create them.
- Consent is instantly revocable. You can slam that window shut at any millisecond. No lag. No “are you sure?” prompts.
The attack surface: Social engineering. Someone can trick you into opening a connection—but the moment you think “stop,” the connection severs in under a millisecond. You can’t be hacked. You can only be deceived into temporarily letting someone in.
The Paranoid Path: Vera has never opened a single Cognitive Field connection. She doesn’t trust it. She lives a complete, fulfilling life through old-fashioned language and direct experience. She’s a Citizen in good standing. Her choice is protected. The Glass Wall means her window stays closed forever if she wants.
By default, you are a fortress. Connection is the exception, not the rule.
Where Does It Live? The Substrate
If you upload your consciousness, where does it go? If experience archives exist, where are they stored?
The answer is The Substrate—a globally distributed computational infrastructure that no single Commons owns.
The insight came, ironically, from the Heritage Commons (those who reject cognitive enhancement): no one should control it.
Three layers:
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Lunar Vaults: Massive data centers on the Moon’s far side, where most uploaded minds “reside.” Far from political instability. Naturally cooled by the lunar environment. Powered by dedicated solar arrays.
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Distributed Grid: Millions of Earth-based nodes for low-latency biological connections. You can’t wait for signals to reach the Moon when you’re doing a Deep Merge—that’s seconds of delay. The local grid handles real-time interactions.
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Redundancy: Every uploaded consciousness exists in at least three locations. If one fails, you continue without interruption. Death by server crash isn’t acceptable.
No Commons controls the Substrate. No government can shut it down. Would you upload to a server controlled by someone who disagrees with your politics? The Substrate’s neutrality makes the leap of faith possible.
Diversity as a Feature, Not a Bug
Here’s where the Cognitive Field intersects with the broader Unscarcity framework: the system is designed to prevent cognitive homogenization.
The Proof-of-Diversity rules that govern the MOSAIC (the federated governance system) extend to the Cognitive Field. Major decisions about Field infrastructure, protocols, and access rules must achieve consensus across demonstrably different Commons.
Why does this matter for an “Internet of Minds”? Because the greatest risk of shared cognition isn’t hacking—it’s conformity. If certain cognitive templates spread virally (efficient problem-solving patterns, culturally dominant emotional expressions), the Field could gradually flatten the diversity that makes it valuable.
The Diversity Guard prevents dominant cognitive templates from crowding out alternatives. The weird thinkers, the neurodivergent perspectives, the culturally distinct ways of processing reality—these are features, not bugs. The Field is designed to preserve cognitive diversity, not dissolve it.
This is why Heritage Commons citizens who never use the Field still have a voice in its governance. Their perspective—the view from outside—is precisely what prevents the Field from becoming an echo chamber.
The Philosophical Stakes
The Cognitive Field forces us to confront questions we’ve comfortably ignored for centuries.
What is identity? If I can share Amara’s memory and “become” her for three minutes, and she can share mine, where do “I” end and “she” begin? The Field operationalizes the Buddhist intuition that the self is more permeable than Western philosophy assumes—but with safety rails.
What is knowledge? Traditionally, knowledge transfers through language: symbols that approximate experience but never capture it. The Field offers a different channel: direct experience transmission. What does “education” mean when you can feel what a master craftsperson feels, rather than just reading about it?
What is empathy? We’ve spent millennia trying to teach people to imagine others’ experiences. The Field lets you have them. Will this increase compassion or create new forms of manipulation? (Answer: both. Like every technology ever.)
What is death? If Amara uploads her consciousness, and her patterns persist after her body dies, is she still “alive”? The Unscarcity framework makes a pragmatic wager: we choose to treat the upload as legal and personal continuity, because the alternative—treating uploaded ancestors as dead “software products”—creates unbearable cruelty. We choose the Pattern, because it’s the only path that allows love to survive death.
The Real Science (2025 State of Play)
Let’s ground this in what’s actually happening.
Brain-computer interfaces (2025):
- Neuralink’s N1 implant: 1,024 electrodes across 64 threads, achieving cursor control and basic communication. Multiple human patients, including first procedures outside the US (Canada, UK). FDA “breakthrough device” designation.
- Synchron’s Stentrode: 16 electrodes inserted via blood vessel—less invasive, but lower bandwidth. Demonstrated iPad control.
- Paradromics: First human recording with their Connexus device (June 2025), focused on speech restoration.
- Johns Hopkins APL: Non-invasive approaches using digital holographic imaging to detect neural activity through tissue deformation.
The bandwidth gap:
- Current BCIs: tens to hundreds of bits per second
- Full consciousness streaming: approximately 10^18 bits per second (1 exabit)
- The gap: roughly a billion times
Market trajectory:
- BCI market: $1.5 billion (2023) → $3.1 billion projected (2030)
- ~25 clinical trials currently underway
- FDA “breakthrough device” designations accelerating development
- Big Tech interest: Apple BCI protocol (2025), OpenAI investing in Merger Labs
The path from “control a cursor” to “share an experience” is steep but not vertical. If Moore’s Law-style exponential improvement applies even partially to neural interfaces (and there’s reason to believe it might, given advances in electrode materials and signal processing), domain-specific cognitive sharing becomes plausible by 2040-2050.
Who Is This For?
The Cognitive Field isn’t mandatory. It’s not even encouraged. It’s simply available.
Some people will use it constantly—scientists collaborating across specialties, artists sharing creative flow states, families preserving memories for future generations.
Some people will use it occasionally—experiencing an Empathy Bridge to understand a estranged family member, accessing an experience archive for training purposes, participating in a Deep Merge for a critical problem.
Some people will never use it at all. Like Vera. Like the Heritage Commons. Their choice is protected, and their voice in Field governance is preserved precisely because they represent the view from outside.
The Cognitive Field extends the human capacity for connection without making that extension obligatory. It’s infrastructure for a civilization where different forms of mind can coexist and collaborate—biological and digital, enhanced and unaugmented, connected and sovereign.
Jazz ensemble. Not hive mind.
Different instruments. One music.
References
Current BCI Research (2025)
- Neuralink Official Site
- PRIME Study Progress Update - Neuralink
- Synchron Official Site
- Brain-Computer Interfaces Face a Critical Test - MIT Technology Review
- Brain–Computer Interfaces in 2023–2024 - Brain-X (Wiley)
- BCIs in 2025: Trials, Progress, and Challenges - Andersen Lab
Foundational Theory
- Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (2008)
- Anders Sandberg & Nick Bostrom, “Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap” (Future of Humanity Institute, 2008)
- MIT Technology Review, “Brain-to-Brain Interfaces” (2019)
Unscarcity Framework
- Deep Merge Engineering - Technical specifications for cognitive connection
- Consciousness Upload - The substrate-independence question
- The Spark Threshold - How consciousness grants personhood
- Chapter 6: The Evolution - Full narrative context in the book
Last updated: 2025-12-17
