Cognitive Field (Internet of Minds)

The Cognitive Field is an opt-in network for sharing experiences, memories, and cognitive bandwidth directly between minds–human, augmented, or uploaded. It supports everything from empathic bridges to temporary group problem-solving, modeled more on a jazz ensemble than a hive mind. Consent is hard-coded: no session initiates or persists without explicit, revocable permission.

Capabilities include experience archives (living libraries of first-person perspectives), collaborative cognition for complex engineering or ethical debates, and skill transfer where experts expose their decision traces to others. Identity boundaries persist, and Proof-of-Diversity rules prevent any dominant cognitive template from crowding out alternatives.

Technically, the Field extends ideas from brain-computer interfaces, shared neural decoding, and distributed cognition research. Philosophically, it operationalizes Voluntary Symbiosis–supporting plural forms of consciousness while maximizing empathy and collective intelligence without coercion.

References

• UnscarcityBook, chapter5
• MIT Technology Review, “Brain-to-brain interfaces” (2019)
• Andy Clark, “Supersizing the Mind” (2008)