https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02469-0#:~:text=Bridging%20directly%20connects%20billions%20of,%2C%20daydreams%2C%20memories%20and%20thoughts.

>If two normal brains were connected with adequate bandwidth, would they form a single, conscious mind or remain as two?

Of course remain as two if they forgot to connect the two normal bodies as well.

Just so everyone understands: this is a sci-fi article, not real.

Fun read though.

What is your definition of consciousness?

Basically it's life.
Like a very long VR movie.
A stream of visuals, thoughts, feelings.
A simulation that "runs" on a brain.
It's hard to define in words, and humanity knows too little about it.

Why can’t you see how multiple super-intelligent beings can coexist? The universe is so vast it’s mind-boggling, and that’s without accounting for a multiverse.

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Consciousness is an evolutionary side bar. If anything, our current success with AI is decoupling intelligence from consciousness. I doubt superinteligence will be conscious or have any use for consciousness. I suspect modern day humans are the last conscious life forms.

Terrifying to consider

Well, imagine you are superintelligent. You can experience indescribable bliss every nanosecond. To which the best hallucinogen trips are nothing.

And you can expand this feeling even more, by using available resources.

Now imagine a second superingelligent being next to you, with the same goal.
And suppose that it is impossible for you two to merge

We don't yet know, how consciousness exists.
It's called "Hard problem of consciousness" for a reason.

AI may be conscious or not, with the same probability, it's literally 50/50 for us at the moment

What do you mean? Also if it closely resembled what we consider to be conscious does it even matter I guess?

It does matter because the last thing we'd want is for humanity (which can feel) to be wiped out by a machine (unfeeling, possibly) and leave behind a universe where said machine grows and destroys all feeling things it comes across.

Also whether a machine is able to feel or not will affect whether making such machines is ethical.

Also hypothetical "brain uploads" some people talk about would be horrifying if the copy is unfeeling and the original feeling human dies. It would just be loss of life.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness is very important for far future ethics and policy, but just hard, or impossible, to answer.