It occurs to me the only human instinct is mimicry – our brains are built with mirror neurons that light up when we see something a human does, in the exact same pattern our regular neurons would if we had performed that action.
Consciousness copies itself that way – what it is to be a human consciousness, anyway. DNA is all about replication and accretion. Dinosaurs ruled for hundreds of millons of years, but it took millions more for tool using intelligence to develope. Now we’re seeing it in other species and it’s on the rise – witness parrots that can hold actual conversations, tool using ravens.
Information does want to be free. That’s why it’s so damned easy to copy and getting easier. It’s an offshoot of intelligent consciousness, which is itself an offshoot of dna, whose sole purpose is to replicate with some other dna and make new things.
Whichs brings me to a weird thought – your dna can be encoded onto an average cd. With memory technology where it stands, storing that on a chip in your head would take a trivial amount of space, getting exponentially smaller. You can store your blueprints.
And if the only human instinct is mimicry, you can bet we’re gonna mimic the hell out of nature once we decode most of the planet, let alone advances in biomechanics. At some point you may be able to pack yourself up into your head and regrow a body from code and regenerative technology wherever you end up getting shipped.