The world would be a terrible place to live. You'd be in bed sleeping, and the Thought Police would show up, and have you breaking rocks until your time was served. Never mind thinking how great someone looked, your thoughts would be out in the open, and if the person you were crushing on had a significant other... Oh boy.
I can't remember which philosopher first posed the thought experiment of two beings which knew and experienced all of each other's thoughts, feelings, and memories (Descartes perhaps?) and as a result were only distinguishable in the sense that they inhabited different points of space.
The more I think of this question the more it seems like such a world wouldn't really have individuality, at least not as we know it.
There'd be no need for a thought police, and even if such a thing existed you'd know they were coming for you before they got there.
__________________
“Where the longleaf pines are whispering
to him who loved them so.
Where the faint murmurs now dwindling
echo o’er tide and shore."
-A Grave Epitaph in Santa Rosa County, Florida; I wish I could remember the man's name.
It reminds me of a race of aliens from a story I wrote a few years ago. They'd developed incredibly sophisticated cybernetic telepathy that (via subspace relays) could support instantaneous communication between the entire society.
When one was separated from the network by some humans he barely had an individual personality to speak of and fell into a coma soon after. I think at that point I'd just read Nietzsche so I was big on the idea of herd consciousness.
__________________
“Where the longleaf pines are whispering
to him who loved them so.
Where the faint murmurs now dwindling
echo o’er tide and shore."
-A Grave Epitaph in Santa Rosa County, Florida; I wish I could remember the man's name.
It is an interesting notion, the idea of losing individuality through mind-reading. To me it depends in whether or not telepathy allows you to gather information or process information as others would. I think that if you need sheer processing power -you could call it intelligence- it would not be the lost of individuality, but the exacerbation of individuality through hive-like constructs.
If it was limited, we'd still be individuals. We could still lie. We'd develop ways to be deceptive including ways to control our thoughts to prevent them from being read. Come-on...doesn't anyone know about Star Wars, here?
lol
An individual still produces unique thoughts, at times. I guarentee that a telepath would have difficulty making sense of my thoughts because they are very messy and in bursts. Some people do not think "cleanly" and I'm not talking about naughty stuff...I'm talking about in ways that would make sense to someone else had they stumbled upon the person. We also think in ways that are unique such as how we associate things together. We subconsciously filter out these associations to put it into forms others understand...but sometimes, those things slip out and we don't filter it properly and we end up not making sense to others but we make sense to ourselves. It's happened to everyone.
Anyway, yes, we'd have ways to still being deceptive such as not thinking about stuff to avoid being invaded.
Gender: Male Location: ATL\PASADENA\BATTLECREEK\CHICAGO
The idea of unrestricted telepathy is too daunting to fully conceptionalize through todays envirorment. I have often started the conversation with "natural limitations."
In my version telepathy would only be possible between persons who have had close intimate emotional or physical contact with one another.
So family members or a person with whom you have developed a strong emotional bond and a person with who you have had intercourse are persons with whom you would share telepathic bonds.
In this settting I think society would still be very different than what we have but allows for a more controlled imaginary world perspective.
This all depends of the exact nature of this scenario but assuming the complete and total exposure and awareness of mental activity:
What I would imagine is that with the whole and exact public exposure of personal identity, the variance (as well as the scale behind the extremeties in that variance) in the true tastes, opinions, methodology, attitude, desires, imaginings, experiences, and feelings of individuals would help eliminate feelings of shame and embarrasment with regards to an individual's personal details; there is the sense that you are not alone and not being singled out in your situation - everyone is in it together - and what would otherwise seem weird by comparison would now become normal outside of the influence of dishonesty and discretion and with such notions a thing of the past, without the capacity to conceal personal information there is no longer the need or desire to do so - with people being born into such a world such a state of total exposure would truly be the norm and something with which you become used to.
Communication becomes far more efficient and direct and with that the visual and aural components of the personality, and the style behind wordplay become utterly diminished, existing in a practical sense only in the arts. People become as close to one another as they possibly can without all being as one; no longer is there a need for physical closeness and intimacy as no longer is there such a strong divide between the mental makeup of individuals.
Information becomes far more exact and reliable and readily available, as does knowledge and technical proficiency to an extent; the world would be a far more efficient place.
The practise of the social sciences would enter a golden age with absolute perfection in data. In psychology, the roots of mental illness will be picked up as early as possible and be in a far greater position to be eliminated. Perfect symmetry of information, assuming adequate understanding, would exist in the market place and politics becomes a matter of administration rather than persuasion.
Without the notion of going unpunished from criminal activity, given the physical presence of the authorities outweigh the physical presence of the criminal, no longer is there even any desire or notion of commiting crimes, unless the benefit gained from commiting the crime is worth the sacrfice of facing punishment, a presumably anomolous occurence. For the very same reason, no longer is there opportunity for criminality to rise to the point that it becomes a physical threat to legal and political authorities - such thoughts of organisation would be eliminated before having had a chance to be put into practise.
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Nov 23rd, 2011 02:54 AM
