Quite a while back I talked about how our interactions with each other are framed by our inability to read each others’ minds (in September 2008, actually).
Recent events — as you might imagine if you’ve been reading this blog steadily — have led me to wish, at least for a moment, that I could actually read the mind of another. People have the ability to put on such smooth smiling faces, and we may never learn about their inner pain until it is too late to help them.
But as I think more carefully on this thought, I realize that society as it is now constituted could not exist if we could read each others’ minds. Just about any social, legal or ethical convention you can think of would be torn apart beyond recognition if we could peek into each others’ heads.
In fact, it’s not really clear that the notion of an “individual”, as we currently understand that word, would continue to have any meaning. So much of our essential being is predicated on the inviolable privacy of our own thoughts, and upon our ability to navigate the difference between those inner thoughts and the self that we outwardly show to the world.
Even to those who are closest to us.
The more I think about it, the more it seems that if we were all to wake up tomorrow morning with the ability to read each other’s thoughts, the result would be a vision from hell.
Guess we’ll just have to muddle through without the mind reading.
I think the best think we can do for those we love is to show that we like any other person are hurt at times, don’t know how to deal with certain circumstances.
That needs a certain strength in especially in our society, where being perfect and ever smiling seems to be the only target.
To feel the inner pain of someone would be too much, in my opinion we can’t hardly feel with someone.
I guess we can be sad, because we feel that a friend of us is sad, or we can be happy, because a friend of us is happy.
So I feel sad, because I know a friend of mine has to deal with a difficult loss, but even if I know through experience how it feels to lose a person one has been close to, I will never be able to guess about the pain my friend feels.
Everything else would be unbearable, you are right Ken.
I’d be happy if I could read my own mind once in a while for a start 😉
I’ve been thinking about the whole mind-reading thing, and it occurs to me that there are very few people in the world who think in such a straight-forward, thought-by-thought sort of way, the way that we’d be capable of reading. If anyone were to read my mind, instead of hearing a single voice narrating they’d probably be hearing something to the equivalent of a loud room full of very different people all getting maybe one or two words in edgewise. They might be able to find the general topic that I’m thinking about, but it would be really really tough to find anything else. Peoples’ minds assume so much that sometimes it’s sufficient to think just one word and understand what you yourself mean. If a stranger were to read into that mind, they wouldn’t at all understand the larger context and would probably be lost in confusion… imagine the pain it would cause to read the minds of a number of people in a room, then, assuming that in general they weren’t completely linear thinkers. It would quickly become a headache to listen to. That’s why telepathic people in television and other media confuse me… they’re so cool about it but it must be incredibly difficult for them.
It would be an interesting character if they didn’t read minds, like word-for-word, but instead could understand them – like if someone was trying to explain a mathematical process, instead of hearing a bunch of math stuff, the understander person would simply get it. It would be the same for emotional sorts of things. I suppose society would still be torn apart, but it would be a lot different if everyone just got where everyone else was coming from, so to speak. I suspect conversations would have a lot more of, “I get it. I know what you’re going through. I understand what you mean. But…” It would be like a psychiatrist’s weird dream, ha ha.