I’ve been thinking about what love might be like in a society of telepaths.<\/p>\n
Our ability to show love for each other, at least in this Universe, is connected with our ability to choose to make choices that benefit the person we love. The person we love cannot see our thoughts directly — they can only see what we choose to say and do.<\/p>\n
If we had the ability to read each others’ minds, would we still be able to show love for one another in this way? In some sense, it is this hidden staging area, this part of ourselves that only we know, which allows us to make these choices at all.<\/p>\n
I am trying to envision what it would be like to care for another person in a world in which they know all of our thoughts as soon as we think those thoughts.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, it could be that we are psychologically incapable of envisioning such a world. After all, our social development as individuals is entirely predicated on this ability to mediate between thought and action within a zone of absolute privacy.<\/p>\n
If we were to encounter a truly telepathic race of people, perhaps our respective societies — and the way people relate to each other within those societies — might be a source of complete mutual bewilderment and incomprehension.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been thinking about what love might be like in a society of telepaths. Our ability to show love for each other, at least in this Universe, is connected with our ability to choose to make choices that benefit the person we love. The person we love cannot see our thoughts directly — they can … Continue reading “Love and telepathy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7181"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7182,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7181\/revisions\/7182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}