{"id":2951,"date":"2010-01-16T20:08:55","date_gmt":"2010-01-17T01:08:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=2951"},"modified":"2010-01-16T20:10:47","modified_gmt":"2010-01-17T01:10:47","slug":"mind-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=2951","title":{"rendered":"Mind reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>, actually).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Even to those who are closest to us.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Guess we’ll just have to muddle through without the mind reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Mind reading”<\/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":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2951"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2951"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2954,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2951\/revisions\/2954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}