Reading the Enemy's Mind

"Fight for the decrease of human alienation, the decrease of loneliness; make this struggle more important to you than the saving of a single life, even your own."

Factoring Humanity ended with the overmind of humankind making contact with the overmind of the alien race. The simultaneous awareness of 'I am not alone' was transmitted throughout the collective unconscious of humanity and brought about an almost instantaneous reduction in violence and hatred. Wishful thinking, or an accurate projection of how the intimate awareness of other minds can change a person's perceptions and behaviors?

What if we could read each other's minds? All of us, not just some of us who may or may not be delusional. ;) Let's ignore for the moment questions about whether this advancement would be biological or technological in origin.

If you had the ability to forge a connection to even one other mind, what would you notice? And how would your thoughts alter if you knew someone could access them? Speaking generally, I'll make the following predictions about what you'd find...

1) The 'sameness' of human emotions supercedes factors such as chronological age, gender and race. Emotions that are tied to culturally-driven values may differ in frequency, but the experience of shame, insecurity, or arrogance transcends the circumstances that prompted that instance of emotion. Likewise, the need for love and the need to be understood are universal.

2) The ability to feel the hurt - psychological or physical - that has been inflicted on the other person would cause you to rethink how your actions or thoughts might injure another person. You would find that you do more to bring happiness to other people because the feedback enhances your own mental state. You would also do more to alleviate the suffer of others when you see it, because you would be less afraid of being taken advantage of and more able to identify the specific need that is causing the suffering.

3) Your brain would adapt to process and prioritize this new stream of information much as it currently processes information from the conventional senses. Information that is pertinent to your survival/well-being would demand your attention, but for the most part you wouldn't know all the details of what another person is thinking.

4) Translation would be the biggest problem. You would need to integrate the incoming data with your existing knowledge structures in order to make it useful, so a person's highly-technical thoughts may be grasped by you only in more general terms.

5) Reciprocity of contact would promote more efforts to understand and appreciate the other person. After all, who wants contact with someone you can't stand? Likewise, if such a mode of communication were wide-spread, very few people would choose to isolate themselves from it, and they would adapt accordingly to the need for thought/emotion control that such contact requires.

6) Reading another person's mind requires the ability to internalize (temporarily at least) value and knowledge structures that may radically differ from your own. To the person whose mind you are reading, these are the valid operating systems. If these systems of knowledge and belief differ radically from your own, you will at least gain an appreciation of the variance in human thinking. This would generally be followed by an increase in tolerance for others and a decrease in the amount of purely dogmatic belief that one can sustain.

7) A cultural shift would take place to ensure that no person would be permitted to engage in large-scale telepathic contact without first having a stable personal identity. Likewise, those seeking contact with other minds would cultivate their own minds so that such contact with others would be an enjoyable and beneficial exchange. (Considering the prevalence of 'identity crisis', and the cultural shift away from wanting to have a cultivated mind that we currently seem to be experiencing, I say 'Bring it on!')