COLLECTIVE TELEPATHY
Posted by Erik Frey Fri, 11 Oct 2002 05:49:00 GMT
these thoughts have been whirling around my head so much recently, it’s almost obnoxious. the past couple of weeks have had such a strong theme, i could almost call it a flavor and package a new bubble gum brand after it.
so,
there have been some interesting advances in technology recently.
on one hand,
scientists have been fine tuning bionic eye implants for blind people. they strap a bundle of wires and plug them into parts of your brain. the other end is plugged into a CCD sensor. they spend hours calibrating the thing. press a button, bzzzt, “doctor i just saw a spot of light in the upper left part of my vision”, another button, bzzzt, “red and green flecks everywhere, doctor”
sometimes they press the wrong button and the patient goes into seizure. it’s not quite an exact science just yet.
but the result? blind people have the ability to “see” with something like a 16 by 16 (256 pixels) resolution. it’s rudimentary, but it’s certainly a start.
on the other hand,
scientists have also somewhat recently discovered how to plug a bunch of biosensors into chimps and have them navigate a mouse cursor with their mind. the experiments were so succesful that they’ll soon be trying it on humans. imagine using photoshop without a mouse.
if you see where i’m going with this, give yourself a cookie.
input and output.
as these things become more advanced and refined, we’ll have people who can “see” without using their eyes, and perhaps see better than even our own eyes can see. likewise, we’ll have people who can “draw” at incredible speeds. the paint brush would fly across the screen at such a fantastic rate that perhaps it wouldn’t even look like drawing. the user would simply project an image in his mind and it would appear on the screen. or it would appear on the screen projected artificially in someone’s vision.
and what have we just done? we’ve created a bridge. a new mode of communication that doesn’t require the ol’ voicebox. “ahh”, the astute reader will say, “but that’s the same thing as a keyboard.” yep, fundamentally it is the same, but where it’s different is the potential data rate. with a keyboard you’re limited to how fast you can type. if you can change the medium to something that isn’t even mechanical, something that transfers nearly instantaneously once you’ve thought it… that’s powerful, and pretty intense once you consider the consequences.
take technology like that, stick it on the internet through a wireless modem on the guy’s hip, so he can take it with him wherever he goes, and you have telepathy. yeow! we could be within a decade’s reach of artificial telepathy!
i used sight as an example, but the fact is that human senses are malleable. just like some blind people can actually use ecolocation for a primitive form of vision (and scientists have found proof that these blind people are actually stimulating visual centers of the brain when they do this), the human brain has an extraordinary ability to adapt to receive different kinds of information from different senses. what this means is that i think some time in the next few decades, a whole new kind of bio-information science is going to blossom in which people study the art of transmitting information, and developing a new language, not like english which uses gutteral noises in the throat and tongue to communicate, but a kind of hybrid language that uses sight, sound, smell, everything, to communicate entire pages of thought in mere milliseconds, with so many subtle nuances that we can’t even begin to imagine.
i’m tying this into leah’s post any minute here now, i promise.
so, now you’ve got a way of having two people able to instantly communicate massive amounts of thought back and forth to eachother, with some kind of defined meta-language. say you have a device that facilitates this. maybe it looks like a fancy dick-tracy wrist watch. now give every fucker on the planet one of these wristwatches, and hook them all up onto the internet.
instant, collective telepathy. minds all over the globe are interacting and reacting at the speed of light. imagine if livejournal existed then. someone would “think” a post, and instantly hundreds of thousands of comments would appear to that post, all interweaving with detailed conversation. entire subcultures of thought and music could be born and die in a day. or in the blink of an eye.
and this is where i return to leah’s post. because what do we have at this point?
a collective mind. people are the neurons. millions of miles of fibre (or radio network or whatever the hell makes up the internet at that point) serve as the synapses.
and the strange thing is that i haven’t really gone out into sci-fi. all this stuff is doable with extensions of technology we already have. it’s just a matter of time and fine-tuning.
and this is where it gets way cool.
look at the history of life on this planet. without getting into the specifics of evolutionary theory, i think it’s safe to say that life started off here as pretty basic shit. chains of amino acids that interacted in mutually conducive ways stuck around.
i don’t want to get too metaphysical, but this relates to leah’s “efficiency is key”. there are simply patterns in reality, be it atomic configurations or the paper boy’s bicycle route, that are more conducive to the “flow” of the universe. and so they perpetuate.
from this point you can look at it as steps. in reality they aren’t really steps per se, because it’s continuous, but it helps my explanation to look at them as steps.
so yeah, now the next step. we have these amino acids, that figure out ways to work together to act even more efficiently. this keeps happening till we have the first basic forms of life. amoebas. all that good stuff.
now the next step. the amoebas come together and learn to specialize, compartmentalize, and we have the first multicellular organisms. some of those cells become good at doing certain things, like detecting light – they turn into the first simple receptors. others transmit electrical signals and become the first ganglions. so on and so forth, fast forward a few billion years, we got people.
now the next step. people learn to specialize, compartmentalize. the first tribes and small towns (like amoebas), suck the land of resources and produce products, and those small towns learn to trade. roads are formed and we have the first rudimentary circulatory system. soon people are communicating and we have industries and methods of science for accomplishing different things. factories are like mitochondria, or the stomach. the railways are like endoplasmic reticulum or the veins. telegraph wires and antennas become our first nervous system. astronomy labs and radio telescopes become our first primitive eyes, only able to capture the very minute, blunt realities of the universe around it. and the internet becomes the first ganglion. the first simple brain processing ALL kinds of messages – from information on the resources we are consuming to information on the growth we’re experiencing, to the signals we’re receiving from outer space through our new rudimentary eyes, to just about anything imaginable.
you can almost see this creature we’re becoming and identify with it being in some kind of embryonic stage.
maybe the earth is a giant yolk.
and don’t confuse yourself into thinking that this giant sentience we are becoming doesn’t exist because we can’t see it. it exists at a level of information that is simply beyond us. it’s outside of our realm of understanding of the patterns in our universe, in the same way that a brain cell can’t tell that it’s part of a monkey. it exists, does its own thing, and never realizes it’s part of a greater pattern.
so patterns. yeah, there we are. we swim in them, and they swim in us.
and i’m getting sleepy, so i’ll stop there. in part 2, i’ll ramble about this new “collective telepathy” and how it relates to a book by herman hesse entitled the glass bead game.