beccaelizabeth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccaelizabeth) wrote2013-03-16 12:34 am
beccaelizabeth) wrote2013-03-16 12:34 am
Not telepathy
Superpowers I half the time convince myself I do not want: Telepathy.
Because while it would be nice to understand people better, I'm unconvinced that more data of that sort would in fact lead to that outcome. I mean, if everyone else's head is as busy as mine, trying to see any one person would find dozens of tracks going on, including at least one for music, one for telling you you're a dumbass, one for how awesome you are (at varying volumes of course), a whole hypertext associative fiction area where anything and everything reminds you of bits of stories, and of course a sort of background baseline of porn. To see amongst all that the things they think they're thinking would take a whole lot of filtering. And how accurate is it really anyway? Freud made a whole living of saying you never really know what's going on in your own head. Freud is a crazy person, but on the stopped clock principle reckon he managed to be right there. Humans are confused and confusing, and I'm not sure telepathy would be any help at all, because it would be worse than plugging in to the internet all day. I mean, it would involve the internet, and funny cat videos, but it wouldn't just be the ones in front of your eyes, it would link back and back through memory to every funny cat you had ever seen, and how is that going to give you either grand insights into human nature or the clues to solve the mystery of the week?
Telepathy, on the whole, sounds more like super senses with no dials: more of a curse. Rather wildly inconvenient.
But, of course, there's appealing aspects. I mean, I love a good soul bond fic as much as the next mushy romantic, so the idea of being all connected up to just one special person and learning to understand them all the way through is all <3 <3 ... though even there if there was no off switch it would be a particularly intricate annoyance and more the breaking of a relationship than the making of one.
But what does interest me is something that wouldn't work just with telepathy anyway. But I'd quite like to go visit the worlds other people carry around in their heads. Like, you read fanfiction, and you realise the world in that person's head isn't quite like any of the ones you've got in your own head, and you want to visit, and maybe stay longer than the story. That's why fanfic gets fanfic of it. And of course there's authors we fanfic off in the first place. But it's not just writers who have those worlds. Bazillions more people have worlds but don't have the words all in a row part sorted out. If people carried their worlds around like little virtual bubbles you could visit, that would be awesome power.
... granted it would still involve music tracks and a lot of porn, but, likely quite a lot of interesting too.
And some people would be these bright happy nice nice people on the outside but their brain worlds would be all horror movies and Alien. Or they'd be growly people with My Little Pony fluffy cloud worlds.
Hearing what they think they're thinking ... my internal commentary is just not that interesting.
But visiting their stories, dream worlds, all wrapped into pretty symbols? That sounds like fun.
... if this kind of sounds like 'write moooooore, internets!' then that would be a bit true also, but, it doesn't all show up in writing.
One of the RPG books has an actual literal dream world where people live in bubble worlds while they sleep and you can train up to go visit other people's bubbles. That would be awesome. Except you'd want to learn how to skip the ones where they're stuck in school naked again, cause really, enough of that already.
... yeah, this is why everyone liked Inception, only that film was way not imaginative enough.
Hmmm, another rough translation of this one is 'no wants to talk to humans, wants to daydreams more instead'.
... oops.
Because while it would be nice to understand people better, I'm unconvinced that more data of that sort would in fact lead to that outcome. I mean, if everyone else's head is as busy as mine, trying to see any one person would find dozens of tracks going on, including at least one for music, one for telling you you're a dumbass, one for how awesome you are (at varying volumes of course), a whole hypertext associative fiction area where anything and everything reminds you of bits of stories, and of course a sort of background baseline of porn. To see amongst all that the things they think they're thinking would take a whole lot of filtering. And how accurate is it really anyway? Freud made a whole living of saying you never really know what's going on in your own head. Freud is a crazy person, but on the stopped clock principle reckon he managed to be right there. Humans are confused and confusing, and I'm not sure telepathy would be any help at all, because it would be worse than plugging in to the internet all day. I mean, it would involve the internet, and funny cat videos, but it wouldn't just be the ones in front of your eyes, it would link back and back through memory to every funny cat you had ever seen, and how is that going to give you either grand insights into human nature or the clues to solve the mystery of the week?
Telepathy, on the whole, sounds more like super senses with no dials: more of a curse. Rather wildly inconvenient.
But, of course, there's appealing aspects. I mean, I love a good soul bond fic as much as the next mushy romantic, so the idea of being all connected up to just one special person and learning to understand them all the way through is all <3 <3 ... though even there if there was no off switch it would be a particularly intricate annoyance and more the breaking of a relationship than the making of one.
But what does interest me is something that wouldn't work just with telepathy anyway. But I'd quite like to go visit the worlds other people carry around in their heads. Like, you read fanfiction, and you realise the world in that person's head isn't quite like any of the ones you've got in your own head, and you want to visit, and maybe stay longer than the story. That's why fanfic gets fanfic of it. And of course there's authors we fanfic off in the first place. But it's not just writers who have those worlds. Bazillions more people have worlds but don't have the words all in a row part sorted out. If people carried their worlds around like little virtual bubbles you could visit, that would be awesome power.
... granted it would still involve music tracks and a lot of porn, but, likely quite a lot of interesting too.
And some people would be these bright happy nice nice people on the outside but their brain worlds would be all horror movies and Alien. Or they'd be growly people with My Little Pony fluffy cloud worlds.
Hearing what they think they're thinking ... my internal commentary is just not that interesting.
But visiting their stories, dream worlds, all wrapped into pretty symbols? That sounds like fun.
... if this kind of sounds like 'write moooooore, internets!' then that would be a bit true also, but, it doesn't all show up in writing.
One of the RPG books has an actual literal dream world where people live in bubble worlds while they sleep and you can train up to go visit other people's bubbles. That would be awesome. Except you'd want to learn how to skip the ones where they're stuck in school naked again, cause really, enough of that already.
... yeah, this is why everyone liked Inception, only that film was way not imaginative enough.
Hmmm, another rough translation of this one is 'no wants to talk to humans, wants to daydreams more instead'.
... oops.
no subject
" a whole hypertext associative fiction area where anything and everything reminds you of bits of stories" - oh, yes, so very much this!
"The Listener", or at least the first season, played around a lot with the telepath, Toby, picking up information that was erroneous or incomplete without the proper context. Not just what we think we're thinking (which is a fantastic point!) but what you as observer think you're hearing.
Fascinating topic :)