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kalium comments on As an upload, would you join the society of full telepaths/empaths? - Less Wrong
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I expect I would opt out. I cannot feel completely free to do anything that many people can easily observe. I become deeply uncomfortable if someone looks over my shoulder while I am reading, and I am simply not able to listen to music while someone else is in the same room. I expect that if I lived in a fully telepathic society I would feel forced to try to stop thinking entirely. Not sure how exactly that would end, but I expect not well.
Aside from matters of my own personal comfort, like Lumifer I would be very concerned about the power structures in this society. The worst case is so vastly worse than the worst case in a non-telepathic society. And if contact is so limited I have little reason to believe the claim that most people who opt in are truly satisfied with their choice.
I am curious, can you unpack the reasons for this a bit?
I can speculate, but there's no particular reason to think I know the "true" reason.
My ability to logically defend my preferences is not strongly related to their importance to me. So if I particularly like or am emotionally affected by some piece or genre of music and someone notices me listening to it and argues with me or explains why I am wrong to like it, I may find that when I listen to it later I only feel wrong and cannot enjoy it anymore.
If I am reading material that is not interesting enough, I may be judged unintelligent as a result. If I am reading material that is interesting enough, I may be expected or demanded to produce insightful commentary, and when I fail (which I will---if you put me on the spot you're lucky to get audible words out of me let alone anything sensible) I may be judged both unintelligent and unaware of it since I was obviously reading material beyond my comprehension and couldn't even tell that this was so.
My value system is under construction and not especially stable, and if my reading material is relevant to this I risk failing to defend my values and being forced to admit the superiority of the value system of whoever happened to catch me reading. I don't want to end up in the position of, say, admitting that utilitarianism is superior and, since you're whinier, you obviously care more about X than I do and therefore I must go along with your position on X. (Sounds like a strawman, but nope. I've actually been argued into that one before. I seem to have a particularly weak will.) Therefore I try to avoid anything that might lead to discussions relating to my value system. However if I only hide my reading when it's related to my value system, that's practically telling you when to harass me, so I have to hide all my reading in order not to give away that information.
In a telepathic society I would feel required to restrict my thoughts to ones I could defend in an argument, which in practice means I could not get away with developing any new thoughts unless they spring into place fully formed.
That all makes sense. However, in an ideal telepathic society, people would learn about those who need time to think and space to appreciate what you like, and you'd be cut slack and not be argued with about things that aren't urgent.
For that matter, people who like to argue would always have someone available to argue with.
Your model of a typical human mind seems fundamentally more charitable than mine.
If you're telepathic, you can feel their pain as your own. That's a game-changer.
Public torture of undesirables pour encourager les autres becomes a REALLY effective technique, don't you think?
I was thinking more along the lines of 'Oh shoot. I really hurt them, didn't I?'
Yes, I know.
However another likely thought would be "Good, it *should* hurt, you're a bad person".
Maybe. However, we have been told that this society is said to be happy and not devolved into a shit-flinging match, I suspect that the way it usually works out is more benign. Or they kill/expel the infidels and our happiness sample is biased.
You can savor it! A certain subset of people will find that hurting people has suddenly become more fun than ever.
People who do this might be killed. Is there a reason to think a telepathic society would be wimpy?
Just as normal people play a lot of signalling games, the telepathic society would probably invent a new layer of them. (Which does not prove that those games would be worse than those we have now.)
For example, people who need more time to think may be given more space and at the same time could be perceived as e.g. less intelligent -- just how we would automatically feel now about slow-speaking people.