That's what it should have been like.

[silveradept]

I helped a friend celebrate 21 years of age today, and it was good. I kinda wish my party had been a little more like that, but hey, when you're born on a national holiday in the summer, it's a little hard to get all of your college pals together for a drink or two. Oh, well.

Looks like my Greek Sport class will be very interesting. Plus, I have all my books, and I think I managed to keep it relatively inexpensive. Wah-hoo.

So, a smattering of interesting, silly, useful, and otherwise sorts of links culled from me being lazy and crushing about two days worth of weird browsing into one post.

First, fear will kill you. Or at least speed things along. Plus, manual typewriter men. It really is worth a read. And then, thinking about communication. From there, off to faith-based rehabilitation still has some kinks to work out. But all is not lost. Read on about The Tao of Sudden Enlightenment.

If you haven't already seen this, your vote tabulators may be easily hackable.

Finally, if any of you nuts are interested in role-playing Final Fantasy characters, one of the LJ RP's that I was suckered... err, volunteered for, is going through a drought of disappearances due to unforeseen circumstances. So, if you wouldn't mind picking up a character or two, let me know and I'll forward you on to the appropriate place.

Comments

[rimspace.livejournal.com]

And then, thinking about communication.

Heh, interesting take on the idea, although I believe he doesn't really appreciate the real problem - this line gives it away: "This problem may work itself out with a few more generations of evolution, but only if we start today to understand its causes and effects."

The problem isn't what he calls the Rational Brain getting in the way, it's the very nature of conciousness and communication itself that gets in the way. Everyone's brain is unique; the general areas are analogous but below that there are immense, sometimes even fundamental, differences. Communication in any format - whether tactile, visual, verbal or any hypothetical psionic or higher level - is the process of creating isomorphisms between brains, it is the process of attempting to map the symbols contained in one mind to the symbols in another. It doesn't matter whether this is an attempt to map rational, emotional or irrational symbols - the level is immaterial: as soon as you try to get anything out of one mind into another you hit the fact that it needs translation, and there will always be nonisomorphic symbolic processes in each mind - a result of the different structures, histories and conciousnesses - that simply can not be mapped. No matter what communication mechanism you use there will always be information loss in any sufficiently complex symbolic interaction. Even he is right and the Rational Brain gets in the way, even if you could find a way to get around it and connect minds directly, you still have to do the symbolic mapping.

This isn't something that can be evolved around because it arises directly from the differences between minds. The only ways to avoid it are:

- everyone must have the same neurological and symbolic processing structures. This would create nothing more than a race of carbon copies, each of whom think the same way, believe the same things and know the same. This is, obiously, impossible quite apart from genetic issues - the entire development of the brain and conciousness is chaotic and there are far too many variables to maintain parallel development.

- abolish the concept of the individual mind and create a hive mind. Here everyone has access to everyone else's symbolic processing and hyper- and metasymbolic communication becomes possible to resolve any remaining problems. But this still could not permit completely loss-free communication right down below the base of conciousness. Intrestingly enough though, this is far more possible, especially post-singularity.

Meh, I could probably ramble on about this for ages but that's probably enough to get across what I mean...

It's a good start...

[silveradept]

...and it does get the point across. The unique deveopment of each individual makes it impossible to translate 100% of the idea. You'll get close, even with the hive-mind, but you won't achieve perfection. This, parhaps, may be the reason why some philosophies abandond words as useless and go for more direct methods of enlightenment.