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Friday Fun Thread for December 23, 2022

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Merry Christmas!

As someone asked (ironically) in another thread - how would life change if everyone could read thoughts and there was no off filter?

I believe there would be many maybe surprising consequences, such as an explosion in social anxiety.

However the no filter effect would have interesting consequences on the group thinks/culture wars.

BTW one of the strangest things of this timeline is that apparently a huge chunk of the population is not able to think or at least they believe themselves they can't think.

Think as in subvocalize words.

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/exan65/today_i_told_my_mom_that_i_have_no_internal/

I have extreme skepticism on this phenomenon but if true it has many implication for AI research and philosophy.

In other words it might be that for a chunk of the population there is not thoughts to read at all.

However, one could talk about telepathy for the intermediate subsymbolic representation but that's not what your original comment was about and is definitely much less well defined, by definition since it is ineffable.

Of all things, the Harry Potter series has a good take on this. Mind reading is a skill that wizards can learn. It does not let someone listen to the inane verbal chatter of someone else's mind. But it might let a skilled practitioner perceive a memory association that the victim of mind reading is currently feeling. Or perceive other deeper non-verbal thoughts.