scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/2omjrl.md

A Rational Telepath

• Author: u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy*

• URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2omjrl/a_rational_telepath/

• Score: 19

• Created: 2014-12-08T06:59:09

Post:

Since we seem to have a fair number of story ideas on this sub-reddit lately, I have decided to propose a story idea and see how you guys abuse it for maximum fun and potential. If enough people like it, I'll post a situation/writing prompt for people to think of ideas or solutions for once a week.

Story Prompt

You have suddenly developed the ability to read minds. You can only sense the thoughts of one person and only the thoughts they are currently thinking. You can't learn about things they are not currently thinking of, but you can ask them questions to get them to think of the answer. Once the person you are reading has died, you will automatically be able to read the mind of the person you are physically closest to until they too have died.

The drawbacks of this power is that you can't block the thoughts of the person you can mind-read. It's known that humans will accept other people's statements as truth, before analyzing it for falsehood. This leads to problems with your mental state having a high probability of matching the other person's personality.

Assume that all of the above knowledge was discovered by careful introspection and asking close family members and friends for any changes in your personality or behavior.

The first person you can mind-read is a murderer. What do you do?

Explanation

I'm trying to illustrate the difficulty of checking for how well you know your internal beliefs, and how well your beliefs match with reality framed as a story idea. This way people can think of how they would actually do an in-depth analyzation of their thoughts to catch biases and deal with your mind being influenced by outside presences such as advertising, social pressure, culture behaviors, memes, and other non-supernatural phenomena. Hopefully, we can help some people be more rational instead of just reading rational writing.

EDIT

I originally wrote this post to get people to generate ideas or thoughts about how they would differentiate between their thoughts and the thoughts of a stranger whose morals/ethics may or may not be clearly not within acceptable tolerances. I intended to let the readers decide how guilty they wanted the murderer to be and see if how they would differentiate between their thoughts and the thoughts of someone who could be anywhere on the scale from cold-blooded psychopath to guilty wreck overcome with remorse.

People seem to have the biggest problem with being able to tell that they are actually telepathic and not simply suffering from schizophrenia/a brain tumor/unspecified mental illness. I would probably do the following checklist:

1. Record what thoughts are not my own or clearly unusual.

2. Write down identifying information such as I'll go get my usual lunch at the blue coffee shop on Third and Garfield's today.

3. Examine the out-of-place thoughts for internal consistency or any obvious patterns in a desperate hope that I am not insane, since to me and my family/friends I am not acting in an unusual manner. Only thinking unusual thoughts.

4. Notice that the out-of-place thoughts include a day-to-day routine and investigate places like the coffee shop to find matching person.

5. View person doing exactly what the strange thoughts describe and ask family/friends to check for hallucinations.

6. Check with psychological literature and/or trusted psychologist for any mental illness that somehow match observed symptoms.

7. Wonder what to do with telepathic abilities.

DISCLAIMER

The above list is just a hypothetical exercise on how I would check for telepathic abilities or noticed that I am having strange thoughts. Do not do the above checklist if you, for any reason whatsoever, think you are insane, delusional, or thinking/acting oddly. Go to a hospital.

Comments:

u/alexanderwales [+14] Time flies like an arrow (13 hours later)

Phase One: Investigation

I could hear his thoughts. I knew it was a "he", because I could hear everything that was said to him. That was something that I figured out even before anything gendered came up. Whenever someone was talking to him, he was thinking about what was said, and those thoughts - by some strange alchemy that I still don't understand - made their way to me. I thought I was going crazy. Perhaps the smart thing to do would have been to talk to my wife about the thoughts I was hearing, and maybe if he'd been less of a violent person I would have, but I'd been in a mental institution before, and I knew I'd be going back there if I told them what I was hearing. I gave myself a day to figure out whether there was a more rational explanation than simple insanity, and if there wasn't, then it was back to the nut hut for me.

The thoughts were mundane most of the time. He would have these flashes of intense anger and violence, and I would get nothing more than a mental image of some grocery store clerk stripped down and flayed alive, but more often it was dull. Ticking off items from a grocery list. Wondering why shelled and unshelled meant the same thing. Inspecting a trio of freckles on his right arm. That was part of what convinced me that it was some one else's thoughts - I figured that if I were insane, I would have thought of something more interesting.

It didn't take him long to go online, and that was how I got him. I'd already known from when he'd ordered coffee at Starbucks that his name was John, and maybe it would have made a better story if I'd had to piece everything together from context, assembling a collection of clues and tracking them down one by one. Maybe I would have had to do that if he'd used LastPass. Anyway, he typed in the URL to go to his bank's website, and I wrote down that thought as I heard it. He typed in his username, and I got that too. And with his password, I had the same full access as he did. I waited until he was done, then walked down to the local gaming store, where you could rent computer time for five dollars an hour without even having to sign anything. No security cameras either. If I could have handled listening to his thoughts, I probably would have figured out some more elegant solution like booting from a flash drive and hiding behind TOR, but ...

Look, I know how it looks. It looks like I was planning even then to get away with killing him. You'd argue that a truly innocent man who only cared about finding out whether he was crazy or not would have just used his home computer instead of taking the extra time and money to do it relatively anonymously. But it wasn't like that, not really. I was thinking that if he was real, he wouldn't want me to be looking into his mind like I was. It just seemed like a reasonable precaution is all. I wasn't thinking about the police investigations that would come later, even if it seems like I was.

Anyway, I logged in to his bank account, which would have been a major victory even if it hadn't given me virtually all his information. A bank account was proof that he existed - that the thoughts I was hearing weren't just schizophrenia. My aunt was a paranoid schizophrenic - I guess I should have mentioned that earlier, since it was obviously on my mind - and she heard voices on a pretty regular basis. She thought that the United States Postal Service was out to get her. But schizophrenia can't make a bank account appear out of thin air. It was possible that it was a visual hallucination, but those are pretty rare. I wouldn’t have trusted a phone call, because that could have played into the persistent auditory hallucinations of believing that I was hearing a person’s thoughts, but I felt pretty certain that I could trust a website. I paid five cents to print off a screenshot of the account information, then went back home.

John Greenwood. He lived in my city, though I won’t tell you which one it is. He was close enough that I could go visit him. That moved us to Phase Two.

u/alexanderwales [+12] Time flies like an arrow (15 hours later)

Phase Two: Verification

It was midday. I hadn’t told my wife anything, and I didn’t want to, not until I had verified that what I was hearing had some bearing on reality instead of just being a case of insanity. All the same, I needed help, so I called up Brady.

I can’t remember how we first met, but Brady and I had been friends for years. He was a bodybuilder, with biceps like thick hams, though his day job was working sales at a fabric outlet. He picked up on the first ring, and when I said that I needed him, he dropped everything that he’d been doing and came to help. Brady was like that. He took friendship seriously. It made it easy to overlook his faults.

“So was this guy fooling around with your wife?” asked Brady when he got to my place.

“No,” I said slowly. But I didn’t want to tell him what we were doing, so then I just sort of stood there awkwardly. “I just need you to go talk to him.”

“Just talk to him?” asked Brady. “About what?”

“Anything,” I replied. “Just make something up. Make up … make up a three word phrase, something that I’d have no way of knowing. Work it into the conversation.”

“Alright,” said Brady. He hopped out of the car and walked up to John Greenwood’s apartment.

That was the thing about Brady - he would just do things. I wouldn’t say that he was suggestible, but he always seemed to see everything as a lark. You’d tell him to moon a friend, and he’d laugh and do it, because he was just up for anything. He didn’t have any real sense of shame, and seemed to only follow conventions when the mood took him. I went grocery shopping with him once, and he grabbed a doughnut from the case and started eating it while we walked. That was the sort of thing that always made me nervous, like I’d get stopped by someone in the store - which was exactly what happened. A manager came up to us and asked Brady whether he was going to pay for the doughnut, and Brady just took another bite, looked the manager directly in the eyes, and said no. That was the kind of guy that Brady was. So it wasn’t all that surprising that just forty minutes after I’d called him up, he was walking up to a stranger’s house for a chat.

Twenty minutes passed by while I waited in the car. I had a pencil and notepad ready, and I wrote down every thought that I heard. Brady was in there for a lot longer than I would have thought, and they talked about all sorts of inane things. John was only entertaining Brady because he was suspicious, and as soon as John thought about identifying the car, I started it up and moved it. When Brady finally left, I called his cell and told him to walk around the block to where I was parked. Brady just said okay, and thankfully, John was willing to brush it off as a bit of strangeness.

“Mission accomplished!” said Brady with a laugh when he got in the car. “What was that all about?”

“I can read minds,” I said.

“Shit, can you read my mind?” asked Brady.

That was his response. Not, “bullshit”, not “prove it”, just wondering whether his own thoughts were safe. He said it with a half smile, like he was just joking, but he did that a lot. He’d done that when he’d asked whether my wife was cheating on me. That was another thing that grated on me sometimes. For a guy that was so brash, he was never really serious, I think mostly to give himself an out. He’d ask if your wife was cheating on you, and if you took offense, he’d laugh it off as a joke.

“I can only read one mind,” I said. “That guy you just visited.” I handed him the notepad. “This is everything that he was thinking while he was talking to you. I need you to very carefully read it over and make sure that it matches what you said. The three word phrase you said should be in there.”

Brady looked over the notepad in silence, while I fidgeted beside him. I’ll admit that I was nervous. I was waiting for Brady to tell me that I’d just imagined the whole thing, or that what I’d written was chicken scratch, or that it was all a dream. But overlayed on top of that were all of John’s thoughts, which distracted from my own.

“Well, that proves it,” said Brady after a while. He was wrong, naturally. His first thought should have been that I was playing a prank on him - that I had used some parabolic microphone aimed at John’s window or slipped a listening device into his jacket pocket, or that John was a confederate trying to trick him. But Brady didn’t push the issue, just accepted it with a good nature.

I gave him the rundown. I’d started hearing the thoughts when I’d woken up in the morning, just after my wife left, and based on his thoughts, just when John woke up. I couldn’t figure out any way to switch the focus to someone else. I couldn’t turn it off.

“Look, there’s something I haven’t told you,” I said slowly. “This guy, John Greenwood … I think he’s killed a few people. Three women, if I’m right. Maybe four. He thinks about the crimes. He thinks about hurting people too, people he just randomly meets, or passes on the street. I don’t know what to do with that information.”

“That’s fucked up,” said Brady with a nod. “Of all the people whose thoughts you could be peeping, you get a killer.”

“I don’t know that he’s a killer,” I replied. “Not for sure. The fantasy and reality are hard to distinguish, and I get distracted by my own life when I’m not actively listening to what he’s thinking. But I should be able to find out whether the murders were real or fake, if I can listen in on some names. He’s going to access his e-mail account sometime, and I should also be able to snoop there, maybe get some more information. If he did kill the women, maybe he would have written about it. Maybe I could RDP into his computer with the right credentials. I don’t know.”

“And then what?” asked Brady. “You go to the police, they put him on trial for a few years, eventually they convict his ass, and he rots in jail for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, you’re stuck listening to his every thought, every time he gets raped in prison, all that crap. You shouldn’t have to put up with that.”

“If he did it,” I said. “And there’s no guarantee that this link between us is going to last for much longer. Maybe tomorrow I wake up and nothing is back to normal. Or … eventually I’m going to have to bring someone in. If the link persists, it’s the scientific discovery of the century, and if we can change its focus - even if I’m the only one who can hear someone else’s thoughts - it would revolutionize court cases. Or spycraft, for that matter.”

“And if there’s not enough evidence to put him away? If it’s a he-said he-said thing?” asked Brady. “If we can prove that he’s guilty but not enough so that the cops can touch him? And let me tell you, you want to be careful who you share this with. You don’t want to get your brain picked apart in a lab somewhere. Nothing to say you’re the first either, maybe there’s already a whole team of mind readers out there.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said slowly. “There are a few things that I need to try.”

“But if we can’t prove he’s a killer?” asked Brady. He was insistent, and pointed his finger at me as he talked. “If you keep hearing him? We could take him out ourselves, is all I’m saying.”

Brady had always had a vigilante streak to him. That was part of why he had built such big muscles - he liked to get in fights and right perceived wrongs. He was one of those guys that seemed like he was constantly spoiling for a fight, always talking about how he would fuck someone up if they pushed against him, or how he’d shoot a burglar through the heart with one of the guns he kept around his house. I mostly took it for bravado, but he seemed serious about taking the law into his own hands.

I said my goodbyes, but thought about what he said. John was arguing with someone online about how to properly care for a box turtle, even though he knew nothing about the subject. He was gleeful about getting a rise out of someone. When that was done, he opened some horse porn and masturbated again - it was a slender Ukrainian woman and a horse with a penis the size of a forearm. She seemed unhappy, and John kept calling her a slut. I nearly threw up.

Then my wife came home, and I had to explain things to her.

u/The_Mad_Duke [+2] House Tremontaine (2 days later)

That was wonderful. I would love to read more.

u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (2 days later)

I will write more of it - should be able to finish up a reasonably quick story in another two parts of about the same length - but I'm in the middle of other writings right now that actually have a deadline and are less strictly "for fun".

u/The_Mad_Duke [+1] House Tremontaine (2 days later)

Cool. Looking forward to it, good luck with your other writing.

u/t3tsubo [+0] (23 hours later)

Upvoted

u/None [+7] (33 minutes later)

Assuming that I didn't know who the murderer was, or his or her location?

Track him or her down, gain/record enough of his or her personal/bank information as is available so that I can turn a profit, invite a carefully chosen close friend out for some vigilante justice, kill the murderer.

Tracking down the murderer and recording his or her personal info for later thievery-related purposes would be quite easy just by reading surface thoughts. Plotting an opportune murder should be similarly easy. Finding a friend good enough to trust me and high-quality enough for me to not mind being mind-linked to them would be harder, but I have some prospects in mind already.

After the murder is accomplished I'd then team up with my friend to demonstrate that we're genuinely linked, win Randi's million dollars, and retire.

All the above assumes that the murderer I'm initially linked to is actually a bad person, though. If said murderer happens to be an intelligent, interesting person who happened to be in a bad situation which caused him or her to commit the crime, then I'd probably approach the person and explain the situation directly. Then win that million bucks.

u/E-o_o-3 [+6] (11 hours later)

Assume that all of the above knowledge was discovered by careful introspection and asking close family members and friends for any changes in your personality or behavior.

..

Once the person you are reading has died, you will automatically be able to read the mind of the person you are physically closest to until they too have died.

You can't know this one, unless the real first person you mind-read dies before anything interesting happens, and the second person you mind read is a murderer. If I was writing the story I'd probably have you first gain telepathy on a terminally ill ally who dies right around the time you pick up enough evidence to suspect something magic is going on, then have you immediately lock on to the victim of the murder and experience being murdered, then have you lock onto the murderer. You can probably skip the terminally ill patient if you want, but that gives you a chance to experiment with a cooperative party and also follows the classic narrative Rule of Three (wherein it takes 3 cases to establish a pattern. In this instance, three repetitions makes it clear that the mindlink transfers on death.)

Anyway, I'd probably ignore the fact that they are a murderer and try to co-opt them to help me tell the world of my powers, so that scientists can discern the underlying laws powering our apparently magical universe which has special laws for human minds. Manipulation of this person should be doable thanks to the mind reading, right?

I admit that the idea of killing the murderer For Science and/or protection of my mind does occur to me (and subsequent mind-links aught only to be formed with those near death, or on animals if possible, until such time as there was no need for further experimentation) so if he or she is a morally irredeemable person the "murderer" bit actually makes this instrumentally expedient option a little more palatable.

The murderer and even my sanity is kind of small potatoes compared to my real internal debate, concerning the implications of the existence of magic and whether or not telling humanity about it could somehow fuck everything up. I'd be thinking thoughts along the lines of "am I the only one", "if not, why don't we already know about it", "if so, why me", and so on.

Just think about the ginormous implications... the universe is somehow recognizing human minds as well as human death. (we can experimentally test the boundaries of when the universe considers a mind "dead"), and there's a ton of new stuff in neuroscience and physics, not to mention the fact that telepathy is just one of the things people commonly believe in but scientists consistently refute which actually turned out to be true.

The problem is that an awful lot of stories involving the sudden introduction of secret magic into a non-magical world reduce to this exact scenario when you look at them rationally, so unless this scenario is the story you want to tell you kind of have to blot that out for the sake of story telling or introduce compelling reasons to not tell (or just, have your character believe in the idea of secrecy more than I do I guess)

u/CopperZirconium [+3] (3 hours later)

Assume that all of the above knowledge was discovered by careful introspection and asking close family members and friends for any changes in your personality or behavior.

I think you are missing an important portion of the story here. If I suddenly developed the ability to read one murderer's thoughts, my first thought would be that I developed schizophrenia, not telepathy. I would place higher probability on me going insane than on me getting psychic powers, unless I lived in an alternate universe with magic. I would get professional help and learn all I could about the brain, psychology, mental illness, and cognition. After some time I would discover that the foreign thoughts belong to another real, living person. At that point my next actions would depend on the nature of the murderer. The other comments cover the possibilities from here.

(Alternatively, maybe my psychiatrist figures out my telepathy before I do and tips off an evil conspiracy of neurologists. I escape with the help of some other captured psychics or maybe I'm rescued by a rival research teem of ethical psychics and neurologists. The evil conspiracy uses the my link to the murderer to try to find the renegade research team, so I become a liability. What follows is an epic chess game of psychology, ethics, and psychic powers; all the while searching for the cause of our ESP.)

u/PeridexisErrant [+1] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (5 hours later)

The alternative story sounds awesome - if anyone writes it I'll read!

u/xamueljones [+2] My arch-enemy is entropy (an hour later)

I mentioned above that

humans will accept other people's statements as truth, before analyzing it for falsehood

but I can't remember where I read it online. I think it's an article on LessWrong or a scientific paper. If anyone knows where it came from, I would like to post a link above so more people can read it to know what I'm trying to illustrate in my explanation. Thank you!

u/None [+6] (7 hours later)

It's a well-known fact in cognitive science that humans will accept other people's statements as truth, before analyzing it for falsehood.

That isn't a fact. Take my word for it.

u/xamueljones [+5] My arch-enemy is entropy (8 hours later)

squints at comment

I now believe everything you say and I am your servant for life. I will be contacting you soon to negotiate my high salary.

u/Stefanido [+2] (13 hours later)

I had read this somewhere too. It was probably on this Less Wrong post.

That phenomenon reminded me of the idea that our brain is constantly creating paths to do all things, and that we suppress the things that we decide, subconsciously, not to do.

Rebecca Saxe had a fantastic interview on The Agenda where she describes this. In the [second interview] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgGcaUtdOZg) (appropriately titled "Reading your Mind"), she discusses how our ability to make moral judgements develops as we age, and also how magnets can make you make different moral choices.

u/Lugnut1206 [+1] (13 hours later)

I'm pretty sure it was on Less Wrong in the How To Actually Change Your Mind sequence. Halfway throughish, maybe?

u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (13 hours later)

Found it! Thanks for pointing out the sequence. From there it was an easy skim of the titles to find it.

u/chthonicSceptre [+2] Highly Unlikely (8 hours later)

Hmm. It depends, are your friends/family willing to entertain extraordinary hypotheses?

If you can get the murderer convicted and executed, do that. If not, either because capital punishment is outlawed in your state/province or because they're a psychopath who covered their tracks too well for the police to follow with anonymous tips, you'd have to do something else.

You weren't entirely clear in your post - can the target of this telepathy be changed at will? Or is it limited to only one person until they die, at which point it changes focus to the next nearest person until they die, ad infinitum?

If it's controllable, your options are boundless. But if not, as I suspect you intended, then your main goals would be to arrange for the death of the murderer, while sitting next to a coma patient. This assumes that you can't discover anything else about the mechanism of this telepathy, in which case it's time to learn more about the arbitrary laws of the universe.

As far as reacting to the murder, it all depends on whether it was premeditated. If the murderer is drunk and kills someone else in a barfight, we already have the ability to disregard crazy-talk (like the opinions of the drunk or the clearly insane). If they're a sociopath and the murder was premeditated, could you prevent it from happening at all? Maybe they got off on killing people, but surely its easy enough to disregard stimulus linking murder to happiness for long enough to get them arrested and/or enacting some hill justice?

Eh, there are a lot of ways this could go. Your main problem is coming up with a convincing way for the protagonist to come to the conclusion 'telepathy' and not 'schizophrenia' or 'brain tumour'.

u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (20 hours later)

Imagine if one were a writer, and somehow channeled these strange thoughts into what you imagined to be a 'muse' or constructed personality. You used inspiration from the killer's thoughts to write a book. Then, shortly after publication, you are contacted by the police, because you have described aspects of a few murders that you shouldn't know, unless you were involved.

This then becomes a rational noir detective story where you first determine that the creative voice in your head isn't a constructed personality you use to write your books - it's a real person. Then you have to convince the authorities that you didn't do it, and presumably help them apprehend the murderer.

When all is said and done, the murderer is taken into custody, but is severely injured. They die in the hospital late one night, while you are sleeping with your spouse...

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+2] Godric Gryffindor (a day later)

If I lower someone's temperature to the point where their brain activity stops, does the ability switch targets?

u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (a day later)

If you want it to. The point is to have a story prompt for others to use their rationality skills to deduce things and imagine how they could be convinced of the supernatural in today's modern world as well as a couple of reasons.

For me, I would imagine it to be so, because the ability switches when you cannot read any more thoughts which most often occurs due to death.

I imagine it doesn't matter either way if you just want to change targets or get the person to stop thinking in an ethical matter. You first convince the person whose mind you are reading to go for cryonic freezing. If the ability switches to a new target, then you are now reading the mind of someone who you deliberately placed as the closest and are fine with reading their mind. Otherwise, the frozen person is now not thinking anything and is not a problem anymore.

u/EliezerYudkowsky [+3] Godric Gryffindor (a day later)

You can lower someone's body temperature to the point where brain activity stops without freezing them. Just use very cold water. Then warm them back up again. It's not super healthy but it sure beats murder as a way of switching mind-reading targets.

u/None [+12] (a day later)

Either Eliezer Yudkowsky had thought of a lot of very good ideas very fast, or for some unimaginable reason he'd already spent a lot of time working out how to stop people's brain activity without freezing them.

u/notmy2ndopinion [+5] Concent of Saunt Edhar (a day later)

Therapeutic Hypothermia After Cardiac Arrest: An Advisory Statement by the Advanced Life Support Task Force of the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/108/1/118.full

This is typically done with ice packs in the armpits/neck/groin or chilly IV fluid infusions. http://www.med.upenn.edu/resuscitation/hypothermia/protocols.shtml

Or a lot of Frigideiro charms.

u/Traiden04 [+1] (41 minutes later)

How sure are we that the person whose mind we are currently reading a murder; are they planning on killing just one person, have they already killed a person and trying to cover it up, or are we reading the mind of a serial killer who is planing on killing again?

I would be interested in reading a story like this and wish you the best and for a link to it after you put it up for consumption.

u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (an hour later)

All I wanted is do is to tell people that she/he is a murderer; let them imagine how guilty the murderer is and decide how they would act. The protagonist has proof due to the fact she/he can read the murdeer's mind as the murderer remembers making the kill. I'm curious in how rationalists will react, and if it's popular enough, I plan on taking everyone's ideas and start posting it as a series of short rationalist stories on FictionPress. (With credit given to /r/rational)

I just wanted to liven this thread up a little where more people contribute their own original thoughts, instead of links or discussion of related topics.

Feel free to post your own story prompt, or ask advice on a hard decision.

EDIT: Thanks noggin-scratcher for catching that embarrassing mistake.

u/noggin-scratcher [+2] I am a happy tree (4 hours later)

You keep saying "the murder"...

"Murder" is a verb for the act of killing a person (I murder, you murder, he/she/it murders), or a noun for a specific instance of that act (a murder was committed, what a horrible murder). A murderer is the person who does it.

u/Chosen_Pun [+3] The Chosen Ones (5 hours later)

The first person you can mind-read is a murder.

Of crows. To get another target you have to kill them all, presumably with one or more stones.

u/qznc [+1] Chaos Legion (an hour later)

How is the emotional impact? I don't believe thoughts and emotions can be really separated, so I assume they get transfered as well.

If I assume a cold-blooded psychopathic murderer, he probably felt something like accomplishment or sexual arousal at the murder. How does that mix with my emotion of disgust? Can I distinguish who generates which emotions? Is there even a difference?

u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (an hour later)

If this happened in real life, and the murderer is a cold-blooded psychopath, I would assume you'd easily notice the murderer's emotions since you don't normally feel excitement/lust at the thought of murder. However, over time your brain will begin to associate the murderer's emotions with the thought of murder (or any other subjects your emotions differ significantly from the murder's). Since you cannot block the murderer's thoughts, you will come to think of killing others as a joyful experience and be conditioned into desiring it. From there it's a question of how strong your morals and integrity is.

It's why I always viewed telepathy as a horrifying curse. You can't not absorb other people's associations and views; you become a copy of the people around you. It's peer pressure taken to its logical extreme.

u/Nepene [+2] (a day later)

You're not a blank slate. You have your own prejudices and whims and desires that the emotions are going to overlay on. There are heavy limits to what peer pressure can do, especially if you deliberately avoid reinforcing it.

Personally I'd probably try and convert the whole murder thing into a video game thing. I am already easily able to murder within video games so I'd interpret the emotions I got as those from a video game. That would limit the applications. Am I not in a video game? Then these feelings don't apply.

u/CaesarNaples2 [+1] (12 hours later)

This comment has been overwritten by an open source script to protect this user's privacy.

If you would like to do the same, add the browser extension GreaseMonkey to Firefox and add this open source script.

Then simply click on your username on Reddit, go to the comments tab, and hit the new OVERWRITE button at the top.

u/CopperZirconium [+1] (13 hours later)

DISCLAIMER

The above list is just a hypothetical exercise on how I would check for telepathic abilities or noticed that I am having strange thoughts. Do not do the above checklist if you, for any reason whatsoever, think you are insane, delusional, or thinking/acting oddly. Go to a hospital.

If we want to write a rational story with level 1 intelligent characters, the protagonist wouldn't do your checklist. S/he would go to a hospital. Unless there is a clear reason not to, like strong evidence that S/he is telepathic and super strong evidence that the doctors can't be trusted.

u/notmy2ndopinion [+1] Concent of Saunt Edhar (a day later)

This is a great prompt -- I find myself almost paralyzed with a series of questions though.

If you read surface thoughts, would you be able to read sensations, images and emotions better than internal dialogue?

How much of our internal world is coded in language -- and what if the person you're mind-reading speaks a different language? How would that translate in your brain?

How much of my internal world is occupied by idle internal dialogue versus active recall of past memories vs experience of external phenomenon and a reaction to those things?

u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (a day later)

I'm sorry, but I have to make a comment on this: "humans will accept other people's statements as truth, before analyzing it for falsehood."

I work in technical support. I promise you that I do not accept other people's statements as truth, before analyzing them for falsehood. In fact, I can be very confident that they are lying before I even pick up the phone!

u/xamueljones [+3] My arch-enemy is entropy (a day later)

I know what you mean. It's an interesting fact that explains a lot about human nature to me (mostly why con artists can be so successful), but it doesn't explain how we can assume someone is lying before hearing anything they might say. I wish I could find more research about this, but it's a hard thing to analyze in cognitive science since one's perception of truth and lying is a fuzzy thing.

u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (2 days later)

To be fair, the scenario above really only holds true at work for me. Amongst family and friends, I'm sure I'm more normal.

Amongst strangers, I'm also more likely to give the benefit of a doubt. I will trust when someone asks for help, but I never trust anyone that I am asked to give money to, to use it for what they say they will. The stranger at the gas station asking for money, I pay for their gas, and they have to pump it while I'm there. Or I'll buy them food that's not packaged, off the grill, or I open packaged food before giving it to them so it can't be returned or exchanged for alcohol. I suppose that I am trusting them, assuming that they really need a helping hand when they might not.

However, when at work, with the very high percentage of people who try to dodge, invalidate, or otherwise break the support system, when that phone rings, I verify, then trust.

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