If aliens showed up to Earth 1,000 years later, they’d find an abandoned planet with ten billion mummified corpses laying on the floor of ten billion dusty holodecks, with huge smiles on their faces.

I would be the last one to disagree with you on that. However, I still sense a potential danger involved in the swapping of perceptual fields, and I feel I’d be lax if I didn’t point it out.

Personally, if the technology was being worked on, I’d sign up as a test subject immediately (sometimes I feel like I have already…) because I understand that we are not really our thoughts and perceptions. We are also the field in which they interact. Of course, I think I understand that more intellectually than as an everyday experience, but I’m working on that. And I think technology like this would help me do that.

But with any technology, there is a good side and a bad side. Maybe I’m only acting the part of the overprotective parent. Maybe the only thing that would need to be done here is give the person a warning, and then like anything else, give them a chance to try it for themselves. But I think it’s dangerous to at least not point out potential problems when they are noticed.

I think that the continuance of some sense of I-AMness would have to be self-monitored, and prolonged swapping of perceptual fields, as well as quickly changing between multiple fields in one session, might be something to consider a sort of expert-level kind of thing.

So yeah, while I love the idea behind the technology, and I love the potential it offers, I just want to make sure I also keep a notation of any worries that pop-up during my explorations of these ideas. Cause it might save a lot of trouble if something like this ever does manifest.

But the idea of the Borg doesn’t scare me as much, mainly because of the way I look at the situation. Yes, a Borg type society where the weak are subsumed by the strong would be bad. Very bad. But as Tim has point out at his blog, the technological basis for this is pretty much already around. I’d like to explore paradigms here that allow for this technology to be used in a way that promotes Great Things For Everyone All Around. Hence the fact that everything I write here usually has a positive spin or happy outcome to it. That’s what I’m writing for, that’s what I want to find.

If more people are aware of ways that this kind of technology can be used for “good”, than when they see it being used negatively, to hurt them, they’ll understand that other options are available. Hope is lost if a weapon can only ever belong in the enemy’s hands.

And to be honest, I’m not sure if just blogging about it really helps much in the end. But it’s all I’m capable of doing about the matter right now. I want to examine these things as closely as I can, and find good positive paradigms to encase them in. And if I ever get the sense that I should do more to bring one of these paradigms into being, well, I’ll worry about it at that point.

Seems like many people are this way with or without technology…

http://quietanarchist.blogspot.com/

I think either all these INTP’s /enneagram 5’s may either opt out, since it no longer offers anonymity, or they will ascend the scale to enneagram eight and be more in control and master their environment and by extension other people.

And this is another aspect of this ego thing. The danger is that in a power struggle the weaker egos become subsumed by the stronger ones.

That already happens already but we may see a clearer picture of how this works through this body swapping stuff. Peoples bodies and skills can be requisitioned to a more powerful ego or a group ego.

That is the BORG.

You know like build a machine for manifesting your dreams into reality, ways of augmenting that process and tracking it.

Have VR interacting with real time and creating a paradise.

I am excited about this.

I think there is a lesson there. I mean your assumption for ubiquitous surveilence working out is in the context of a bunch of freindly people in a totally egalitarian setting.

In terms of unequal power relationships, I see a lot of problems, you know like people being jailed for giving off “violent vibes” or dangerous MRI scans and thinking “terroistic thoughts.”

Plus there is the whole shadow side of human nature, that is always there, that we aren’ t aware of. How we are like animals and can be predatory and dishonest and how this stuff is already worked into the system as a given, but people don’t admit it. This is the part of the tao that is hard to work out, how there is no good and evil. That tigers aren’t evil for killing deer and that maybe an implication of that is that strong nations aren’t evil for dominating weak ones. Maybe Powerful corporations aren’t evil for putting other companies out of business.

Trying to “stamp out evil,” “correct human nature” “stop terrorism”

using ubiquitous surveilence will probably be a disaster.