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Okay. This is some musing, partially based on fiction and partially on personal experience, about how we fundamentally view the world and how that affects how we then interact with it. It's sort of a meta, but probably too personal to really qualify. It's been a long time coming, because I've been trying to figure out how to SAY it for ... well, approximately three or four years? *shrugs sheepishly*
I apologise in advance if it makes exactly zero sense.
I apologise in advance if it makes exactly zero sense.
The Sensation of Telepathy
Have you ever wondered what telepathy feels like? *shakes head* It's a thing I've been kind of musing around lately, part of a bundle of thoughts about bodies and face-blindness and the way our brains work. What would something like telepathy actually feel like as an experience?
Have you ever sort of felt your own brain work? I mean, when you pull back a little bit, usually in the middle or just after your brain going a little bit wrong, and just sort of wondered what the hell?
I mean like simple things. Like when you lose a train of thought and deliberately try to trace it back, groping through your memory for the sensation of something that was entirely inside your head. Or let a train of thought sort of run on autopilot for a while, and then noticed it again? And wondered how the hell you'd gotten from where you remembered starting to here?
Or if you let a train of thought run on autopilot for a while, and then accidentally interrupted it with something without realising it, and that other thing got accidentally incorporated into the original train? Like, when I go for walks with the dog, I often plot stories out in my head at the same time, and I often have to switch my attention from the physical walking to the mental plotting from time to time to avoid things like, you know, getting run over by a truck. But they're both still running, it's just which one is getting my conscious focus at that point in time. So sometimes I don't manage to switch over fully, and I'll switch back from having noticed something weird around me to realising that my character, in the middle of a complex political discussion and/or quiet romantic scene, has suddenly started randomly dropping large lumps of metal that he hadn't had a second ago.
That happens a lot when you're running a mental verbal sequence at the same time as having part of your brain tracking external cues. Or it does to me, anyway. Simple one. When you're reading something, have you ever had your mental tracking of the story run ahead of your visual tracking of the words themselves? Like when you read something so often that you can still parse the meaning, but the words themselves start to look funny and don't feel like real words anymore? Or when you're trying to read something out loud, and your voice physically sounding out the words has lagged behind your mind mentally parsing them, and you can actually feel your mind start to gently split in two for half a second before the two parts trip each other up and you verbally pratfall? (This is why I have to read stuff in my head first before I read it out loud, so that my brain knows what's coming and doesn't trip itself up trying to run ahead of what my voice can actually do). Or when you're in the middle of writing an essay, and you're kind of half watching something at the same time, and you look down after a particularly engrossing bit to realise that the last half-sentence or so of an essay on radiocarbon dating suddenly has a lot more death threats than it ought to?
And usually you catch that in the aftermath, but sometimes if you've managed to step back enough in your own head, you can actually feel it happening. Like when time slows down when you see yourself start to fall over, like you're watching yourself from outside your head. Except, you know, inside your head. When you kind of partially feel the non-conscious part of your brain start to do something funny. You catch an odd word in the train of thought you're not focusing on, and have split focus enough to realise there's something wrong with it. When you feel your brain run ahead of the words and just know the trip is coming.
Sometimes you can feel bits of your mind moving, is what I mean. You can sense the different trains of thought running simultaneously, and sort of watch them switch up and down in priority. Which is actually a third train of thought/split of focus that's watching the others, but basically there's always a bit of yourself that's watching stuff rather than doing stuff, and sometimes you can point it at the other bits of yourself that you've partially shunted onto autopilot and kind of watch yourself work.
Usually for about a second at a time, of course. It's weirdly exhausting. At least for me. Maybe other people find it easier? I don't know.
But then that's ... That's sort of the point. I'm saying 'you' here, but I'm mostly meaning 'me'. I do this. I can feel these things. I have no idea if other people can, or how easy/hard it is for them, and if they interpret them the same way even if they do do them.
Also, I'm saying 'watch/feel'. This is because I tend to interpret most things visually and/or kinesthetically first and foremost, and they're also the easiest two senses for me to distinguish between. This is also because there's a large disparity for me between my visual and my sensory inputs, which I notice primarily in relation to how I interpret people.
I'm kind of face-blind, you see. Not fully, I'm not sure how much my sensations match up to the words, but I have trouble seeing people as ... as people. Physically, I mean. Um. Let me give examples. I tend not to remember what people look like after too long apart. Like my grandmother, who died four years ago. I tend not to remember her face unless I've looked at a photograph of her recently. What I do remember of her is this sense of size and roundness, and this sense of ... exasperation? I'm not sure, I think I translate emotion funny, I don't know how much sense it makes. But. My memory of her isn't visual, you know? It's kind of mostly physical with impressions of emotions and personality that aren't really connected with a body, as such. She's a presence, more than an image.
I do this when I'm writing stories, too. I don't imagine bodies. Actually, all my visual imaginings are sort of ... cartoony? The general gist of colour and shape and movement, without too much detail. But people I tend not to imagine physically at all. That's the wrong word. I imagine their physical presence, their weight and movement and the actions they take, their personality and feelings, but not ... not their bodies. Not what their bodies look like? And then when I'm writing I tend to get bogged down in expressions and gestures because I'm trying to manufacture the body to make the motion as I'm writing, rather than from the sense of the story in my head. (My editor may remember a crap tonne of people smiling/laughing/grinning while trying to fix my pro-fic? I have trouble imagining expressions, so when I want to say 'their expression changed', I think I mostly tend to make it smile because it's one of the easiest expressions for me to imagine).
Actually ... if you read Space Electric? Those parts of the story where Tony's in uplink, where he's registering the AI presences and sort of disconnecting from his own body slightly? That's, um, that's a lot of what people feel like to me in my head. They're kind of floaty and not really in bodies, unless the body is right in front of me and then it moves. Randomly, it does things like make me one of the few people in my class who could tell the set of identical twins apart. Mostly because I wasn't tracking them visually, so much, as tracking them as a bundle of physical sensations and personality. One of them felt brighter. Not smarter, I mean, but more there? She moved more, she talked more, she smiled more. She did more. The other one was a much quieter presence. She felt softer and less intrusive.
I kind of suspect this has something to do with being Aspie and having trouble connecting emotions with body language? Or, the other thing, someone suggested I'm possibly a bit synesthetic and I'm getting my visual and kinesthetic wires crossed?
It also might have something to do with my relationship with my own body, which is possibly a little strange sometimes. You know above, where I'm walking the dog and running my focus on another track entirely at the same time? Where I can put my body on a fairly elaborate autopilot and trust it to ping me if something pops up out of the surroundings? This is because my body is kind of an awesome little bit of kit, and I trust it fairly implicitly, which allows my mind/brain a lot of freedom to run parallel tracks and interpret things funny sometimes.
I think maybe I view other people's bodies a little weirdly in part because my relationship with my own is kind of ... a little disconnected? Or, well, not disconnected, I sit in my body incredibly comfortably, but it's more that my body isn't me so much as it's the thing I live in? I've wondered about this in terms of my sexual attraction, too. In that I mostly don't have any? For people, anyway? I feel it I think in terms of imagined sensations, but I don't look at someone, at a body, and feel anything. I think maybe part of that is because in my head, the body isn't a person so much as a person-holder? So for me it'd be like being sexually attracted to clothing or something?
And then I wonder if that isn't a little bit chicken and egg, and the reason neither my own body nor other people's are quite attached to the people inside them is, again, because I have trouble seeing the physical indicators of mood/personality with body language, which means I'm flat mentally not connecting bodies to personalities on a causal level.
Um. It's all a bit confusing, really?
But. But. Pulling this train of thought back a bit towards the original track. Thinking about all of this made me think about frames of reference. How much of how we think about things, how much of how we experience things, is tied to how we sense things and then how our brains interpret those senses?
Because, maybe, if suddenly I couldn't trust my body to function to a large extent automatically, would that change the shape of my thoughts? If something damaged my body or whatever, and I was forced to live much more enmeshed with it, would that force my impressions and my interpretation of other people's bodies to change? But that depends on which side of the correlation is causal, I suppose.
But if I didn't sense bodies this way. If they were visual to me rather than kinesthetic, would I think about people and sex and stuff like that differently? I think it's strongly possible that I would. My strongest sense memories are kinesthetic, and my strongest reactions to people are based on how they move and how much space they take rather than what they look like. The time my uncle flipped out at me and pinned me against the wall, all I remember is hands on my shoulders and having no space. I honestly cannot remember a single other thing about the situation. It's all about space and action. There are times when people feel sort of invisible to me? Like invisible forces that move and touch and do things. They're very unpredictable.
Other people's bodies to me are the spaces where they live and the things that make their actions possible, and when I remember them after they're gone, it's the actions and the spaces that I remember, not the images. That makes me frame them a certain way in my head, and it means I don't frame them the way a lot of other people describe them to me. Whole ranges of social interaction that are based on appearances and visual cues of mood bypass me utterly. I think. Always, it's just that I think.
But if you were someone with telepathy and a brain that DID frame things visually, and you got a sudden random window into my brain, how would you parse that? If you got dumped into a suddenly alien frame of reference, running off data-inputs that were foreign and/or normally invisible to you, how would you make it make sense? How much of other people's minds would actually make sense to you at all?
Even little things. People who think verbally, who run verbal tracks through their brain. What if those verbal tracks are in a different language? But maybe you could do the thing, you could parse other information like the emotion? Or, if their brains did what mine does, and parses the meaning of words on a slightly different level than the shape of the words, could you feel the separate tracks running and use one to interpret the other?
But if your mind didn't normally run verbal tracks, or if it wasn't used to noticing separate threads in mental tracks, would it be able to do that?
And then there's the sensation of telepathy itself. I often wonder about this with fictional mutants or espers, people with extra-sensory abilities. I wondered it with Magneto for ages, what it would be like to feel magnetic fields.
Because if you were born like that, then those senses aren't extra-sensory. They are to people around you, but to you there was always the extra thing. It was always part of how you framed the world, always part of the lens that structured your world view. And maybe then it was just that you couldn't explain that to people. You couldn't make it fit into the words that were designed for senses you couldn't quite understand (because senses blur into each other, there's always a little overlap, how could you explain the whole picture your body provides you to someone who's missing a part of the overall system?)
But if it was forced on you, or developed all at once later in life? Like X-men mutants where it hits at puberty or people who suddenly gain superpowers. How do you deal with a whole new intrusive sensory bundle that you don't have the background to interpret? Would you develope a kind of involuntary synesthesia where your brain desperately cable-ties the new sensations to the closest-feeling pre-existing sensory net? Like Magneto, does he sense magnetic fields visually? Kinesthetically? Does it feel like push and pull in his head? And if you did do that, if you cabled your senses together involuntarily, would it change how you interpreted your pre-existing senses as you slowly got used to it?
There's a fledgling part of the human brain that does react to magnetism, though. I think, anyway. So maybe after a while, or even initially, your brain could manufacture a system to parse the new data. And then it got slotted into your new worldview, the shape and sensation of the world around you. But wouldn't that warp it, then? Wouldn't it change the way you interpreted the world at baseline, change the way the world felt to you?
And then imagine it with telepathy. Because the world in other people's heads isn't just whole different information, it's a completely different sensation too. It's a complete experience, an outlook and a mental architecture that grew up based on how their brain worked and how their senses worked and how they grew to experience the world because of it. Combined with different experiences and alien belief systems, internal as well external architectures, and the inside of someone else's head is a completely different world. How could you learn to parse that? How could you learn to interpret not only the new sensory data that's being delivered to you via the sensation of telepathy itself, but also the new and sometimes alien sensory data that's being crunched in their head at the same time?
Even hearing about and trying to grapple with how other people see the world is difficult for me. My sense of the words and the sensory data that's supposed to go with them is partial at best. It's so incredibly difficult to try and understand what the things they're describing would feel like, when I don't think my senses work quite the same way, and there's always the question of how much of subjective sensation can reliably be put into objective language in the first place.
But then imagine actually getting plugged into that sensation. Imagine your brain having to scramble to interpret a completely different OS and data inputs all of a sudden. Would you try to parse it through your own framework? Would you be able to consciously even feel the bits that don't match your own senses? Would they sense something and draw conclusions from it, while you're stuck sensing just the conclusion and wondering how the flying fuck they'd come to it? Or would you do the synesthesia thing again, sort of plug the strange sense into the closest thing in your head that feels vaguely similar? Would you start to exist in a weird mélange of half-sensed things that your brain tries to streamline with how you view the world? How the hell would you view the world if these were the senses you were basing it on? Would you view people as something fundamentally different to how other people around you seemed to view them?
Because I think, on a fundamental level, an awful lot of what we think and how we think it and why we think it is based in how we experience the world around us. Not just ideologically, but physically. The physical inputs into your brain and then the specific ways your brain interprets them can change vast tracts of your internal view of the world and the people in it. Just look at me and bodies. Because I don't quite parse them properly in a visual sense, it completely changes how I view and interact with the people in them. (I think. This is my theory. There's something funky going on, anyway). If you posit a character with a completely different sensory relationship to the world around them, I think that probably really would change their entire worldview from the ground up.
I don't know. I'm basing this on the ways I sense things, and the ways people around me describe how they sense things, and trying to draw correlations and conclusions from it that maybe don't exist. I think there is a correlation, though. Sensation and conclusion, sensation and interaction. I think it changes things.
Have you ever had that? Where someone described a feeling, or a way of looking at things, and it was completely alien to you? And you're not sure if that's a language thing, if the words just aren't right, or if there's actually a sensory thing, if you're actually feeling different things and it's causing you to draw different conclusions to each other.
I grab at the edges of the pictures people describe. I try to reverse engineer what I think the sensations must be based on the feelings described and the conclusions come to. There is something different, something different in the way their mind works, I can feel it. Some of it is ideological, different experiences and different frames of thought, but I think some of it is sensory too? I think the world literally and physically feels different in other people's brains, that living their lives in their bodies would be a completely different sensory experience to the one I have in my life and my body. That part of why they look at the world differently to me is because the world actually does look different to them. We're not coming from exactly the same set of inputs, and we're not interpreting them exactly the same way, and because of that the lives we live are fundamentally different, even if they happen to be right beside each other.
But I can't know it for sure. I can't feel what they feel, I can't even know for sure they're feeling it at all. The only senses I have are my own. The only subjective experience I have is my own. All my interpretation of other people's senses of world and self are coming from my attempts to reverse engineer the end results (their actions) with their stated sensations as it happened, and my limited understanding of the subjective meaning of them under the false objectivity of the language we're using. It's all flailing blindly in a void and trying match sensory descriptions to the closest personal sensation I can find.
I wonder about telepathy, though. I wonder what it would be like to have a direct sensory link to someone else's subjective experience. Would it make it easier, to feel as they feel? Or would it be incomprehensible even still, because the way we sense the world is partially hardwired and no matter the external data, the brain can only interpret it in certain ways?
I wonder what telepathy would feel like.
Do you?
Have you ever wondered what telepathy feels like? *shakes head* It's a thing I've been kind of musing around lately, part of a bundle of thoughts about bodies and face-blindness and the way our brains work. What would something like telepathy actually feel like as an experience?
Have you ever sort of felt your own brain work? I mean, when you pull back a little bit, usually in the middle or just after your brain going a little bit wrong, and just sort of wondered what the hell?
I mean like simple things. Like when you lose a train of thought and deliberately try to trace it back, groping through your memory for the sensation of something that was entirely inside your head. Or let a train of thought sort of run on autopilot for a while, and then noticed it again? And wondered how the hell you'd gotten from where you remembered starting to here?
Or if you let a train of thought run on autopilot for a while, and then accidentally interrupted it with something without realising it, and that other thing got accidentally incorporated into the original train? Like, when I go for walks with the dog, I often plot stories out in my head at the same time, and I often have to switch my attention from the physical walking to the mental plotting from time to time to avoid things like, you know, getting run over by a truck. But they're both still running, it's just which one is getting my conscious focus at that point in time. So sometimes I don't manage to switch over fully, and I'll switch back from having noticed something weird around me to realising that my character, in the middle of a complex political discussion and/or quiet romantic scene, has suddenly started randomly dropping large lumps of metal that he hadn't had a second ago.
That happens a lot when you're running a mental verbal sequence at the same time as having part of your brain tracking external cues. Or it does to me, anyway. Simple one. When you're reading something, have you ever had your mental tracking of the story run ahead of your visual tracking of the words themselves? Like when you read something so often that you can still parse the meaning, but the words themselves start to look funny and don't feel like real words anymore? Or when you're trying to read something out loud, and your voice physically sounding out the words has lagged behind your mind mentally parsing them, and you can actually feel your mind start to gently split in two for half a second before the two parts trip each other up and you verbally pratfall? (This is why I have to read stuff in my head first before I read it out loud, so that my brain knows what's coming and doesn't trip itself up trying to run ahead of what my voice can actually do). Or when you're in the middle of writing an essay, and you're kind of half watching something at the same time, and you look down after a particularly engrossing bit to realise that the last half-sentence or so of an essay on radiocarbon dating suddenly has a lot more death threats than it ought to?
And usually you catch that in the aftermath, but sometimes if you've managed to step back enough in your own head, you can actually feel it happening. Like when time slows down when you see yourself start to fall over, like you're watching yourself from outside your head. Except, you know, inside your head. When you kind of partially feel the non-conscious part of your brain start to do something funny. You catch an odd word in the train of thought you're not focusing on, and have split focus enough to realise there's something wrong with it. When you feel your brain run ahead of the words and just know the trip is coming.
Sometimes you can feel bits of your mind moving, is what I mean. You can sense the different trains of thought running simultaneously, and sort of watch them switch up and down in priority. Which is actually a third train of thought/split of focus that's watching the others, but basically there's always a bit of yourself that's watching stuff rather than doing stuff, and sometimes you can point it at the other bits of yourself that you've partially shunted onto autopilot and kind of watch yourself work.
Usually for about a second at a time, of course. It's weirdly exhausting. At least for me. Maybe other people find it easier? I don't know.
But then that's ... That's sort of the point. I'm saying 'you' here, but I'm mostly meaning 'me'. I do this. I can feel these things. I have no idea if other people can, or how easy/hard it is for them, and if they interpret them the same way even if they do do them.
Also, I'm saying 'watch/feel'. This is because I tend to interpret most things visually and/or kinesthetically first and foremost, and they're also the easiest two senses for me to distinguish between. This is also because there's a large disparity for me between my visual and my sensory inputs, which I notice primarily in relation to how I interpret people.
I'm kind of face-blind, you see. Not fully, I'm not sure how much my sensations match up to the words, but I have trouble seeing people as ... as people. Physically, I mean. Um. Let me give examples. I tend not to remember what people look like after too long apart. Like my grandmother, who died four years ago. I tend not to remember her face unless I've looked at a photograph of her recently. What I do remember of her is this sense of size and roundness, and this sense of ... exasperation? I'm not sure, I think I translate emotion funny, I don't know how much sense it makes. But. My memory of her isn't visual, you know? It's kind of mostly physical with impressions of emotions and personality that aren't really connected with a body, as such. She's a presence, more than an image.
I do this when I'm writing stories, too. I don't imagine bodies. Actually, all my visual imaginings are sort of ... cartoony? The general gist of colour and shape and movement, without too much detail. But people I tend not to imagine physically at all. That's the wrong word. I imagine their physical presence, their weight and movement and the actions they take, their personality and feelings, but not ... not their bodies. Not what their bodies look like? And then when I'm writing I tend to get bogged down in expressions and gestures because I'm trying to manufacture the body to make the motion as I'm writing, rather than from the sense of the story in my head. (My editor may remember a crap tonne of people smiling/laughing/grinning while trying to fix my pro-fic? I have trouble imagining expressions, so when I want to say 'their expression changed', I think I mostly tend to make it smile because it's one of the easiest expressions for me to imagine).
Actually ... if you read Space Electric? Those parts of the story where Tony's in uplink, where he's registering the AI presences and sort of disconnecting from his own body slightly? That's, um, that's a lot of what people feel like to me in my head. They're kind of floaty and not really in bodies, unless the body is right in front of me and then it moves. Randomly, it does things like make me one of the few people in my class who could tell the set of identical twins apart. Mostly because I wasn't tracking them visually, so much, as tracking them as a bundle of physical sensations and personality. One of them felt brighter. Not smarter, I mean, but more there? She moved more, she talked more, she smiled more. She did more. The other one was a much quieter presence. She felt softer and less intrusive.
I kind of suspect this has something to do with being Aspie and having trouble connecting emotions with body language? Or, the other thing, someone suggested I'm possibly a bit synesthetic and I'm getting my visual and kinesthetic wires crossed?
It also might have something to do with my relationship with my own body, which is possibly a little strange sometimes. You know above, where I'm walking the dog and running my focus on another track entirely at the same time? Where I can put my body on a fairly elaborate autopilot and trust it to ping me if something pops up out of the surroundings? This is because my body is kind of an awesome little bit of kit, and I trust it fairly implicitly, which allows my mind/brain a lot of freedom to run parallel tracks and interpret things funny sometimes.
I think maybe I view other people's bodies a little weirdly in part because my relationship with my own is kind of ... a little disconnected? Or, well, not disconnected, I sit in my body incredibly comfortably, but it's more that my body isn't me so much as it's the thing I live in? I've wondered about this in terms of my sexual attraction, too. In that I mostly don't have any? For people, anyway? I feel it I think in terms of imagined sensations, but I don't look at someone, at a body, and feel anything. I think maybe part of that is because in my head, the body isn't a person so much as a person-holder? So for me it'd be like being sexually attracted to clothing or something?
And then I wonder if that isn't a little bit chicken and egg, and the reason neither my own body nor other people's are quite attached to the people inside them is, again, because I have trouble seeing the physical indicators of mood/personality with body language, which means I'm flat mentally not connecting bodies to personalities on a causal level.
Um. It's all a bit confusing, really?
But. But. Pulling this train of thought back a bit towards the original track. Thinking about all of this made me think about frames of reference. How much of how we think about things, how much of how we experience things, is tied to how we sense things and then how our brains interpret those senses?
Because, maybe, if suddenly I couldn't trust my body to function to a large extent automatically, would that change the shape of my thoughts? If something damaged my body or whatever, and I was forced to live much more enmeshed with it, would that force my impressions and my interpretation of other people's bodies to change? But that depends on which side of the correlation is causal, I suppose.
But if I didn't sense bodies this way. If they were visual to me rather than kinesthetic, would I think about people and sex and stuff like that differently? I think it's strongly possible that I would. My strongest sense memories are kinesthetic, and my strongest reactions to people are based on how they move and how much space they take rather than what they look like. The time my uncle flipped out at me and pinned me against the wall, all I remember is hands on my shoulders and having no space. I honestly cannot remember a single other thing about the situation. It's all about space and action. There are times when people feel sort of invisible to me? Like invisible forces that move and touch and do things. They're very unpredictable.
Other people's bodies to me are the spaces where they live and the things that make their actions possible, and when I remember them after they're gone, it's the actions and the spaces that I remember, not the images. That makes me frame them a certain way in my head, and it means I don't frame them the way a lot of other people describe them to me. Whole ranges of social interaction that are based on appearances and visual cues of mood bypass me utterly. I think. Always, it's just that I think.
But if you were someone with telepathy and a brain that DID frame things visually, and you got a sudden random window into my brain, how would you parse that? If you got dumped into a suddenly alien frame of reference, running off data-inputs that were foreign and/or normally invisible to you, how would you make it make sense? How much of other people's minds would actually make sense to you at all?
Even little things. People who think verbally, who run verbal tracks through their brain. What if those verbal tracks are in a different language? But maybe you could do the thing, you could parse other information like the emotion? Or, if their brains did what mine does, and parses the meaning of words on a slightly different level than the shape of the words, could you feel the separate tracks running and use one to interpret the other?
But if your mind didn't normally run verbal tracks, or if it wasn't used to noticing separate threads in mental tracks, would it be able to do that?
And then there's the sensation of telepathy itself. I often wonder about this with fictional mutants or espers, people with extra-sensory abilities. I wondered it with Magneto for ages, what it would be like to feel magnetic fields.
Because if you were born like that, then those senses aren't extra-sensory. They are to people around you, but to you there was always the extra thing. It was always part of how you framed the world, always part of the lens that structured your world view. And maybe then it was just that you couldn't explain that to people. You couldn't make it fit into the words that were designed for senses you couldn't quite understand (because senses blur into each other, there's always a little overlap, how could you explain the whole picture your body provides you to someone who's missing a part of the overall system?)
But if it was forced on you, or developed all at once later in life? Like X-men mutants where it hits at puberty or people who suddenly gain superpowers. How do you deal with a whole new intrusive sensory bundle that you don't have the background to interpret? Would you develope a kind of involuntary synesthesia where your brain desperately cable-ties the new sensations to the closest-feeling pre-existing sensory net? Like Magneto, does he sense magnetic fields visually? Kinesthetically? Does it feel like push and pull in his head? And if you did do that, if you cabled your senses together involuntarily, would it change how you interpreted your pre-existing senses as you slowly got used to it?
There's a fledgling part of the human brain that does react to magnetism, though. I think, anyway. So maybe after a while, or even initially, your brain could manufacture a system to parse the new data. And then it got slotted into your new worldview, the shape and sensation of the world around you. But wouldn't that warp it, then? Wouldn't it change the way you interpreted the world at baseline, change the way the world felt to you?
And then imagine it with telepathy. Because the world in other people's heads isn't just whole different information, it's a completely different sensation too. It's a complete experience, an outlook and a mental architecture that grew up based on how their brain worked and how their senses worked and how they grew to experience the world because of it. Combined with different experiences and alien belief systems, internal as well external architectures, and the inside of someone else's head is a completely different world. How could you learn to parse that? How could you learn to interpret not only the new sensory data that's being delivered to you via the sensation of telepathy itself, but also the new and sometimes alien sensory data that's being crunched in their head at the same time?
Even hearing about and trying to grapple with how other people see the world is difficult for me. My sense of the words and the sensory data that's supposed to go with them is partial at best. It's so incredibly difficult to try and understand what the things they're describing would feel like, when I don't think my senses work quite the same way, and there's always the question of how much of subjective sensation can reliably be put into objective language in the first place.
But then imagine actually getting plugged into that sensation. Imagine your brain having to scramble to interpret a completely different OS and data inputs all of a sudden. Would you try to parse it through your own framework? Would you be able to consciously even feel the bits that don't match your own senses? Would they sense something and draw conclusions from it, while you're stuck sensing just the conclusion and wondering how the flying fuck they'd come to it? Or would you do the synesthesia thing again, sort of plug the strange sense into the closest thing in your head that feels vaguely similar? Would you start to exist in a weird mélange of half-sensed things that your brain tries to streamline with how you view the world? How the hell would you view the world if these were the senses you were basing it on? Would you view people as something fundamentally different to how other people around you seemed to view them?
Because I think, on a fundamental level, an awful lot of what we think and how we think it and why we think it is based in how we experience the world around us. Not just ideologically, but physically. The physical inputs into your brain and then the specific ways your brain interprets them can change vast tracts of your internal view of the world and the people in it. Just look at me and bodies. Because I don't quite parse them properly in a visual sense, it completely changes how I view and interact with the people in them. (I think. This is my theory. There's something funky going on, anyway). If you posit a character with a completely different sensory relationship to the world around them, I think that probably really would change their entire worldview from the ground up.
I don't know. I'm basing this on the ways I sense things, and the ways people around me describe how they sense things, and trying to draw correlations and conclusions from it that maybe don't exist. I think there is a correlation, though. Sensation and conclusion, sensation and interaction. I think it changes things.
Have you ever had that? Where someone described a feeling, or a way of looking at things, and it was completely alien to you? And you're not sure if that's a language thing, if the words just aren't right, or if there's actually a sensory thing, if you're actually feeling different things and it's causing you to draw different conclusions to each other.
I grab at the edges of the pictures people describe. I try to reverse engineer what I think the sensations must be based on the feelings described and the conclusions come to. There is something different, something different in the way their mind works, I can feel it. Some of it is ideological, different experiences and different frames of thought, but I think some of it is sensory too? I think the world literally and physically feels different in other people's brains, that living their lives in their bodies would be a completely different sensory experience to the one I have in my life and my body. That part of why they look at the world differently to me is because the world actually does look different to them. We're not coming from exactly the same set of inputs, and we're not interpreting them exactly the same way, and because of that the lives we live are fundamentally different, even if they happen to be right beside each other.
But I can't know it for sure. I can't feel what they feel, I can't even know for sure they're feeling it at all. The only senses I have are my own. The only subjective experience I have is my own. All my interpretation of other people's senses of world and self are coming from my attempts to reverse engineer the end results (their actions) with their stated sensations as it happened, and my limited understanding of the subjective meaning of them under the false objectivity of the language we're using. It's all flailing blindly in a void and trying match sensory descriptions to the closest personal sensation I can find.
I wonder about telepathy, though. I wonder what it would be like to have a direct sensory link to someone else's subjective experience. Would it make it easier, to feel as they feel? Or would it be incomprehensible even still, because the way we sense the world is partially hardwired and no matter the external data, the brain can only interpret it in certain ways?
I wonder what telepathy would feel like.
Do you?
