Timothy Birdnow

I have often pondered the matter of privacy and our lack of telepathy. As society grows increasingly knowledgeable about the workings of the brain and how to access information from it the matter becomes of critical importance. We are reaching the stage where we can no longer hide in the privacy of our own minds, and once we reach that point I think our civilization will be in peril.

In the Book of Genesis it is said that God "sewed clothes of animal skins for Adam and Eve" when He booted them out of Eden. Why? Why were they disturbed about being "naked"?

My view is that everyone - the angels and then Adam and Eve - had the ability to see into the minds of others, to read their thoughts. It would be a great blessing and joy if your thoughts were pure but a horrible curse if they were not. Adam and Even didn't really care about their physical nudity so much as their psychological nudity. They wanted to hide their THOUGHTS, not so much their bodies, because their thoughts were now polluted and embarassing to them..

So God gave them animal bodies that they could hide in.

So human history began metaphorically with the loss of telepathy and the rise of privacy.

And since then governments and merchants and those with certain interests have labored dilligently to find ways to force thoughts and memories out of human heads.

It has been a work that has been ongoing for millenia. And now with modern technology we are reaching the point of being able to do it.

One wonders if this isn't the beginning of the end for Mankind.

Isaac Asimov, no believer nor even Conservative, wrote a story once about a kind of time viewer. A historian became exasperated in his efforts to obtain time on the machine, and he found a young physicist who helped him build his own. It turned out it was a lot easier than everyone thought it would be and worked much better. In fact it was limited to just about a hundred years in the past - but it worked very, very well with the present. It was possible to spy on anyone you wanted to spy on. The government had purposely suppressed the development of it and all the "research" it did was bogus. They hoped nobody would realize a portable, cheap model could be made. In the end the physicist and historian agreed not to publish - but the physicist's uncle had read the research and published it anyway out of fear of the government. In the end they realized civilization would collapse under the weight of the prying eyes and loss of any privacy.

Human beings are private animals. We are now at the point of dragging people into the group like it or not. This can't end well.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:23 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 486 words, total size 3 kb.