As an upload, would you join the society of full telepaths/empaths?

I really would like more information before committing.

In particular, I would be interested in power structures in that new society. Who decides things? Who runs things? What happens to the malcontents? How does propaganda and various ideological manipulation work?

The obvious reason is that as an entirely open empath/telepath you cannot hide anything from the authorities.

As an aside, I would also expect normal unfrozen/uploaded people who chose the telepathic society to be severely stressed, at least in the beginning.

Even with telepathy status games and indirect hiding might still happen. And it depends also what kind of access. If everybody feels every thought of everybody else it could easily be overwhelming and pure cognitive economy could favour opting out.

If you can choose to access at will anybodys mental state you can adopt strategies to people not opt to do so in critical moments. If you build up yourself a reputation for violent thoughts people might want to try to avoid your mind out of comfort granting you a degree of privacy (similar effects for boringness etc). You could also attach meanings to your thoughts that other people would not associate in essence encrypting your mind so that they can't natively read it in full clarity (even if they have full cryptotext access) (may or may not be synonymous with going mad).

If everybody has intimate psychological contact your mind could form dependencies to parts of other minds without which you could not psychologically function. So people might want to opt out for wanting to remain individuals and not fuse with the hive mind. Even if only others formed such dependencies could be bothersome because you don't only think for yourself but potentially for others as well.

It seems to open a can of worms that would need to be dealt somehow and those solutions would be far more important to opting than whether it would be cool.

In the real world, this would lead to tremendous efforts to develop the ability to crimestop.

The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak. He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions -- 'the Party says the earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than water' -- and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them.

D.H. Lawrence did a better job than I ever could of describing my personal objection to living in the society of universal surveillance:

"That I am I.

That my soul is a dark forest.

That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.

That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.

That I must have the courage to let them come and go.

That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women."

I notice that I am confused. I try and understand why the telepaths are much happier than I would have predicted. If the results of this are sufficiently convincing I join them, but my default position is no - the risk seems too great.

I'd join up for Team Overshare. I expect that the version of myself that I recognize as myself would not long survive full disclosure. I'd probably end up changing to adapt, but I don't see anything terrible about what I'd change into (probably a person who holds the opinions which are the mean of the mass mind's values).

I defy your assertion that both societies are similarly happy. Unless the telepath society is extremely accepting of fringe thoughts, it's going to be worse. Knowing that others will read your thoughts and judge you for them causes you to censor yourself. But at that point, it's already too late. People will know that you thought of something objectionable and suppressed it out of fear of judgement.

Really though, the two options are silly. Ems allow for so many more possibilities. A society in which people could voluntarily expose their thoughts would have quite a few advantages. Ditto for a society with perfect (optional, voluntary) lie detection.

What kind of exploitation/manipulation is being prevented by limiting and "monitoring" interaction, exactly?

I'm not sure this should get its own topic but seems like it should be in the open thread. It seems more like general transhumanist speculation than rationality focused.

I suspect that any world I wake where we've advanced to the point where we have sims will likely be very different from our current one, to the point where issues I can't anticipate now could easily impact the answer to this question.

It all depends what other interactions are possible besides mind-reading. Depends on whether the telepaths can communicate with normals, what everyone spends their days doing, whether someone can get kicked out of telepath-land. Also depends on details of the telepathy - whether telepaths can format their thoughts for easy browsing, how powerful mind searches are, etc.

Not fighting, just indicating dependencies.

I probably would not join, but I would try to research it to figure out why people who join usually like it. Depending on what I learned, I could change my mind.

What I would prefer is to have the option of sending/receiving thoughts/emotions/memories when and with whom I choose, with consent of those involved. Other mental abilities would of course have to be implemented as well, to allow this kind of telepathy to be manageable.

I don't think it's easy to define what it means for one neural net to be directly interfaced with another neural net. Even in todays world I can imagine technology that scans a person emotion and displays them to other people.

There is also the group of those who opted out, and it looks basically like your "normal" mundane human society.

I think the idea that a society of upload will look like a "normal" mundane human society is severely misguided. Not having a body changes much about society.

I wouldn't be happy having to isolate myself to one or the other, so I'd need a switch that allowed me to be a telepath among telepaths and a normal among normals. Or, for party games, a normal among telepaths. :D

Not only would I decline the invitation, I would be extremely suspicious of the fact that very few have defected, and also extremely suspicious of those who have. What you're describing goes beyond telepathy. It's effectively one mind with many personalities. I could never trust any guarantee of safe passage through such a place. It would be trivial for a collective mind to rob a single mind of choice, then convince it that it made that choice. It would also be slightly less trivial but still plausible for a collective to convince that mind - and fool other independent minds - into believing that it chose to defect when it actually didn't.

On the other hand, if after observing the political landscape of the time period I came to realize that this entity is clearly taking over, then I would jump on board as a self-preserving strategy, knowing that at some point the non-connected independent minds would become marginalized enough to feel threatened and lash out violently, at which point the faster-thinking collective mind wins the fight. Being caught in a collective is less horrible than being caught in the crossfire.

With an opt-out possibility I would give it a try. I suspect that I am suboptimally secretive and ashamed of a lot of my thoughts and feelings and have a "natural" instinct to lie and shield myself from being known accurately. I'd like to try a society that seemed to be working for others even if I didn't stick with it. It reminds me of what I did in Second Life years ago. I entered as a woman with powerful secondary sexual characteristics. After a guy more or less fell in love with me, I spent about two days on that, talking with him while he tried to seduce me, and then blew my own cover on purpose. My sense is I learned a tremendous amount about the interaction between men and women by doing that, understanding how attractive women are driven to be aloof and superior.

I'd like to learn more about my own secretiveness and shame as I am positive that very little of it is in my conscious mind at this point.

With full telepathy, the cognitive illusion of "one self per body" would shatter. To join a telepathic society would be to melt into a hive mind. And that hive mind wouldn't regret the melting of its individual members any more than our bodies regret the loss of individuality of its cells.

However, in the sim-world there is no technological reason it cannot be implemented in some way, for just thoughts, or just feelings, or both.

The technical details of the implementation may be critical. How specifically are the thoughts shared.

Right at this moment I am commenting on LW from my work. My colleague in the same room has been loudly speaking on the phone for the last half hour, so I am completely unable to focus on any work anyway. Hardly able to focus even on reading LW. -- If telepathy would be anything like this, I would avoid it as hell.

Loss of privacy is one aspect, loss of silence (which I consider critical for my sanity) would be another one.

I expect I would opt out. I cannot feel completely free to do anything that many people can easily observe. I become deeply uncomfortable if someone looks over my shoulder while I am reading, and I am simply not able to listen to music while someone else is in the same room. I expect that if I lived in a fully telepathic society I would feel forced to try to stop thinking entirely. Not sure how exactly that would end, but I expect not well.

Aside from matters of my own personal comfort, like Lumifer I would be very concerned about the power structures in this society. The worst case is so vastly worse than the worst case in a non-telepathic society. And if contact is so limited I have little reason to believe the claim that most people who opt in are truly satisfied with their choice.

I'd want to try the telepathic society before deciding, but would probably opt out. I like games, and I like some game-like social structures, and acting in ignorance of the other person's plans is an important ingredient in games. If I specifically want someone to know that I'm thinking, then we have a variant of telepathy called "talking" that I can employ.

If you're serious about the opt-outs looking like my current society, I go for the telepathic society in a heartbeat. Something is very very wrong with the opt-outs, because that just ought not be happening.

If you just mean that the opt-outs are an unmarked case, I want to explore the opt-out society for a while, and I might decide to stay there, depending on what it's like... though the telepathic society is still tempting.

I don't see any reason why it would be easy to implement in the sim world. There can be apps that broadcast your thoughts, or even communication standards that require you to broadcast your thoughts, but if you don't give away your thoughts, and there's no exploiting security holes, then there's no telepathy.

I think I would be fine with telepathy, so long as I can preserve anonymity. That is, if I don't like what happened at the telepathic meeting, nobody can trace that to my non-telepathic identity.

Unless everyone has an equal ability to effortlessly switch telepathy on and off, separately for inbound and outbound communication, at any moment, I'm not for it.

SMBC take on shared experiences.

In the telepath society, is there a "polite" subculture where people don't look at each other's thoughts unless they're explicitly marked public (as a subcultural norm) ? If so I probably would opt in. I might opt in anyway, but I'm not sure.

I would probably opt in to a society where one could optionally publish verified, authenticated, non-repudiatable thoughts and/or feelings.

(In shminux's further specified "mandatory write / voluntary read Facebook stream" model, access to your thoughts would be effectively logged, because the accesses would appear in the accessor's stream. I presume that you could also be alerted to people accessing your stream.)

A lot of the discussion in both the original post and the comments seems to be stuck in '21st century' (present day social) mindsets.

Firstly, the idea of there being only one or two societies for people to participate in seems highly unlikely in a simulation environment. Computation of the mind is much more complex than computation of the environment, meaning it's difficult to foresee a reason why engineers in charge of the 'sim' would limit the number of environments to anything less than whatever the individuals decide to dream up.

Of course it's likely that over time certain environments (IE 'planets' or 'spaceships' or whatever scenery/location/laws of physics) will be appealing to a large number of people, leading them to become much more popular and almost like a 'real life' for members who spend much of their life there.

Assuming that two of the most popular of these environments were 'telepath' and 'non-telepath' mirrored versions of reality, then it's true that many members would spend time deciding which of these societies to spend time with.

This decision is much less finalistic than earth decisions, however. If a person get's sick of one of these, they could, presumably switch into the other environment with very little effort.

I believe you would see a bit of a split between those who enjoy the more 'primitive' enjoyments in life, who would choose to go with non-telepath, and those with a more spiritual/philosophical interest who would be more likely to start on the telepath route.

Sports, competition, games, sex, many other recreational activities are, one would imagine, more fun in a non-telepath environment. However, I couldn't imagine the incredible rush of knowledge, wisdom and compassion that would come with being able to hear everyone's thoughts.

To a degree, one could assume a telepath society to be calm, happy, esoteric, and relatively laid back. Since everyone has dark secrets and nasty character flaws, only those with enough courage to lay bare their darkest secrets, and enough wisdom not to judge others would be able to enjoy a true uncensored mental link with someone else.

There is a middle ground, however, that I believe is most likely.

In a simulation environment:

1. instant travel is trivial
2. there is virtually unlimited resources
3. any idea or concept, whether social or political, etc., will ultimately stand or fall on the merits of how many fellow players want to experience a reality where your idea is implemented in some way. I'm sure some Neo-Nazi player might try to create a fourth reich, and no doubt it would be a beautiful imitation of 1930s Germany, but it's hard to imagine that many players excited to join him in his new Nazi Germany locale, as free as he is to create and promote it.

One could easily imagine a scenario where the most popular 'reality' would be something like:

Clone of real earth except:

1. positive thoughts are broadcast, negative or embarrassing ones are not. (presumably trivial to a computer that can simulate a planet and billions of minds)
2. there are numerous large land masses where people can build their own cities and businesses instantly accessible by anyone.
3. due to unlimited resources, lots of different venues exist, each with different 'rules' (ie program state) in regards to telepathy.

Pretty sure I'd opt out. I would instead try to start a society where skills, not feelings or thoughts, are the shared elements. Doing the necessary research if required.

I realise this may lead to a Hansonian hell-world, but if by this time there isn't a reliable means of blocking that outcome we're doomed anyway.

I would probably like it, at least if there is a way to keep a few thoughts private and/or to temporarily "disconnect". Like, I'm a big fan of Gaïa/Galaxia in the Foundation cycle.

Huh, I'm surprised that some of the commenters expect to want to opt out. I'd love to live in a society free of status games, constant guessing of thoughts, feelings and intentions, relationship screwups, embarrassment... I am having trouble thinking of disadvantages of full telepathy+empathy. Well, maybe becoming too complacent or something. Assuming it's a bad thing.