A few days ago, @m31 made a post on a concept she called "mind jumping." Aside from the awesome artwork (seriously, look at that brain), the idea of the post was: what if we could take our consciousness, our self, and leap into another person's mind and experience what it is like to be them?
Image by geralt on Pixabay.
I have an odd sort of belief system or rather, a way that I have convinced myself that things might be. It is less that I am 100% certain of it and more that I want so much for it to be true, and it makes so much sense. It seems probable to me that this thing, my conscious being, this subjective experience that I think of as myself.... is not really me. Rather, for lack of better words, there is no me; instead there is some conscious manifestation of the Universe which experiences all sentient lives from start to finish. That is me right now, for me... and for you, it is you. Someday "I" will be "you," or maybe "I" already have been. Actually, in terms of how we humans perceive the dimension of time, "I" am "you" right now. "You" are "me" too.
So this idea of mind jumping was so cool to me, since I have already thought about it quite a bit in different terminology and context, but very similarly in terms of actual concept. Surprisingly though I had never given much thought to who I would most look forward to being. This was @m31's question to us: "whose minds would you want to explore and experience?"
As a consensus technology enthusiast and Steemian, my very first thought was Dan Larimer. I want to know what it is like to have that kind of mind, which can think up things like Bitshares and Steem almost completely from scratch and bring them into reality. As a developer myself with a constant stream of "cool ideas" which almost never go anywhere, I cannot help but look at Dan in awe of his mind. Regardless of how anyone feels about his actions regarding Steem or anything else, it does not change the fact that without him DPoS would simply not exist, at least not in the form it does today. I want to experience the mind of the man to whom Satoshi Nakamoto once wrote:
If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.
...concerning Bitcoin's practical viability for microtransactions, and who went on to fully embrace consensus technology, building some of the most revolutionary consensus platforms ever made, with the lowest confirmation times and highest transaction capacity on the whole scene, and which actually freaking do something unlike 99% of the aimless bullshit altcoins out there. A decentralised collateralised lending platform and decentralised exchange, followed by the first ever blockchain social network. You can argue about his viewpoints or people skills or failure to commit or the merits of his current project; whatever. In spite of it all, just look at what he created. What a bloody legend.
There is another person whose mind I think I'd like to explore a bit: Aileen Wuornos. That'd be a bit complicated if I have to jump in the present, though, because she is dead now. She was a serial killer; a hitchhiking sex worker who killed seven of her clients in what she called self-defence. To her credit, the first of her victims, and the one who landed her the first death sentence, was a convicted rapist. Was she making it up? Who knows? Who can know?
Aileen scored 32/40 on the PCL-R, a widely-used test for psychopathy. The higher the number, the more consistent the individual's traits are with those of a psychopath. No score on a test, though, can be as damning as these words:
I killed those men, robbed them as cold as ice. And I'd do it again, too. There's no chance in keeping me alive or anything, because I'd kill again. I have hate crawling through my system... I am so sick of hearing this "She's crazy" stuff. I've been evaluated so many times. I'm competent, sane, and I'm trying to tell the truth. I'm one who seriously hates human life and would kill again.
Aileen made the above statement to the court, as she requested to terminate all of her appeals. She made it after years on death row, being constantly mistreated by prison staff. They had put dirt in her food, spit in it, and even allegedly pissed in it. They said and did hateful and disrespectful things constantly. She was physically, psychologically, and emotionally abused. She even overheard some of the staff conspiring openly among themselves, racing to push her to suicide before her execution could take place.
There are a few films about Aileen's story; I remember watching one of them when I was a teenager. The film is called Monster; it is a dramatisation of her life up until her first conviction and takes some artistic licence (most notably, her lover Tyria Moore was replaced with a fictionalised version named Selby Wall). It was after watching this movie that I became interested in her story. But was Aileen Wuornos really a monster? Did she truly mean what she said in the above quote? Or did she really believe what she said later, in her final interview:
Thanks a lot! I lost my fuckin' life because of it; couldn't even get a fair trial! Couldn't even get a fair investigation or nothin'! Couldn't even have my appeals right! You sabotaged my ass, society! And the cops, and the system! A raped woman got executed, and was used for books and movies and shit!
Aileen recanted the "cold as ice" confession while "off the record" with a filmmaker; stating that she lied to the court because she just wanted to die and could not stand being on death row any longer, where she had been tortured for years. But there was nothing to be done at that point. Her appeals had been dismissed at her own request; her date had been set.
On the 9th of October, 2002, Aileen Wuornos was murdered by a representative of the U.S. State of Florida.
Given the opportunity for a last meal, she chose a cup of coffee.
Given the opportunity for a last statement, she declared:
Yes, I would just like to say I'm sailing with the rock, and I'll be back, like Independence Day, with Jesus. June 6th, like the movie. Big mothership and all, I'll be back, I'll be back.
I'm not sure whether she really meant the things she said in her confession. I have no idea. The psychopathy test indicates it's a distinct probability, but in her interviews she is just so full of pain and anger and what most people would probably call delusional ramblings. There's only one way I could ever know, and it would be to experience her life from her perspective. Besides, it must be fascinating to think like this:
I'm okay... I'm okay. God is gonna be there; Jesus Christ's gonna be there; all the angels and everything... and you know, whatev-- whatever's on the beyond. I think it's gonna be more like Star Trek, beamin' me up into a space vehicle, man. Then I move on; recolonise to another planet or whatever, but... it's... whatever's the beyond, I know it's gonna be good.
If my whole "universal consciousness" thing doesn't pan out, I sure hope my beyond is as cool as yours, Aileen. Can I get one of those space vehicles too? 🍋
So in a way you believe in some sort of form of reincarnation? Living many lives in different bodies, as you, me and others. Or, maybe anything alive on this planet? Maybe not even just alive things.
Indeed I admire minds like Dan's and Satoshi's purely because they are capable thinking of things that do not exist yet before even most of us realize we need them or that they could be. That's what true genius is to me.
Aileen's mind sounds fascinating indeed. I had not heard about her story before and I am glad you wrote about her. While people called her monster, does it justify the monstrous, disgusting ways they made her suffer while she was waiting for her death? I don't think so.
That is probably the closest existing thing to describing it. Usually, though, reincarnation is thought of as a way to keep going.
My thought is that when we're gone, we're gone. But we have all had the panic: what happens to my perspective? What happens to this consciousness from which I observe the world? My thoughts on that are that the thing you feel and the thing I feel are the same entity. There is one source of consciousness and, from our perspective, we never die. We just wake up someone else. No, we don't take any memories with us, or our personalities, or anything, but this conscious identity we feel is an eternal, perpetual thing, and it is all of us.
Damn. That's a great way of putting it.
The prison system, at least there, is made to break and dehumanise people. They are given numbers and uniforms and menial, unfulfilling tasks to complete. They are presented with a broken economy as their only legitimate option to purchase things that are essential to quality of life. They are treated like dog shit. They are mocked, shouted at, threatened, raped, and manipulated for fun and profit. And if any of them acts on their natural impulse to escape, they are shot dead if they are lucky. Otherwise they're locked in a concrete room for 23 hours a day.
Then there is the death penalty itself. There's a reason most of the civilised world has done away with it. Aileen Wuornos killed seven people. Those killings were homicides, but were they murders? Did she fully understand what she was doing? Was she being honest about feeling threatened? We'll never know.
There's only one certainty here: Aileen Wuornos was murdered, in cold blood, after over a decade of torture, in a very questionable state of mental health, by a representative of the government of Florida. I hope that person knows what they did, and I hope it haunts them, not because I want them to suffer, but because maybe they'll feel regret and share that regret with others. Then maybe there will come a day when the judge who hands down a death sentence has nobody to do their dirty work for them.
Interesting idea!
I think I wrote about something similar a few years ago.. well, your introduction reminds me of it.
It's about what is real or true.. And I'm going pretty deep.. Deeper than your "you are me and I am you" :D
The text is - years old and I posted it yesterday.. in german. You could translate it with deepl.com if you are interested in reading. :)
I would like to transfer my mind into Nietzsche..^^ would be pretty devastating I guess
greets from germany!
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