weirdway

Arguably, there are already many technologies that we should want to remove from our experience. Simpletons have access to guns and nuclear weapons.

Those don't bother me at all.

So, even in a world full of mind-reading technology, we should, in theory, be able to prevent our minds from being read, while everyone else is getting the contents of their minds exposed by the mind-reading device.

The distinction you're missing is that short of a nerf gun and a water pistol there is no ostensibly friendly way to get shot from a gun. With mind reading the situation can be different as the act of having your mind read can be advertised as ostensibly a service, and perhaps many idiots will volunteer for that. That's the problem.

I will not bother to show you "proof" that the technology needed to do this is already in its embryonic stage. But I wouldn't say it has no utility. Dream recording will be the first step. Eventually, there'll be devices that give people maximum lucidity in their dreams, and eventually, as these devices connect different minds together, there will be shared dreaming.

All this is perfect nonsense as far as I am concerned. I've already experienced shared dreaming and sharing a dream is a matter of will rather than tech. It's always like that. If you believe that you don't want it but the tech comes over and takes over anyway, you have a run-away unconscious volition that you're not getting a handle on. This is similar to having a nightmare, which is also volitional. In other words, just because all experience is volitional it doesn't mean you won't ever project some fears for yourself to experience and fuck yourself up with. The only way to really avoid such episodes is to cultivate wisdom and practice using your will consciously all the time, and keep practicing bringing any unconscious tendencies you may have under the light of your own conscious awareness so that you can understand yourself and your process of visioning better.

The only downside is that technology disempowers them by having them think they cannot do such things without technology.

That's a major downside indeed. There are other downsides. Technology of this kind (as opposed to magick tech) is also a product of collective activity and it tends to be related to exploitation because you have to get it through trade and when you trade you know subconsciously the other parties in any trade are economically hostile to you. This can sometimes be controlled through a public policy focused on sharing and on suppressing the super-rich, but it's not a given that it just lands like that without effort or will on your part. So you'd have to always fight politically or secretly through magick against the worst excesses of physicalistic tech. That's a time that could be better spent on something else.

Are you asserting that the mind is fully under your control? I guess this brings up the mind vs awareness issue. If fundamentally, what you are, is Awareness, then the mind is something that can potentially be out of your control.

Why are you on this sub if you aren't even going to read? I'm not here to argue with you. I don't find your beliefs interesting and worth arguing against. It's all dumb and tedious. I expressly pointed out that I will abstain from any polemics here. Our discussion is very close to a polemic right now. I'm just not interested. I'm also not interested in personally dispelling your doubts for you. Although on some level I want to be amenable to all, I don't want to nanny anyone and I am not in the business of individually helping and/or nurturing anyone.

If you want to know what I believe, read the other content on this sub. If you want me to clarify something that I previously said, fine. If you want to argue with me, then please feel free to go elsewhere because I don't convert and don't proselytize and do not engage in polemics. If you don't agree then you don't agree and I am fine with it and don't want to spend time on it. I don't have the slightest bit of sentimental attachment to anyone here on this sub, not even to my "favorite" people. I'm here to serve a grand cause and not people. Those who share in that cause can benefit. That's all.

Certainly empowering! This is something I am working on. The reason I am thinking of all these things is because I want to firmly ground myself in the subjective idealist worldview.

You don't seem to be going about it in a correct way. You need to contemplate more and when you have doubts, then bring your doubt under the light of analytic contemplation and investigate it the way Nagarjuna investigates conventional conceptions in his Mulamadhyamakakarika. Blow through your own doubts with contemplation by your own effort. Extreme logic can dissolve or undermine any offensive conception, and it's just a question of will. The more you rely on having me dispel your doubts for you the dumber you'll be.

If I encounter some guy in the future that brings up the possibility of mind reading, conscious machines that are super intelligent, etc, I want to be able to not be shaken by these ideas.

I'm not shaken by them. :) Basically what you want is possible. That's all I want to say right now. First try to understand the basic definition of subjective idealism. It sounds to me like you're confused about awareness vs mind. In subjective idealism as I have presented it here such confusion does not exist in the slightest. Plus, you need to have your own contemplation. Not just a little bit, but hours daily for decades. After 10 years there is minor progress. After 20 years there is a second wave of minor progress. That's roughly the speed at which it developed for me. It might sound "slow" but if you compare this to the way physicalist understanding grows in society, their evolution rate is even slower than that. Scientists take hundreds of years to reach a new insight instead of new one every 10 years. Basically conventional science is much slower because in addition to contemplation which they have to do just like me, they also have to do peer review work and confirmation experiments, which I don't need to do, because I rely on first principles and never take experience as evidential.

The method I use for developing my own mind is in principle much more agile than the method of science. Of course I could take this process with higher potential and just be really lazy about it and make it even worse than science, hahaha. I don't do that. But I could. So just because the uppermost potential of subjective idealist style of contemplation is much higher than anything explicitly collaborative it doesn't mean it must always be like that in practice. In practice the way it works depends on the individual. For some people the progress may be very slow. But there is no shortcut when it comes to learning self-reliance. Especially other-reliance is not a shortcut toward self-reliance! I hope that's obvious.

It makes me uncomfortable and undermines my power just thinking about it. So even if it may not seem like it, I am seeking power by asking these questions and thinking of these possibilities. By openly discussing such things, It helps dissolve my fear of them.

You don't get it. In the short term if I gently take your hand and start explaining it will help but you'll cultivate an idea that wiser parental sort of figures are always "out there" and they're powerfully shaping your well-being for you. This very premise right there is the source of the technological menace that you fear. In other words, technology is other-power whereas what you want is self-power. But the more you lean on someone like me for easy explanations and avoid your own effort (decades and lifetimes) in contemplation, the more your method resembles the situation of other-power, while your goal is ostensibly self-power. So your method becomes at odds with your goal. Then no matter how well I or anyone else explain anything, that fundamental other-reliance will not be undermined inside your mindstream, and you'll never stand confidently on your own two, and other-power technology will remain an essential reliance to you then and the very thing you fear will come to pass.

What I am saying is: do not be an engineer of the very thing you don't want. Be careful.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2017-10-11 11:21:17 (do71qzk)