I keep thinking of this [url=http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2011-12-22]Schlock Mercenary strip[/url]. That being said, I'm guilty of wondering on this concept myself; I've used it myself in some fanfic I wrote way back when, and touched on the concept for some EP homebrew that I wrote up (as well as mentioned in the side in the EP fiction I wrote a year and a half or so ago)

My guess? It's going to up your ups and down your downs. Sure, during the honeymoon period it's fantastic. She thinks you're wonderful, which makes you feel wonderful towards her, and it becomes a loop. But then do you want her also 'hearing' when you lay in bed and wonder 'what if'? When you think fondly of your ex? When she really does look fat in that? Do you want to be looking into her head when she's thinking those things? Don't imagine that you'll only get to use it when things are working well. If the technology is there, it's there. Available technology gets used. Sure, people who grow up with it and feel comfortable walking around naked in someone else's living room will certainly have a degree of emotional intimacy the rest of us can only dream of (although there will certainly be other unintended consequences. Higher suicide rate? Greater self-delusion to protect ourselves?) As for me, I'm happy letting my wife moderate her thoughts when we interact. A little privacy is good, even within a marriage.

My homebrewed concept around this idea: Summer's Day A nanodrug and performance booster cocktail, Summer's Day is, bluntly put, a sexual performance and intimacy-boosting drug for the "hopelessly monogamous". Distributed as either a rose (making some mistake it for a form of petal) or a large sugar heart or other "romantic" candy divided into two distinct portions, the drug is consumed by a pair of individuals. For the drug's duration, it creates a low-level XP feed back and forth between the pair, comprising mostly of surface thoughts and hormonal responses (while being careful to block the formation of dangerous feedback loops; early users often experienced heart attacks or strokes during the drug's peak effect), while at the same time, the drug meddles with hormone and neurotransmitter production, particularly serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and other hormones, giving both users a feeling of intimacy, euphoria, and reduced anxiety, as well as boosting physical performance and reinforcing pair bonds. [Low to Moderate] Type: Nanodrug, App: O, Onset: 20 minutes. Duration: 2 hours. Addiction modifier: 0. Addiction: Mental.

It should surprise absolutely no-one that [url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MindlinkMates]there's a trope for that.[/url] It's one of those really romantic-seeming ideas that, in practice, would probably lead lead to you needing to be rolled all the way back to your last backup. No backups? Well, you're screwed. Then again, if experiencing others' inputs directly, ala XPs, is possible without massively fucking someone up from the get-go, then mindlinking with someone shouldn't. It'll be the long-term psychological aspects that winds up fucking you up.

I dunno about you, but I wouldn't subject anyone to the interior zone of my mind. It's the place where nightmares go to die and just the peripheral contact via me running games has left some people with nightmares. :P (True story. On one occasion, I had to change a game because a player started having nightmares about the creepy bastard of a nemesis monster I'd put in for their character.) That aside, what happens if an async uses this kind of link? Could it infect the other person with Watts-McLeod?

It's something I could only concieve of doing with my significant other once we'd reached a point in our life of incredible stability and overcome a lot of current stumbling blocks. It would answer a lot of questions we weren't ready to ask in an ungentle, un-nuanced way.

I have had to argue about whether a lack of inhibitions represents "an honest, true version" as though alcohol or recreational substance remove a false mask on our identities. I disagree with this notion, I think that our "masks" and "inhibitions" and what we choose to not reveal is part of our identity just as much as the whimsy and inner most thoughts. So I agree with you, Smokeskin, though I wouldn't tell another couple to not try something like that. Just as I won't tell polygamous people not to experiment with that, just because I am comfortable with monogamy and not sharing every single emotion or thought in my flawed and imperfect mind with my partner.

Thomas Metzinger makes a pretty good case in [i]Being No One[/i] (and the subsequent version of [i]Being No One[/i] for general audiences, [i]The Ego Tunnel[/i], which I recommend if you're not 100% up to snuff on contemporary neuroscience and philosophy of mind) that we actually don't have a self as distinct from the workings of the brain that Smokeskin is referring to here, and takes an opposing stance to uwtartarus' view in the sense that while Metzinger would agree that the "masks" are "just as much" a part of the self as the inner chaotic churnings, that "just as much" wouldn't be an indicator of parts that make up the whole (as in uwtartarus' stance) but instead that they would be just as irrelevant to the constitution of a concept of "self" (or "soul" or "will" or "mind" or "I" or what have you). I think one of the things about this setting that's interesting is that because it's a complete picture of your brain, it includes all of the informatic occlusion that just comes standard with being a homo sapiens, including the informatic occlusion that blinds us to the processes that delude us or trick us. Children stand in front of the magician as he performs his coin trick, and think magic is being done (i.e. "I" think "my" "self" is real), but an adult stands behind the magician (the field of neuroscience ever more rapidly cracking the black box of the brain as the 21st century marches on) and sees exactly how it's done (i.e. the neural correlates for various parts of "self-awareness" and other forms of self identity always happen prior to consciousness of the totality). It's sort of like flash fusion, which is when a light blinks faster and faster until the human eye sees a solid light, but researchers looking at a screen can see how many times per minute it's flashing. The aggregate experience of our brains, moment to moment, forms a flash fusion of the various limited drips of information that gets filtered through our thalamocortical system (and other systems, but this seems to be the final sifter from current research) from the massive overload we'd get otherwise, arranges it in time (sometimes erroneously, as multiple witnesses to a single crime can attest) and that DIY, jury-rigger flash fusion we believe is this magic "self", even though actually it's just all the moments of our lives appearing solid enough to categorize and label (when in actual fact each "flash" dies away and does not live on in any meaningful way, including the one you're having right now reading this). This is a vast oversimplification, but it's the best analogy I've found, and it's also an approximation of the actual neural correlates that happen (i.e. flash fusion and the perception of a "self" in our thoughts, although you've have to mix in another visual correlate: that of visual anosognosia). tl;dr Bleeding edge neuroscience is confirming with ever-greater certainty: Buddha was right all along, the self is illusory.

Smokeskin wrote:

consumerdestroyer wrote:

we actually don't have a self as distinct from the workings of the brain that Smokeskin is referring to here

That's just my inadequacies in communication that gives that impression, or maybe it is just our language that is imprecise :) I don't think we have any self distinct from the brain. It's like "I saw the sun rise" - when the reality is that the Earth rotated so photons from the sun could reach my eye.

Yes, exactly! Heliocentrism within our solar system was counter-intuitive because, well, geocentrism [i]was what we experienced[/i]. Same goes with noocentrism...but science has a way of dethroning the counter-intuitive ego trips of (not so) great apes.