Imagine, if you will, a device so powerful it could instantly make everyone feel what the whole world was feeling. All the pleasure and all the pain of everyone, felt by everyone.
I know that when I feel pain in myself, I want to ease that pain, and I imagine most people would do the same. If the whole world was as one, the world would naturally want to heal its pain and ease its own suffering.
While such technology doesn’t exist yet, we are slowly heading to a point where it will be possible.
Video sharing, blogging, rss, instant messaging, and voter moderated forums/news are all examples of how we use communication tools, like the Internet, to enhance our global consciousness.
As we develop ways to understand how the human brain works, so too will we learn how our brains store ideas. Once we get far enough, we will be able to treat our brains like a hard drive, giving us the ability to read and write information directly to our minds.
We will also be able to send and receive ideas between minds, thereby creating technologically based telepathy that lets us truly connect our minds.
If we combine this technology with the Internet, we will be able to create a global consciousness… a worldwide neural network that we can join and leave at will.
It is my hope that as we approach this point, we will end extreme poverty on earth. No longer will our world’s most powerful be able to hide their head in their riches and their toys and their greed and their lust for power. For they, like all of us, will be held accountable for the repercussions of their actions by their own conscience and their own sense of empathy when they truly look at the suffering that they have the power to prevent.
