Author: КОЖИНА АННА МИХАЙЛОВНА / KOZHINA ANNA MIKHAILOVNA
Taking into account the infinity of the information space of the inner world of a person, one can draw a parallel with the cosmos: the soul of each person is like an unknown planet, full of secrets and mysteries, which is not going to be revealed soon. Have you ever had an idea to visit the mind of another person in order to feel and understand from your own experience what is incomprehensible in real time: to see with your own eyes how another person perceives the world around them, to feel the degree of their emotions and feelings, to immerse yourself in way of their thoughts, to penetrate into the secret corners of their fantasy? Now it is very difficult to even imagine that this could be possible, but humanity tends not to get stuck in one place and the future is already blowing its hot breath on human backs.
A giant-sized building called the Cosmodrome of Human Lives rises before your eyes. The entrance to it is far from accessible to everyone, so you have a unique opportunity to take a closer look at what people now call a miracle. Running along the long corridors of the building, you rush through the whole universe: on the walls, like in Hogwarts, there are animated pictures and inside them stories of famous people are played, fragments from their memory, significant moments from their lives – this is how memory is honored at the very beginning of the 22th century. Then you find yourself in the very heart of the Cosmodrome – a place from where you can get to any of the "stations". The station here is not just a virtual immersion in another reality, not an artificially created sequence consisting of films, but a single real human life, its inner content, the embodiment of its consciousness in real time – what in our world is usually identified as a soul.
At first glance, everything looks quite normal in the eyes of a modern person who is accustomed to computer and innovative technologies. It is unlikely that in our time someone will be greatly surprised or even more shocked by virtual reality glasses: the maximum that they can do is to give new impressions and emotions from the realism of what is happening. But only few people can imagine how to be transported into the world of another person, not just look at everything from their angle, but become a part of their world, if not all of it completely, live their present or their past, feel specifically their perception of the world, which will certainly be different from yours in one way or another. The device for transferring into the mind of another person is no different from those very familiar virtual reality glasses, at least outwardly, inwardly – everything is much more complicated: in front of you there is not just immersion in a fictional world, in front of you there is a whole universe created by the mind of a person. The only one thing you take with you is your memory in order to bring a piece of another person's life back into your world.
It is worth being prepared for the fact that your world can turn upside down, because every time you think that other people are the same as yourself, you are greatly mistaken. So here, in the up-coming century each station has its own features. People here call them "characteristics". Perhaps the analogy that immediately comes to your mind is that of ordinary computer games, in which there are the same traits of different characters that you can play as, but everything is a little trickier. In games, you play as characters, and even if you have a wild imagination, you can, of course, immerse yourself in their stories and try to think the way they would think. But all this happens only on the basis of your personal experience: the experience of communicating with different people, reading literature, studying human behavior, etc. Another person is equated to another planet: here you act not just as an observer, but as a participant in the process. It sounds just as fanciful as the supposed fact that the universe is infinite, while a human has their finiteness in everything. However, the idea that the comparison of the human soul with the cosmos now casts doubt on the finiteness of everything.
I don't reckon there's much point in detailing how the mind-transfer device works, let's leave that to more experienced scientists. It is much more interesting to explain what they are, other worlds, what people will face living at the beginning of the next century and who has managed to take advantage of this unique opportunity. Here is an image that displays the characteristics that were mentioned earlier. All of them are primarily based on general ideas about a person from the field of psychology and biology: gender, age, temperament (and its inherent qualities), dominant values, degree of education, mindset, various predispositions and addictions, the presence of problems with mental and physical health. Scientists tried to divide the stations into categories to simplify the system: it was said that there is a station for choleric people, and there is a station for phlegmatic people; or there are people of a humanitarian mindset, and there is that of a technical one. Disputes are still ongoing, but one thing remains eternal – it is impossible to drive a person into a narrow framework, because this causes great damage to their freedom of expression and reduces the potential for development and formation of a personality.
Just picture you have the opportunity to look into the world of your closest relative, your uncle, for example, with whom you are still not getting along, who has the following characteristics: male, 34 years old, choleric (emotionally unstable, quick-tempered, etc.), has two higher educations (the first is an engineer, the second is an actor), an extrovert, a hysterical personality type, a creative mindset, some other features of character: does not take into account other people's opinions, loves to receive praise and does not tolerate any negative criticism. Perhaps, initially you absolutely do not want to make contact, since you are not eager to understand this person, but nevertheless you decide to take this step – only just for the sake of your own peace of mind. You do not use your empathy and do not have the opportunity to think the way you used to, the view from your side is simply not available. So, you find yourself in the place of your eternally dissatisfied relative, look into the corners of his memory, find the reasons and motives because of which he behaves in this way, delve into the logic of his actions. Perhaps he really is not the most pleasant person in the world, most likely he understands this by himself better than anyone. You realize your uncle is just a man, with his own history, with his own personal tragedies and hard fate. He has fears, and where he behaves too self-confidently or even pompously, he actually has a million doubts and is afraid of being abandoned, disappointed, not accepted by people. And this is not reflected in the characteristics, and it is hardly visible just from your side, and you would never guess for yourself and could not imagine how your relative feels and on the basis of what he acts.
Although the scientific environment is moving forward, the moral and social aspects of the issue remain open: in what form are permits for mind movement granted, who has the right to make such a journey, and on what basis? At the moment, the system has not yet fully developed and has no answers to all questions, so only a small number of people, mostly scientists, are given chances to further knowledge of the world within us. This is not to say that by the time we live until 22th century, everyone will suddenly have the ability to travel wherever they want, or that there will be no more problems understanding human behavior than we have now.
My idea of the future is only a small but paramount step on the way to the knowledge of our uncountable possibilities. For a person, their internal information space is an “objective” reality, this is the way how they perceive the world around them. Most people do not even assume that another person has a different "objective" reality. It is possible to overcome the distortion of perception of the surrounding world only through understanding and awareness of the mechanisms of the work of the human psyche. That’s exactly what Cosmodrome of Human Lives gives us. Humans are such grandiose, curious and inquisitive creatures, really tiny compared to the cosmos, the size of which can only be guessed, but have inside them whole undiscovered universes that have yet to be considered with close attention to an infinite number of details.