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[Pancakes]

What is a truly neutral image, though? And what are these emotional images, would a sociopath present different results? If emotion and personality can vary so greatly from one person to another, how do we not know that the aforementioned "lookahead" does not also vary?

If so, there would be some rather unsettling conclusions that could be drawn. Such as do certain people have more free will than others, etc. Of course, this study needs to be thoroughly tested with a much larger range + number of people to even be remotely credible. Still, it's an interesting thing to think about.

BUT, perhaps the greatest thing to come of this is that there are readable and recognizable EXG readings prior to emotional images being shown. What can illicit emotion in someone? An idea. A new idea, to be precise. If we can recognize when an idea is thought of, and do some super-duper-high-tech-thing with it, we could send an electrical impulse on a new idea being thought of. We could use that impulse to power a light bulb! In the future, lightbulbs will literally light up when someone has an idea, just like in cartoons!

[KittyTac]

The "discovery" is most likely a bunk, though, as Ispil was not able to find anything else on it, it would likely be a huge sensation if it was true.

[Egan_BW]

If it were real we'd probably be seeing people setting up giant arrays of people set up in front of monitors wearing brain scanners, in order to send information minutes back in time and therefore make a killing on the stock market.

[wierd]

"We have the "5 second advantage" in our trades! In this era of microsecond transactions, our ability to show stock market data to living analysts and get their reactions precognitively gives our algorithms a profound advantage over pure computational models!"

Silly aside, there *IS* respectable research about DECISION MAKING happening in advance before one makes the action of committal.

https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.html (Friendly pop article)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2112 (Actual paper)

To me though, that just highlights how free will is illusory, and that the mechanisms that drive our decision making happen without our control or knowledge, and then we simply believe we have chosen willfully.

[Egan_BW]

Ah, but if you use enough people you can get MORE than a 5 second advantage.
You "send" a bit by presenting the human with either an emotional or neutral image. Emotional is a 1, neutral is a 0.
5 seconds in the past, the scanner picks up that 1 or 0. Then you can put that bit on the screen of a different human, sending the bit back another 5 seconds. With enough stacks you could send data hours or days back in time.

[wierd]

I am sure that there will be some kind of diminishing return that will make the signal useless after the first pass.

[Egan_BW]

Then you just need more humans to amplify the signal. Should be easy enough to get buttloads of people on the premise of "get paid minimum wage to stare at this screen all day and do nothing".

[wierd]

Runs foul of expected returns from the trade.  Has to be in the intersection where there is a profit from the trade, over the cost of hiring humans, over the loss of signal from compounded sessions.

[Jopax]

A thought occured to me that the US could potentially see the rise of small scale communism in the coming decades. Perhaps not in name (reeeeeee kerminism) but something similar to what the Israelis have with their (and the term escapes me atm) several dozen family strong communities which pool their resources together for things like housing, living expenses, child raising and similar.

Some of this could already be seen in the artistic community where you'd have 4-5 freelance artists pooling together for a big flat and sharing the expenses while working from home so it's only logical to have something like it pop up elsewhere. People driven together by econimic hardship, forming say a communal kindergarden where each of the mothers take turns in watching the kids or similar. Or even splitting medical costs between themselves so the impact of an injury or sickness isn't back-breaking on a single person.

Hell certain indications of this could've been seen in what the occupy movement did by raising funds and buying off student debt for people, tho that was several years ago, not sure where it is now as I hadn't really followed it much.

In the end tho, I think it'll mostly come down to folks toning down the individualism in favor of a more community oriented worldview.

tl;dr
Random thought on how funny it would be that rampant capitalism turned parts of the US low-key communist.

[McTraveller]

Quantum-based thought wouldn't have to be "random" - it would just be probabilistic.  The value you get by summing two dice is not mathematically random - it follows a probability distribution where some values are more likely than others.

Regarding the 5-second "lookahead": that is probably just merely anticipation.  The human brain is really good at developing a model of the universe, so probably just anticipates an image, and starts "priming" the reaction.  An even more mundane example is the ability to catch a ball.  In technical terms, this is just a predictor-corrector control system.

Shared resources isn't necessarily "communisim" - though I suppose at some point it might be.  Did you know that in the US there are actually places where people do share land and resources? And these places are literally called communes?  They work quite well up to a certain size.  There's also a sad semantic error that people often make: communism is merely sharing resources like that. What most people think of when they hear "communism" though is really "socialism" which is state control of resources, or forced public communism, rather than what you've described which is private communism.  Or more traditionally, "a community."

[Lunardog15]

oh no
this form is a voluntary communism 

[Teneb]

oh no
this forum is a voluntary communism 

We must seize the memes of production.

[Lunardog15]

and PUNISH the resisters

[MrRoboto75]

The sun never sets on the Golden Arches

[Lunardog15]

um what yes it does there is such thing as night in LA