You gotta love a Vulcan mind-meld, but Spock just went hands-free via the ship’s sensors. Beautiful. Just beautiful.
Mind-melding holds a special fascination for me because of my philosophy “a better world through better storytelling.” It affords pairs of individuals the unique opportunity to understand one another’s perspectives fully. However well someone may explain their ideas to you, you can only understand their point through the experience of being yourself and listening to them.
Fiction writers and negotiators and mediators and certain very astutely sensitive people can empathize with others, sometimes to the point of intensely imagining that they fully understand others’ perspectives. Yet we know true understanding of what it is to live in another’s shoes is imperfect from the current model of “pretending to be other than you are and experiencing being treated differently” because that model still only has your thoughts inside your mind even as the new experience unfolds.
Such a model has value, but the understanding implicated by the sharing thoughts in their purest form inside the minds thinking them with all their sensory cacophony is just mind-boggling. Mind-melding is mind-boggling. For the greater good.
Sonnet 66
All things alive walk by desire;
doubt no one's search to have their peace,
to stoke or quench their burning fire,
to do no harm with their short lease.
Consider first the things you crave,
then do the thing uncommon brave
and question every life you touch
and if they'd do the same as such.
If only all would take no more
than that which satisfies their need
without making more mouths to feed.
If only all could see the score,
the small in multitudes made one,
the feast-or-famine days undone.