Copy-blindness is a contemporary affliction that prevents people seeing two or more objects if they are otherwise identical in appearance.

If you show them two indistinguishable objects and ask them how many there are, they will say “One”.

If you give one object to Fred and another object to Jane, and ask the sufferer how many objects there are, they will again say “One”.

If you ask how many owners of the objects there are, they will say “One”. But, they can’t tell you who. They simply cannot see Fred and Jane as owners. I conclude that this is because there is only one object to their mind, and yet there are two people, so their disturbed mind explains this by invoking a 3rd, mysteriously absent, but single owner.

If you gave one object to a tribe deep in the Amazon jungle, and another to a tribe in darkest Africa, and then asked them how many objects there were, they would again say “One” – despite the fact that each tribe clearly enjoys and perceives a single object, and there are two tribes.

If you actually take them to one of the tribes, and then ask them if it’s the same object as the one that the other tribe has, they will agree. You can then visit the other tribe and ask them the same question and they will still agree.

This wierd perception of singularity despite spatial separation could only be rationally supported by the afflicted (if they were aware of their condition) as some kind of spooky action at a distance at a work, or some kind of morphic resonance that identical objects become one and the same – even if separately created.

I have heard tales that unkind people sometimes exploit this blindness to their amusement, e.g. at a dinner party of ten people a copy-blind person may be asked how many chairs there are, and invariably they will respond “Two: A carver chair and a dining chair”. They simply cannot see ten chairs. Most sad.

My latest research has discovered that this blindness has been caused by some kind of social hypnotism, and is due to being brought up in an environment in which, through the intellectual property laws of patent and copyright, and subliminal messages at the start of movies, corporations have deliberately programmed into today’s youth the idea that identical objects are one – in order to retain a monopoly over all the objects they sell. Unfortunately, they have been highly successful in their programming, but not so successful in retaining their monopoly.

I have been looking for a cure for copy-blindness for some time. I have tried numerous rational and reasoned arguments in case the disease is amenable to psychotherapy, but I find that the person with copy-blindness simply does not respond.

Just as with congenital colour blindness, its victims are often completely oblivious to their inability to count or distinguish between identical, spatially separated objects. I suspect that some have a nagging suspicion that something may not be quite right, but their fear of having a mental illness creates a stubborn reaction against any persuasion that they are copy-blind.

If you know of any psychotherapeutic methods that may help, I’d be very grateful to know of them.

This is a new and though very common, poorly understood and rarely detected disorder, but with your help, perhaps we can bring it to the attention of a wider field and a greater chance of discovering a cure.