Full-Mental NudityThe arrival of mind-reading machines.
By William SaletanUpdated Tuesday, March 20, 2007, at 5:02 AM ETHaynes understands the objection to these scans—he calls it "mental privacy"—but he buys only half of it. He doesn't like the idea of companies scanning job applicants for loyalty or scanning customers for reactions to products (an emerging practice known as neuromarketing). But where criminal justice is at stake, as in the case of lie detection, he's for using the technology. Ruling it out, he argues, would "deny the innocent people the ability to prove their innocence" and would "only protect the people who are guilty."
I hear what he's saying. I'd love to have put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed through an fMRI before Sept. 11, 2001, instead of waiting six years for his confession. And I wish we'd scanned Mohamed Atta's brain before he boarded that flight out of Boston. But what Haynes is saying—and exposing—is almost more terrifying than terrorism. The brain is becoming just another accessible body part, searchable for threats and evidence. We can sift through your belongings, pat you down, study your nude form through your clothes, inspect your body cavities, and, if necessary, peer into your mind.
FMRI is just the first stage. Electrodes, infrared spectroscopy, and subtler magnetic imaging are next. Scanners will shrink. Image resolution and pattern-recognition software will improve.
But don't count out free will. To make human choice predictable, you first have to constrain it so that it's not really free. That's why Haynes confined his participants to arithmetic, gave them only two options, and forbade them to change their minds. They could have wrecked his experiment by defying any of those conditions. So could you, if somebody came at you with a scanner or an electrode helmet. To look into your soul and get the right answer, science, too, has to cheat. Somewhere, Woody Allen is laughing. I can feel it.
A version of this article also appears in the Outlook section of the Sunday Washington Post.
Remarks from the Fray:
Well it seems that Ray Kurzweil's predictions of CPU and MRI technology are tracking pretty well.
Given the rate at which technology accelerates - it isn't all that far fetched to think that somewhere between 2025 and 2035, we will have the ability to scan the neuron and synaptic states of the brain and to replicate them within a computer using neural networks or something similar.
And the question will no longer be one of "mental nudity" or of epistemology but instead one of defining what is life. Is the scan of your cognitive state that then continues to run forwards INSIDE the computer any less cognitive than you?
Can a soul reside inside a computer?
--Degsme
(To reply, click here.)
Enough of this metaphysical nonsense from Saletan. fMRI (and neuroscience for that matter) is a materialist enterprise. I'm getting pretty sick of Saletan coming at us again and again with the "we've found the soul, we've scanned choices, natural selection is shaped by free will.. Did I blow your mind?"
No, dooood, you did not. The reason it sounds so freaky to scan "free will" or "the soul" is because you haven't...no one can and no one will. If these things exist at all they are nonphysical, so, for the purposes of science they can safely be ignored.
What you scan in an fMRI, or an EEG, or measure with a key press are the consequences of the physical events which are thought. Cognition is a material activity. Once you get this concept through your head then you can stop with the mysticism.
For instance, "thinking about faces" is a cognitive state instantiated in matter...thus, it has a chance to show up on an fMRI. The cognitive state that we experience as "the intention to add or subtract" something is also instantiated in matter. The fact that an fMRI picks this up, too, is not a transcendental experience unless you willfully misinterpret what's going on. Who's to say a cognitive "intentional state" is uncaused, separate from the material world, or otherwise special or supernatural? Why cannot an intentional state be caused just like anything else? The answer is "it can".
There's plenty of wonder to be had in the science itself...this is very cool stuff. We don't need Saletan's injecting inappropriate, outdated shorthands and concepts from Cartesian dualism and medieval philosophy muddying the waters in order to hook us.
--Mangar
(To reply, click here.)
The rights of the people to be secure in their persons, their houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause......
Our thoughts are our own, they are to our persons as personable as can be. Other than our very soul our thoughts are who we are. Indeed our real thoughts known only to us perhaps describe and identify our soul as no other means could hope to achieve.
The all intrusiveness of this technology flies in the very face of the freedoms we claim to be fighting for. This technology is in its infancy but given the rapid pace of development today this technology could possibly mature in a few short years. Strong, ethical safeguards must be put in place now along with strict limitations as to who may have access to this technology and for which purposes. Without such safe guards in place perhaps we should be as the throngs of people in the movie Frankenstein and surround this castle with torches and pitchforks, though I would hope we do a better job of preventing the monsters release.
--NickD
(To reply, click here.)
"Under controlled conditions, they can tell from a brain scan which of two images you're looking at. They can tell whether you're thinking of a face, an animal, or a scene."
The way to beat this is to be paranoid, and carry false images in your head, to deliberately fool the machines. Mutter constantly about all kinds of nonsense. That way, they can't "see" your mind. if you don't want them to "see" you thinking about a cow, then force yourself to imagine a chicken instead, while waving your arms about wildly. Oh, and possibly tinfoil hats help, too.
They can even tell which finger you're about to move."
Probably not, if I'm alternating with my mind: left, right, left, right, and then I make a split decision. Because even I didn't know which finger I was about to move until I did it.
--Caromer
(To reply, click here.)
(3/20)
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Remarks from the Fray:
Well it seems that Ray Kurzweil's predictions of CPU and MRI technology are tracking pretty well.
Given the rate at which technology accelerates - it isn't all that far fetched to think that somewhere between 2025 and 2035, we will have the ability to scan the neuron and synaptic states of the brain and to replicate them within a computer using neural networks or something similar.
And the question will no longer be one of "mental nudity" or of epistemology but instead one of defining what is life. Is the scan of your cognitive state that then continues to run forwards INSIDE the computer any less cognitive than you?
Can a soul reside inside a computer?
--Degsme
(To reply, click here.)
Enough of this metaphysical nonsense from Saletan. fMRI (and neuroscience for that matter) is a materialist enterprise. I'm getting pretty sick of Saletan coming at us again and again with the "we've found the soul, we've scanned choices, natural selection is shaped by free will.. Did I blow your mind?"
No, dooood, you did not. The reason it sounds so freaky to scan "free will" or "the soul" is because you haven't...no one can and no one will. If these things exist at all they are nonphysical, so, for the purposes of science they can safely be ignored.
What you scan in an fMRI, or an EEG, or measure with a key press are the consequences of the physical events which are thought. Cognition is a material activity. Once you get this concept through your head then you can stop with the mysticism.
For instance, "thinking about faces" is a cognitive state instantiated in matter...thus, it has a chance to show up on an fMRI. The cognitive state that we experience as "the intention to add or subtract" something is also instantiated in matter. The fact that an fMRI picks this up, too, is not a transcendental experience unless you willfully misinterpret what's going on. Who's to say a cognitive "intentional state" is uncaused, separate from the material world, or otherwise special or supernatural? Why cannot an intentional state be caused just like anything else? The answer is "it can".
There's plenty of wonder to be had in the science itself...this is very cool stuff. We don't need Saletan's injecting inappropriate, outdated shorthands and concepts from Cartesian dualism and medieval philosophy muddying the waters in order to hook us.
--Mangar
(To reply, click here.)
The rights of the people to be secure in their persons, their houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause......
Our thoughts are our own, they are to our persons as personable as can be. Other than our very soul our thoughts are who we are. Indeed our real thoughts known only to us perhaps describe and identify our soul as no other means could hope to achieve.
The all intrusiveness of this technology flies in the very face of the freedoms we claim to be fighting for. This technology is in its infancy but given the rapid pace of development today this technology could possibly mature in a few short years. Strong, ethical safeguards must be put in place now along with strict limitations as to who may have access to this technology and for which purposes. Without such safe guards in place perhaps we should be as the throngs of people in the movie Frankenstein and surround this castle with torches and pitchforks, though I would hope we do a better job of preventing the monsters release.
--NickD
(To reply, click here.)
"Under controlled conditions, they can tell from a brain scan which of two images you're looking at. They can tell whether you're thinking of a face, an animal, or a scene."
The way to beat this is to be paranoid, and carry false images in your head, to deliberately fool the machines. Mutter constantly about all kinds of nonsense. That way, they can't "see" your mind. if you don't want them to "see" you thinking about a cow, then force yourself to imagine a chicken instead, while waving your arms about wildly. Oh, and possibly tinfoil hats help, too.
They can even tell which finger you're about to move."
Probably not, if I'm alternating with my mind: left, right, left, right, and then I make a split decision. Because even I didn't know which finger I was about to move until I did it.
--Caromer
(To reply, click here.)
(3/20)