19 Jun 07
Originally posted by ArrakisThis article is full of crap. It's what usually what happens when a layman reporter tries to report on a very technical scientific discovery.
Can determine what you are going to do before you do it...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2009229,00.html
First of all, the idea that a computer can read your thoughts is laughable. Sure they can scan your brain to find out where the activity is at any given moment, and even recognize patterns, but read your thoughts? They couldn't even tell if subjects were going to add or subtract two numbers with greater than 70% accuracy!! And that's with a proper calibration of the equipment and repeated scans of the subject's brain. How could they possibly codify something as complex as an intention to commit a crime? Especially when the subject in question would be somewhat less than forthcoming with calibration info.
Second, the brain is so enormously complex that the number of neural connections exceeds the estimated number of particles in the universe. That's a lot of connections. There's no way scientists could hope to map something that complex, to the level of detail they are discussing, with anything much less complex than another brain - and then there's the problem of how you get the information out of the model brain! I'll eat a half ton of raw horse meat if a scientist can ever accurately predict whether I'll say something as simple as "I" or if I'll say "me" instead.
Third, the extrapolation of this technology for e-mail and computer use is ridiculous. The brain does not relay information in English or any other mother tongue, it does so in something cognitive scientists call "mentalese", which is really nothing more than spacial, relational, quantitative and qualitative information contained in electrical impulses. In order to determine what the person wants to say, the brain scanner would have to have a "mentalese to English" dictionary. How could you develop such a thing? You'd basically have to make the user read through an entire English dictionary, and think hard about each word as they say it to get a proper brain scan. But what if the associations that come along with each word change over time? This can happen in seconds. Try saying "banana" 20 times fast, and see how different it begins to sound. Then imagine how the connotations of every word you know change depending on who says it, how they say it, where they said it, when they said it, whom they said it to, and what other sights, sounds, touches, tastes and smells you were experiencing when you heard it. Each of these impact the meaning of a particular word to a particular person, and meaning is intrinsic to the usefulness of language. Considering that "there", "their" and "they're" all sound the same but are completely disparate in meaning, and that "flammable" and "inflammable" are different but mean the same thing, it's no small task to decipher the thought process behind language.
I wouldn't start wearing a tinfoil hat to block out CIA mind scans anytime soon. 😉