Mind reading

Phi is fine. The devil is in the details Well the problem with mind reading is that Science has not discovered what exactly is the mind. There is a collection of materials that makes up a human brain. There are nueropathways that transmit and store the data. Science even has mapped where certain aspects of cognition take place in the brain. But how the data is encoded or stored is the question. If I think tree. You would not know I was thinking tree. If you could hook up a machine that could probe my brain how would it isolate the zillions of thoughts and memories being transported inside my brain? You could do a PET scan of me thinking tree and print out a picture of what my brain looks like when I think tree, but if I had a bad day the PET may look totally different.And your memory or thoughts of a tree would look different than mine. I admit that to say humans will NEVER develop mind reading sounds final, but humans will NEVER put a square peg in a round hold either. The problem with humans is we are all to human.IMO.

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"One is punished most for ones virtues" Fredrick Neitzche

Dosn't mean we wont keep trying Seriously, maybe Im biased since I want this to happen, but I think one day we may crack it. I belive IBM has been investing in neuroprocessor reaserch for a while now. Where they are trying to develop a new computer architecture based on the way human neurons work.I had this very interesting article on it... don't remember where it is now

I just bet you have a cryo tube waiting too.
Considering lobotomys have only recently been considered bad medicine; humankind has come a long way. If mind reading is ever perfected there is going to be a awful lot of pissed off people running around. Think Mel Gibson in that movie What Women Want.
I read one of your earlier post and agree that it seems a awful waste that all our memories and past are lost when the brain dies. It is awful. One reason perhaps why some people believe in a after life?

Ok this is my thread, and you moved me to start some off-topic musings:I don't belive in an afterlife per se, I do sort of have an idea that maybe we all return to the universe as some sort of "life energy". But I have no proof, nor do I expect any, it's just a personal belife hehehanyway... thats neither here nor there.Isn't it spectacular that a non-sentient, inanimete universe, over the cource of millions of years, essentialy spawned an eye to look back on itself thrugh us?I mean seriously, in a sense, we are the consiousness of the universe. This gigantic inky bubble of dust and nothing is staring back at itself and wondering "what the heck am I anyway"This thought blows my mind every time it crosses it.At the risk of sounding like some sort of new age hippy... it is this same sort of thing that causes me to think, "perhapse our own thoughts, imaginings, arbitrary ideas, are just as real as this phisical realm?"After all, if the universe is just an arbitrary existing "thing" then certainly all arbitrary existing things have just as much potential to house such unimaginable complexity. Once, a long time ago, I imagined, what if the universe was a dream of god?It was only later that I learned that hindus have a similar belife, and even more revelatory is the belife of australian aborigionees.They describe the world as the dreams of animals. The great snake went to sleep and dreamd of mountains, etc.Sleeping gods aside I seriously wonder how far these fancifull imaginings are away from actuall reality?heheh...Ok thats that.And no, I don't do drugs This message has been edited by Yaro, 07-21-2004 10:54 PM

Yaro Seems similar to your sentiments

I will do everything humanly possible to become an immortal even if I have to put myself on ice.

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The Laminator

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All very interesting, no doubt. This is why I rather enjoy being agnostic as opposed to atheist...lots of fun stuff to think about .I still think mind reading is quite possible. Just because something is complex doesn't mean we can't eventually figure it out. I don't want to start a debate or anything, but I was just curious about something. Do you have any ideas as to some sort of mechanism of the mind that we could never be able to figure out or access? I mean, something that we just can't explain through physical means? That's the only type of thing I can see as being a solid wall in the progression of such science.Edit: Just wanted to clarify that the last part I wrote was directed towards Phi, though anyone's comments would surely be welcome.This message has been edited by Glordag, 07-22-2004 04:30 AM

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The idea of downloading a mind to silicon may just be an inappropriate appealing to our modern technology sense of things to set the hook and reel us in.

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To what?

I think Glordag nails it. Seeing as I have already rejected supernaturalism, it mjust be the case, as far as I can see, that consciousness and mind are epiphenomenon of our physical structure. If that is true, then the default presumption must be that it is a set of code and that we will eventually figure it out. The contrary position seems to me to require the introduction of some kind of unmoved mover.

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"Thought-controlled" Neuroprosthesis
ROSSLYN, Va., March 6, 2000---Biomedical engineers have developed a prototype neuroprosthesis that a quadriplegic can use to grasp and manipulate objects just by thinking about it.

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The experimental device combines muscle-stimulating electrodes implanted under the skin with a computer sensitive to brain waves. Brain signals activate the electrodes that cause the hand muscles to contract.

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Note this is 4 years old.

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Volunteers Play a Video Game Using Only Their Thoughts; One Player Achieves Pinpoint Accuracy

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ARLINGTON, Va., July 9, 2004 -- Four adults quickly learned to play a simple video game---and win---by using only their thoughts to control the computer.

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"It took six minutes of training and they all achieved control in less than 24 minutes," said Eric Leuthardt, M.D., a neurosurgeon at Washington University in St. Louis. One player hit the target on every try.

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Error: 404 Category not foundThat ones more recent. Now I ask: if we have info tech already that can duplicate our brains control over its limbs, what reason is there for thinking that the organ which produces these instructions is essentially any different from a computer, or that it's data is in some sense a specially complex problem? It is not. The problem is that the brain and its programming is NOT intelligently designed, and so figuring out how to get these things done is messy. But that is only a matter of time.And then we might be able to run optimisation algorithms against the design and implement them into DNA.

Not gonna bite on this one.
And open up another Intelligent design thread. But I concede that the mechanisms of the brain and muscle are being sucessfully duplicated. This is not mind reading in the sense that one person can read the thoughts of another. I can use electrical impulses to manipulate a dead frogs leg, does this mean I can have it jump up and do the "Michigan Rag"? LOL.
Humans are emotional animals. Can emotion be duplicated?. AI is most likely going to be a reality in the future, I just do not think AI will be human. Spock answers every complex question on his computer terminal until the computer ask? "How do you feel?" *edit to add image. This message has been edited by 1.61803, 07-22-2004 03:16 PM

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"One is punished most for ones virtues" Fredrick Neitzche

Personally, I think that people do not take seriously enough the arguments advanced by the likes of J.R. Lucas, Roger Penrose, David Chalmers et al that use the halting problem/Gdel Incompleteness to substantiate the non-computability of consciousness.It seems obvious to me that the contents of private thoughts can never be fully captured in terms of exterior states. Certainly, a measure of pleasure centers in a subject's brain might indicate roughly if he is feeling "happy" or "good," for example, but even the most complete description of a brain-state will never communicate to an observer the actual feelings of the subject, and that's what thoughts are fundamentally: feelings. Feelings are inherently subjective, and for that reason objective descriptions of them can never contain all of their information. Knowing all the physical facts about a person's experience will not induce the experience itself. The actual experiences -- called "qualia" -- contain facts that are not physically describable.

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The actual experiences -- called "qualia" -- contain facts that are not physically describable.

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I regard that is completely impossible; for them to be experienced in the first instance they must have been materially expressed. If they can be materially expressed in one brain, they can be materially
expressed in another.

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and that's what thoughts are fundamentally: feelings.

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... which are in turn merely chemical and electrical interactions. That is what you feel - just as a computer would.

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I can use electrical impulses to manipulate a dead frogs leg, does this mean I can have it jump up and do the "Michigan Rag"? LOL.

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Yes, potentially. If you had a good enough algorithm, and a good enough interface, you could programme a sequence of electrical signals that would produce a series of muscular contractions that could in turn make a dead frog dance.

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Humans are emotional animals. Can emotion be duplicated?.

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I don't see why not. Emotion too is a chemical and electrical interaction like everything else your consciousness experiences. In fact, you felt emotions as a small child before you were meaningfully sentient; as do animals. So of all things that might separate biological and silica intelligences, thats unlikely to be it.

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AI is most likely going to be a reality in the future, I just do not think AI will be human.

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Oh it certainly won't be HUMAN by a long way. Consider, it won't even be a mammal.

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Personally, I think that people do not take seriously enough the arguments advanced by the likes of J.R. Lucas, Roger Penrose, David Chalmers et al that use the halting problem/Gdel Incompleteness to substantiate the non-computability of consciousness.

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Can you give me any websites or books to read on that subject? It seems pretty interesting, and I'd like to read up on it and see if my view changes at all. Note that I wouldn't be going into it very biased, as I can most certainly see the possibility of something like this being impossible. I merely do not see anything that would prevent us from accomplishing it at this point, so I am forced to believe it is possible. I suppose there's a little bit of faith/hope in science there, too .BTW...nice frog joke lol.

Mary Shelly would be proud.
And I do not agree that emotions can be duplicated . I say this because if emotions are different for every person and creature dependant on so many developmental factors and experiences. How could the life of a creatures experiences be recreated and duplicated? I have memories that shape my behaviors and conciousness, if one were to attempt to duplicate my emotions and psyche how would a programmer know what I thought about a tree, or the color red? Or how it felt to be 3 years old and swinging on a tire? No..that comes from being alive and having those memories makes me ...me. I doubt seriously emotion will ever be duplicated. Nor will mind reading. IMO. I respect your opinion as well but there is nothing at the present that suggest to me it will ever be possible. Thats not to say AI wont be, I concede it will, but like I said it wont be human. Just think about how many hormones that upregulate and downregulate a woman who is PMS'ing..influencing her emotions. Now say she had a bad day. Do you think this complex system of whoopass is going to be duplicated? And suppose in her past she was conditoned to hate the smell of fish, because her dad use to make her clean fish as a child. So you decide to eat a fish sandwich, and she unloads on you. Can you not see how uncertain human emotion is. You would stand there with tartar sauce splashed in your face wondering...what the hell did I do?