Kevin's Watch

www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16811042

Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words.

The technique reported in PLoS Biology relies on gathering electrical signals directly from patients' brains.

Based on signals from listening patients, a computer model was used to reconstruct the sounds of words that patients were thinking of.

The method may in future help comatose and locked-in patients communicate.

It's only a matter of time before the understanding is robust enough and tech is sophisticated enough for someone to listen in on the thoughts of people in the street....

Man - those people are in for a fun ride when they get inside 'my' head!

Seriuosely though, that is a frightening idea Murrin. You just know that this type of technology is bound to be abused in the manner you state if/when it comes to pass. It brings you heavily into the debate as to whether all knowledge is ethically neutral, it's goodness or badness being entierly dependant on it's use.

One thing that may make the above difficult is the question 'do we actually think in the same format (if that is the correct word) as we speak/write and generally communicate'. ie Are our conscious thoughts occuring in our heads as streams of words appearing on a page with temporal sequence, syntax etc in a way that they could be understood. Joyce et al's 'stream of conscious' writtings were an atempt to explore this but did they actually come close to the way we really think.

OTOH, the technology could be a godsend for women going through menopause. "What *is* that word? It's right on the tip of my tongue..."

peter wrote:It brings you heavily into the debate as to whether all knowledge is ethically neutral, it's goodness or badness being entierly dependant on it's use.

That's an easy one for me, but doubtless there are plenty who disagree. What you think doesn't matter. What you do does.

Yes, disturbing implications...thought crimes anyone?

--A

The construction of a nuclear bomb begins with an act of thinking and ends in an act of doing.

peter wrote:The construction of a nuclear bomb begins with an act of thinking and ends in an act of doing.

So? That doesn't mean that thinking about a nuclear bomb, or even about nuclear bombing a city, is equivalent to building one or bombing one.

--A

These are fair comments guys. But are there many examples of scientists *not* persueing their ideas to fruition (in fairness how could we know) on the basis that the work could have morally abhorent uses at some future time. Let us say for example a synthetic biologist decides he can engineer a highly virulent strain of H1N1 that will only infect people of a given ethnic background. Surely it would be wrong to pursue such work from the outset, rather than take the view that the work would be ethically neutral until it was actually put to a bad use?

All knowledge is morally neutral. But I can't think of a "good" use to put that knowledge to. Knowing how to do it however, is not "bad." Only using it is.

--A

The Knowledge may (I repeat may because I do have doubts even about this) be morally neutral in its self , but the transmission of knowledge is not so - this can be good (if it's intention is to do good and that intention is achieved) , bad (if its intention is to do evil [ditto], or neutral. Some Knowledge I feel could never be transmitted with good intent (eg tecniques of torture desighned to maximise pain without causind death etc) and on this basis the pursuit of such Knowledge and the knowledge itself become one and the same and are not separable to the point where the morally neutral nature of the knowledge is significant.

(hope this makes sense Avatar - I've read it through a couple of times and I still aint sure. )

What if the intent in transmitting knowledge is transmitting knowledge?

If I tell you about a way to torture people that is very effective, and you do it, then the responsibility is yours.

I'm not responsible for what you do with that knowledge.

Not only is knowledge neutral, I might even go so far as to say that all knowledge is "good" in itself, and that the transmission thereof, simply for its own sake, is equally "good."

It is only in the application that we may assign a negative value to it. And even then, only so far as we rely on our own perception of what is "bad," currently probably defined by how much harm is caused by that application.

--A

But Avatar, if I give someone a gun and they go out and kill someone, I must take some responsibility. If I give a boy a sports car and he goes out and knocks a pedestrian down I must take some responsibility. If I give someone the knowledge of how to torture and they go out and torture, similarly *I must take some responsibility*. I can see no way out of this. I maintain the transmission of this type of knowledge *cannot* be morally neutral.

peter wrote:But Avatar, if I give someone a gun and they go out and kill someone, I must take some responsibility.

Why? Unless they inform you that they would kill somebody if you gave it to them, or you knew that they had the propensity for killing people, how can you be responsible?

Everybody is responsible for their own actions. The things that they, by choice and will, can affect, change or manage. How can you be responsible for something outside of your control?

It's not your fault if somebody abuses the knowledge you gave them. Unless you knew in advance that they would do so. And even then, they remain ultimately responsible.

--A

Should we no longer be allowed to talk and make movies about the Holocaust?

Of course we should be able to Fist. I state quite clearly that knowledge transmission can be for good as well as bad (and neutral) reasons. Demonstrate to me that the person who taught Uday Hussein the torture tactics he used in Abu Graib bore no moral responsibility for the future crimes commited by that monster using those tecniques.

Everybody is responsible for their own actions. The things that they, by choice and will, can affect, change or manage. How can you be responsible for something outside of your control?

Transmitting knowledge is an action, therefore you can be responsible for it, and it is within your control whether you want to transmit it or not unless you are being tortured for the information.

Additionally, if decisions are made based on circumstance, then the decisions we make are not really entirely under our control since they were made on the basis of circumstances outside of our control.

In my mind, sharing a torture method is fairly mundane, since most people can probably come up with fairly painful methods of hurting someone else if they want to. Sharing knowledge of how to read words from people's minds is not, since most people probably can't figure out how to do that.

Hmm. On a strictly cost/benefit analysis, I'd say the advantages for spreading far outweigh the costs, especially when you consider: If you wanted to stop the spread of torture knowledge, what other related knowledge that is good/beneficial/positive would you also have to censor? It's nasty, in my view, to use knowledge biology [pain and autonomic reactions, for instance] and psychology/psychiatry [fear, stress for example] to torture...but how do you edit out the possibility of torture knowledge [or the invention/reverse engineering of it] without eliminating all the benefits from understanding those same fields?

But, back to the thought of being mind-read on the streets: Tinfoil hats really WILL help keep you safe! All those people we locked up aren't crazy, they're Seers!

I agree, Av, doing matters not thinking...OTOH, things could get odd in surveillance, search [unreasonable and otherwise], and related. For instance, I'm not a techie and I haven't read how/where it works, but there's supposedly software scanning the net for "keywords." Considering how often things like "terror,*" "Islam*," and a host of other related things come up in this place, and we're multinational...what are the chances that NONE of us have been looked at?

Well, considering that couple who were refused entry to the US and deported for some jokes they made on Twitter, (weeks before actually going to the US), possibly fairly small...

Bastards.

--A

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