Brain waves are a product of neural activation. As action potentials are released in series, they generate waves of subtle electrical activity. This is what EEGs are picking up. You can no more give people thoughts and experiences by pressing "PLAY" on an EEG than you can make your car move by making engine noises. "Vroom vroom!"
I don't know how I could disagree with that, as I don't recall mentionning "thoughts and experiences" (as memories), kind of being implanted into a subject's mind as you suggest. I didn't even
think of that, essentially because that was not my point.
At best, I've mentionned a degree of puppetizing. Influencing the mood of someone scores as puppetizing in my book, and can also be considered a form of control, from the moment you actually manage to influence the mind to some extent, you're just pulling a puppet string, even if it's just a minor one. As you supported yourself, tests made decades ago, with rather primitive tools, already proved it could be possible to alter the state of a person with something as raw as two electrodes and some weak electrical currents. Again, to some degree. We agree on that.
There are opinions on the form the technologies adressed above could grow into.
There are huge skeptics, and some who are enthusiastic, maybe a bit too much. I'm in the second group.
"Mind Control" is just a term that sells, if you allow me the expression, just like the title of the article says "Mario reads minds". I was particularily curious about the necessity to associate Mario to the real meat and potatoes of the article, which somehow illustrated how people might be unconsciously unsecure about those technologies, and need a "friendly face" to be associated to them. To me, the association is just as creepy as clowns are.
Besides the book's name, I've been cautious not citing the term "mind control"
myself. But we're in the first steps, and it's not without a reason that I'm talking about what could be done in the future. There's a fair part of belief, true, and I know that this is anti-scientific, as all has to be based on observations, facts and empirical study, but history has also largely proved that many things scientists considered firmly impossible yesterday, have become realities now, and I hardly doubt that all scientists don't have part of dream that feeds them. What you consider an unforeseenable future, I say it could come sooner than expected.
So between ramblings worth of a SF average seller, and the traditionnal blasé attitude certain scientist groups display, I believe there's a middle ground that is nice to explore.
Yes, the brain is complex, there is no point denying that, and I think it's been sufficiently hammered for the past decades. I'm sorry if my words make it sound as if I was claimnig that studies stopped after 1970, but somehow, I don't think that even
you really believed that I was making those sorts of claims. Or am I wrong?
But as for what's "easy" (and again, please notice the ""), you're putting the word
out of context. I encourage you to reread the paragraph in question. It was regarding what's
already done today, with the proposed headsets (which will probably be looked upon as outdated in a couple of years later). That is, how they can "control" a machine with those devices to a certain extent, minor at the moment, with an amount of actions derived from the reading of those brainwaves. Now, there are various degrees of control on a machine
at the moment, but I don't recall talking about making robots walk or whatever else similar to that, or even approaching that. The subject of the paragraph, which you picked the word easy from, was about forms of interaction
in video games, and that, taking their word, is easily done. They're about to sell devices to prove it. Above all, it's only the beginning. When I provided examples from the mainstream entertainment that would ring a bell to most people (Animatrix, Minority Report), it was in conjunction with the words "future variants". There might be a leap of logic to be found here, but my very belief (which is a funny thing to say when it comes to science) is that in several decades, maybe many, maybe in more than a century, we'll reach a level of technology (if everything goes right... or wrong) that will lead to the creation of devices moderately capable of similar feats. I mean, science has provided many tools which have been used in such wrong ways. Why would those devices be free of such a travesty?
A slight correction however: In the Animatrix, IIRC, the robots
did plant electrodes in the studied specimens' brains to trigger emotions.
Continued
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