No, always wrong all the time. Negating someone's choice is both negating their autonomy and culpability. People should have to consider and deal with the consequences of their actions, which mind control would negate.
Interesting that you ask this, as I recall playing a mind controlling mutant in an online chat format, in a Marvel/Mutant school setting. My guy was an open believer in Magneto's philosophy that mutants were the next evolution of man. My character didn't openly suggest genocide of normals, but he sure didn't have much love for them. The funny thing, was even though he was always a perfectly polite person, and helped people, and only ever used his mind control powers one time (to force an non-mutant enemy to drop his weapon and handcuff himself, instead of you know, attacking us), he was looked on as a pariah. Which is funny, considering one of the other mutants killed a guy in the same fight. That was ok apparently, but me ending the conflict without bloodshed, creepy. I found it funny, how the people were willing to just let certain plot elements go as being "ok", even though they were super suspiciously anti-mutant. And when my character spoke up, he was shunned. So I would say that most of the population would probably find it distasteful.BloatedGuppy said:Spoiler for Jessica Jones Episode 8 if you want to know what prompted the question:
Jessica takes Kilgrave to the site of a hostage situation, where he uses his powers to talk the hostage-taker into letting his hostages go before turning himself over to the police. Jessica tells him he saved four lives, and briefly considers whether it would be worth surrendering the balance of her own life to act as a caretaker for him, pointing him in the right direction and "using his power for good".
So, my question is this. Presume you had a power to make people do whatever you wanted. You could talk suicides off ledges, you could talk ideological fanatics into reason, you could talk dictators into humanitarians, etc, etc. You could impose your view of a moral society on the world, one hi-jacked brain at a time.
Regardless of the outcome. Let's say you saved thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives. Would the use of that power still not be a fundamentally evil act? Regardless of your intention, you are still violating someone in the most intimate way. You are making them a prisoner in their own mind. You are removing their volition and substituting your will.
Could such an act ever be good? Does the end justify the means?
PLEASE DO NOT POST JESSICA JONES SPOILERS I'M ONLY ON EPISODE EIGHT THANK YOU.
The difference being that if the gunman surrenders, you're reasonably sure he's surrendered to your authority, if only for a time. Someone mind controlled may break free, being incensed after the violation of their free will.Secondhand Revenant said:I think it can. What's the big difference between telling a gunman to surrender and using mind control or forcing him to physically? His choice doesn't matter in that position, what matters is stopping him.
Or if you command someone "Never murder someone". What's the dilemma? That they cannot make a wrong choice that ruins someone else's life?
I don't think there's a dilemma in situations where you are depriving someone of a choice they shouldn't be allowed to make.
Yes ... but the thing is the same could be said of other systems, such as manipulating peer pressure or circumventing the mnechanics of the diffusion of responsibility. You're right about hypnoitism, but at the sometime, but I would argue against authorioty simply being situational. I mean you can say that of anything ... knowing how to manipulate the psychosocial environment is nothing but situational, doesn't mean it's not tangibly disimilar to circumventing systems of self-control. Given that's exactly what it is and the effects can often be far more surprising than fictional depictions of mind control.DMSO said:By definition, hypnotism is both a voluntary state, and voluntarily maintained. If you try to induce someone to behavior they're not prepared to do, they simply have an "abreaction" and wake up. It is considerably less powerful as a tool than depicted in most fiction in any case, unless you're using it like meditation. In the case of authority tests it's not a matter of mind control either, but situational control. One may tend to resemble the other, but only in the way that strangulation starts to resemble any process which leads to cellular asphyxia. They reach a similar grisly conclusion in most cases though.
Fairly skeptical, but the difference is that we don't just see examples of long-term memory store being rewritten, but also short-term memory store. As you said, by the misappropriation of stimuli when being brought into recall. Remembering a memory as part of a specific stimuli irrevocably changes the memory. They've know about that for awhile. In fact they did experiments by trying to improve memory by associating it with sensation. What we learnt that scent is particularly potent due to the biological construction of how we smell.DMSO said:I think the larger issue there isn't the ability to selectively edit memories, it's that we as people haven't come to accept what we as people are. We're fragile, and every act of recollection opens a memory to editing. The thing is, if you're educated about these, trained even, you can simply resist or ignore them. They are not magic, not a "power". They are powerful because they are stealthy, because they can be used in ways that are made to be egosyntonic. "You have bad breath, no one will love you, use Listerine." That's really powerful, until you know the principle behind it, then boom... zero engagement.
It's always been, and will always be a war for our minds, with education being the only real defense. The point of mind 'CONTROL' over influence though, is disregard for the individual. For example, torture works if you don't care about it working on any one person. If you're only interested in meeting some quota, with endless raw human material, time, and resources, you can torture people as a group into just about anything. The Chinese produced the illusion of "Brainwashing" this way, in Korea.
The dirty secret though is that like the swan, a lot goes on beneath. For one, most people you torture, around 40%, simply won't break. There are a ton of reasons why this is, and we don't need to get into them here, but the point is that if the state needs you Paul H to confess to your "crimes" (and not scream "I'm being framed!" on the stand at your show trial) there is no way to do that now. There's a way to make a certain number of people in a group, some of whom will die, be crippled, and lose their minds, do it, but not just YOU, not reliably.
If or when that changes, our society is going to change. Why try to manipulate subtly what you can control outright? Our lives are relationships built on exchanged influence, but what if that didn't matter in the face of some absolute control? Not a tendency, not a high percentage of compliance, but total control? I think that line matters, because it changes how people relate to each other and governments relate to people. For one, killing people becomes an insane waste of future resources, a future slave waiting to be made. For another, once someone is under your control you don't have to have any concern for maintaining their state of servitude, there is no risk of your system being unstable like any slavery-based system.
Finally, and most critically, if you can control minds you can do so in a way that hides the fact of what you've done. Yes, I know that you can kick down my door if you want to and rob me, but I will know that my door has been kicked in. If you pick my lock, you can enter without my knowledge. If you can pass through walls...
WutThe Philistine said:The difference being that if the gunman surrenders, you're reasonably sure he's surrendered to your authority, if only for a time. Someone mind controlled may break free, being incensed after the violation of their free will.Secondhand Revenant said:I think it can. What's the big difference between telling a gunman to surrender and using mind control or forcing him to physically? His choice doesn't matter in that position, what matters is stopping him.
Or if you command someone "Never murder someone". What's the dilemma? That they cannot make a wrong choice that ruins someone else's life?
I don't think there's a dilemma in situations where you are depriving someone of a choice they shouldn't be allowed to make.
In the case of progamming someone to not murder, what was overwritten in the process? What part of them is lost or damaged? There would likely be some reasoning or function that brought about their urge to murder, and progamming the urge away by force might not reconcile with the new progamming. Murder isn't a normal choice to make, impeding that decision may not remove their threat.
They might be unable to defend themselves or others to avoid the risk of killing someone, take the order in some obtuse way such as a skewed definition of murder to justify continuing to kill, or take it to a logical extreme and stop eating to avoid the death of anything.
The results almost certainly would be unpredictable, or at least unreliable. Should a progammed person break from that progamming, they may wind up being an even worse danger from the experience.
No, using plausible possibilities in place of spoiling works that follow the victims of mind control like Jessica Jones, Dresden Files, or Clockwork Orange. The human mind is complex, and tampering with it could lead to unexpected results. If it's used to issue an order like, "Don't murder", the underlying cause of that person wanting to murder is not addressed, and will likely be taken out in some other way, which could wind up being even worse for all involved.Secondhand Revenant said:Wut
You're arguing based on the *details* of mind control that doesn't exist? Just no. That's not about the ethics of mind control that's about *your* version of it. This makes as little sense as saying we can't use a gun that freezes someone in time since it might accidentally obliterate them from existence. You're making up new details to the theoretical power.