“ These feelings are exacerbated in a democracy, where, in order to be taken seriously, one must have an opinion to-hand on every topic. What matters is to be able to loudly articulate this opinion, rather than its truth.”
I love this. Having lived in San Francisco for 10 years where diversity of opinions go to die, this totally resonates with me.
Nik Jewell
2 months ago
I thoroughly recommend Nita Farahany’s The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology. What the authors of the book and this piece are warning about needs to be taken very seriously and urgently.
Robbie K
2 months ago
The article is taking a huge and somewhat ridiculous leap in what this tech is capable of.
Besides, why would anyone want Alexa inside your own head?
“In the UK, we are protected from being discriminated against for our “philosophical beliefs” by the Equality Act 2010.”
If only that were true.
The reality is that this mountain of “equalities” and “human rights” legislation has only eroded the basic and long-established principles of our legal system which did guarantee free speech. Everything is now treated as an exception (special case). And each minority interest group insists on both a) equal treatment when they want it and b) special (preferential) treatment when they don’t.
Just bin the whole lot. And fire all the parasitic lawyers and “activists”.
Steve Murray
2 months ago
In order to be able to think, at least in the way the author intends, one must be prepared for discomfort and exercised in the act. That’s what’s becoming less evident.
The whole tech, media and academic sectors are geared towards reducing independent thought, as opposed to the regurgitation of the thoughts of others.
How often, for instance, do we see quotes provided on here to try to bolster an argument – or even make the whole point. Please desist! Make your own case, and stand or fall by it. Either way, you’ll learn something and next time your argument may be more robust. That can only happen if you’re able to think in the first place.
John Riordan
2 months ago
I must be unusual, according to this article, in that I get out for running, walking, gym etc three times a day specifically so I can get away from the torrent of information that the web blasts in everyone’s face.
I didn’t develop this habit out of some far-seeing wisdom about how web and social media would come to dominate our attention, in case anyone thinks I’m bragging here, I developed it years ago because as a software developer I stare at a screen all day anyway and getting away from it is essential for sanity’s sake.
I get out for running, walking, gym etc three times a day specifically so I can get away from the torrent of information that the web blasts in everyone’s face.
As a fellow gym-goer, I am constantly struck by the number of people who bring the digital world along with them, mostly getting in people’s way and accomplishing little themselves.
Indeed. My gym often takes up 50% more time per workout session than it needs to just because of other people using weights machines as chairs so they can play with their smartphones, forcing other people to wait around for them.
Doubtless they’d claim to be resting between sets, but the fact is that if you rest between sets without a smartphone in your hand, you’ll be on the machine for much less time.
Go up to them and ask to ‘work in’ on the equipment and alternate sets. Always used to be the correct gym etiquette at busy times. Or would that get you a torrent of abuse these days?
Not a torrent of abuse, no, more passive-aggressive behaviour that is still unpleasant enough to be a deterrant. On one occasion I was waiting for the only leg extension machine in the gym, there was a bloke lackadaisically doing a few sets with such poor technique that he’d have been better off just sitting in a comfy chair, and he was of course looking at his phone for a minute or two between sets. When I asked him if I could jump in he just gave me a not-quite hostile look and said he had 8 more sets to do, in a tone of voice that implied I was rude to have asked.
You can guess where I’d like to have shoved the phone he was holding.
Jules Anjim
2 months ago
As an undergraduate I took part in a similar study where students were left in a room for 15 minutes with the choice of either thinking or masturbating. Needless to say, I wouldn’t have wanted to be on duty as a cleaner that day. That’s not to say that participants were not also partial to thinking (about masturbation).
Apropos of nothing in particular, has the author ever spent much time outside of a university environment ?
Jules Anjim
2 months ago
I think historians will ultimately recognise the important role that free thinking and associated negative sentiment played in the demise of the consumer-capitalist model (in no small part fanned by subversive agitators such as UnHerd and its gaggle of associate professors cum writers). The natural evolution of smart gadgets is a convergence with increasingly autocratic corporate governance and political approaches to devise a micro-chip implanted at birth which will detect negative thoughts, regulate the host body’s emotional state along continuum of calm, civility and compliance, and collate an inventory of near-term material desires, which are transmitted to a virtual market place where vendors submit instantaneous offers which are accepted based on your iPhone’s default ‘consumption’ settings.
While some say this already exists in the form of modern media (the BBC in particular), the private sector’s endeavours in this sphere have been far more effective – Fox News and Apple would be my preferred models – and I think given their existing business links to autocratic governments, they will be more likely to make substantive progress in the general evolution towards a more efficient and necessarily autocratic system of compliant consumption required to maintain consistent and non-volatile economic growth which does not disrupt the associated political status quo required to physically enforce compliance as a fail safe.
We have already have gadgets capable of detecting physical things like neuronal activity, and from which we can, within limits, infer your ’emotional state’ as you wrote this. We’ll never have one that can detect your thoughts, ‘negative’ or otherwise. The only way we can know those is if you tell us yourself, as you’ve done here. See my post on this.
Douglas Redmayne
2 months ago
The best use for neuralink will be for neuromodulation: the device will send electtonic signals to counteract stressful or depressing thoughts by engaging tbe parasympathetic nervous system an/ or dopamine production pathways. It will be able to do this in response to electronic signals sent by srnsors in other parts of the bidy that can measure the quantity of stress adrrniline and stress hormones in the body. In this way people may live happier stress free lives.
that is so if we were machines…. but we are living beings who can only be alive in contact with other life… we are very complex systems that will often react in very unpredictable ways….linear explanations often fail in medicine…
” Flly human” is a subjective concept and irrelevant. If people can experience the nirvana of the present moment by artificial means then they wont care and neither will most other people as long as they dont create ant social disturbanc ir crime which they will be less likely to do.
Why? If people can attain happiness eadily then its good isntnit?
Robert
2 months ago
“A 2014 study foundthat when students were left in a room for 15 minutes with the choice of either thinking or giving themselves electric shocks, two-thirds of men and a quarter of women electrocuted themselves.”
Bill Hicks had thoughts (sorry!) on this too – see ‘Love All The People’.
Alex Lekas
2 months ago
The continued erosion of free speech and expression invariably leads to the creation of thought crimes. It’s already happening. Anyone not on board with “the current thing” is immediately branded as guilty of some ism or phobia.
Mark Kennedy
2 months ago
“Before Neuralink’s “brain-reading” technology works out how to decode thoughts from neurons…”
That any kind of technology will ever succeed in doing this seems wildly improbable. How–even in principle, never mind in practice–could any observation of neural activity discover your estimate of the adequacy of the plot of a movie you’ve just watched, for example, or enable an observer to infer that at this moment you’re recalling an incident from your childhood? There’s nothing in patterns of neural firings from which such arbitrary and idiosyncratic thoughts could be ‘decoded,’ no ‘table of associations’ one could consult that links ‘specific neural firing pattern X’ with ‘specific thought Y;’ brains just don’t work like that. You can share opinions with other people on a wide range of issues, yet the configurations of neurons in their brains are different from yours, and the patterns of neural firings associated with the identical opinions will also differ from individual to individual. Whatever ‘identity of thought’ may exist between you, there certainly won’t be a similar ‘identity of neural firing patterns’ in all these individuals.
It’s not even clear that the same opinion in your own brain necessarily has to arise from the same pattern of neural firings twice in a row. Depending on the contexts in which you happen to be thinking about something, your neurons could take very paths to the opinion in question. It follows that even a complete history of your neural activity, whatever else it might tell an observer about you, could never provide that observer with anything like a code book from which your thoughts could be deduced.
John Tyler
2 months ago
It’s a fine line between thinking’ and ‘expression of thought’.
I am allowed to hate or love something that it is illegal to express. Other thoughts may be legal but unwise to express for fear of negative judgement by others. People sometimes negatively judge a lack of expression as lack of some expected thinking (hence, at least partly, virtue signalling, which is nothing new).
The fact is, one can rely neither on keeping one’s silence nor speaking one’s mind, even tactfully. Well, that’s my thoughts anyway…
Mark Kennedy
2 months ago
“Before Neuralink’s “brain-reading” technology works out how to decode thoughts from neurons…”
That any kind of technology will ever succeed in doing this seems wildly improbable. How–even in principle, never mind in practice–could any observation of neural activity discover your estimate of the adequacy of the plot of a movie you’ve just watched, for example, or enable an observer to infer that at this moment you’re recalling an incident from your childhood? There’s nothing in patterns of neural firings from which such arbitrary and idiosyncratic thoughts could be ‘decoded,’ no ‘table of associations’ one could consult that links ‘specific neural firing pattern X’ with ‘specific thought Y;’ brains just don’t work like that. You can share opinions with other people on a wide range of issues, yet the configurations of neurons in their brains are different from yours, and the patterns of neural firings associated with the identical opinions will also differ from individual to individual. Whatever ‘identity of thought’ may exist between you, there certainly won’t be a similar ‘identity of neural firing patterns’ in all these individuals.
It’s not even clear that the same opinion in your own brain necessarily has to arise from the same pattern of neural firings twice in a row. Depending on the contexts in which you happen to be thinking about something, your neurons could take very paths to the opinion in question. It follows that even a complete history of your neural activity, whatever else it might tell an observer about you, could never provide that observer with anything like a code book from which your thoughts could be deduced.
Mark Kennedy
2 months ago
Why has nobody pointed out the obvious: you can’t substitute the phrase ‘detecting thought’ for the phrase ‘detecting neuronal activity’ in a proposition without changing the proposition’s meaning. To pretend that you can simple commits the fallacy of logical equivocation.
No doubt thought arises from neuronal activity in some way, but I have yet to read a philosopher or neuroscientist who can plausibly explain how. How does conscious experience arise from material processes in general? I’ve been reading proposed solutions to this problem since the 1970s, and while some are quite ingenious in the end they always prove disappointing; we’re no closer to solving “the hard problem of consciousness” than we ever were. How does any scientific analysis of colour in terms of wavelengths get us to the lived experience of redness? How could any description of colour convey to someone blind since birth what this experience is like?
The very phrase “arises from” is an admission that, whatever the relation between neuronal activity and thought might be, it isn’t an identity relationship. Neuronal activity and thought may be two sides of the same coin, but we still haven’t the slightest idea how to get from one side of this coin to the other, and heads still aren’t tails. It’s no accident that the vocabularies for describing thought and neuronal activity are completely different: both vocabularies are necessary. What could it possibly mean to say that a neural pattern is ‘subversive’ or ‘negative,’ or that your opinion that movie A is better than movie B is two centimetres to the left of, and one centimetre higher than your opinion that a van is a better choice for you than an SUV?
Benedict Waterson
2 months ago
Thought-provoking article.
‘Freethinking’ is a relative term, because all thought relies on networks of previous and current thinkers, so no-one is truly independent in their thought.
The prevailing authoritarian progressivism is attractive to those who seek the psychological comfort of tribalism and group -think, while outsourcing their personal thinking and worldview to the impulses of the tribe.
The appeal of ‘independent thought’ is not that it is genuinely sui generis, but that it provides valuable correctives to destructive mass delusions
Mangle Tangle
2 months ago
“ Before Neuralink’s “brain-reading” technology works out how to decode thoughts from neurons…” Fat chance!
“ These feelings are exacerbated in a democracy, where, in order to be taken seriously, one must have an opinion to-hand on every topic. What matters is to be able to loudly articulate this opinion, rather than its truth.”
I love this. Having lived in San Francisco for 10 years where diversity of opinions go to die, this totally resonates with me.
I thoroughly recommend Nita Farahany’s The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology. What the authors of the book and this piece are warning about needs to be taken very seriously and urgently.
The article is taking a huge and somewhat ridiculous leap in what this tech is capable of.
Besides, why would anyone want Alexa inside your own head?
Try this as a brief intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP_7FOnMRF0
The photo at the beginning of the article makes Elon look really creepy (not that this would be hard).
An apposite photo, then.
Nonsense! He just needs a proper shave.
“In the UK, we are protected from being discriminated against for our “philosophical beliefs” by the Equality Act 2010.”
If only that were true.
The reality is that this mountain of “equalities” and “human rights” legislation has only eroded the basic and long-established principles of our legal system which did guarantee free speech. Everything is now treated as an exception (special case). And each minority interest group insists on both a) equal treatment when they want it and b) special (preferential) treatment when they don’t.
Just bin the whole lot. And fire all the parasitic lawyers and “activists”.
In order to be able to think, at least in the way the author intends, one must be prepared for discomfort and exercised in the act. That’s what’s becoming less evident.
The whole tech, media and academic sectors are geared towards reducing independent thought, as opposed to the regurgitation of the thoughts of others.
How often, for instance, do we see quotes provided on here to try to bolster an argument – or even make the whole point. Please desist! Make your own case, and stand or fall by it. Either way, you’ll learn something and next time your argument may be more robust. That can only happen if you’re able to think in the first place.
I must be unusual, according to this article, in that I get out for running, walking, gym etc three times a day specifically so I can get away from the torrent of information that the web blasts in everyone’s face.
I didn’t develop this habit out of some far-seeing wisdom about how web and social media would come to dominate our attention, in case anyone thinks I’m bragging here, I developed it years ago because as a software developer I stare at a screen all day anyway and getting away from it is essential for sanity’s sake.
I get out for running, walking, gym etc three times a day specifically so I can get away from the torrent of information that the web blasts in everyone’s face.
As a fellow gym-goer, I am constantly struck by the number of people who bring the digital world along with them, mostly getting in people’s way and accomplishing little themselves.
Indeed. My gym often takes up 50% more time per workout session than it needs to just because of other people using weights machines as chairs so they can play with their smartphones, forcing other people to wait around for them.
Doubtless they’d claim to be resting between sets, but the fact is that if you rest between sets without a smartphone in your hand, you’ll be on the machine for much less time.
Go up to them and ask to ‘work in’ on the equipment and alternate sets. Always used to be the correct gym etiquette at busy times. Or would that get you a torrent of abuse these days?
Not a torrent of abuse, no, more passive-aggressive behaviour that is still unpleasant enough to be a deterrant. On one occasion I was waiting for the only leg extension machine in the gym, there was a bloke lackadaisically doing a few sets with such poor technique that he’d have been better off just sitting in a comfy chair, and he was of course looking at his phone for a minute or two between sets. When I asked him if I could jump in he just gave me a not-quite hostile look and said he had 8 more sets to do, in a tone of voice that implied I was rude to have asked.
You can guess where I’d like to have shoved the phone he was holding.
As an undergraduate I took part in a similar study where students were left in a room for 15 minutes with the choice of either thinking or masturbating. Needless to say, I wouldn’t have wanted to be on duty as a cleaner that day. That’s not to say that participants were not also partial to thinking (about masturbation).
Apropos of nothing in particular, has the author ever spent much time outside of a university environment ?
I think historians will ultimately recognise the important role that free thinking and associated negative sentiment played in the demise of the consumer-capitalist model (in no small part fanned by subversive agitators such as UnHerd and its gaggle of associate professors cum writers). The natural evolution of smart gadgets is a convergence with increasingly autocratic corporate governance and political approaches to devise a micro-chip implanted at birth which will detect negative thoughts, regulate the host body’s emotional state along continuum of calm, civility and compliance, and collate an inventory of near-term material desires, which are transmitted to a virtual market place where vendors submit instantaneous offers which are accepted based on your iPhone’s default ‘consumption’ settings.
While some say this already exists in the form of modern media (the BBC in particular), the private sector’s endeavours in this sphere have been far more effective – Fox News and Apple would be my preferred models – and I think given their existing business links to autocratic governments, they will be more likely to make substantive progress in the general evolution towards a more efficient and necessarily autocratic system of compliant consumption required to maintain consistent and non-volatile economic growth which does not disrupt the associated political status quo required to physically enforce compliance as a fail safe.
Brave New World. Pass me the soma.
We have already have gadgets capable of detecting physical things like neuronal activity, and from which we can, within limits, infer your ’emotional state’ as you wrote this. We’ll never have one that can detect your thoughts, ‘negative’ or otherwise. The only way we can know those is if you tell us yourself, as you’ve done here. See my post on this.
The best use for neuralink will be for neuromodulation: the device will send electtonic signals to counteract stressful or depressing thoughts by engaging tbe parasympathetic nervous system an/ or dopamine production pathways. It will be able to do this in response to electronic signals sent by srnsors in other parts of the bidy that can measure the quantity of stress adrrniline and stress hormones in the body. In this way people may live happier stress free lives.
that is so if we were machines…. but we are living beings who can only be alive in contact with other life… we are very complex systems that will often react in very unpredictable ways….linear explanations often fail in medicine…
But will they be fully human? With the already large number of addled people in our midst, I wonder if we are already witnessing this dystopia.
” Flly human” is a subjective concept and irrelevant. If people can experience the nirvana of the present moment by artificial means then they wont care and neither will most other people as long as they dont create ant social disturbanc ir crime which they will be less likely to do.
What a horrifying scenario.
Why? If people can attain happiness eadily then its good isntnit?
“A 2014 study foundthat when students were left in a room for 15 minutes with the choice of either thinking or giving themselves electric shocks, two-thirds of men and a quarter of women electrocuted themselves.”
I’m still laughing.
Bill Hicks had thoughts (sorry!) on this too – see ‘Love All The People’.
The continued erosion of free speech and expression invariably leads to the creation of thought crimes. It’s already happening. Anyone not on board with “the current thing” is immediately branded as guilty of some ism or phobia.
“Before Neuralink’s “brain-reading” technology works out how to decode thoughts from neurons…”
That any kind of technology will ever succeed in doing this seems wildly improbable. How–even in principle, never mind in practice–could any observation of neural activity discover your estimate of the adequacy of the plot of a movie you’ve just watched, for example, or enable an observer to infer that at this moment you’re recalling an incident from your childhood? There’s nothing in patterns of neural firings from which such arbitrary and idiosyncratic thoughts could be ‘decoded,’ no ‘table of associations’ one could consult that links ‘specific neural firing pattern X’ with ‘specific thought Y;’ brains just don’t work like that. You can share opinions with other people on a wide range of issues, yet the configurations of neurons in their brains are different from yours, and the patterns of neural firings associated with the identical opinions will also differ from individual to individual. Whatever ‘identity of thought’ may exist between you, there certainly won’t be a similar ‘identity of neural firing patterns’ in all these individuals.
It’s not even clear that the same opinion in your own brain necessarily has to arise from the same pattern of neural firings twice in a row. Depending on the contexts in which you happen to be thinking about something, your neurons could take very paths to the opinion in question. It follows that even a complete history of your neural activity, whatever else it might tell an observer about you, could never provide that observer with anything like a code book from which your thoughts could be deduced.
It’s a fine line between thinking’ and ‘expression of thought’.
I am allowed to hate or love something that it is illegal to express. Other thoughts may be legal but unwise to express for fear of negative judgement by others. People sometimes negatively judge a lack of expression as lack of some expected thinking (hence, at least partly, virtue signalling, which is nothing new).
The fact is, one can rely neither on keeping one’s silence nor speaking one’s mind, even tactfully. Well, that’s my thoughts anyway…
“Before Neuralink’s “brain-reading” technology works out how to decode thoughts from neurons…”
That any kind of technology will ever succeed in doing this seems wildly improbable. How–even in principle, never mind in practice–could any observation of neural activity discover your estimate of the adequacy of the plot of a movie you’ve just watched, for example, or enable an observer to infer that at this moment you’re recalling an incident from your childhood? There’s nothing in patterns of neural firings from which such arbitrary and idiosyncratic thoughts could be ‘decoded,’ no ‘table of associations’ one could consult that links ‘specific neural firing pattern X’ with ‘specific thought Y;’ brains just don’t work like that. You can share opinions with other people on a wide range of issues, yet the configurations of neurons in their brains are different from yours, and the patterns of neural firings associated with the identical opinions will also differ from individual to individual. Whatever ‘identity of thought’ may exist between you, there certainly won’t be a similar ‘identity of neural firing patterns’ in all these individuals.
It’s not even clear that the same opinion in your own brain necessarily has to arise from the same pattern of neural firings twice in a row. Depending on the contexts in which you happen to be thinking about something, your neurons could take very paths to the opinion in question. It follows that even a complete history of your neural activity, whatever else it might tell an observer about you, could never provide that observer with anything like a code book from which your thoughts could be deduced.
Why has nobody pointed out the obvious: you can’t substitute the phrase ‘detecting thought’ for the phrase ‘detecting neuronal activity’ in a proposition without changing the proposition’s meaning. To pretend that you can simple commits the fallacy of logical equivocation.
No doubt thought arises from neuronal activity in some way, but I have yet to read a philosopher or neuroscientist who can plausibly explain how. How does conscious experience arise from material processes in general? I’ve been reading proposed solutions to this problem since the 1970s, and while some are quite ingenious in the end they always prove disappointing; we’re no closer to solving “the hard problem of consciousness” than we ever were. How does any scientific analysis of colour in terms of wavelengths get us to the lived experience of redness? How could any description of colour convey to someone blind since birth what this experience is like?
The very phrase “arises from” is an admission that, whatever the relation between neuronal activity and thought might be, it isn’t an identity relationship. Neuronal activity and thought may be two sides of the same coin, but we still haven’t the slightest idea how to get from one side of this coin to the other, and heads still aren’t tails. It’s no accident that the vocabularies for describing thought and neuronal activity are completely different: both vocabularies are necessary. What could it possibly mean to say that a neural pattern is ‘subversive’ or ‘negative,’ or that your opinion that movie A is better than movie B is two centimetres to the left of, and one centimetre higher than your opinion that a van is a better choice for you than an SUV?
Thought-provoking article.
‘Freethinking’ is a relative term, because all thought relies on networks of previous and current thinkers, so no-one is truly independent in their thought.
The prevailing authoritarian progressivism is attractive to those who seek the psychological comfort of tribalism and group -think, while outsourcing their personal thinking and worldview to the impulses of the tribe.
The appeal of ‘independent thought’ is not that it is genuinely sui generis, but that it provides valuable correctives to destructive mass delusions
“ Before Neuralink’s “brain-reading” technology works out how to decode thoughts from neurons…” Fat chance!