The Ethics of your thoughts: Brain Wave Decoding is possible

[mnorian]

Over ten years ago there was a show on Discovery channel; where they showed how a man that was paralyzed; and could not speak; had implants put into his brain and he was able to type on a computer just by thinking of the letters.

Even then the doctors were saying that they were working on wireless chips that could be put into the ear channel, without surgery, and through computer decoding of the electrical signals; from the brain; that the thoughts of the person could be turned into speech. If they could do that; then they should be able to put a miniature transmitter and be able to hear what a person thinks. This is no longer science fiction, but science fact. From an article in the Daily mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ng-Science-creates-decode-thoughts-words.html

CNN had an article about this in 2014 where Jack Gallant, a prominent neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley; said:

"The issue of mind reading brings up important ethical and public policy questions about privacy. Who can have access to your thoughts, and can you choose to keep certain things to yourself, or will even your strangest dreams be readily accessible? How will we control the use of mind-reading devices?
The actual technology may be far off, but Gallant insisted, "We need to start thinking about this now."

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/12/health/brain-mind-reading/

Now this was from a scientist that admits in the piece; that he wasn't interested in the mind reading part; but in the biological/neurology aspects to help people with speech and other problems; but there are others that are more into the research of mind decoding.

So; I don't really want to debate the reality of wireless thought communication; as since that show in 2003 I have read many articles and in depth research papers from universities and it's obvious that the technology is out there; and if this is out to the public; what has the government labs been up to?

What if they were able to put receiving antenna into elevators and monitor people; don't laugh, the Russians were experimenting with this against our embassy people back in the 70s. Or a govt like N. Korea put chips in Christians ears? Not technical advanced enough to do it; then how about China?

What I would like some feedback on; as DR. Gallant said above; is the privacy and moral implications of somebody else knowing your thoughts; be it doctors, judges, or govt agencies.

And as a Christian; what about in 1 Corinthians 2:11 "For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God." Do you think the thoughts of a person are the same as the spirit or is it on another level without thought?

What if someone else knew your thoughts; would you be able to pray in secret to the Father as the Bible tells you to?: Matthew 6:6: "But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly."

Oh; by the way; I'm an ex-electronic microwave technician; so, no the tin-foil hat wouldn't stop the radio waves from transmitting out from your skull; but would act like an antenna and help the probe transmit; so hold your tin-hat jokes.

 

[Dave-W]

They have been working on that tech for a long time .......

 

[Dave-W]

As to the doctrinal questions - yes the spirit is deeper than our conscious thought.

Romans 8:26 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

 

[mnorian]

They have been working on that tech for a long time .......

Newer device:

 

[mnorian]

San Diego neurobiologists have uncovered evidence that sheds light on the long-standing mystery of how the brain makes sense of the information contained in electrical impulses sent to it by millions of neurons from the body.

In a paper published 2004; in the early on-line version of the journal Nature, a UCSD team led by Massimo Scanziani explains how neurons, or nerve cells, in the brain sort out information before deciding how to respond. The paper appeared in a print issue of Nature.

"This study advances our understanding of how the brain reads a code made of identical electrical impulses, in order to produce a coherent perception of the world,” he says. “Deciphering the language of the brain will help us understand the neuronal basis for sensation and cognition and their associated disorders.” Said Dr. Scanziani.

Strangely; I am not coming up with in searches; white papers about the decoding of brain electrical impulses much newer then this; that I saw online years ago.

 

[mnorian]

As to the doctrinal questions - yes the spirit is deeper than our conscious thought.

Romans 8:26 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

Some translations, like the New International Version; translates 1 Corinthians 2:11 that I posted above as:

"For who knows a person's thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God."

Changing the "things of a man" to "a persons thoughts" equating the thoughts with the spirit.

 

[mnorian]

From MIT Technology Review:

Could a person who is paralyzed and unable to speak, like physicist Stephen Hawking, use a brain implant to carry on a conversation?
That’s the goal of an expanding research effort at U.S. universities, which over the last five years has proved that recording devices placed under the skull can capture brain activity associated with speaking.

While results are preliminary, Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, says he is working toward building a wireless brain-machine interface that could translate brain signals directly into audible speech using a voice synthesizer.

The effort to create a speech prosthetic builds on success at experiments in which paralyzed volunteers have used brain implants to manipulate robotic limbs using their thoughts (see “The Thought Experiment”). That technology works because scientists are able to roughly interpret the firing of neurons inside the brain’s motor cortex and map it to arm or leg movements.

Chang’s team is now trying to do the same for speech. It’s a trickier task, in part because complex language is unique to humans and the technology can’t easily be tested in animals.

At UCSF, Chang has been carrying out speech experiments in connection with brain surgeries he performs on patients with epilepsy. A sheet of electrodes placed under the patients’ skulls records electrical activity from the surface of the brain. Patients wear the device, known as an electrocorticography array, for several days so that doctors can locate the exact source of seizures.

Chang has taken advantage of the opportunity to study brain activity as these patients speak or listen to speech. In a paper in Nature last year, he and his colleagues described how they used the electrode array to map patterns of electrical activity in an area of the brain called the ventral sensory motor cortex as subjects pronounced sounds like “bah,” “dee,” and “goo.”

“There are several brain regions involved in vocalization, but we believe [this one] is important for the learned, voluntary control of speech,” Chang says.

The idea is to record the electrical activity in the motor cortex that causes speech-related movements of the lips, tongue, and vocal cords. By mathematically analyzing these patterns, Chang says, his team showed that “many key phonetic features” can be detected.

One of the most terrifying consequences of diseases like ALS is that as paralysis spreads, people lose not only the ability to move, but also the faculty of speech. Some ALS patients use devices that make use of residual movement to communicate. In Hawking’s case, he uses software that lets him very slowly spell words by twitching his cheek. Other patients use eye trackers to operate a computer mouse.

The idea of using a brain-machine interface to achieve near-conversational speech has been proposed before, most notably by Neural Signals, a company that since the 1980s has been testing technology that uses a single electrode to record from directly inside the brains of people with “locked-in” syndrome. In 2009, the company described efforts to decode speech from a 25-year-old paralyzed man who is unable to move or speak at all (see “A Prosthesis for Speech”).

Another study, published this year by Marc [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse]zky at Northwestern University, made an attempt to decode signals from the motor cortex as patients read aloud words containing all of the 39 English phonemes (consonant and vowel sounds that make up speech). The team identified phonemes with an average accuracy of 36 percent. The study used the same types of surface electrodes that Chang used.

[bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse]zky says that while that accuracy may seem low, it was achieved with a relatively small sample of words spoken in a limited amount of time. “We expect to achieve much better decoding in the future,” he says. Speech recognition software might also help guess which words people are attempting to say, scientists say

 

[mnorian]

Some of the best info I found was from Wiki; on BCI (brain-computer interface):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain–computer_interface#Synthetic_telepathy.2Fsilent_communication

And thought identification:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_identification
On BST (brain scanning technology) they reported that people's brains were scanned while they were using some of the new computer games that use BCI to control the games:

• In 2009 Mattel partnered with NeuroSky to release the Mindflex, a game that used an EEG to steer a ball through an obstacle course. By far the best selling consumer based EEG to date.[113][115]
• In 2009 Uncle Milton Industries partnered with NeuroSky to release the Star WarsForce Trainer, a game designed to create the illusion of possessing The Force.[

Wiki on BST:
With brain scanning technology becoming increasingly accurate, experts predict important debates over how and when it should be used. One potential area of application is criminal law. Haynes states that simply refusing to use brain scans on suspects also prevents the wrongly accused from proving their innocence.[2] It has been argued that allowing brain scans in the United States would violate the 5th Amendment's right to not self incriminate. The important question is whether brain imaging is like testimony, or instead like DNA, blood, or sperm. Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta predicts that this question will be decided by a Supreme Court case.[4]

In other countries outside the United States, thought Identification has already been used in criminal law. In 2008 an Indian woman was convicted of murder after an EEG of her brain allegedly revealed that she was familiar with the circumstances surrounding the poisoning of her ex-fiancé.[4] Some neuroscientists and legal scholars doubt the validity of using thought identification as a whole for anything past research on the nature of deception and the brain."

 

[Dave-W]

Some translations, like the New International Version; translates 1 Corinthians 2:11 that I posted above as:
"For who knows a person's thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God."
Changing the "things of a man" to "a persons thoughts" equating the thoughts with the spirit.

Yeah - not a fan of the NIV. Never have been.

It leads to misunderstandings when arguing something from the text of a translation. If you want the real story - go back to the original text.

Have you done that with 1 Cor 2.11?

 

[Dave-W]

"This study advances our understanding of how the brain reads a code made of identical electrical impulses, in order to produce a coherent perception of the world,” he says. “Deciphering the language of the brain will help us understand the neuronal basis for sensation and cognition and their associated disorders.” Said Dr. Scanziani.

I read back years ago in the early attempts to decode brain waves was that everyone's brain encoded things differently.

 

[mnorian]

Yeah - not a fan of the NIV. Never have been.

It leads to misunderstandings when arguing something from the text of a translation. If you want the real story - go back to the original text.

Have you done that with 1 Cor 2.11?

1 Corinthians 2:11 (Greek commentary):
assigns the reason for the καὶ τὰ βάθη τοῦ Θεοῦ just mentioned, and that in such a way as to represent the searching of these βάθη as exclusively pertaining to the Spirit of God, according to the analogy of the relation between the spirit of man and man himself."

 

[Dave-W]

1 Corinthians 2:11 (Greek commentary):
assigns the reason for the καὶ τὰ βάθη τοῦ Θεοῦ just mentioned, and that in such a way as to represent the searching of these βάθη as exclusively pertaining to the Spirit of God, according to the analogy of the relation between the spirit of man and man himself."

That is a step in the right direction. Now I would like to see something on how βάθη was used in the Greek speaking Jewish diaspora community. (such as composed much of the Corinthian congregation)

 

[mnorian]

That is a step in the right direction. Now I would like to see something on how βάθη was used in the Greek speaking Jewish diaspora community. (such as composed much of the Corinthian congregation)

I would too; you have any thoughts on that?

 

[Dave-W]

Yeah - George M Lamsa. His upbringing in an Aramaic speaking culture may be as close as we can get, at least for now. (since most of those people also spoke Aramaic) Beyond that - some theologians and commentators are starting to look at word usage in those Greek speaking Jewish diaspora communities of the first century.