15 KiB
[D] Rational mind-reading
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Author: u/Sparkwitch *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3af2gv/d_rational_mindreading/
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Score: 12
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Created: 2015-06-19T16:37:22
Post:
I've been chewing on this one for a long time.
Brain-reading is a technological reality with a number of extant applications, but brains are a relatively uniform hunk of hardware. Most brain development happens in the womb, and most of its structures are evolutionarily ancient. Minds, the iterative clumps of memory we call "you" and "I", are individually constructed on a moment by moment basis over the course of our lives.
We may both have comperable things in mind when we think of Idaho or Ronald McDonald, but the architecture of those concepts and the paths our neural impulses make to recall them are certain to be almost completely unique. Layers upon layers of cross-reference have gone into establishing complex referents like those.
Even if I could discern every brain impulse, and separate out the only the mindiest portion, the challenge would be less like someone who speaks only English translating Basque into German, and more like somebody raised by wolves translating Basque into Dolphin.
Is there an obvious solution I'm missing, or is a rational mind-reader stuck cold-reading off of autonomic, sensory, and emotional impulses?
Any fiction recommendations that wrestle with this topic?
Comments:
u/eaglejarl [+9] (an hour later)
When I hear questions like this on computer forums, usually my first response is "Step back. What are you trying to achieve?"
If you're trying to write a rational story in which a character has a mindreading ability, you don't need to know the details, you just need to create a setting where there is a plausible explanation. Every story is allowed one Suspension of Disbelief token--but only one[1]--that it gets to spend on its main premise. Any of these would work:
- Scientists have spent fifty years building up a database of brainscans of everyone on the planet in realtime as they aged and then supercomputers did frequency and traffic analysis in order to determine correlations so as a result we can read thought-images in real time, although we can't read memories.
- An alien crashlanded on Earth. His Universal Translator is damaged but semi-functional, and....
- We have this person who has this ability. We don't know how it works but it very clearly does.
[1] Note that some premises cost more than SoD token.
u/Sparkwitch [+6] (an hour later)
Absolutely, but what makes world design in science fiction fun for me is figuring out the nuts and bolts of how such SoD tokens work. Having the mechanism mapped not only provides the quirks and limitations that keep a story interesting, it can also lead directly to plot points and possibilities I would have never even imagined if I just leaned back and said "A wizard did it".
That's what I'm trying to achieve: Inspiration via conceptual understanding.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
I generally agree, but thinking about these things can be good for adding in some details to sell your premise. If you have a form of mind-reading that works on "surface thoughts", and you have some relevant scientific literature to back it up, you can describe exactly what different modes of thinking "look like" to your protagonist.
(Much in the same way that you can "sell" New York City a lot easier than you can sell a fantasy city, because you can just look at New York City and borrow some images that you see there rather than having to make things up.)
u/ArgentStonecutter [+3] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (40 minutes later)
IIRC, the visual cortex is pretty straightforward, to the point that you can crudely map the field of vision into it, and it's credible that it would activate when you think visually. So that's one hook you could start with.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (41 minutes later)
Is hearing similar?
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (56 minutes later)
I don't know. This article suggests not.
u/capsless [+1] despiser of hpmor (2 hours later)
hmm. that sounds plausible, but must a human mind-reader go through the whole "neuron->waveform" rigamarole? it seems to me that in this sense we can model a brain as a sort of advanced black-box encryption mechanism, and with an audio output that's a big problem. however, if what you want isn't unencrypted in the first place -- if you're perceiving a pattern of neurons firing anyway -- can't you cut out the middle man? couldn't a mind-reader just superimpose whatever relevant patterns the subject is experiencing over their own brain?
u/Solonarv [+2] Chaos Legion (3 hours later)
That only works if the mind-reader's brain is similar enough that a) it can support the same pattern, and b) they translate to (roughly) the same subjective experiences. Also, I'd argue that mind-reading is a lot more practical if it doesn't just consist of replacing (parts of) your mind with theirs.
u/IllusoryIntelligence [+2] (35 minutes later)
Apparently for at least some processes you may be overestimating the difficulty involved in mind reading.
http://www.nature.com/news/brain-decoding-reading-minds-1.13989
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-08-letters-brain.html
u/Sparkwitch [+1] (an hour later)
Those (and Argent's link elsewhere) are exactly what I was talking about when I mentioned technological brain-reading. There's a large theoretical gap between discerning those sensory impulses and translating them into goals, desires, or other human thoughts.
u/None [+2] (7 hours later)
[deleted]
u/philophile [+2] (9 hours later)
If I were trying to create a mind-reader without breaking neuroscience too badly, I'd have their ability tap into the "area" theorized to be the internal/self monitor, responsible for metacognition. I say "area" because, as far as I know, this is one of our higher cognitive functions, intimately tied to consciousness, and at this point, very poorly understood (i.e. it's somewhere in the prefrontal cortex, probably)- which leaves it more open to your fictional fiddling and interpretation than, say the visual cortex or other parts of the 'animal' brain. You could, for example, claim that it not only receives input from the senses and listens in on the internal monologue, but maybe when memories are recalled they are presented before the monitor. And maybe because the monitor's 'job' is to take all of these neurochemical inputs and observe and understand what they are in the mind it is in, it might do the same job for the mind-reader, whose special, extra listening power connects their monitor to others'.
u/Geminii27 [+1] (36 minutes later)
I suspect that a form of frequency analysis might give a degree of accuracy. Looking at a snapshot of someone's mindstate may not be of use, but monitoring it over months or years as they are subject to various inputs and deliver outputs could allow some solid guesses as to what a mind is perceiving or even contemplating.
It might even be possible to read off an image that the mind is specifically concentrating on, if it activates a suitable number of neurons in the visual cortex.
u/IomKg [+1] (6 hours later)
Why are you modeling mind reading as reading the electrical\chemical structure of neurons in the brain firing?
Thats like trying to figure out the password stored in ram from a computer by reading EM radiation\heat coming out of it when it's running, sure it might be possible, but its overly complex for no reason, you could just freeze the ram stick and connect it to another computer, as long as it has similar design there's a pretty good chance it will be able to read the content, even if one ran on linux and the other was running windows..
You could imagine it more like an actual neural link between the person doing the mind reading and the person being read. Or lets say a copy of the neurons of the person being read being connected to the mind of the reader, obviously neurons can communicate with each other, so i wouldn't really say that it is stretching it too far to assume that if such a neural connection was made the reader will be able to read the state.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (8 hours later)
Maybe because reading a monitor from the EM fields it emitted was a credible threat. Just Google "Tempest Attack" or Tempest Security", or "van eck phreaking."
u/IomKg [+2] (15 hours later)
Read what i said more carefully. I did not say its not possible(btw the ram as opposed to the screen is significantly less em active..) But instead i said that it is overly complex, and that there are easier ways to get the same result.
Also regarding the "credible threat" you mentioned, a quote regarding tempest attacks from the top reault on google: "However it's painfully hard and extremely expensive to successfully complete such an attack".
I.e. for most points and purposes setting up a successful tempest attack is more expensive then the data you will get with it
Anyhow the attack i was thanking about while writing the example was http://www.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/ if you are interested.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (12 hours later)
There's always evolution. There are some truly bizarre evolutionary pathways creatures have taken. If your 'suspension of disbelief' token is that Neanderthals were able to read each other's minds (They did have a different brain configuration), and humans were able to cross breed with them (Which is true), then, well, in the right circumstances, the trait for mind reading might breed true in humans even to this date if the right genetics were passed.
u/None [+1] (15 hours later)
That's kind of a cop-out, though - like asking for the technical specs on a telephone and getting the story of Bell spilling acid on himself. "Evolution" is a method for generating explanations, not an explanation of things in itself.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (22 hours later)
We're limited to a cop-out. Even if it sounds clever. We don't know how the brain works well enough to properly model one, never mind how to model a modified brain with different functions. We might be able to come fairly close, but we don't have AI yet, or recorded individuals.
u/darkflagrance [+1] (2 days later)
There is apparently some hardware that allows thought transference between brains here.
Apparently the words thought in one brain as a command translate in a feeling or urge in the recipient, bypassing the need to translate. I guess in effect the brain is translating for you, crudely. A Harvard team in the article did transmit specific words.
Theoretically, a mind-reading mechanism would need to pick up the EEG from the recipient somehow. You may need to handwave this with a powerful signal that is currently undetectable or is the result of a some future development. In addition, your theoretical telepath would need some biological or mechanical apparatus to pick up signals, as well as enough experience to unravel the thoughts of various people (which is achievable through training). Perhaps the theoretical telepath would need to spend more time around people learning to interpret their thought patterns or adjusting her receiver.
u/Sparkwitch [+1] (2 days later)
It looks like both sender and receiver had to be trained, both to send and to detect specific signals. The creation of a telepathic language is a fine use of the tech, but I don't think this discovery says anything about whether either senders or receivers would be able to process much usable data alone.
u/darkflagrance [+1] (3 days later)
Filling in the gaps in the province of the science fiction writer. There are plausible mechanisms to compensate for the lack of training on one party's part. Simply say that the tech does that function for you.
u/None [+0] (15 hours later)
What about test patterns? Like, a telepath broadcasts a certain signal into the target's brain, analyzes the resulting pattern, and when they can predict the result, uses that as a method of backtracking signals, or even just pinging words and images off various regions and interpreting the associations. Not quite quite mind-readin, but enough for surface reading and figuring out that "Johnny" brings up memories of hatred, guilt, blood, anticipation, and regret.
u/Transfuturist [+0] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)
How exactly can a signal made in one mind transfer to another's mind? You're pushing down on a waterbed when the thread is about letting the water out.
u/autowikibot [+1] (a day later)
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#### Waterbed theory:
Waterbed theory is the observation, ascribed to Larry Wall, that some systems, such as human and computer languages, contain a minimum amount of complexity, and that attempting to "push down" the complexity of such a system in one place will invariably cause complexity to "pop up" elsewhere. This behavior is likened to a waterbed mattress which contains a certain amount of water; it is possible to push down the mattress in one place, but the displaced water will always cause the mattress to rise elsewhere, because water does not [compress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_(physical)). It is impossible to push down the waterbed everywhere at once, because the volume of the water remains a constant.
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u/None [+1] (a day later)
Fair enough, just throwing ideas out there.