In
Mexico, there is a saying which translates into English “Every mind is a world”. The implication is that every mind is a
separate psychological entity that has a coherent self-contained consciousness
that can be impacted by other minds but that always remains protected from
total penetration and control. To the
extent that machines can be controlled by commands, it is because they have the
electrical potential for different activities, but lack a coherent sense of
self to direct that potential. At least
up until now. People are working on
creating computers and robots that can approximate as much as possible the
cerebral activity of humans. And through
this, there is the hope of somehow creating an equivalent of a mind and a sense
of self in robots.
And
while one group of scientists and engineers is trying to create the possibility
of robots becoming like humans, another group of scientists and engineers is
creating the conditions for humans becoming like robots. In the case of the latter, I am thinking of
the successful experiment that just occurred that allowed for the direct transmission
of a message from the brain of someone in India to the brain of someone in
France using the Internet as an intermediary.
Brain activity of the person in India was obtained via an
electroencephalogram. This activity was
converted into the letters of the two word message using binary code. Then the message was passed to a computer and
then to the Internet where it was transmitted to the person receiving the
message in France. Transcranial magnetic
stimulation (TMS) was used to activate a part of the brain of the receiver,
letting him know that the message was arriving.
There
is the hope that this technology could be useful to help those who have severe
communication difficulties.
Unfortunately, the potential for misusing this form of “communication”
once the technology evolves is enormous.
What is important here is the fact that the stimulation used here is the
kind of focused defined discrete stimulation that is also used to activate
modern machines. The implications of
this are vast. Eventually we could get
to the point where certain people could control other people’s movements and
activities through thoughts. Individual
humans would no longer have the effective mental barriers created by protected
coherent senses of self. Gradually trained
to respond primarily to these focused defined discrete thought stimuli, humans
would lose the capacity to respond to the less focused organic flowing
blendable continual stimuli found in nature.
Without the organic flowing blendable continual stimuli, there is no
possibility for a person as an individual organic entity to make, preserve or
receive organic imprints, to have rich vibrant life experiences as an
individual organism, and to calm the anxiety in his coherent consciousness by
preparing for death with a surrogate immortality.
Brain
to brain communication can all too easily lead to the abuse of thought
control. The experiment just performed
in India and France was still very primitive and very limited in its scope. But modern technologies have a way of
evolving very quickly, and they frequently move into applications for which
they were not initially intended. This
technology-based brain-to-brain communication is qualitatively very different
from telepathy, one of the major forms, along with clairvoyance, precognition
and telekinesis, of so-called extra sensory perception (ESP). ESP is something that is still being studied,
and while many people believe in its existence, many others do not. While some students of ESP believe that we
all have the natural capacity for ESP, in reality, it is only a relatively
small number of people who actually profess to have it. I am not aware of any of these people using
their ESP abilities to try and control and manipulate other people on a
sustained basis. On the contrary,
particularly with telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition, there is the sense
that many of these people do not have control over when they are going to have
their supposed ESP experiences. Instead,
these experiences seem to happen at unexpected times. It is almost like the ESP controls them,
rather than vice versa. Yes, there are
clairvoyants who are used to find property or lost people, but most clairvoyants
do not seem to have such control over their skills.
The
distinction between technology-based brain-to-brain communication and
traditional mental telepathy has to do with the kind of stimuli involved. In the technology-based brain-to-brain
communication, the stimuli for most of the communication journey are
digitally-based defined discrete
stimuli. Because they are defined discrete
stimuli, they are easily controllable, and therefore potentially enable the
senders of these stimuli to control the people receiving them through the
content of the message. In most cases,
the receivers of telepathic messages do not appear to be controlled in any way
by the messages they receive. The
receivers are not usually being told to respond in a certain way. Sometimes the receivers might pick up
thoughts from people in danger, which might lead the receivers to try to help
the senders, but frequently, such thoughts are translated into physical
reactions. The receiver does not receive
a specific message, but instead a global sense of dread or uneasiness or some
other vague sensation. In other words,
the message is not a focused, defined, discrete message in such cases. It is received as organic, flowing, blendable
continual stimuli.
And
frequently even the verbal thoughts that are supposedly received through
telepathy are not specific, but instead ambiguous. Such thoughts when received are a mixture of
defined discrete stimuli from the verbiage and flowing blendable continual
stimuli from the ambiguity of the thoughts being conveyed. So telepathy functions very differently from
the brain-to-brain communication under consideration here. It does not lend itself to the kind of
control of one person by another, because basically it is such an
uncontrollable mental function. It does
not tend to be discrete and focused. It
tends to be flowing and blurry. It
cannot be used to enslave people the way that modern computer-based
brain-to-brain communication could very possibly be used in the future.
The
question presents itself as to why people felt a need to develop a technology
like this? Was it simply to help certain
people with communication disorders, people who are unable to speak? I tend to think that there is a much deeper
reason involved, a reason connected to one of the major reasons that people
have felt a need to develop the whole modern technological infrastructure. Developing a technology that potentially
allows a person to control another person by potentially turning him into a
puppet or a robot puts the controller into the role of God. Being omnipotent is one of the traits we ascribe
to our monotheistic God in the Western tradition. Having potentially endless control over
another person’s mind certainly puts the controller well on the path to a kind
of omnipotence at least over people. It
certainly gives the brain-to-brain communicators a more effective temporary
experience of feeling immortal than would be gotten by traditional
pathways of creating a surrogate
immortality like having a baby, planting a tree, writing a book, breaking a
sports record, painting a picture, building a business, or leaving a fond
memory. Playing God through
brain-to-brain communication and potential thought control allows a person to temporarily
deny the existence of death.
The
problem is that while one person is playing God, another person, in losing his
free will, loses his capacity to live a rich vibrant independent life and to leave
his own individual surrogate immortality and thus to prepare for death. In truth, thought control over a person
causes the person to lose his individual coherent sense of self, the very
essence of his humanity. This is why the
experiment that just occurred in India and France should be the cause of great
concern for anyone who is interested in maintaining the freedom and the dignity
of the human race.
© 2014 Laurence Mesirow
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