Yes. And, is anything accorded with the philosophy?

The television show Sixty Minutes some many years ago had a segment on something like this. Subjects were hooked up to machines that showed brain activity by region and recorded images generated by their looking at pictures. Later they hooked up subjects and asked them to think about an object from a list of objects. Then - the point of the experiment - the idea was to try to deduce the object thought from the image of the brain activity. Apparently they were pretty good at it. But I've seen nothing in popular science or the press about such things since.

Well they think they may be able to detect lying using heat sensing technology to read blood flow to certain facial muscles that are allegedly associated with lying.

It was developed as part of a study of identifying when a child was lying based upon roles. So Drs, Teachers, psychologists, parents and some other demographics I might be forgetting, where shown footage of children during an experiment and they had to provide their answer for whether they thought the children was lying or not. Most people scored poorly and the ones that scored highest were parents at around 6?%of the time they’d guess accurately truth or lie.

It’s actually a lot harder to tell when children are lying due to their facial muscles not being fully developed. However, with sensitive heat sensing equipment it did show that children still have blood flow to muscles associated with micro expressions even if those muscles aren’t moving in a discernible way to an adult.

Need to go find that study again it was really interesting. Will be back!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-lie-detectors/

May have butchered it a bit and couldn’t find the article I read, think it was a science opinion piece now that I think about it so it was probably not right in some way.

Anyway, have a read of this. Few ideas going on.

One day,might it be able to read clearly every sentence in the brain by machine?

We can already so this. Basically you just record the brainwaves and then apply that ‘thought’ to an action. It is more like programming a computer to respond to your brainwaves.

Some Aussie set up a company selling the hardware some years ago - not crazy expensive (around $500-700 I think).

So that we can easily communicate with deaf and dumb person?

There has been (and is) some research/studies in these areas ...

• Brain makes decisions before you even know it (Kerri Smith; Nature; Apr 2008)
• Mind-reading program translates brain activity into words (Ian Sample; The Guardian; Jan 2012)
• Scientists Use Brain Waves To Eavesdrop On What We Hear (Peter Murray; Singularity Hub; from the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology; Feb 2012)
• Neural Decoding of Visual Imagery During Sleep (Horikawa, Tamaki, Miyawaki, Kamitani; Science AAAS; Apr 2013)
• Researcher controls colleague’s motions in 1st human brain-to-brain interface (Rajesh Rao, Andrea Stocco; University of Washington; Aug 2013)
• Brain decoding: Reading minds (Kerri Smith; Nature; Oct 2013)
• Mind-Reading Computer Instantly Decodes People’s Thoughts (Tia Ghose; LiveScience; Jan 2016)
• Device that can literally read your mind invented by scientists (Ian Johnston; The Independent; Apr 2017)
• After 15 years in a vegetative state, nerve stimulation restores consciousness (Cell Press via EurekAlert! / AAAS; Sep 2017)
• Computer system transcribes words users “speak silently” (Larry Hardesty; MIT News Office; Apr 2018)
• Amazing New Brain Map of Every Synapse Points to the Roots of Thinking (Shelly Fan; Neuron via Singularity Hub; Aug 2018)
• Our brains reveal our choices before we're even aware of them, study finds (Lachlan Gilbert; University of New South Wales; Mar 2019)

Can we be able(in future) to use some machine to read the thought of person? Is it accorded with the philosophy? — nguyen dung

What does this say about the inaccessibility of the first-hand, subjective, experience? If we can use external machines to read the thoughts of a person, and what we see on the machine's screen isn't the first-hand, subjectiveness of their experience, rather it is numbers and letters, or lines on a graph that represent their first-hand, subjective experiences, then can we really say that we are getting at their first-hand, subjective experience?

Why would I need to have their experience if I can have information about their first-hand experience and still get the same relevant information?

It seems pointless to ask what it is like to be that person when all you need to get at is what information that person possesses in their brain, because what it is like to be someone else is what it means to have access to the information that person has. It doesn't matter the form the information takes, only what information they have - like they are the secret admirer of a fellow co-worker.

Why would I need to have their experience if I can have information about their first-hand experience and still get the same relevant information? — Harry Hindu

Well you'd be missing the qualia.

Can we be able(in future) to use some machine to read the thought of person? Is it accorded with the philosophy? — nguyen dung

It's probably impossible to directly read thoughts. Thoughts are bound up in the individual experience of whoever has them, and you cannot recreate them without copying the entire person.

You can probably still extract a lot of information though.

Thoughts are bound up in the individual experience of whoever has them, and you cannot recreate them without copying the entire person. — Echarmion

The trouble with that approach is it seems to set an unreasonably high bar not consistent with other objects. No one has any objection to me talking about 'this chair' yet have I captured all that is this chair, it's history, it's place in my life, it's connections to other stuff in the world, it's fuzzy boundary at the fundamental particle scale? No. But it's just fine to talk about 'this chair' nonetheless. I don't see why 'this thought' should be treated any differently. I'm thinking broadly about a chair. Yes the exact nature of that thought is inextricably linked to my whole ecosystem (as we're discussing on the other thread at the moment). But insofar as "have this machine read thought X?" is concerned, I don't see any reason why a loose similarity should not be sufficient to answer "yes".

The trouble with that approach is it seems to set an unreasonably high bar not consistent with other objects. No one has any objection to me talking about 'this chair' yet have I captured all that is this chair, it's history, it's place in my life, it's connections to other stuff in the world, it's fuzzy boundary at the fundamental particle scale? No. But it's just fine to talk about 'this chair' nonetheless. I don't see why 'this thought' should be treated any differently. I'm thinking broadly about a chair. Yes the exact nature of that thought is inextricably linked to my whole ecosystem (as we're discussing on the other thread at the moment). But insofar as "have this machine read thought X?" is concerned, I don't see any reason why a loose similarity should not be sufficient to answer "yes". — Isaac

This is a valid objection. What I had in mind was the "pop culture" version of mind reading, where you literally hear someone's thoughts the way they sound in their head. And that probably requires you to model their entire brain. In any event, in order to gather more than just very basic emotions, you'll probably need to know a lot about the structure of the specific brain you're trying to read thoughts from, since you'd need to know the connections between neurons to determine what their activity means. So in that sense, the history of the brain is much more important to it's current state than the history of a chair might be.

What I had in mind was the "pop culture" version of mind reading, where you literally hear someone's thoughts the way they sound in their head. And that probably requires you to model their entire brain — Echarmion

Yeah, fair enough.

in order to gather more than just very basic emotions, you'll probably need to know a lot about the structure of the specific brain you're trying to read thoughts from, since you'd need to know the connections between neurons to determine what their activity means. So in that sense, the history of the brain is much more important to it's current state than the history of a chair might be. — Echarmion

I see where you're coming from, but there's more than just the very basic emotions hardwired into the brain from birth. The somatosensory map, for example. any of these things could go wrong, of course, so activity in one brain area cannot be said for certain to indicate some though or other, but I think that, if were talking about flights-of-fancy type theories, I would envisage mind-reading to be more than just activity in a particular brain region. It would have to entail recognising neural firing patterns, combinations of those patterns in the presence of a certain neurotransmitter make-ups, and all this within a recognisable brain architecture. I don't see any of that as being beyond the capabilities of a machine in theory though. Once these things can be recognised, history becomes less important, because the markers of that history are readable. History cannot have an effect without leaving some (theoretically) readable mark on the present.

What I was talking about was interaction between brainwaves to operate a computer.

It was actually a woman from Vietnam that started the company up in Australia. Cannot recall her name or the name of the company.

Why would I need to have their experience if I can have information about their first-hand experience and still get the same relevant information?
— Harry Hindu

Well you'd be missing the qualia. — Echarmion

But why would I need the qualia to know what they are thinking? Doesn't qualia let us know what form their knowledge/awareness takes, rather than what their knowledge/awareness is about? Isn't what it is about what is important and useful? Why would I need to access their qualia?

Can we be able(in future) to use some machine to read the thought of person? Is it accorded with the philosophy?
— nguyen dung

It's probably impossible to directly read thoughts. Thoughts are bound up in the individual experience of whoever has them, and you cannot recreate them without copying the entire person.

You can probably still extract a lot of information though. — Echarmion

Why would we need to directly read thoughts? If we get the information we need by getting at what their thoughts are about, then what else would we need, and why?

So, in principle, we can read the information of what their thoughts are about?

Or I mean can we know what they are thinking about?

Could we (in future) use some machine to read the thoughts of a person? Is it accorded with the philosophy? — nguyen dung

Actions speak louder than words...or...thoughts or...do they?