[nusq]

This reminds me of a cool thought that I've read some place else: "imagine a technology so advanced that can transmit thoughts wirelessly between humans and even change the actual layout of the neruons in our brains". We already do that with our voices....

[qubax]

> We already do that with our voices....

But that requires one side speaking. If they refuse to speak, then we can't know their thoughts. And people can also tell lies with their voices. Now if we could somehow interface directly with the brain...

Voice is like an API the person provides to others. Like twitter's API for users access data. But twitter can shut down the API or manipulate their API to show us what they want us to see. But imagine if you had direct link to their database?

[booleandilemma]

Something about putting it in technical terms like that made this idea 10x more unsettling.

[carapace]

People will just learn to lie with their brains.

[logfromblammo]

I would argue that this has already happened, and the evidence that eventually proves it will be truly horrifying.

Think about a person--someone you may already know well--that actually believes his own bullshit. Such a person armed with a brain-to-brain interface is an existential threat to objective reality.

[sizzle]

Sociopath brain?

[hoseja]

I think the point is to eliminate the extremely inaccurate translation from thought to speech back to thought.

[scrollaway]

Who's to say that there isn't translation to do from thought to thought?

Kind of like we have different voices, accents, speech patterns, languages and manners of speech, I can't imagine our thoughts, even our most accurate representations of the simplest picture (eg "think of a white square"), aren't similarly different.

[angus-prune]

Feynman had a party trick where he could time a minute in his head by counting the seconds and count up the number of lines in a newspaper article.

A friend of his tried and couldn't do it, but was able to hold a conversation while timing a minute, which Feynman couldn't do.

They realised that while Feynman was counting the minute, he was counting verbally (but silently), while the friend was visualising a counter - or Feynman was using the speech centre, so could do a visual task at the same time, while the friend was using the visual centre, so could do a verbal task.

Something as simple as counting in their head was done completely differently.

[ddrdrck_]

That is an extremely interesting experiment, I had never heard about it before. Searching for it, I found the original article by Feynam (.pdf scan) : http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf

[ontouchstart]

His visual thinker friend is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tukey

[menacingly]

Agreed. Furthermore, thought has linked layers and context. Even if you could perfectly transmit an island idea from one person to another, it's unlikely that it would happen to contain the rich subjective context to make it nearly as useful to the recipient.

This is why learning and maturation take so much damned time.

[rayiner]

How much of thought is encoded as speech to begin with?