DimitriRascalov
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User ID: 450
At least weak versions of mind reading or mind control, essentially. Science as a social institution spent the first half of the twentieth century claiming not only that these were possible, but that it had practical methods for implementing them.
I'm aware of the general vibe you're pointing at, but I've honestly never come across a strong claim by someone I'd consider a serious scientist (i.e. someone who has made a meaningful contribution in some scientific field) that resembles anything akin to mind control or mind reading, that's more or less the domain of speculative fiction authors.
What is commonly argued, and what I personally also find defensible given what we know about material reality, is that the human brain, which for the purposes of this argument is assumed to be equivalent to the mind in terms of functional behavior apparent to outside observers, is in principle a deterministic material thing and thus predictable just like any other material system is, again in principle. Noticeably, that claim doesn't entail that we will ever find sufficient models and theories to achieve that predictability, nor that it's even possible in the first place. The obvious parallel here is the weather or n-body systems. The constituent interactions that make up these things are known with high certainty to be deterministic, but the overall system in each case is so chaotic that predicting it with meaningful precision is impossible for large timescales, because even in the best of models the errors keep adding up.
Are you aware of a reliable cure for alcoholism?
I'm hearing good things about Ozempic, though it's not as effective as it is with hunger. That's probably a much stronger example I should have gone with in the first place.
DimitriRascalov
20d ago
None of that impinges on the mountain of evidence that the human mind cannot be manipulated deterministically
Can you clarify what you mean by this? What qualifies as deterministic in your view? To me, things like alcohol or lack of oxygen impacting cognition in very predictable ways seem like good evidence that there are ways to alter mental states deterministically. Certainly not in a particularly precise way at current levels of biological knowledge, but clearly not random or immune to structured intervention either. For example, my uncle very consistently goes from sweet and caring old man to raging asshole after a couple of drinks, and I feel it's pretty intuitive to understand this in a model where that is a straightforward deterministic effect of the alcohol on his brain chemistry.
For what it's worth, I reran the GSS query split by US census regions (state-level detail needs a permit, a 6-month waiting time and a cool 1.5k dollars) and the consistent tendency is that Hispanics in the West (goes as far east as Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico) lean quite a bit more towards classic Republican policy positions than those elsewhere, but even they support the welfare state at much greater rates than North Eastern whites, who you'd expect to be the bluest of the blue (North Eastern Hispanics are also the most social democrat/leftist Hispanics).
The only area where Hispanics of any region get particularly close to whites is in their shared love of social security, which is the part of the welfare state that does by far the best in the "do you like the amount of spending" questions across all groups and ancestries. Otherwise, Hispanics fairly uniformly and with little apparent regional variation would like to see more social spending, more money spent on black people, less money on space, more on unemployment (here Hispanics from the West are a significant outlier, this is the only welfare-related question where they actually give a more right-leaning answer than whites nationwide, and they beat North Eastern whites by a significant margin) and higher taxes on the rich. EDIT: perhaps the best example of this: in the GSS Cubans are by far the most Republican non-European group, comparable in their party loyalty to Dutch- or Scottish-Americans, yet their attitudes on classical liberalism or the welfare state are more or less the same (and generally even more leftist!) as those of Mexicans or Puerto Ricans.
I concede that these are notable people in their fields and that they made all sorts of dumb predictions. But I hope you'll forgive me if I engage in some "No true Scotsman"-ing: none of these are who I thought of when I wrote "scientists" (although I do admit in common usage they also fall under that term). All of these people constructed elaborate theories without much empirical feedback or validation, I was thinking more of people in the hard sciences producing testable results than then tried extending out into making claims about the brain.
It depends on what you mean with empirically proven and how much weight you put on the word "machine". Again, I fully concede that a predictive theory of the brain as a whole is nowhere to be found in current science. But all isolated parts we've ever looked at look like other matter, which at our scales behaves according to deterministic rules. And again, using the weather or n-body examples, we already know that deterministic systems can quickly escape predictability. The sort-of-empirical argument then is that the stuff the brain is made out of is deterministic, the small components and subsystems are deterministic, and since there doesn't seem to be a good argument for where non-deterministic behavior would come from, it stands to reason that the resulting system is deterministic, too, even if it is so unfathomably complex that a full accurate description might never exist.
I'm not sure I agree. It depends on the scale of causal and mechanistic resolution that you are willing to accept as a sufficient base level. Newton famously caused a lot of consternation among his scientist colleagues because his model replaced a universe of metaphoric pistons and levers acting directly on each other with spooky action at a distance.
For Ozempic, we don't know exactly how the concrete interactions work out in altering specific emotional states, but we do know that it "attacks" the parts of the brain responsible for hunger and reward signals (this we know from simple observation), and how that affects downstream calorie consumption. That's not an exhaustive model, sure, but the statistical evidence from placebo studies and from normal usage across millions of people is IMO more than enough to be able to positively claim that this is a material intervention that results in a broadly predictable outcome on the brain.
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