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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.
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.
John Watson
B.F. Skinner
At least arguably Freud, depending on how much weight you're willing to give to his motte-and-bailey caveats.
At least arguably Dewey and many of his disciples in the blank-slate educators camp.
Marx, notably not a scientist, but a whole lot of scientists don't seem to have been able to tell.
I have zero argument with an axiom that the human mind is a materialistic machine, so long as it's recognized that this is, in fact, being used as an axiom, not as something that's been empirically proven. My objection is to the often-conflated claim that the brain has been empirically proven to be a machine. I object to this because the great majority of useful things that we can do to and with machines that make the label such a useful one, we can't actually do to or with the brain.
I'm on Ozempic, and it's not exactly a silver bullet for hunger either. But in the case of both alcohol and Ozempic, we're still a long, long way from mechanistic interactions, right?
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