Martin LeFevre: Neuroscientific Nightmares

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Snow covers most of the ground on the north side of the mountain lake. The reservoir is so low that large swaths of barren, stump-strewn land lay between the water’s edge and the conifers. It is at once a picture of Sierra splendor, and moonscape.

There is no snow or ice on the south-facing side, and it’s completely dry. Such is the difference between sun and no sun even at 1000 meters in winter in California. It looks like another year of below-normal rain, and the lead story in the San Francisco Chronicle today said to prepare for water rationing.

I sit at the terminus of the snow, at the far end of the little lake, where a streamlet empties into the reservoir, obviously to little effect as yet. It would be too cold to sit in the shade today, snow or no snow, but it’s pleasant in the sun.

The cosmic silence of the place is bookmarked, and pockmarked, by the noise of dirt bikes roaring over the ridge at the beginning of the sitting, and sporadic gunfire coming from different directions near the end. Lest I forget that we are a consumer nation at war.

A busy, active mind can have insights, but only a quiet mind can be in a state of insight. Perpetually looking forward to the next thing is as stultifying in the end as habitually looking backward to the past.

It’s strange how intelligence does not emanate from right thinking, as important as it is, but from non-thinking—that is, a deeply quiet mind.

Some may ask whether a movement that is not of thought and time (which are the same thing) has anything to do with this world? My feeling is that one can only inwardly survive in this world when one regularly enters into the movement that is beyond thought and time.

Neuroscientists seem to be vying for the title of the smartest and most dangerous people on the planet. They are combining the ability to scan the brain in action with computer science’s increasing power to organize huge amounts of data. They call it “thought identification,” but it’s mind reading by any other name.

According to Marcel Just at Carnegie Mellon University’s neuroscience department, “we can identify which object someone is thinking about by brain activation patterns.”
And we are just at the beginning stage of this new science and technology.

For now, subjects must subject themselves to the claustrophobic’s nightmare of an ‘FMRI,’ or Functional MRI. That technology makes it possible to observe what is going on in the brain while the person is thinking.

Volunteers are told to think about certain objects, such as a hammer or a house, and the FMRI reads the brain patterns, while the computer collates and translates them. Incredibly, on a randomly picked guinea pig, the computer was able to get 10 for 10 with various types of specific tools and dwellings.

The legal, philosophical, and spiritual implications are staggering. One neuroscientist in Germany, John-Dylan Haynes, says they can now “tell whether someone has been in an al Qaeda training camp.” Asked whether national security agencies have contacted them, he creepily laughed and said, “not in the USA,” before hesitantly adding...“in Germany.”

Marcel Just, when asked whether all this isn’t rather scary, displayed that special obtuseness that specialists have. He replied, “We’re not satisfied with [detecting brain patterns for] ‘hammer.’”

Pressed further, he revealed his core philosophical bias: “Our brain is a biological thinking machine…that is the essence of what it means to be a person.” Oh really, you’ve done the philosophical heavy lifting on this question?

Asked whether neuroscientists will be able to read very complex thoughts, like ‘I hate so and so,’ the ironically named Just proudly proclaimed, “Definitely, definitely, within five years.”

So there we are. It will not be necessary to monitor bodies when science gives authorities the power to track thoughts. With or without our consent, we will be subjected to thought-tracking to determine if we’ve committed a crime, or what we buy, or where we’ve been.

How is one to safeguard oneself against the use of this power, which will almost certainly lead to another abuse of power?

Our thoughts are private, but they aren’t personal. By that I mean ‘my thoughts’ don’t reside just in ‘me.’ That way of thinking is erroneous and redundant. Scientific and technological advances prove that there is no separate, unique individual where thought is concerned.

There is a way to defeat these technological intrusions, whether by the State or Corporatania (which have become essentially the same thing). It’s through self-awareness. Self-knowing and insight are not programmable.

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