am I a sinner???

[paragaster]

I have fantasized about everyone around me. Is it fantasy or reality? Is masturbation ethical/moral? I have been hounded by the society that my conduct is highly inappropriate. The society has veil of numbers across which it judges other people.

[iNow]

Masturbation is perfectly normal. Feeling shame about sexuality is not.

 

Respect those around you. Respect yourself. Do no harm.

 

The rest tends to work itself out.

[Sriman Dutta]

Your personal life has nothing to do with your conduct in the society. Your attitude shows your character.

[paragaster]

The problem is that they have used a 'mind reader device' to actually know the names and relations of the persons I have fantasized about. This has been quite an ordeal for me as I now have to give explanation for very private matters. I do not think anyone else will go through the situation I am facing.

Warning : I have searched the internet and have found out that such a device exists. No conspiracy theory here.

[Fuzzwood]

'They' have done no such thing as such a device does not exist.

[Delta1212]

While there are devices that can be used to extract some limited information from brain signals, most of them require extensive training of the device for the person, all require some degree of contact or very, very close proximity with your head and the amount and fidelity of the information that can be extracted is extremely limited.

 

You can't read someone's thoughts directly and you can't extract anything without it being immediately obvious that they are doing it since your head is either inside of a machine or hooked up to a series of sensors.

 

There's no way to covertly find out what someone is fantasizing about with present technology or even anything close to present technology.

[paragaster]

I know people who have read my thoughts and told me verbatim. The number of such occasions is alarmingly large. I have even tried taking medicines thinking it is schizophrenia. They have even scanned my brain using the latest FMRI. No results. The results show that I am a perfectly normal person having ZERO schizophrenic symptoms. The voices originate out of my head. I have changed my doctors. I have been treated with Allopathic,Homeopathic and Ayurvedic medicines. The problem remains. Someone is playing foul.

I have also read that an AI(Artificial Intelligence) can learn your thought patterns and adapt. The AI then proceeds to manipulate your brain 'Just by Words' that originate out of my head.

[Delta1212]

As someone who did some work with "thought reading" machines and software in college and who is presently studying modern AI in his spare time, no one has anything even remotely close to the technology you are describing right now. There are numerous major obstacles that would need to be overcome in order for that to be accomplished and none of them are trivial, so we're not even talking "under wraps government project ten years in advance of what's publically available" type technology, let alone something that a large number of people would be capable of casually using in conversation with a random person off the street.

 

I would do some research on cold reading, which is a psychological technique that gives the appearance of mind reading, often even very detailed mind reading, without actually doing any mind-reading. It relies heavily on manipulation, observation and a vareity of cognitive biases that the practioner to cue in on signals that people don't realize they are providing in order to walk them down specific lines of thought and probe for reactions that will cue them into successes and failures and then emphasize the successful guesses and downplay or redirect the failures before their target has had time to fully process when a mistake has been made, so it 'feels' like a constant stream of very specific successes when it's really mostly guess and check work done artfully enough to disguise itself from a normal person's perception.

[paragaster]

I know one thing for sure. Every thought creates a partciular brain pattern. The 'thought reader" reads my thoughts even before I have thought about the thought. It then responds accordingly.

[dimreepr]

You really have been fantasising...

[Delta1212]

While it may, hypothetically, be possible to read someone's thoughts through brain patterns, there are major signal to noise ratios that we are not technically capable of overcoming right now, and the best we can do requires plugging a cord directly into brain.

 

Even with that, there is a huge amount of data that needs to be crunches to figure out what signals represent what kinds of thoughts and we don't even have access to most of the signals in order to start that process, let alone an existing library that would allow us to do any real interpretation even if someone could get at those brain signals, which presently they can't.

 

There is also the problem that brain patterns are not completely consistent from one person to the next. It is much easier to read signals that indicate specific motions than specific thoughts, because while motor control signals are relatively consistent across individuals, thought patterns are not, and it's much harder to get at exactly what the thought is that correlates with a given pattern whereas the end result of motor signals is obviously externally apparent.

 

There is simply no way to do what you are describing using present technology, and the scale of the knowledge that would be required to do it means that even if someone built a machine with the capacity for mind-reading, there would be no way to use it.

 

It would be like someone building the software that Wikipedia runs on but having no entries. It's a great platform but you won't learn anything from it until someone goes in and enters actual information. In this case, collecting that information is not something someone, even someone with a lot of resources, could realistically do hidden away in a lab somewhere.

 

In other words, the thing that you are worried about does not exist and you need to look elsewhere for the cause of your problem. There isn't a technological answer in the way you are thinking there is.

[Phi for All]

I know people who have read my thoughts and told me verbatim. The number of such occasions is alarmingly large. I have even tried taking medicines thinking it is schizophrenia. They have even scanned my brain using the latest FMRI. No results. The results show that I am a perfectly normal person having ZERO schizophrenic symptoms. The voices originate out of my head. I have changed my doctors. I have been treated with Allopathic,Homeopathic and Ayurvedic medicines. The problem remains. Someone is playing foul.

I have also read that an AI(Artificial Intelligence) can learn your thought patterns and adapt. The AI then proceeds to manipulate your brain 'Just by Words' that originate out of my head.

 

!

Moderator Note

If you're prepared to present evidence in a scientific attempt to support your assertions of mind control, please open a thread in Speculations. Please remember that you will need evidence in the OP; no unsupported claims at all. Hearsay and anecdotes are NOT evidence. We're looking for points that would stand up in a court of law, basically.

 

There are plenty of places on the web to discuss this without this methodology, but here we don't chase conspiracies and we don't give medical advice.

 

This thread is closed.