The Thought Police! Wow! The cold, scary reality sets in. We already have such things as speech crimes, where just talking about what you will do can get you into trouble. Even writing about it in the press or wearing a slogan on a t-shirt can result in you being imprisoned (39-year-old man from Manchester, England, was sentenced to eight months in jail - a teenager from Lancashire, England, was jailed for three months for writing jokes on his Facebook page). The regularity with which the police and legal system now hurl anyone into jail judged to have executed a “speech crime” is highly disturbing.
As equally as how mind power can be used in a positive way to manifest your desires, then it is equally so that in the future negative thoughts may also give rise to some sort of manifestation in the guise of the Thought Police knocking at your door!
Even tweetcrimes and Facebook misbehavior are being spelled out in law as to what is right and what is wrong for anyone to post! Criminal charges can be brought for trolling or provocative speech online! To me, speech is either free or it isn’t.
At the moment, the state may well only be locking up bigoted joke-tellers or teenage clowns, but who knows who else could fall foul of today’s self-styled shapers of civic decency. Non- believers in religious faiths, perhaps?
However, what about thought crimes? What if you simply hold views in your head without speaking or writing about them that are not acceptable to the overwhelming majority of people? Is freedom of thought a thing of the past? A world where people are prosecuted for what they think, rather than what they do. To me, the idea of being imprisoned for what you think is deeply sinister. Governments don’t just want to steal your money, they also want to own your mind.
The NSA (National Security Agency) is developing a gizmo that George Orwell's “Thought Police” may, perhaps, have found useful: a man-made intelligence system planned to obtain an insight into what citizens are thinking!
With the whole world-wide web and thousands of databases for a brain, the apparatus will be capable of responding nearly immediately to difficult questions asked by intelligence forecasters. As more and more information is collected by means of telephone calls, credit card receipts, social network sites like Twitter and Facebook, GPS tracking, cellphone cross-referencing, search engine searches, internet retailer book purchases, it may one day be possible to be acquainted with not just where people are and what they are doing, but what and how they think!
The structure is so potentially invasive that at least one researcher has already walked out, mentioning concerns over the hazard in placing such a controlling weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little answerability.
THE LAST DOMINION OF PRIVACY IS YOUR MIND
Our thoughts, it seems, are increasingly able to be revealed through brain imaging. People could be jailed, and in fact have been in India, after lie-detecting brain scans find them guilty. This science is just the latest instance of neuro imaging being used to read the human mind. If private enterprise has its way, courtrooms around the world will soon be convicting people based on brain-imaging evidence.
The Cephos Corp of Massachusetts has been marketing commercially available fMRI-based deception-detection services, based on software analysis of subjects. Cephos asserted better than 90 per cent precision in determining deception. In California, “No Lie MRI2” charges customers $4,000 to $5,000 (£2,750 to £3,500) to carry out lie-detection tests.
Although US and British courts do not permit brain images as evidence, companies have aspirations in that direction. Lie detection evidence based on brain scans will one day enter America's legal system. These professional companies will also try to get the scans accepted in British courts.
NOW YOUR DREAMS AREN’T EVEN SAFE FROM PRYING EYES!
Scientists say they have discovered a way to read people's dreams by means of MRI scanners to observe brain activity.
Japanese scientists were able to predict what images volunteers were seeing with about 60% accuracy.
While scientists are still a long way from being able to tune in to the intimate details of your dreams, the work so far is probably the first real manifestation of the brain basis of dream content.
HAVE SCIENTISTS FOUND A WAY TO READ YOUR MIND?
But these are just passing thoughts; they're not actually plans, right? Well, researchers are able to read people's intentions with great accuracy. The next step is to build on these results to create a sort of mind-reading database of intentions. If scientists can correctly identify the brain activity signalling particular intentions - such as violent or criminal intentions - the intention to lie, the uses of this procedure are infinite.
A new scientific breakthrough allows scientists to see what people are imagining! They can even make sense of what number a person has just seen, what video the person has just watched, or what particular memory the person is recalling!
In a series of new experiments, scientists have been able to use a computer to decipher brain activity. So what? Well, the computer can reconstruct those signals into the actual words the participants are thinking about. It can, in fact, read your mind!
For now, reading someone's mind like this is an invasive process requiring access to the brain, but that's not to say it always will be.
THE THOUGHT POLICE
Let’s look at the future of thought reading and thought crime. The thought police would detect and punish thought criminals. The detection would be through surveillance techniques involving all seeing methods such as telescreens to monitor, search, find and arrest members of society with any deviation from prescribed thinking!
The prevention of negative thoughts though may be something that is addressed, and as time goes on it may be a case of having to take a “positive thinking” course in order to avoid a penalty for your negative thoughts! Oh well, good job I meditate!
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