Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Inteligence works using a neural net. This net anylyses incoming data and tries to find patterns in this data that are then stored in the neural net and that can then be used to predict future patterns.
The unit of data that gets captured tends to be stable. For instance capturing temperature, humidity data is a stable, structured dataset that is used to predict the weather. So weather prediction use vast amounts of such data collected over long periods of time.
The effectiveness of ML is limited by what data you capture. Weather predictions become more accurate if you also add satelite images to the data set of temperature and humidity.
So how would you start to collect actual human thoughts in a way that can be exploited to do something meaningfull? You need to start by defining the data structure. Unlike the weather human thoughts can be structured and captured as follows:
These 3 combined form a single data point that is collected for machine learning. This forms a database of converted data from its initial analogue form to an abstraction in digital format.
The patterns that are recognized may include the mapping of associations that recur. For instance if you think about a person you love your hearth rate might increase slightly and derived from those 2 elements an emotional state of “love” can be derived. Another example could be if you think about space exploration and the moon an emotional state of curriosity might exist.
Emotions change but there are certain fixed sequences that exist. For example humans tend to curious beings, however they are also cautious. So a caveman that for the very first time sees fire, say after lightning struck a tree, would first be curious. As he closes in on the fire he starts to feel heat and the curiosity starts to change into fear as the heat felt on his skin increases. So here we have a sequence of emotions where fear follows curiosity.
First of all a sacret place is gone. You now have to live without the certainty of knowing that your thoughts are your own. Something else, someone else, is now directly interacting with your thoughts without letting you externalise your thoughts through speech or body language. You’r not even able to finish your thoughts before this interaction starts. There’s reactions, external reactions, on an unfinished thought. In fact I take the position that all thought is by definition unfinished until it gets externalised through speech or other reactions that another human being can pick up with his or her senses. For this reason alone I think that the idea of telepathy is madness. Adding a filtering AI between human minds will also not work as it deprives human interaction from genuine exchange of feelings. Remember when I talked about how this database of thoughs works by converting to digital format you have to make an abstraction. This Analogue to Digital conversion by definition means you always loose something. In a world or with zero’s and ones, you cannot capture half a one.
So there are limitations because of this abstraction to the digital. This being said humans also have their own limitations in rational thinking. These can be exploited to manipulate the mind. We do part of our rational thinking using our instict or intuition. This is what I call “false logic shortcuts”. These false-logic-shortcuts are actually very useful to speed up our rational thinking which otherwise is one of the slowest processes in our brain. We rely on instict to quickly calculate, without doing detailed arithmetic and we accept the result as true even thouth we didn’t do the detailed mathematical processing.
In a world where your thoughts are no longer your own, your rational thinking can be diminished by making you accept something that is not logical, that does not make sense, by artificially triggering false-logic-shortcuts in the wrong place of your trail of thought. When you have doubt about this, that it might be happening to you, the solution is to slow down your thinking, rethink and follow your logical reasoning in detail without skipping steps even when intuitively they feel right and not worth the rethink.
So far I’ve been talking about rational thinking but we are never just rational, we always have an emotional backdrop.
The data collection of thoughts that I explained in the beginning links our rational thoughts to an emotional state. When external thoughts are injected they can also trigger emotions through parallel associations. When thinking about the weather tomorrow, an almost subliminal injected thought of “fire”, will trigger a (faster) emotional reaction of fear into your rational thinking about tomorrows weather. This in turn can steer your next thought into a different direction and on it goes. You might think that predicted rain fall will cause a landslide in which while driving your car you could be swept away.
When enough thought data is collected the steering of thoughts by applying previous identified patterns becomes not that difficult. Not only can thoughts be directly manipulated, steered, your thinking is now also predictable within a set margin of error.