FMRI — Can the FBI see our thoughts?

[Brian4Liberty]

Silicon Valley predicted everything...just like Idiocracy.

 

[ClaytonB]

Okay.

This:

Not equivalent. One is a baseless speculation from left-field that the retarded FBI "might" have mind-reading technology. They "might" also have a colony of leprechauns that they farm for gold coins. Who knows. The other is a respectable cosmological theory in modern physics. Might turn out not to be true, but it is not completely baseless. There are good reasons to suspect the universe might be, at root, holographic. No tinfoil-hats required.

 

[acptulsa]

Not equivalent. One is a baseless speculation from left-field that the retarded FBI "might" have mind-reading technology. They "might" also have a colony of leprechauns that they farm for gold coins. Who knows. The other is a respectable cosmological theory in modern physics. Might turn out not to be true, but it is not completely baseless. There are good reasons to suspect the universe might be, at root, holographic. No tinfoil-hats required.

And this thought nexus where everyone's thoughts can be read, of all the cosmos, is on the surface of the earth or nearby, even though the earth moves through space quite a distance. And nobody ever found it until the FBI came along.

Remember, you're saying the retarded FBI could find this holographic nexus when no one else ever could, not just that it might exist.

Are you sure you wouldn't like a little Reynolds Wrap?

 

[ClaytonB]

And this thought nexus where everyone's thoughts can be read, of all the cosmos, is on the surface of the earth or nearby, even though the earth moves through space quite a distance. And nobody ever found it until the FBI came along.

Remember, you're saying the retarded FBI could find this holographic nexus when no one else ever could, not just that it might exist.

Are you sure you wouldn't like a little Reynolds Wrap?

I give up. Think what you like. I've been quite clear, so no point in further explanation.

 

[acptulsa]

I give up.

Don't give up now. You're so close to learning how to take what you dish out...

 

[Occam's Banana]

The point: If the universe is holographic, you don't actually need an MRI machine, the information can be snatched from any point in space if you know how to fetch it. The functional word in that last sentence, obviously, is "IF". It might be possible, nobody has proved it isn't.

Saying that "if the universe is 'holographic', then information can be snatched from any point in space" is no different than saying "if pink unicorns exist, then they fart flower-scented rainbows".

Strictly speaking, it is indeed true that either of those "might be possible" because "nobody has proved it isn't" - but that is not how the science of physics is supposed to work (at least, not physics of any genuinely respectable and fruitful variety). There is not so much as a single shred of evidence (and thus, not a single real & credible reason to believe) that either is actually the case. Both are nothing but fanciful speculations (the former by physicists who apparently don't have anything better to do than try to dazzle "pop science" rubes and journal editors by erecting entirely unsupported extrapolations on top of relatively well-established and much more "mundane" observations and models - but that is the proper role of science fiction authors, not of physicists qua physicists).

Not equivalent. One is a baseless speculation from left-field that the retarded FBI "might" have mind-reading technology. They "might" also have a colony of leprechauns that they farm for gold coins. Who knows. The other is a respectable cosmological theory in modern physics. Might turn out not to be true, but it is not completely baseless. There are good reasons to suspect the universe might be, at root, holographic. No tinfoil-hats required.

The notion of a "holographic universe" is indeed baseless, and there are no good reasons to "suspect the universe might be [...] holographic". It is, as Sabine Hossenfelder says in the description of the first video below, "wild speculation". (To paraphrase something else Hossenfelder said in a video you yourself posted in another thread, "There is even less evidence for a 'holographic universe' than there is for Bigfoot.")

Or, as she says in the second video below, which is specifically about the "holographic universe" hypothesis [sic]: "There is no evidence for [it], neither observational nor mathematical." IOW: It's just a pud-pulling offshoot of string-theory wankerism, which seems to be far more efficient at generating artifacts like "holographic universes" that physicists can publish lots of papers about - because no one can "prove" them wrong - than it is at producing actually fruitful physics (or even just physics that can reasonably hope to someday become fruitful). The latter is hard - but wildly speculative "gee-whiz!" "physics" is relatively quite easy (which is why so many public-facing physicists and science "journalists" gravitate to it).

Why do some scientists believe that our universe is a hologram?
In this video, I explain why some scientists believe that our universe is a hologram and we really live in the 2-dimensional projection of a higher dimensional space.

First, I explain just what physicists mean by the "holographic principle." The holographic principle says that the degrees of freedom inside a volume of space can be described by information on the surface of that volume at the same resolution.

Then I explain that this relation goes back to ideas about the black hole entropy and string theory in space with a negative cosmological constant, the so-called Anti-de Sitter space. I briefly mention what the problems are with these arguments.

I then discuss a recent idea of Verlinde & Zurek about how one could test holography experimentally.

Finally, I tell you my own opinion about this. As so often, I am highly skeptical that wild speculation will lead to progress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmDKlcaAWO0



Is the Universe REALLY a Hologram?
Is the universe a hologram, a projection of a higher-dimensional space? String theorists think it is. How does a hologram work, what is the holographic principle, and what do they have in common? I will explain all that in this video.

0:00 Intro
0:16 What is a hologram?
2:02 How do holograms work?
5:40 The holographic principle
8:41 Optical holography vs the holographic principle
9:55 Sponsor message
​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4DAGabiGms

 

[Occam's Banana]

And this goes here:

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show her.

And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
​

 

[twomp]

Right, but that's still hypothetical... my point is that the OP video doesn't talk about the FBI at all, so the connection between AI decoding of fMRIs and your opinions about FBI capabilities is pure speculation, nothing more. It's not bad to speculate, I'm simply highlighting that that's what it is. And, personally, I see it as a pretty absurd speculation because the FBI's collective IQ seems to be in the low-double digits, trending for single-digits....

Now that the thread has been derailed. I will try to bring it back to the point. Weather you think the FBI are a bunch of idiots or not (I personally don’t) is not really the issue. They have first dibs on the technology patents and that alone should make a viable case that they may be in possession of advanced technologies. Not to mention DARPA or any other research agencies they may have access to.

 

[ClaytonB]

Now that the thread has been derailed. I will try to bring it back to the point. Weather you think the FBI are a bunch of idiots or not (I personally don’t) is not really the issue. They have first dibs on the technology patents and that alone should make a viable case that they may be in possession of advanced technologies. Not to mention DARPA or any other research agencies they may have access to.

I'm not dissing your view, I just think you're attributing to the "Russia-Russia-Russia"-FBI wayyyy more intelligence than they actually possess. They certainly don't have the in-house capability. Could they get help from other, less idiotic agencies? Perhaps, but I don't think that's how the power dynamic really works in DC. Nobody is going to help the FBI "just because". The FBI uses its secret police methods to infiltrate and exert control over other agencies -- using "legal" methods only, of course! -- and that's how they strong-arm cooperation from agencies like CIA, NSA, etc. who otherwise have no incentive to help the Keystone Kops FBI. "Scratch our back, we'll scratch yours" is another method we know they use because of Snowden's disclosures of how FVEYs works. FBI itself cannot directly read data that NSA collects on US civilians (which is all of it, meaning ALL OF IT), but they ask CIA to share records of "overseas intelligence" that they claim is applicable to domestic investigations. Using the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" method, they define at least 3-hops of association as relevant to any investigation, a blanket broad enough to likely cover 90+% of the US automatically. CIA (or NSA or whoever, some agency with foreign jurisdiction) first collocates its own intelligence on US civilians to a server in GCHQ, Aussie intelligence, or whoever, and then they request it from there on behalf of FBI, then share it. The end result is blatantly illegal and un-Constitutional, but every link in the chain has been "defined" as fully-legal:

- FBI wants to look at John Q Public's records... "just because"
- FBI draws three or four links to connect John Q Public to some individual or entity that they have in their database of criminal investigations. This works with 90+% probability.
- FBI then takes this "investigation" to CIA/NSA/whoever and says, "can you request any information on this US individual that our 'foreign partners' may have?" This may require FISA warrant, I'm not sure, but that's just a rubber-stamp.
- The foreign-jurisdiction agency then asks a FVEYs partner to send them the information that we have already collected on this individual and stored with them, back to us. All this does is transfer the legal liability for spying on this US citizen onto that FVEYs partner. "Oops, the Brits spied on a US civilian and we shared that info with the FBI... whoopsie-daisy, pinky-promise it won't happen again!"
- The FBI then collects this information and uses it to target and harass John Q Public, perhaps because of his political activities or for some other reason

So yeah, a bunch of super-geniuses in the Hoover building really giving it to the mafia just like the G-men did back in the good old days. "We're gonna keep spending that political capital because it's in infinite supply, you know. We The People are an Idiocracy, so they're never going to say enough is enough and forcibly disband the secret police. They're too scared to try it anyway, because we've got a mind-reading machine!!!" -- The FBI, probably.

 

[ClaytonB]

Saying that "if the universe is 'holographic', then information can be snatched from any point in space" is no different than saying "if pink unicorns exist, then they fart flower-scented rainbows".

It's not like that at all. While the technical jargon meaning of "holographic" in specific fields of physics may be limited to particular implications within that field, the general concept of the universe-as-holograph is that information is fundamentally non-local which, in the limit, could mean that all information about every state in the Universe is accessible at every point within it, possibly even without loss. This would be an overturning of the principle of locality but, in many ways, quantum theory has already done that (sorry, Einstein), so that's not even revolutionary. The specific implications of holographic theory have to with how that information might actually be accessible. Yes, it is still theoretical physics, which means that nobody has yet demonstrated any of this in a laboratory, but it's a long ways from flower-scent-farting unicorns.

Strictly speaking, it is indeed true that either of those "might be possible" because "nobody has proved it isn't" - but that is not how the science of physics is supposed to work (at least, not physics of any genuinely respectable and fruitful variety).

Yeah, the experimentalists are always grinding that axe against the theoreticians. Oh well... nothing changes but that it always stays the same...

There is not so much as a single shred of evidence (and thus, not a single real & credible reason to believe) that either is actually the case.

Nonsense. Quantum physics is fundamentally non-local, both in time and space. Holographic theory is primarily motivated by that fact. The whole reason for trying to understand how/if information may be evaporating off a black-hole is to understand why quantum physics so often violates locality. Modern physics has completely thrashed the principle of locality, it is simply not a valid physical principle. The real question is not "if" but why locality is violated, and how does that reconcile with our macroscopic experience wherein locality seems to apply.

Both are nothing but fanciful speculations (the former by physicists who apparently don't have anything better to do than try to dazzle "pop science" rubes and journal editors by erecting entirely unsupported extrapolations on top of relatively well-established and much more "mundane" observations and models - but that is the proper role of science fiction authors, not of physicists qua physicists).

Sure, that sounds really serious and impressive and vaguely Boomer.

The notion of a "holographic universe" is indeed baseless, and there are no good reasons to "suspect the universe might be [...] holographic". It is, as Sabine Hossenfelder says in the description of the first video below, "wild speculation". (To paraphrase something else Hossenfelder said in a video you yourself posted in another thread, "There is even less evidence for a 'holographic universe' than there is for Bigfoot.")

Aka it's theoretical physics.

Or, as she says in the second video below, which is specifically about the "holographic universe" hypothesis [sic]: "There is no evidence for [it], neither observational nor mathematical." IOW: It's just a pud-pulling offshoot of string-theory wankerism, which seems to be far more efficient at generating artifacts like "holographic universes" that physicists can publish lots of papers about - because no one can "prove" them wrong - than it is at producing actually fruitful physics (or even just physics that can reasonably hope to someday become fruitful). The latter is hard - but wildly speculative "gee-whiz!" "physics" is relatively quite easy (which is why so many public-facing physicists and science "journalists" gravitate to it).

A lot of physics is about how you choose to organize the available facts (observations). Newtonian and Lagrangian mechanics are formally equivalent... but each are more suitable for different domains of physics. You just gotta choose the right hammer from the toolbox.

Nobody knows why the universe is non-local. All we know for sure, is that it is. Holographic physics is one way of organizing our thinking about why the universe is non-local, and what are the other implications of that. Could turn out to be a dead-end.

Personally, my own favorite cosmology/theoretical-physics is Digital Physics. It is strongly connected to holographic cosmologies because information is, in a sense, natively holographic (dimensions can be reduced/increased at-will). One "non-unicorn farts" reason to suspect this is quantum erasure... the universe acts like it's a quantum computer, even when this behavior violates any mechanical intuitions we have about how waves and particles "should" propagate. If you'd like to learn more about this topic, I highly highly recommend the following video to your attention. In particular, pay attention to his live demonstration of quantum erasure starting around 15:45.



If we're just running on some quantum mainframe in some other space that is inaccessible to us, then yeah, all that information is centrally-accessible from that point. This is a little different than the holographic principle, but it gets to the same idea, that the Universe is non-local somewhere. Once again, there is no reason this is impossible, and there are many reasons to suspect that this could be the case, because it resolves many of the fundamental "paradoxes" of QM in a snap. What are the verification/falsification laboratory experiments for these various theories? Not my problem, I'm not a physicist.

 

[ClaytonB]

And this goes here:

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show her.

And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
​

That is an excellent quote. If only we had more scientists like Trin Tragula!

 

[Occam's Banana]

 

[pmbug]

... I think that nano particles/sensors which I believe the FBI is in possession of ... could replicate the same function as an fMRI. ...

This is an fMRI machine (basically the same as an MRI machine):

There is no way that a "nano sensor" the size of a hair is generating magnetic fields comparable to an MRI machine.

...
How Does fMRI Scan the Brain?

fMRI is based on the idea that blood carrying oxygen from the lungs behaves differently in a magnetic field than blood that has already released its oxygen to the cells. In other words, oxygen-rich blood and oxygen-poor blood have a different magnetic resonance. Scientists know that more active areas of the brain receive more oxygenated blood. The fMRI picks up this increased blood flow to pinpoint greater activity. The measurement of blood flow, blood volume and oxygen use is called the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal.

The MRI machine is an expensive piece of equipment (costing between $500,000 and $2 million) that visualizes the brain using a combination of radio waves and an incredibly powerful magnetic field [source: Frost & Sullivan Research]. The typical research MRI scanner has a strength of three teslas -- a force about 50,000 times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field [source: University of Oxford].

When you lie inside the cylindrical MRI machine, it aims radio waves at protons -- electrically charged particles in the nuclei of hydrogen atoms -- in the area of your body being studied. As the magnetic field hits the protons, they line up. Then the machine releases a short burst of radio waves, which knocks the protons out of alignment. After the radio-wave burst has ended, the protons fall back in line, and as they do, they release signals that the MRI picks up. The protons in areas of oxygenated blood produce the strongest signals.

A computer processes these signals into a three-dimensional image of the brain that doctors can examine from many different angles. Brain activity is mapped in squares called voxels. Each voxel represents thousands of nerve cells (neurons). Color is added to the image to create a map of the most active areas in the brain.
...

https://science.howstuffworks.com/fmri.htm

 

[twomp]

This is an fMRI machine (basically the same as an MRI machine):

There is no way that a "nano sensor" the size of a hair is generating magnetic fields comparable to an MRI machine.



https://science.howstuffworks.com/fmri.htm

The fMRI machine uses the magnetic field to highlight the blood (mainly oxygen particles/neurons) moving throughout the brain. With the nano sensors, the magnetic field would no longer be needed as each nano sensor could then be used to measure brain activity.

 

[ClaytonB]

The fMRI machine uses the magnetic field to highlight the blood (mainly oxygen particles/neurons) moving throughout the brain. With the nano sensors, the magnetic field would no longer be needed as each nano sensor could then be used to measure brain activity.

While I don't rule out the holographic principle as a serious theoretical possibility, there are a lot of good physical reasons to suspect that it is very difficult to access useful information about brain activity beyond what is detectable from a person's own externally-visible reactions. One way to see this is that we're actually hardwired to have involuntary facial responses to a wide variety of situations, including disgust, terror, recognition (of someone we know), and many more. That is, nature has already wired us to be "mind-readable" simply by someone looking at our external presentation. Since we're already wired this way (and the body itself has full access to the brain), it follows that there is a strong law of diminishing returns on this kind of activity.

This is the real "mind-reading":



Obviously, the tinfoil-hat-wearers mean something much more specific by "mind-reading", such as being able to forcibly extract my childhood dog's name or my uncle's birthday, whether I consent to such extraction or not. What is usually overlooked in these discussions is if we're talking about that kind of mind-reading, we're not really talking about physics anymore, we're talking about the spiritual realm. The brain-mind identity hypothesis is just that... a hypothesis. In fact, the mind and body are ontologically distinct... my mind (soul) does not depend upon my body to exist, a fact that you should at least have some inkling of awareness if you've ever had a very vivid dream where you were in another place, or speaking to someone else who clearly was not some kind of dreamed-up puppet of your brain, perhaps even someone you know. And so on.

The kind of mind-reading that secret police goon-squads like the Gestapo, the Stasi and the FBI wish they could do, isn't really about physics at all, it's spiritual. You don't get to peer into the souls of others without the Abyss peering back into you. This is why I have explained many times on this forum that the kinds of tools and methods employed by intelligence agencies are swimming in the same swamp as the occult. They do not understand that they are but naked babes stumbling around and making a racket in a dark forest filled with ravenous wolves. My advice to everyone (including those working in secret-police agencies) is to run away as fast as you can from anything having anything to do with this. It's called "the bottomless pit" for a reason. There is no end to it, it goes on forever into greater and greater evil and horror. The flip-attitude "I like horror movies" is a recipe for disaster... I'm not talking about horror movies, I'm talking about horror itself. Run away! The Truth can be found in the Word of God and nowhere else. Salvation is found in Jesus, and no one else. Get away from this veiled-occult evil, it will burn you alive and eat you from within. These "technologies" are fashioned from the very flames of hell. I'm not being rhetorical, here, I mean every word.

 

[acptulsa]