Is it possible to ‘program’ someone to kill themselves?
In the TV show [continuum] terrorists from the future used tech which changed specific neurons [and bundles etc], to ’program’ people to kill others and then themselves.
I am just wondering if such a thing would be possible?
On the show one programmed lady stepped on the edge of a train platform, as if seeming to be about to fall over the edge. Seeing a fast train approaching the victim [a man] grabbed her to save her but she grabbed him and pulled them both onto the track in front of the speeding train.
The detectives on the show noted that this was more than hypnotism could do.
There are at least two possibilities here, either the consciousness is in sleep mode and so the killer is as if sleepwalking, such that the dream-state is being manipulated by the tech implanted in her brain.
Or, as it seemed, the programmed person is conscious but has no control over what they are doing?
My thoughts are that this may work for a short period of time and perhaps if there are no great conflicts e.g. they don’t know the victim. However, neurons tend to recalibrate quickly ~ as the brain has a certain amount of plasticity. Considering that the brain is evolution made, and would try to survive even in an insect with only a few neurons, I would think that it would be virtually impossible to program someone to kill themselves, especially after a prolonged series of events.
To carry out a complex set of plans one would think that the intellect would be involved, making calculations etc. then if the consciousness is awake it would surely be involved in the processes?
I would expect that to make a brain carry out such a dramatic series of instructions, the tech would need to program a great many of the neurons in the brain. Even with that one would expect other neurons to be changing to compensate, or even that such a flood of chemical changes in the brain would knock someone unconscious, make them hallucinate, or otherwise make the brain dysfunctional.
Maybe if the tech some how effected impulse and caused the impulse to act to kill at a specific time… or you could have a tech that causes sudden anger, which may or may not result in someone killing it would depend on the person. It would be hard to make such tech work effectively due to all the other… mechanisms in the brain that might interfear with what was impulsed.
Indeed! I feel that as we cannot do such things with hypnotism, or at least that would take an extraordinary compliance from the individual. Then the brain/mind is simply not that programmable.
Sometimes I wonder what such fantasies are trying to tell us e.g. about determinism, as if we are being told that we are weak. I question this to the utmost and I wonder if science/ski-fi is being used in a religionist manner?
This is why bad demons hate morals: Because our conscience and values are forms of self control, and they stand in the way of mind control and possession. A person naturally tries to resist mind control programming when it goes against their values and instincts and desires. Although I believe the brain can potentially be entirely rewritten, a partial rewrite would be an inner battle.
Hmm well it would take extraordinary tech to change all the chemicals and every neuron in the brain, not to mention that it would have to be done at once [one would think], otherwise neuronal plasticity would react from one area to the next.
I am still tempted to think that such a flood of chemicals and other input would simply overwhelm the brain and stop it functioning ~ much like drugs, especially an overdose of drugs.
If we changed specific neurons [as per the show], I would think others would overwrite them ~ at least given time.
Ski-fi Hocus pokus I‘d say? More worrying is the message.
James S Saint
hi
Assumedly at most it would be with unconscious victims? [like sleepwalking kinda]. Would it not be very difficult to execute complex plans in this way, people tend to sense something is awry don’t you think ~ like when someone is sleepwalking.
Um… if they die… then their atoms are still in existence, even if they are ‘dead’. Therefore, they haven’t dropped out of the universe, just the living person. It effects our assumptions that Bob has to live and do so and so for the loop would be established. This is a incorrect assumption. The loop may of been emplaced by person A, B, or C with aims of rewritting time, but the maintance of the time travel loop is dependent upon the act of time traveling, which is based on Physics, not E! Entertainment. I have a deep suspicion is a act of time travel is to occur, it will happen because of a emphasis on technical physics, and not social logical continuums. Even if the whole human race is wiped out, that timeloop is going to remain open with the force that was required to open it in the first place, regardless of the consequences to extraverted social norms and assumptions of ego to causality. You don’t merely replace one timeline with another, the old one never completely dissapates by default, it’s going to leave it’s imprint, and all sort of crazy stuff have happen otherwise relativistically. It will be a time traveling continuum none the less… as it’s taking place Spacially. The even of time traveling from that original past is going to breach any alternative reality.
This is assuming someone would be so lame as to do this, possessing the capacity to do so, without picking up on the consequences.
Since when did everyone become fascinated with time travel here on this forum? You can’t do Time without Size… it’s the monolith that can’t be passed when studying 20th cnetury theoretical physics unless one is regarded in light of the other, any other method produces silly and obvious mathematical paradoxes. Our century is 21, not 20, so it’s time to move drop the pretence to indicisive measurement of realitivity as devived from studying Ballistics and line of sight Telemetry, and move on from such silliness. Relativistic means moving beyond bombastic, smash it up artillery science of point to point exchanges to something… well, more relativistic. Size and Time defied such measurements in terms of consistency and yet were most consisent in their measured inconsistency when measured by indirect means that assumed they were objectively relativistic and yet subjectively limited in our experiences. Time and Size presents the same problems to physics, but our physics in the last century never could shake the narrow side effects of it’s shoot em up bombastic experimental set ups. It’s like looking at the universe out of a gun turrets line of sight, or a 50 Cals ability to interact with the universe. Fuck… ask a infantryman in a guard tower what dark matter is, and he’ll say Depleted Uranium. We’re limited by the assumptions of the tools before us, their constrains can’t become the basis of a universal theory.
What is Time? What is Size? You can’t ask these apart from one another when searching out the base essence of the term.
I know what you mean, but even though it may seem like my first responses are not quite on target, I think they are important enough to mention.
Sure, advertising does this. You can program people to want certain products that will slowly kill them. This happens all over the place.
Sure, patriotism, ideas about honor and duty, lies or extreme reframings of certain international situations, can get young men and now women join up and go somewhere and die.
Sure, telling children terrible things about themselves, coupled with witholding of affection and or more direct forms of abuse can lead to suicides.
Sure, telling cancer patients that the only possible things that can help them are radiation, chemotherapy and surgery can lead them to make choices that will lead to their deaths.
Sure, telling people that if they strap a bomb on their body and blow up the ‘right’ civilians and they will go to heaven, can if coupled with a bunch of other programming over a long period of time, lead them to make a choice that will kill them.
Now more on point. I think the above loose forms of programming can be refined and used on people and create, yes, the type of more rigid, time controllable behavior you are asking about.
Take some of the basic features of the programming involved in the examples:
abuse, mind fucking and lies, reward and punishment, reframing of reality
and do these things in a very organized way over a shorter period of time and you can get people to do just about anything.
Interesting reply, I don’t pretend to know enough about relativity to understand all you said, but I think I got the drift. …a big amount of time jumping would take an equally big amount of size/space/energy?
I don’t believe in time travel because its seems to ask for something outside the system [or that time ‘is something’ maybe], yet I feel all information pathways are universally resolved. People often use the term ‘dimension’ as if it is something, but for me there is no such thing as a dimension, its simply a measure, and one upon the non-absolute.
Moreno
Sure, these are far more indirect than specific mind control though, there appears to be the will in decision making process.
Hmm that’s a good point, if one could tell the brain that what it sees is an enemy rather than a friend, then like an acid trip or something the perceiver is informed incorrectly by the senses.
Could work in the short term perhaps, I don’t know how much contrary info the brain would believe, it’s a very clever ’computer’ and evolution has programmed it since life began [more or less], specifically to get it right or die ~ especially to self preserve.
More actually. That’s the major flaw in most time travel theories… they don’t factor into the new timeline the conception of causality and balancing energy to create the new time line, nor the aspects of physics that would continue without regard to the old timeline to the new one. There is a massive lost of ‘energy’ (used very loosely, I mean any kind of force) from the one timeline into the next by the act of time travel itself. Many people just assume that same energy is just going to be in the new timeline untouched. Now… any actualy physicist following this would grasp what I’m saying here… that’s not rational nor possible. There will be a dramatic imbalance between the two timelines. This imbalance is going to CONTINUE to be in effect from the perspective to OTHER TIME TRAVELERS. It essentially becomes part of the topology of time. It would be traceable in concepts such as quantum mechanics- therefor effecting the question Descartes had… what if the rules of Physics suddenly changed? We would have a history of physics… and then suddenly tests in physics for a time would come off differently. The data wouldn’t match the behavior of sub-atomic particles studied in the past, and it would take a dramatic stretch of the imagination for a researcher NOT tied to the time travel incident to say ‘fuck, think someone traveled into our timeline and tried to change history’. It would just remain a oddity, and something historians would note.
My further stress is, everytime this aspect of the topology of time is effected… it changes… even if from the perspective of the time traveler the continuum ends. Further effects would happen, as much of physics isn’t going to be touched by time.
A example… gravity is linked to concepts of space, but there is no reason for it to be effected by conceptions of time. There isn’t a inherent reason for one to be balanced by the other via the data collected by the tests we do, as we rarely mess with stuff smaller than atoms… and then it’s usually lasers and wavelengths, and that shit continues to terribly confuse us in terms of basic engineering. But we got the smashing of atoms down nicely. Shoot and blow dem up mentality. Fuck yeah. Wait until physicist learn how to smash them on their foreheads in a drunken enthusiasm. Hopefully it will be cheaper.
We really aren’t in a position to know how atoms behave subatomically as a result beyond the nonlinearilty of physics when they interact with atoms. Most of the fun shit time would be based on for considerations of remapping causality would lay there. I doubt it’s possible, but if it was, we’re guaranteed that time wouldn’t encompass all of it… as any means to moving time requires something to push off of… a paddle against a current. Only a aspect of physics would change, and likely only in a locality. Hence the episode above… the continuum only occured in a small aspect of space. The rest of the universe continued on for three months, and when people tried to return to earth from the outlying regions, the people on earch thought only one day passed. However, Cern Labratories likely noticed a change if they were doing something exacting. Same for astronomers. Radioactive decays isn’t timed exactingly enough for such a tight time period, but I wouldn’t be surprised if even radioactive decay would show oddities here if one could measure it.
The more the continuum is effected, the more the ‘time travel event’ happens. Meaning it’s more than a event. It’s a relativistic feature, and it has it’s own causality to consider. Not the ego known as Bob or Larry. In that same episode I listed above, the time continuum happened with or without them repeating the process. Everyone could of killed themselves the billonth time it happened in the very beginning, and it still would of repeated. Much like ground hog’s day.
However, this is a shitty, shallow aspect of philosophy. It’s not possible to begin with from my perspective. Any society possessing the means to doing it would judt fucking move to a new planet or recreate the people lost, or manufacture the desire wanted from time travel. Fucking why would anyone want to if you were technologically advance to do so? I don’t need to travel back in time to become rich so I can get a super model as a mistress if I can much cheaper and with less effort grow one in a vat. I assure you, the latter is much cheaper and requires less energy. Plus, Time Cop won’t try to kill you when you get a BJ from Vatwoman, which is always a plus.
The way I see it, you would have to either have full control of the brain, or have an incredibly detailed understanding of exactly how the brain works, in order to push and tweak exactly the right bits whilst understanding how the rest of the brain will react. You would also have to have a method of controlling such tweaks, which would probably involve altering the state of minute parts of the brain in isolation (probably), which would mean having full control of pretty much every neuron. And, unless you have a method of seeing exactly how all other events would unfold (which in fairness time travelers might well have) then you’d probably need some sort of live control of what’s going on.
But this is all assuming, of course, that our brains don’t work, on some fundamental level, on some sort of program. Perhaps they do, it’s just so so complicated that we don’t know how it works yet? Maybe there is a built in ‘program’ that our brain works in, and if so this program could be altered in the same way a computer virus can be uploaded. I’m obviously not an expert on either brains or computers, so maybe someone will shoot this possibility down…
Now that part I understood! I don’t believe its possible anyway but I agree it would take less effort given the tech to just make the world you want in the now.
Interesting stuff mate, I’ll try to grasp it once its filtered through all the cobwebs in my brain.
brevel_monkey
I agree and indeed, isn’t the brain to ‘plastic’ to know it fully, there would always be change occurring in different areas to those you are reading. Imho I don’t think you could ever get a full brain map as it just doesn’t work on any singular/particular level.
As such I can’t see there is a specific program, its more a mass of programs continuously rewriting themselves. Apparently the brain has 13 maps of input, which are then reduced to the singular in our conscious eye. In other words the brain as a whole doesn’t work in the singular, that only occurs after multiple calibrations of inputs.