Hopefully I'll have the time to respond in more detail about alleged electromagnetic weapons that simulate voices... To date I haven't seen anything to credibly suggest to me that such technology exists.

My belief is the shadow government is a transnational group with connections to multiple governments.

True and if the US really does have a quantum super computer, then It's safe to say that they're not the only ones. I bet other advanced civilizations throughout the universe have computers that are even more powerful and I bet they are already aware of our existence & tampering with the matrix.

Prior to 1987, almost every state in America either prohibited the carrying of concealed handguns or permitted concealed-carry under a licensing system that granted government officials broad discretionary power over the decision to grant a permit. The key feature of the new concealed-carry laws is that the government must grant the permit as soon as any citizen can satisfy objective licensing criteria. Concealed-carry reform reaffirms the basic idea that citizens have the right to defend themselves against criminal attack. And since criminals can strike almost anywhere at any time, the last thing government ought to be doing is stripping citizens of the most effective means of defending themselves. Carrying a handgun in public may not be for everyone, but it is a right that government ought to respect.

Me: Hello, moderators. I posted a question to /r/AskScience, and it seems to have been caught in the spam filter. Could you let it through? Thank you.

Here is the thread:

www.reddit.com...

Brain_Doc82: We can't "read thoughts" with technology located here on earth, so no, it is not possible to "read thoughts" using satellites.

Me: Have you not seen 60 Minutes' special, "Reading Your Mind"...?

www.youtube.com...

Brain_Doc82: No, I haven't. And no matter what that video says, at present, there is no way to "read thoughts". I assume that video discusses the ability of functional neuroimaging to make inferences about a person's emotional state or even judge their reactions to a given stimuli based on BOLD signal, however that is "making inferences" not "reading thoughts", and the differences are HUGE.

ipokebrains: The computer is not reading a person's mind.

Basically what's happening is this:

You put a person in a scanner and ask them to think about a certain few objects. A lot.

Then you record what their brain activity looks like. For every person this will be totally different, so you have to take a lot of images of each specific person thinking about each specific object.

Then you go play with things in a computer. You essentially try to find the similarities when YOU KNOW that people were thinking about object A. This gives you some kind of average of what this specific person's brain looks like when it's focussed on object A in this particular task.

Then you run things backwards - instead of knowing which image belongs to which object, you try and predict which ones do based on these great average templates of what a particular part of this specific person's brain looks like doing this one thing. The one that 'matches' best is likely to be the one the person was thinking of. This is all done on a computer.

That's it - they aren't reading minds at all. They are training a computer to look at pixels in imaging scans and running big correlation programs based on hundreds of hours of training templates they have stored for a particular person, and a particular object, in a particular context.

If you change even one tiny aspect of the experiment - the person, thinking about even a slightly different coloured object, or even running new trials with the same person sometimes, or a thousand other things, this whole thing no longer works.

Me: Well yeah. Obviously, there has to be a database of objects, and each person's brain pattern is slightly different.

But how isn't that thought reading?

You could take a person, have them think of loads of different things, and build up their database with millions of objects, words etc, and you could therefore read their mind.

All the world is... is objects, colours etc.

ipokebrains: Sure, but that's not all your thoughts are. To get anywhere near your 'conscious thinking' you would essentially have to follow someone around all day every day with a scanner of some description while imaging every part of their brain as it develops and is shaped by experience. Basically model and copy their brain patterns as they develop - and each person would be entirely different and individual so you'd have to do that for everyone.

Problems with this other than the obvious? The technology doesn't even close to exist. The imaging technique used in this study extremely limited, both in terms of resolution and mobility. It's basically only good at looking at rough activation of large, genral brain areas and misses all detail in terms of neuronal activity. Consciousness and 'thinking' as you know it are extremely sparse, distributed processes, so this kind of scan would totally miss them. You also need to be lying perfectly still in a massive pieve of equipment in a hospital to use it.

Then there's the computing power required to process all of this - it takes months of programming and analysis.

So there is simply no way that we're anywhere near the technology or basic knowledge about the brain that it would take to truly 'read minds' - let alone from space.

dearsomething:

Obviously, there has to be a database of objects, and each person's brain pattern is slightly different.

Much more different than expected, even across age-matched neurotypicals. When you go outside of that realm, becomes more and more and more dissimilar.

But how isn't that thought reading?

Just by closing your eyes and then opening them causes neurons to kind of go nuts in the visual cortices. Due to them going nuts there will be an influx of readable electrical and magnetic signatures. Magnetic in terms of field potentials and paramagnetic properties due to expended glucose from blood rushing to your visual system. Simply by opening your eyes. Any and all technologies we have we show this. Many out of field researchers consider this "brain readings" when in fact it is not.

You could take a person, have them think of loads of different things, and build up their database with millions of objects, words etc, and you could therefore read their mind.

No, you can't. EEG and fMRI are not sensitive enough. Furthermore, to generate clearer (higher spatial resolution) fMRI (at a weak temporal resolution) would require enough harddrive space, per person, closely approaching the size used on supercomputers. And that could be for just one task. Imagine millions of tasks.

All the world is... is objects, colours etc.

And the brain responds to those objects and colors with electrial and magnetic signals, rushes of blood, transport of glucose and a whole host of thousands of other things we understand and know with at least thousands of other things we don't understand and don't know.

Also, visual perception is not strictly "thoughts", neither are recalled memories.

Me: See, this is where I think you're arguing over technicals.

You're saying recalled memories aren't thoughts.... and you're talking about reading all of our thoughts.

But if just the strongest thoughts, or just sentences/words were read, think of how useful that could be. I don't see why you couldn't think a sentence in your head and have it relayed.

There is a CBS News 60 Minutes clip showing words recalled with a machine.

Also see this: www.slashgear.com...

ren5311: You are far overstating the potential applications for any of these techniques. This is why we use primary literature and not popular reporting as sources. Go read the original papers.

Dearsomething has answered your questions, and he is arguably the most qualified moderator or panelist here to do so. As a fellow neuroscientist, I agree with him completely for what that's worth. If you don't accept his answer, you are simply trying to defend your personal theory against the qualified opinion of an expert.

This is not the purpose of AskScience.

Me: So, the futurists in this BBC article are wrong?

www.bbc.co.uk...

Brain_Doc82: The folks who are responding to you here are legitimate neuroscience researchers who read (and conduct) the actual scientific studies that result in those popular press articles and videos, we don't need to see or read them. If you don't want to believe what we're telling you, that's fine, you don't have to. But let's please stop this discussion; it is clogging up our modmail system. Thanks, have a good one.