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Shapeless

Teh Future of gaming

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Zaldron said:

This is incredibly naive.

No, it's just down to earth and realistic. I also dream of holodecks and games where the characters are every bit as intelligent as humans and can engage in a real conversation with you, but I'm not naive enough to think that it's going to happen in the next few decades. So no, it's actually the completely opposite of naive.

What you people must understand is that relying on binary input or at best, linearly mapped input is a constraint we can do well without.

Saying that we can do without it is not the same as saying we will do without it. These constraints simply are going to exist for a very long time.

The possibilities offered by the endless combinatory pairs offered by "dimensions" such as joint bending, muscular torsion and orientation in space allow for a magnitude of control over a game never experimented with before.

Personally I'm not disputing your argument that it could offer all these advantages. I'm simply arguing that it won't. The main reason it's going to fail is economics. The development costs for programming a game to interpret camera images and represent them accurately in the game are, without doubt, huge, and these costs would repeat themselves for every new game that's developed. The next point I would make is this: How many game projects would be willing to go to these lengths to support this kind of hardware? Very, very few, and of that I'm certain. The reason this is important is that history shows that video game input hardware never succeeds in the marketplace unless it is either A) the standard controller scheme for the system, or B) bundled with a single extremely hot-selling game. In the case of A), this kind of hardware can never be mandatory for a mainstream video game system because most developers would simply refuse to be saddled with the burden of making their game work well with the hardware. In the case of B, (Guitar Hero, DDR, Wii Fit), you still can't argue that it's doing much to further the game industry because the hardware ends up really just being a flash in the pan that doesn't get picked up by other developers.

What you are all very wrongly assuming is that motion capture can only be used in the context of 1:1 subject:avatar expression, when in fact, you must see the motion of limbs, head and all subtle nuances involved as the evolution of former controller archetypes such as keyboards (combinable binary input), mice (free form 2D + combinable binary input) and joysticks (model dependent).

While in some games punching the air does make sense as the activator of "guy punches forward" or swinging maps to "swing sword", think of this as getting us much more closer to the fast, intuitive GUIs of science fiction such as Minority Report.

I'm going to be frank here. It sounds like you've got an incredibly weak and poorly-thought-out position that you've decided to latch onto for whatever reason, and you're compensating for it by muddling your argument and being extremely vague and unclear of how this video game utopia is going to come to fruition. I really don't see anything in what you're saying that's grounded in realism, and so I've kind of lost interest in wasting any more time tearing your argument apart.

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Heh, this thread made me look through my library for an old "videogame encyclopedia" I have, which is written more like a dictionary and current up to the year 1993. Yup, pre-Doom 1993.

Interestingly however, it had quite a few entries about "alternate" controllers made before that date, meaning that forcibly trying to find new and awkward ways for videogame input is far from being a "new" and "hip" idea.

Besides the obvious ones like the Nintendo Powerglove, there were descriptions of voice-activate helmets (Lipstick Plus), baseless joysticks that used liquid mercury contacts for motion detection (Lestick), devices that eventually became DDR "dancing pads", 360 cabins for flight games, and, guess what, a body motion detection system by Sega called The Activator.

The common bottom line in the entries of those devices was that even when they were not absurdly expensive contraptions, they offered no advantage when used with the existing libraries of games (like the AVGN illustrated so dramatically with his powerglove video), most often they handicapped or even made games unplayable, exactly because those were marketed as replacements for the standard controls, a role in which they utterly failed. The only exception were those bound to specific titles, like e.g. a bicicling game connected to a gym bike or somesuch, which however had no "universal" value whatsoeve outside their specific game.

I'll only conceive Zaldron one point: when mind controls will be perfected, nothing else will beat them. For for now, it's no big secret that humans have most of their dexterity and coordinations in their fingers, which are also the most lightweight appendage.
So any control method relying on anything other (whole arms, feet, body etc.) will always be slower, less accurate, and more tiring. There's a reason why most machinery is operated with hands, fingers, and at most, feet. But not with coordinated whole-body movements which require standing up.

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Maes said:
[Band, guess what, a body motion detection system by Sega called The Activator.

[/B]


Was that arcade shooter of a few years back (the last time i went in an Arcade, well, the lobby of Peterburough Showcase) where you had to genuinely duck to duck in-game made by Sega by any chance?

Pretty sure it was...

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deathbringer said:

Was that arcade shooter of a few years back (the last time i went in an Arcade, well, the lobby of Peterburough Showcase) where you had to genuinely duck to duck in-game made by Sega by any chance?

Pretty sure it was...


Dunno, but I don't see why not. However, the Activator itself appears AVGN-worthy. And they chose MK as an example game? With a directional pad jump? So kicking "forward" would jump? :-S

What killed the powerglove was, among others, that it had to map its sensors differently to different games manually, via a set of punch-in codes. The Activator seemed to do that automatically based on previous knowledge of the Genesis' game library, and probably they planned to reuse known mappings for future games to ensure forward compatibility, but there are countless ways this won't work optimally (or at all) with specific game genres. I don't think I could pull a normal MK game (start to end) with that controller, even if it led to no performance decrease.

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Holy crap, I totally forgot about the Activator. I remember those commercials now.

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Zaldron said:

Ah, but Natal is not incapable of being supplemented by a "controller" or "accessory" of any kind.


This is true. But Natal is still claiming 100% focus on controller-less gaming. Sony on the other hand realizes that a binary element is still kind of necessary at this point in time.

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AndrewB, if you think at this rate of technological advancement we still have decades of clicking and tapping buttons, you're completely delusional.

But feel free to ignore me, that's a plus.

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Zaldron said:

AndrewB, if you think at this rate of technological advancement we still have decades of clicking and tapping buttons, you're completely delusional.

But feel free to ignore me, that's a plus.

Can you waggle your arm to change the channel on the TV yet?

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TheDigitalNomad said:

This is true. But Natal is still claiming 100% focus on controller-less gaming. Sony on the other hand realizes that a binary element is still kind of necessary at this point in time.

I think Sony will beat them in the first round but Microsoft is already giving some thought to the real problem.

At this juncture they're both pretty much the same, Microsoft just decided to give the tech a no-controller slant simply because it fits the purposes of this demonstration (the casual gamer crowd). Making this thing work with a controller is as easy as grabbing a controller with your hand.

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DuckReconMajor said:

Can you waggle your arm to change the channel on the TV yet?

If we still use mice and keyboards and joysticks in 20 years, you're free to come nag me.

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DuckReconMajor said:

Can you waggle your arm to change the channel on the TV yet?

Hardly a development worth spending R&D money in considering it's almost null improvement of the experience of watching TV.

Is my position invalid because my toaster doesn't support HTML 5?

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Zaldron said:

AndrewB, if you think at this rate of technological advancement we still have decades of clicking and tapping buttons, you're completely delusional.

What if I don't think that? Am I still delusional in your eyes? Also, you seem to be arguing that button pressing will be completely eliminated by, say, 2060. I'm comfortable in saying that you're wrong about this.

However, that wasn't even the contention. I asserted that holodecks and conversations with computers as cognizant and intelligent as humans would not happen in the next few decades, and I cited economics as the reason for this. I also asserted that camera-based video game controls are doomed, something that you are putting up a pissy fight about yet haven't even attempted to form a coherent argument as to why you're right.

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hahah made you post.

Kindly direct your attention to Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. Clearly they're just screwing around and have no intention to see this come to fruition or be accepted into the mainstream. Clearly.

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Zaldron said:

hahah made you post.

Kindly direct your attention to Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. Clearly they're just screwing around and have no intention to see this come to fruition or be accepted into the mainstream. Clearly.

This a stupid post because A) their intentions are not the issue, B) you're lumping all of these consoles' technologies together when it makes no sense to do so and C) you're sarcastically making fun of ridiculous statements that nobody made.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're being intentionally dense just to derail the argument. Consider it derailed.

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Maes said:

I'll only conceive Zaldron one point: when mind controls will be perfected, nothing else will beat them.


I wouldn't even concede that. Being able to just think it, and then it happens (wow!) is a fun concept, but even in the best possible case where all of the required technologies exist, pure "mind control" would be a surprisingly awkward control scheme. To subscribe to the notion that mind control would be the best ever, you have to hold onto notions about the human mind and brain that don't stand up to scrutiny.

The concept of mind control intrinsically contains the idea that conscious intentional thought is akin to, say, water, in a tank with a number of outflow pipes, closed off by valves. All pipes are equally capable as conduits of flow, and the tank operator merely needs to decide which valve is open at any given time. To complete this belaboured analogy, mind control assumes that thought is a substance that can be routed, with equal ease, to any destination we wish. Depending on which mental valves we open, a thought can turn into a sentence, expression, or hidden feeling. It is assumed that when we intend for something to occur, it doesn't matter if that thing is in the realm of real, physical action, or within a computer simulation, it's equally easy for that intention to become reality. Here's the thing, though: the mind is more constrained than most people realize. Thoughts tend to fall down the same pathways that have been well-established by experience, and are not easily re-routed to radical new destinations. If thought is like water, then it's like fresh rainfall, which could flow anywhere it wants, but tends to go downhill, in rivers.

I realize that where I'm going with this isn't particularly clear yet, but please be assured that I'm not working my way towards a point about the limitations of technology. In fact, let's pretend that brain-interfacing technology reaches its absolute theoretical zenith. A way is found to read the activity of every individual neuron of a brain, non-intrusively. This information is fed instantly and seamlessly into a supercomputer, which has on file the exact neural activity of this brain over a substantial control period. The contents of the mind at a given moment are not objective and discrete, but are relative; they exist in the differences between the brain's state at the present time and the brain's state at other times, so a databank of information on the brain's past functioning is necessary to determine which neural firings are distinct and important. These most relevant neural signals are then translated to specific thoughts and commands via a perfect map of the function of every neuron in this brain, which has been assembled by some other means, and these thoughts and commands are then translated once again into a digital form appropriate for use by whatever is being controlled. Voila! We have the perfect mind-reading device, which, quite sensibly, will be used primarily as part of a video game controller.

To determine what commands should be passed to the game, there are a few different areas of the brain which would be most sensible to scour for information, and as I'm trying to paint a picture of "perfected" mind control, our video game will consider all of the most relevant centers of brain activity jointly. These are the motor control and procedural memory centers, spatial/visual centers, and conceptual/linguistic centers. The motor control and procedural memory areas are important, as when the player is imagining what the character should do, this may partly include imagining the physical actions the character would make. Spatial centers are important, as the player may also be envisioning what the intended action would look like, or would achieve within the virtual space. Conceptual centers are important, because the player may think abstractly about what the character should do, and these abstract thoughts may be further distilled to linguistic instructions, making the linguistic and audio centers important.

Finally, here's the problem. But, in case you're fuzzy on your psychology, there are a couple things you'll have to know before I tell it to you. First, when we imagine an action, the same neurons are activated that are activated when we actually perform that action - but less strongly, and less precisely. When we imagine an image, the same neurons are activated that would be activated when we see it, but less strongly, and with introduced distortions. The equivalent is also true for the linguistic centers, and for everywhere in the brain, really. This is a well-documented neurological phenomenon. Second, despite seeming to be unimaginably complex, the brain seeks to achieve its goals as simply as possible. It is rare that we expend more effort than necessary to achieve satisfaction. Our complex behaviour is mainly a function of the complexity of the environment we find ourselves in, and individually we do not significantly augment that complexity. This is one of the fundamental premises of grounded cognition theories, and so is the third point: all mental apparatuses that we possess evolved in a physical environment, expressly for interaction with that physical environment. We are not natively abstract thinkers; our thought is meant to be for the sake of action.

So, with those facts in mind, let's imagine a young gentleman in the far-flung future, who's just loaded up Doom 63 from the comfort of his hypercouch. Having never used mind control to play a game before, as it has only recently become affordable for consumer applications, he is eager to give it a try, and plugs the system into the USB 3.0 port in his spine. The game reads his mind, and implements commands exactly as it receives them: badly. This is novel at first, but the player quickly becomes frustrated. He feels like he is stuck up against personal limits. He can see and feel what he wants to happen, but it's fuzzy, and the game's richly-characterized protagonist (now he has RED hair) is clumsily reenacting the player's clumsy thoughts. How can he control the character more precisely, he wonders, and while distracted by his wondering, he hits the solution: move along with the character! It starts with the subconscious tapping of his feet along with Doomguy's steps, but as he moves more consciously and more fully, the game character's responses become more precise in timing and direction. His gunplay improves as he focuses more fully on every target, twitches his trigger finger and shouts, "Shoot!" along with every kill. His brain is unaccustomed to forming thoughts of intentional action and then bottling them right back up, as that's not what it was made to do, so, to meet its goal of virtual success, his brain automatically does what is easiest: it uses the pre-existing neural architecture of physical action. Finally, FINALLY, here's the rub: our perfect mind control technology has become little more than a glorified motion sensing, eye-tracking, voice recognizer, with a few extra supercomputers tacked on. If this is the unbeatable control scheme, then Natal and other motion-sensing preNatal technologies are more forward-thinking than we realized.


EPILOGUE: A week later, our player has adapted to the system somewhat, and doesn't need to perform full actions anymore to achieve satisfactory results. Instead, he communicates with the Doomguy via limp gestures and pidgin English. He's not proud of that, but he can't stop completely without severely impacting his game performance. Sometimes he figures he should just keep playing games with his old Xbox controller - a historical gem, unappreciated in its time - as he feels terribly embarrassed about the motions and sounds this system forces him to make. Or, at least he would feel embarrassed if he interacted with other human beings on a regular basis, but he lives in an isolationist Fahrenheit 451-esque dystopia, lucky him.

EPILOGUE 2: ATTACK OF THE CLOSURE: Gee whiz, every time I think I've written a forum essay on every possible subject, something else comes along that triggers that MUST SHARE WISDOM WITH MORTALS impulse, and then you get this. Sorry everybody.

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What Creaphis is trying to tell us is that mind controls would likely need to be entirely recalibrated for each one of us, until they became fast enough, unambiguous enough and side effect-free enough to be of practical use.

Pretty surely, I would not like to jerk about like an epileptic or perform strange facial expressions when I just want to play a game. The fact remains though, that the fastest-reacting controls available today and for the years to come will be finger-operated mice, joysticks and joypads. Save for a perfectly calibrated mind control, anything other will be heavier, slower and more awkward to use.

This even applies to real machinery: e.g. the controls of a RC plane allow much more violent and rapid maneuvering than real flight controls (rudder pedals, sticks, etc.) even though they may not be as intuitive at first.

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Do you think there's a future for pornographic games with Natal?

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Craigs said:

Do you think there's a future for pornographic games with Natal?


I guess you better hope there is.

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Maes said:

Pretty surely, I would not like to jerk about like an epileptic or perform strange facial expressions when I just want to play a game.

Your problem; but I wouldn't mind moving my muscles more in order to play games (I'm referring to camera controlled games in general, not only mind-control or face-control). Also cut the "get out if you want sports" argument, maybe I don't want to (then again, you don't want such motion-scan games, so..)

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We are not natively abstract thinkers; our thought is meant to be for the sake of action.

Ah, but to think of GUIs, apps and games of the future as abstractions you must force yourself to digest in order to appreciate may be anachronistic with the mind reading tech itself.

Believable sensory input and perhaps some chemical intervention could provide the very sought after alternate realities of today's science fiction.

I don't see what's so inconvenient about learning/training your brain to a specific mapping, we do this continually. In fact you seem to kind of disprove yourself at the end of the post?

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AndrewB said:

This a stupid post because A) their intentions are not the issue, B) you're lumping all of these consoles' technologies together when it makes no sense to do so and C) you're sarcastically making fun of ridiculous statements that nobody made.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're being intentionally dense just to derail the argument. Consider it derailed.

Ah the classic "i didn't say that"/"that's not the point" fluff counterattack.

Here, let me make it simple: posit one single reason why you think it won't work, and I try to disprove you. No multi-quote barrages of text, just one solid problem. I'll concede victory if you present me with one insurmountable problem.

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Zaldron said:

For everything that is heavily mouse dependent, like large parts of an OS, graphic design, file manipulation, strategy games and the like, everything could be easily and phenomenally controlled through body movement.

Easily? Yes.

Conveniently? No.

Moving just your wrist (provided you're smart enough to work in an ergonomic environment) is much less straining than moving your whole arm and either simply pointing with your hand or actually pressing a touch pad. There's also the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law]Fitts' law[/url] which basically states that the less you need to physically move between two targets (ie. a file and a recycle bin), the better. With a mouse the physical movement is and always will be less than when using body movement (of course you could be pointing at the screen from mile away, when the actual movement needed would be less, but good luck with precision and filtering away bad input in such cases, not to mention that in this case the objects you'd be pointing would be very small, which again is a Bad Thing according to the law).

I'd like to see a bullet curtain game using body motion controls. :P

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Well, certainly, the fine motor skills of your hands and perhaps sometimes your facial expression should be the cornerstone, razor sharp controls over the environment, but I don't think it's a good idea to dismiss every other part of our bodies on account of how user interfaces work these days. They are, after all, devised around the limitations of our current controllers.

I can somewhat imagine a philosophy of good user interface programming that cascades optional and less relevant intentions depending on the degree of skill over a particular set of muscles. It may come to be the bending of phalanxes provides enough freedom to saturate the human brain, but there's still plenty of body muscle uses in the entertainment industry.

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The direction this thread is going, reminds me of a special I saw on the Science channel about the merge of humanity and technology.

One section of the show was about this guy who had become a quadriplegic, and they had hooked him up with a sensor directly on his brain that connected to a computer. This was meant to experiment with direct thought-to-computer interaction, and he was able to manipulate an on-screen cursor, and eventually use it to draw simple shapes, and play various games. I thought it was pretty cool.

It also might be interesting to note that while they suggested he imagine using his hand to manipulate the cursor, he said that it was easier simply willing the cursor to move. I think that shows that the brain is more adaptive to doing new things than we might think.

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TheDigitalNomad said:

One section of the show was about this guy who had become a quadriplegic, and they had hooked him up with a sensor directly on his brain that connected to a computer. This was meant to experiment with direct thought-to-computer interaction, and he was able to manipulate an on-screen cursor, and eventually use it to draw simple shapes, and play various games. I thought it was pretty cool.

Quite likely it can be done the other way around too. Mind controlling may become reality.

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Zaldron said:

It may come to be the bending of phalanxes provides enough freedom to saturate the human brain, but there's still plenty of body muscle uses in the entertainment industry.


No doubt you can use more muscles for entertainment or as a control method, but there will always be one problem with anything other than the fingers: inertia. Moving your whole leg or even part of it will never be as quick and precise as pushing something with a finger (isn't that what sets apart primates from e.g. rhinos?)

There is an essential dichotomy here: you either view videogames as a casual pastime of pure entertainment where you don't seek the most perfect input possible but merely the most immersive/challenging/fun. Then yeah, accessories and gimmicks make it all more enjoyable and different than sitting on your couch or on front of your PC and mashing at buttons/moving a mouse. Much like a whack-a-mole game.

Or you can view them as a highly precise task that requires the most perfect/optimal input possible, with no input lag due to inertia/input interpretation/whatever, much like e.g. controlling a RC helicopter or an excavator, where maximum precision and no ambiguity/delay can be tolerated unless you want to crash a lot or cause damage. Then there is no substitute for pure manual finger and hand control.

Whatever the case, experienced gamers tend to fall into the second category rather than the first, while casual gamers clearly fall into the first.

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Zaldron said:

Ah the classic "i didn't say that"/"that's not the point" fluff counterattack.

Well, yeah, when the other person implies that you said something that you didn't actually say, the temptation to point that out can be pretty overwhelming. I guess it would have been much more mature of me to accept having said things that I never said. I suppose when I hog all of my arguments and refuse to let you make any of my arguments for me, that puts me at a pretty unfair advantage over you. It looks like I have some personal faults that I'll have to sort out.

Here, let me make it simple: posit one single reason why you think it won't work, and I try to disprove you. No multi-quote barrages of text, just one solid problem. I'll concede victory if you present me with one insurmountable problem.

I posted the reasons in the top of the 2nd page of this thread. Now, I know that you have a bit of a problem with me not saying things that you want me to say. So, as for those reasons which are located in the first post in the top of this page, how shall I rephrase them for you so that you'll find them easier to disagree with?

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Zaldron said:

Ah, but to think of GUIs, apps and games of the future as abstractions you must force yourself to digest in order to appreciate may be anachronistic with the mind reading tech itself.

Believable sensory input and perhaps some chemical intervention could provide the very sought after alternate realities of today's science fiction.


Ah, so now that we've developed the perfect mind-reading device, that can correctly and non-intrusively observe every neural firing, and can then gauge the meaning and important of each of these, we're now going to design another farm of supercomputers that can reverse-engineer the combinations of neural firing that would result from the observation of certain stimuli, and then non-intrustively cause the brain's neurons to fire in this specific way? Then, in combination with chemically-induced paralysis, so that the user can feel as if he is physically responding to this stimuli without actually physically moving, we're going to use all of this technology for entertainment?

Interesting idea. Not the most feasible, but I like it. It avoids my grounded cognition-based complaints, anyway.

Zaldron said:

I don't see what's so inconvenient about learning/training your brain to a specific mapping, we do this continually. In fact you seem to kind of disprove yourself at the end of the post?


I suppose you could interpret my post that way, and to be honest, as I was writing it, I began to find the idea of mind-reading technology more and more enticing. To have a computer that could record your thoughts without error would be phenomenal. This would be an incredibly valuable tool for some professionals, and certainly for artists, though only mainstream media corporations would be able to afford them, obviously, making it even more difficult for independents to escape obscurity, damning us to an endless quagmire of generic songs, games and movies, but anyways, it would be awesome. In fact, I'm willing to appear to disprove myself further, and say that, with sufficient training, one could learn to operate mind-controlled devices, highly accurately, without any physical movement. I'm willing to do this because my point still stands: learning to do this would be far harder, and far less intuitive, than learning to use any physical controller, and "easy-to-use" does not belong in the list of mind control's purported benefits.

I assume that one of the physical control devices you're hoping will ultimately be replaced is the keyboard, so I'll use that as my example. Right now, while writing this post, I am thinking linguistically on several different levels. Some sentences, when I think them, trigger the physical movement of my fingers so that they can be materialized on screen while they are thought. Other sentences, however, are "rough drafts" - they are half-formed, ungrammatical, or tangential, and these do not trigger the physical movement of my fingers. This functional split is valuable - it allows me to keep the bad from the good, and ultimately form a coherent communique (by my standards). However, what exactly is the nature of this split?

One possibility is perhaps that when we merely think language, instead of speaking it or typing it, the neurons in our language centers fire less strongly, or less precisely, and anyways without enough "force" to trigger action. If this is the case, then a mind-reading device could theoretically be calibrated to only record words thought at a certain "strength," though any established cut-off point would likely exclude some words that were meant to be recorded and include some useless mental outflow, verbatim.

Another possibility is that our brain contains "gates" of some form that determine whether linguistic thoughts trigger physical communicative actions. This seems more likely to me, as I observe that, while thinking a linguistic thought with the same high degree of clarity, I can choose to type it, speak it, or neither, and if it was merely a matter of neural firing strength then a particularly striking notion would likely both spill out of my mouth and my fingers simultaneously. This doesn't happen. So, the question is this: how could a mind-reading device possibly differentiate between words I want to keep, and words I want to discard, when I am forced to keep these "gates" equally closed in both cases?

To actually "type" under these conditions would be a monumental task. Assuming the second possibility is correct, the user of this technology has to find a way to impart some sort of intentionality onto the thoughts he wants to keep, but not onto other thoughts. There is no pre-existing mental architecture to accommodate this, as we have only ever had need of "gates" between thought and action, and have never before needed a way to separate two linguistic thoughts with identical content. You're absolutely right to say that the brain is adaptable. With training, the brain will find a way. But, whether it does or not is a moot point - it would still take far more training to learn to quickly and comfortably record words via this method than it does to learn to type with a keyboard. It just so happens that we already possess the mental architecture to operate small tools with our hands, so we can learn to operate all manner of physical input devices quickly. In fact, we're extremely good at doing that. It's one thing that makes our species special. We're so good at it that I can't imagine why the notion is so distasteful to you. It's like you're refusing to eat your pizza because it doesn't contain any nails, and you want to eat nails because if you could eat nails that would be goddamn fantastic.


Other things:

Even if my first theory about the nature of the split between thought and thought+action is the better one, that still doesn't mean our intrepid mind-typists of the future will have it any easier. Again, with training, the brain will find a way to keep strong thoughts across the fence from weak thoughts, as a rancher sorts out runts, but again, this is not something the brain has ever had to do before. The architecture is not really there, and building it from the ground up is not going to be easier than using physical tools. Also, if you consider the constant level of self-monitoring that the brain would have to be engaged in just to keep its thoughts occurring at certain strengths, it would be a miracle if any of these writers could exceed, or even match, the competence they had while using physical input devices, which didn't require them to spend mental resources thinking about their own thoughts.

If you're clever you'll notice I'm not just talking about typing here. The same difficulties exist across the board. To operate any sort of mind-controlled device, the user must somehow find a way to impart some brand new sort of clarity, strength, or intentionality upon certain thoughts, and not others, and this is something that will be difficult to learn to do no matter what the nature of the task.

I acknowledge that all these problems I discuss here could be solved, once again, with chemically-induced paralysis, allowing the user to use his brain as if he were actually moving his muscles while he remains perfectly still. But this just seems unnecessarily drastic if all you want to do is play minesweeper.


Love you too, Essel! <3 <3 <3

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