People are playing mind games these days, more than ever before.
by Ruwantissa Abeyratne
from Montreal
You cannot enslave a mind that knows itself. That values itself. That understands itself.
Wangarĩ Muta Maathai.. first African woman to win the Nobel Prize
People are playing mind games these days, more than ever before. This is largely because others let them do so and accept what they say. Often, when the miscreants are cornered and where denial is impossible, they put a spin on what they have said. Gullible minds swallow the spin hook line and sinker. Their minds are manipulated and enslaved. Politics and demagoguery use mind games to mislead and misdirect the mind to accept perfidious suggestions that intrude on the sub conscience where repeated untruths and baseless hypotheses compel the mind to accept mendacious suggestions.
One example of this deleterious practice is called “gaslighting” – a manipulative technique used by sociopaths, narcissists, and others - which, as someone has said, is “a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes, including low self-esteem”.
A comment on the celebrated book “Gaslighting” by psychologist Stephanie Moulton Sarkis, in the author’s web page says: “ Gaslighting is often practiced by those with personality disorders (including Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder). Whether it’s a spouse, parent, coworker, or friend, gaslighters use a series of manipulation and distraction tactics to distort the truth–from lying, controlling, withholding, triangulation, and more–making their victims question their own reality. Dr. Sarkis delves into the psychology behind the phenomenon, devoting chapters to specific scenarios, such as gaslighting in dating, in relationships, at work, and in families. With warning signs and examples of the destructive consequences along with practical tips and strategies, Gaslighting will help anyone trapped in a manipulative relationship to break free and heal from this toxic behavior”.
A more insidious development of mind games is revealed by author and historian Yuval Noah Harari who ascribes to the development of information technology - artificial intelligence in particular - the ability to one day hack into the human mind and accurately know what we are thinking that would give others the power to manipulate our minds. This manipulation could eventually coerce us to vote for someone of the manipulator’s choice at an election; direct us to buy certain goods; and alter our conduct. In short Dr. Harari says the progression of this technology would enable machines to know us better than we know ourselves: “I think that we are now facing really, not just a technological crisis, but a philosophical crisis. Because we have built our society, certainly liberal democracy with elections and the free market and so forth, on philosophical ideas from the 18th century which are simply incompatible not just with the scientific findings of the 21st century but above all with the technology we now have at our disposal. Our society is built on the ideas that the voter knows best, that the customer is always right, that ultimate authority is, as Tristan said, is with the feelings of human beings and this assumes that human feelings and human choices are these sacred arena which cannot be hacked, which cannot be manipulated. Ultimately, my choices, my desires reflect my free will, and nobody can access that or touch that. And this was never true. But we didn't pay a very high cost for believing in this myth in the 19th and 20th century because nobody had a technology to actually do it. Now, people—some people—corporations, governments are gaming the technology to hack human beings. Maybe the most important fact about living in the 21st century is that we are now hackable animals”.
The CBS program 60 Minutes recently reported: “advances in neuroscience have shown that, on a physical level, our thoughts are actually a vast network of neurons firing all across our brains. So, if that brain activity could be identified and analyzed, could our thoughts be decoded? Could our minds be read? Well a team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has spent more than a decade trying to do just that”. In the words of Professor Marcel Just, a pioneer of the scientific process of “mind reading” which he offered 60 Minutes: “I think it will be technologically possible to invade people's thoughts. But it's our societal obligation to make sure that never happens”.
There seems to be nothing we can do to stop this progression, unless we do our best to discipline our minds. How do we do this? And even so, can we obviate the march of progress of artificial intelligence hacking into our brains? For our part, we could at least try to help ourselves by disciplining our minds and avoid our minds being a prison within our heads. Whether this would help us in circumventing this march of technological process is yet to be seen. Dr. Edith Eger, a Holocaust survivor, in her book The Gift, offers some solace: “Eger explains that the worst prison she experienced is not the prison that Nazis put her in but the one she created for herself, the prison within her own mind. She describes the twelve most pervasive imprisoning beliefs she has known—including fear, grief, anger, secrets, stress, guilt, shame, and avoidance—and the tools she has discovered to deal with these universal challenges”.
As Dr Harari has said, this is a philosophical issue. At the heart of the problem of human minds being vulnerable to hacking is a sociological and legal solution. Any act that is calculated to hack into and manipulate the human mind should be determinable ipso facto and actionable for adjudication under a codified system of international law and regulation. A starting point as an initial analogy should be the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union which goes to ensure privacy rights of the individual. It is time that legislators exercise their predictive intelligence to get ready for the inevitable progression of Moore’s Law which says that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years, though the cost of computers is halved. This in itself is a good thing for progress as long as it is not used to manipulate our minds.
We should stop trying to play God.
Dr. Abeyratne is the author of Megatrends: Legal, Ethical and Economic Issues published by Springer in 2018
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