Brain scans which can retrieve memories accurately?
I believe that the current understanding is that memory encoding, not just retrieval, is pretty unreliable, so even if you can read exactly what’s in people’s brains, it may not be much help.
And then there’s the problem of locating the right person to interrogate—a task equivalent to and as hard as locating the hypothesis. :) But I probably shouldn’t be too dismissive: brain-scanning is one of the better contenders for the next oracle.
Well, having the right technologies can certainly make locating the hypothesis a lot easier; think how much harder it would have been to locate Guede as a suspect without DNA testing.
If we had a reliable way of determining self perceived truth value, nearly all interrogation could be narrowed down to “Do you know who did it?” “Who did it?” and “Did you do it?”
On second thought, given a device that were capable of doing that with a negligible failure rate, it might be simpler to just replace policing with occasional checkups.
My high school psychology teacher gave my class an interesting demonstration on the usefulness of eyewitnesses.
For one class, we found a notice on the door saying that the class had been relocated to another room. We went to that room, and shortly after our teacher arrived, followed by another teacher. He complained that she had not gotten proper clearance to move her class to that room, and he needed it for an exercise for his own class. They spent a couple minutes arguing, and harsh words were exchanged, after which he left the room.
Almost immediately after he left, our teacher asked us to create profiles of his physical description. Estimates of his height ranged from 5′6 to 6′3, his hair was variously described as being brown, black, or red, and his weight was somewhere from 140 pounds to 230.
The information that the students retrieved from their short term memory, which had not yet been encoded as long term memory, was already profoundly unreliable.
This would probably only work if the person knew activity X was a crime. There are probably ways of becoming convinced that X wasn’t a crime (or vice versa).
This occurred to me, but I suspect that it would still be easier to catch more people this way than with active policing, particularly for the crimes you most care about catching people at, which most people will already know are wrong and probably if not definitely illegal.
I agree with that this method seems far easier to catch the majority of people committing those crimes, since the cultivation process would most likely be non-trivial, so the “casual” criminal wouldn’t have access to it.
There is still the problem of someone else doing the cultivation, so one mastermind could create a militia of people immune to the checkups. (I’m not quite sure if this is actually possible though, although, superficially at least, hypnosis seems to do this sort of thing)
(Thanks for the “cultivating deliberate unawareness” term)
Such a system would be far from most current Western legal systems and hence is of not much interest to me in the context of discovering bounds on error rates in current Western legal systems.
It also occurred to me that (although it’s unlikely) we might discover a neural signature distinguishing spurious memories from accurate ones. Or some less powerful but still useful signature, such as one that distinguishes memories that have been accessed after creation (and so potentially overwritten) from memories that have never been accessed (which are presumably more reliable).
There is weak evidence that the memories you make during the day are reviewed during REM sleep, which would mean every memory is gone over at least once.
Brain scans which can retrieve memories accurately? Admittedly, this would be limited to crimes with living witnesses.
The thing is, I think science leads to weird, surprising discoveries. I’m not going to predict what’s impossible a century from now.
I believe that the current understanding is that memory encoding, not just retrieval, is pretty unreliable, so even if you can read exactly what’s in people’s brains, it may not be much help.
And then there’s the problem of locating the right person to interrogate—a task equivalent to and as hard as locating the hypothesis. :) But I probably shouldn’t be too dismissive: brain-scanning is one of the better contenders for the next oracle.
Well, having the right technologies can certainly make locating the hypothesis a lot easier; think how much harder it would have been to locate Guede as a suspect without DNA testing.
If we had a reliable way of determining self perceived truth value, nearly all interrogation could be narrowed down to “Do you know who did it?” “Who did it?” and “Did you do it?”
On second thought, given a device that were capable of doing that with a negligible failure rate, it might be simpler to just replace policing with occasional checkups.
“So, committed any crimes this month?”
Self-perceived truth value sounds like a subtle problem.
I’d settle for memory testing for eye-witnesses, though memory testing under stress is probably too much to ask.
My high school psychology teacher gave my class an interesting demonstration on the usefulness of eyewitnesses.
For one class, we found a notice on the door saying that the class had been relocated to another room. We went to that room, and shortly after our teacher arrived, followed by another teacher. He complained that she had not gotten proper clearance to move her class to that room, and he needed it for an exercise for his own class. They spent a couple minutes arguing, and harsh words were exchanged, after which he left the room.
Almost immediately after he left, our teacher asked us to create profiles of his physical description. Estimates of his height ranged from 5′6 to 6′3, his hair was variously described as being brown, black, or red, and his weight was somewhere from 140 pounds to 230.
The information that the students retrieved from their short term memory, which had not yet been encoded as long term memory, was already profoundly unreliable.
This would probably only work if the person knew activity X was a crime. There are probably ways of becoming convinced that X wasn’t a crime (or vice versa).
This occurred to me, but I suspect that it would still be easier to catch more people this way than with active policing, particularly for the crimes you most care about catching people at, which most people will already know are wrong and probably if not definitely illegal.
And you could always ask them, “Are you cultivating deliberate unawareness?”
The whole point of deliberate unawareness is that it’s unaware—the deliberate part gets hidden in mental fog.
I agree with that this method seems far easier to catch the majority of people committing those crimes, since the cultivation process would most likely be non-trivial, so the “casual” criminal wouldn’t have access to it.
There is still the problem of someone else doing the cultivation, so one mastermind could create a militia of people immune to the checkups. (I’m not quite sure if this is actually possible though, although, superficially at least, hypnosis seems to do this sort of thing)
(Thanks for the “cultivating deliberate unawareness” term)
Such a system would be far from most current Western legal systems and hence is of not much interest to me in the context of discovering bounds on error rates in current Western legal systems.
I thought the same thing.
It also occurred to me that (although it’s unlikely) we might discover a neural signature distinguishing spurious memories from accurate ones. Or some less powerful but still useful signature, such as one that distinguishes memories that have been accessed after creation (and so potentially overwritten) from memories that have never been accessed (which are presumably more reliable).
There is weak evidence that the memories you make during the day are reviewed during REM sleep, which would mean every memory is gone over at least once.
Even just reliable brain-scan based lie detectors...