If I remember it correctly, we had such cases in our country (with a facilitator, not a computer). The local club of sceptics decided to, of course, test it. They showed the locked-in person some objects in the absence of the facilitator, and when the facilitator entered the room again, it turned out the locked-in person couldn’t name those objects, showing it was just ideomotor movement of the facilitator.
Indeed. There are plenty of ways to test that true communication is happening, and those are how you know facilitation is bunk—not the banality of the statements. (I really doubt that they have all that much profundity to share after spending decades staring at the ceiling where the most exciting thing that happens all day tends to be things like the nurse turning them over to avoid bed sores and washing their bum.)
Interesting. But in that case, the person first had problems communicating seven years ago, when he was 30 years old, and appears to have never been completely unable to communicate. So it’s not really a case of communicating with someone with a very different life experience that they are only now able to express.
That’s amusing, but on the other hand, this morning I was reading about a new BCI where “One of the first sentences the man spelled was translated as “boys, it works so effortlessly.”” and ‘“Many times, I was with him until midnight, or past midnight,” says Chaudhary. “The last word was always ‘beer.’”’
Less ‘one small step for man’ and more ‘Watson come here I need you’, one might say.
If I remember it correctly, we had such cases in our country (with a facilitator, not a computer). The local club of sceptics decided to, of course, test it. They showed the locked-in person some objects in the absence of the facilitator, and when the facilitator entered the room again, it turned out the locked-in person couldn’t name those objects, showing it was just ideomotor movement of the facilitator.
Indeed. There are plenty of ways to test that true communication is happening, and those are how you know facilitation is bunk—not the banality of the statements. (I really doubt that they have all that much profundity to share after spending decades staring at the ceiling where the most exciting thing that happens all day tends to be things like the nurse turning them over to avoid bed sores and washing their bum.)
Interesting. But in that case, the person first had problems communicating seven years ago, when he was 30 years old, and appears to have never been completely unable to communicate. So it’s not really a case of communicating with someone with a very different life experience that they are only now able to express.