Popular Science featured an article about mind-reading technology; it describes the development of technologies and computing that helps to reconstruct images from purely information extracted from brain scans. That is pretty amazing since it is basically deciphering the code used to contain information in our minds and then trying to build up the information that is stored in the codes.
What I was wondering is if these images reconstructed actually reflects any sort of thoughts by the person. In other words, has the brain processed these images at all? In the Awareness Tests that was part of a campaign by Transport for London to raise awareness of presence of cyclist to other road users, you realise that you do not see some things that you don’t focus on in an image sequence. The question then, is whether the brain really didn’t see the images or it merely didn’t process it. Would these mind-reading technology at this moment be showing those details or parts that we didn’t notice?
Or perhaps they need to improve the technology before they can answer such questions; then the complex ethical problems will set in. Philosophy can’t work on an ethical problem until infringing it becomes a real possibility. Even then, they almost never help us get an answer. So meanwhile we’ll just think and wait around.