Ninth Commandment: From 'shalt not' to 'cannot'



Pinocchio (by Enrico Mazzanti, 1883)

The Ninth Commandment (“Thou shalt not bear false witness”) implies that we have a choice. 

Martin Luther, in his Ninth Commandment Large Catechism, gives many examples of how people choose to lie in one way or another.  In Luther’s view, this Commandment not only applies to a court of law (or the pulpit), but also to everyday social interactions.  In discussing the social “lying and evil speaking” that often occurs, Luther especially laments “the detestable, shameful vice of speaking behind a person’s back and slandering, to which the devil spurs us on…”

The good (?) news is that the devil might soon be up against a formidable opponent.  It used to be that only folks like George Washington were incapable of lying.  Nowadays, thanks (?) to scientific advances in the field of mind reading, people’s thoughts may no longer be their own private affair.

The Telegraph reported in September 2011 that these four mind-reading “breakthroughs” have occurred: (1) A University of Glasgow team has successfully decoded “brain signals related to vision”;  (2) Utah University bioengineers were able to match computerized brain signals with specific words “up to 90 per cent of the time”; (3) Canadian scientists developed a method of

determining what physical action a person is about to take based upon brain-scan results; and (4) Toyota is

developing a “neuron helmet” that would monitor a cyclist’s “heartrate, speed and cadence to allow the rider to shift gears” via thought-power alone.

If all that weren’t enough to send shivers up the spines (and into the somewhat transparent brains) of less-than-righteous thinkers, PLos Biology is now featuring an article titled Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex (translation: “Thinking Out Loud No Matter Who’s Listening”).  Fast forwarding through the multisyllabic jargon yields this “Author Summary” conclusion:  The results provide insights into higher order neural speech processing and suggest it may be possible to readout intended speech directly from brain activity.   

Resources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie

http://www.ondoctrine.com/2lut0912.htm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8782214/Mind-reading-research-the-major-breakthroughs.html

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001251

Copyright February 3, 2012 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved