How long until they can read your mind? Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail...

Should the government be able to interrogate your thoughts?

In the last year or two, I have met several people who work in the field of mind-reading. Various technologies, of which neuralink is one, are being developed that, if successful, will be able to read your thoughts. I do not know how successful they will be. Some people I have spoken to are very optimistic. Perhaps in ten years, this will be feasible?

I hope not. In general, I am techno-optimistic. If neuralink can reverse hearing loss, or create other such benefits, that is a sort of miracle.

But what about the ability of the government to use non-invasive technology to read your mind? Imagine they could attach pads to you skull or put a helmet on you and that it would work like a real lie detector. No, he isn’t really thinking that, he’s thinking this…

My thoughts fly to the Jesuits who practised equivocation during the interrogations about the Gunpowder Plot. Perhaps they lied to the authorities, while thinking honest thoughts in the sight of God. The government could never know. That didn’t stop terrible abuses, torture, or death. But over time, we have come to see that the Jesuits were right. God can see all; man cannot. And we do not want the government to be gods among men.

It is a central premise of liberalism that your mind is free. That, indeed, is what the word means. That is what a liberal education is supposed to provide. Montaigne, in ‘On Solitude’, put it like this.

We should set aside a room behind the shop—just for ourselves, entirely free—and establish there our real liberty, our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation should be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication finds a place in it; talking and laughing as though we had no wife, no children, no possessions, no retinue, no servants, so that when the time comes to lose them it will be nothing new for us to do without them. We have a soul that can turn in on itself; it can keep itself company; it has the means to attack and the means to defend, the means to receive and the means to give. Let us not fear that in this solitude we shall be crouching in tedious idleness: ‘In lonely places, be a crowd unto yourself’.

He was talking Stoically, of course, but the idea that all things can be endured through the solitude of the mind has larger importance. What is a liberal society if not one which places this humanistic inside at the heart of its polity?

As John Donne said, in the Epistle To Sir Henry Wotton—

Be then thine own home, and in thyself dwell;
Inn anywhere; continuance maketh hell.
And seeing the snail which everywhere doth roam,
Carrying his own house still, still is at home,
Follow (for he is easy paced) this snail,
Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.