Hearing Thoughts: Do any of these situations contradict the faith?

[Ben_Sinner]

I have a few situations that have caused me to worry because I think they might endanger the faith because they involve people being able to read our thoughts which I guess is not possible accoding to the Church…

1. students.egfi-k12.org/brain-implant-gives-voice-to-the-paralyzed/
   
   about a paralyzed person who can’t physically talk, a brain implant has allowed him to communicate just by “thinking” what he is saying and it comes out through a voice synthesizer thing.
2. Psychics who read minds or telepathic conversations
3. I don’t have a link because I can’t find it anymore. But some student did a project on another student and put a chip in their brain…I guess this allowed the person to be able to hear the other person’s thoughts through some audio monitor from the chip…I find this weird, I didn’t know that kind of technology had even existed yet…maybe that article was written with misconceptions.

Does any of this contradict the church teachings and what are the explanation of these 3 situations?

 

[Iron_Donkey]

1. Not at all, we know that as both spirit and animal that our thoughts have physical manifestations.

Although you could probably could think of this as just another tool - at the moment my thoughts are controlling my fingers to type here by sending electrical impulses down whatever, but if for some reason I can’t do that and if there is some machine that can find the start of that process, figure out what the process was going to be, and mimic it (or at least behave predictable so that the person could do stuff with it), then this would just be a sort of more advanced prosthetic limb.

1. Assuming you’re not talking about some sort of technology or other scientific explanation like the above (which might be weird, but really has no impact on faith whatsoever), then my particular response would be: this never happens but theoretically could within the bounds of our faith because God can give people whatever weird gifts He wants to, and demons have a limited ability to mess around with such things.

So while I would tend to view any such claims with extreme skepticism (read: discount without bothering to think about them in nearly all cases), there is no reason to say that it is actually impossible, or that proof that it happened would falsify Catholicism.

1. See 1. There is no reason from within the faith to think that science cannot access our thoughts.

Though even with perfect mind reading technology, we still wouldn’t be able to judge each other in the prohibited way - we’d still have to admit that there is the possibility that something known only to God makes the state of a person’s soul other than how it would appear to us.

But so far as mind reading and the like - certainly weird, certainly far fetched, and not likely to occur any time soon if at all. But not, from the perspective of the Catholicism and as far as I am aware, strictly impossible.

 

[NeedImprovement]

Registering an electro-magnetic impulse or two is not reading thoughts.

Not even the devil can read our thoughts - yet he’s far more apt than anyone or anything involved in the technology described/theorized. And if we are judging by our Blessed Lord’s words, he is still a most skilled tactician.

God, on the other hand, can read our thoughts and our hearts. Not only this, but the particular charism of reading/discerning hearts has been given to some of the saints for certain situations.

St. Padre Pio is one who had this gift . St, André Bessette c.s.c., (Brother André) of Mount Royal here in Montreal is another who had this charism.

I don’t believe that is a gift I would ever want - I have enough trouble trying to figure out all my own shortcomings.

 

[NeedImprovement]

Although the OP does have me reflecting a little now about possible abuse of the neurotechnology as it advances , do you think we could refer to this more as translating or* interpreting *. . . as opposed to *mind reading *?

Parallel to what Iron Donkey has said , the technology appears to require substantial effort on behalf of the paralyzed person ; and as such doesn’t appear to encroach upon his/her “private thoughts” - which is basically what mind reading would entail.

 

[Iron_Donkey]

Although the OP does have me reflecting a little now about possible abuse of the neurotechnology as it advances , do you think we could refer to this more as translating or* interpreting *. . . as opposed to *mind reading *?

Parallel to what Iron Donkey has said , the technology appears to require substantial effort on behalf of the paralyzed person ; and as such doesn’t appear to encroach upon his/her “private thoughts” - which is basically what mind reading would entail.

Yeah, the purposeful mental communication thing seems much likely than the ability to read private thoughts. But I do think that even if such actual mind reading were to become possible as science advances, the ability itself wouldn’t pose a challenge to the validity of Catholicism.

(Phrased that way because the technology would certainly pose the problem of if/how it could morally be used, but I don’t think its mere existence would pose a problem to the faith.)

 

[Ben_Sinner]

It’s the 3rd one that bothers me the most because that seems like mind reading. I wish I could find the article I found on the net but I forgot where it’s at and I’m a little too scrupulous to search the depths of the internet on the subject. If anybody else happens to find it that would be great. Apprently this happend at a big name univeristy. The article looked kind of sketchy though. Surely this would have made more news and be more well known?..especially since some of the brightest minds (according to a Berkley Study) have said this type of techonology will not be able to exist anytime within the next decade or so.