DrunkN

I was actually thinking about writing a science fiction short story on the subject. It would involve the handling of people who are otherwise going to be put to death. I want it to have emphasis on public opinion on both human rights and government control to do whatever they want with duplicating memories.

Let's speak in hypothetical terms for a thread. Say we have access to brain wiping and inserting technologies. A machine will scrap your memories if you end up doing something that will get you the death sentence, with no chance of recovery. You would be compensated with knowledge of your language and facilities, but it would be a government(any government) regulated vocabulary and vision of life and there would be words as well as concepts you would have to learn.

Is capital punishment about removing dangers from society, or exacting revenge on people who have broken laws?
Are such methods practical?
Would you consider memory erasing to be vastly different from death?
Would governments want to restore rights to people after memory wipes, or would they choose to use them as work-craving slaves?
Is too much power put in the hands of governments to turn people into whatever sort of drone they want?
Is capital punishment a better system?
If someone had received the a memory wipe for committing crimes against something you value, (job, community, family) would you accept the decision to wipe their minds?
If someone you value whom you are convinced is innocent but has been sentenced to the new capital punishment, how will you respond?
What do you think that the process would be just as dark to experience as receiving a lethal injection?
Why do you suppose you have come to your conclusions?

bearhawk72

My question would be would it stop anything? A lot of people who kill have something wrong with their brains, wiping memories wouldn't fix that and they could kill again

elrod21

I also think that though some people could accept it, others would not be able to. Imagine someone slaughtering your whole family and they wipe that person's memory. You would still know about them and could you treat them the same as anyone else knowing what they have done even though they don't know.

Whats more what is to stop them from reading old news stories and finding out what they've done? Assuming this mind wipe also alters personality so you don't kill again if you find out you did slaughter someones entire family could you live with yourself?

unclechicken

If the crime was murder, or child rape, torture them to an inch of their lives, then memory wipe them.

Create a place like the film The Island, and make them live and work there till they die, tell them that the world has suffered a catastrophic event and if you go outside you will die within 1 minute, if that doesnt stop them put those explosive collars on them from The Running Man/Escape From New York incase they try to escape.

It would be really easy to build a large underground facility to house them. After the mind wipe, tell them that a massive global event happened that rendered the surface virtually unhabitable,show them some made up CGI videos of the surface, and tell them they have to take pills (sugar pills of course, a placebo) to keep them alive from the Radiation / Global infection / Pandemic etc. Get them to work for you doing a task that seems acceptable, but not too demeaning so they revolt. Make the facility large enough so you can accept them in batches between 100-200, so you do not introduce new people into a pre-existing unit. This stops people from thinking where the new inmates are coming from if the surface world is uninhabitable, and if it does kick off and a revolt happens in a unit, you can easily kill off the 100-200 people, dispose of them and move some new inmates in rather quickly.

joz

What if my life really sucks and I wanted a fresh start. All I would have to go is go on a rampage bad enough to get my memory reset.

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DrunkN

Your memories would be erased and with it, your decision consciousness. It would be the equivalent of suicide, being that you aren't quite the same person anymore.

warghoul

Yeah but your brain still has the same chemical balance and thought process I think youd be a similar person to the one before just not very smart.
Witch brings me to my question would you forget everything like speech, and reading writing basic math all that cause I think that would be expensive and hard to teach an adult all this so they can reenter society and attempt to be productive.

DrunkN

Like I said, in this hypothetical world people would only have memories of their personal life erased, but given processed memories of their country's language and public facilities.

I also believe that thought process usually develops through personal experience and through recognition of social mannerisms, which would be wiped.

warghoul

Sorry I must have missed that part.

You can't deny that people are wired differently if you have 2 people grow up in the same environment they'll still act and be different and many criminals have underlying mental conditions that wouldn't be treated by erasing there memories.

Kong

I agree with warghoul.

I don't think mind wiped criminals are going to be able to reenter society on a routine basis. Many of their crimes were created by chemicals and not memories. And so often enough they would still be dangerous.

And what would be the point. If all of your memories are wiped then "you" have effectively been killed. If you have no memories then you are effectively a new born. So all this would do is perpetuate the death penalty plus create new human babies in old bodies.

And the victims have to see the remorseful people that hurt them.

Dudebro

I think it could work if they were able to wipe the right parts of your personality. If you remove the damaged parts then the person has a chance at being different. But I think that hinges on making sure they know what they did before and the consequences of pursuing that again, like instant death.

The problem lies with our limited understanding of the brain. As far as I'm aware we don't understand what makes someone a sociopath, for example. Someone with that condition could theoretically trick a mind wipe because to them there's nothing wrong in their brain. They see reality differently and it would skew the results, imo.

Demon-Mask

We understand a whole lot about the brain, but also very little at the same time.
We don't know where memories are stored, but we know where they are formed. We know where emotions come from. We don't really know where personality traits come from. We know where things like reasoning and spacial recognition come from. We know where the sense come from, and to some extent how they are decoded.
But, the things we need, that is the locations where memories are stored and where our personality is stored, we can't seem to find. Those are the two things you'd need to change to reform a person by wiping their mind.
Actually, you'd want them to remember what they did, just have their personality altered so they don't desire to act in such a way again, but if you do that, you are changing what makes a person who they are.
It's tricky, so I'd say that capital punishment is sufficient.

Dudebro

So your message is "if it's too complicated just kill the person"?

jim5cents

I'm assuming this is the future? So in your story can you come up with awesome forms of capital punishment? Like laser beam decapitation, or fast acting flesh eating virus, or being on the receiving end of the rocket sled...

warghoul

Or running man

jim5cents

Now we are talkin

Demon-Mask

Yes and no. I don't think capital punishment is always the solution, nor do I believe it will always be the solution. I am, and always have been, in favor of capital punishment. There are crimes where capital punishment is the wrong solution.
Given what we know about the brain, it is impossible for us to only wipe memories of specific events or certain personality traits. We don't know a damn thing about where in the brain the personality lies, beyond the fact that a good portion of it comes from the frontal lobe.
Even if we had the capability to just change aspects of a person's personality, we wouldn't actually do it, that would be unethical.
The ability to choose is what makes us human, our personality is what makes us individuals. In our culture, we can't strip people of either of those things, it would not be percieved as just.
Furthermore, just allowing someone to walk free after committing terrible acts that could incur the death penalty would be unjust to the families of the victims of the initial crimes.
So yeah, I think capital punishment is a better alternative, it is more just and more ethical that screwing around in people's brains, altering memories and personality traits.

Dudebro

Says you and our very limited understanding of the brain. As a general rule it's usually not a good idea to claim anything is impossible though.

So it's unethical to "fix" a damaged brain but it's not unethical to kill someone? You say we can't strip people of their personality or free will but it's ethical for us to strip their life away? Sorry but that's a load of crap to me. I'm not trying to stick up for murderers and the like but I can't get behind your reasoning at all.

Btw we already do take away peoples right to choose, it's called prison.

Demon-Mask

You took that line out of context, I started off with "Given what we know about the brain..." meaning I was stating that it is impossible with what we know, not that it will be impossible for all of time.
I'll try and put it into different terms. Altering a person's brain without giving them the option is unethical. It is not "fixing" anything, it is removing what they are. Killing a murderer is also unethical, but it is more ethical than altering someone's brain and letting them go. It's one of those things I cannot explain beyond the fact that I think it is better to remove murderer than change the murderer into a non-murderer by making them into a person they are not by force.

Prison is the outcome of the choice, but they can still operate as themselves under the restrictions of the prison, and if/when they are released, they can make choices as themselves again. They can choose to an extent. But, if you make someone into the model citizen with no desires save for those that would be beneficial to society as a whole, they cannot choose, they are no longer themselves. The "new and improved" model citizen version of them that isn't really them is not able the choose.

---------- Post added at 10:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:05 PM ----------

I don't think the goal of this thread was a debate.
@drunkninja:
What you are going for kind of reminds me of the "treatment" from A Clockwork Orange.

Dudebro

Besides that it doesn't matter what we currently know, we could have a break through tomorrow and completely understand the brain. Saying it's impossible because of what we know at this moment is useless. We're talking about technology that doesn't exist. It's like saying we can never make lightsabers because we can't do it right now.

Sorry I still can't get behind your idea. I cannot accept that killing someone is more ethical than trying to rewire them and give them a second chance. If the person ends up different than it wouldn't even matter what they did previously since they're a new person, right? If they did remember then this would be their one chance to do it all over. I think it's pretty unethical to basically throw up your hands and say tough luck you're better off dead.

You may get to prison because of choices but once there you lose your free will. For the sake of this discussion I'm only talking about lifers. They have no more choices to make. So since we already strip people of their free will and obviously damage their personality by putting them in prison then why would wiping a memory be so bad?

Demon-Mask

I had lost sight of the hypothetical nature of the discussion, I became too rooted in basing things off of what we already know. I even stated that I was basing my statement of it being impossible on our current knowledge. If we make this breakthrough, and we allowed people the choice to have their personality and memories re-written or die, I wouldn't oppose it nearly as much.

I'm not going to be able to convince you that basically reformatting someone's brain is worse than killing them, so I'll stop trying. I respect your opinion on this matter, and I even more respect your conviction in this opinion.

You have limited free will in prison. You can choose which guys in the yard to hang out with, and which guys to hate. That kind of thing, you have a very limited set of freedoms. You can also create a shank and stab you cellmate, if you are so inclined, you are punished for it, though. In society in general, you have limited free will, but not to that extent.

Dudebro

I think you're confused about one part of my stance on this, I don't mean force the mind wipes on people. If they refuse they can either get life in prison or the death penalty, whichever is appropriate. I just think it would be more humane to give people a chance to start over by fixing them. To me it's like giving someone new eyes when they're blind. The brain is just another organ.

Another point I think you're confused on is the prison free will thing. It seems like you're only thinking of prisons in modern, civilized countries where they are given lots of rights. Think of the history of prison and how it's applied in other, less civilized, countries. Prison is the act of stripping away rights because someone broke a social contract. We're born into the system and we really have no choice if we agree with it or not. You can't decide you don't agree with society and go live someone totally free unless you wanna live at the north pole or something. So in that way we aren't truly free to make our choices anyways, prison is just taking it to another level.

DrunkN

I actually must confess that I have never seen "A Clockwork Orange".

Demon-Mask

@DB: I understand your stance much better now.

@DN: I'd recommend reading it, the book was much better. Everyone should watch the movie and read the book. It's a good one.

Dudebro

How about memory wipes like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? I have some painful memories I'd like to "fix". I think life could improve if some of our past traumas are wiped out. I realize part of life is experiences but some are just damaging.