It could be that the technology exists one day that will allow us similar observation powers. I have recently read that we can actually look at someones brain and tell if he is a musician. I think that is fascinating.
It doesn't rise to the level of fascination for me, but it is interesting, and I'd be curious to see how far they can push that envelope. I'd be watching with interest. I'd be munching on popcorn.
Relatedly I saw a clip of someone claiming to be able to do with I think it was ultrasonics, and a vat of water, that you would stand submerged in up to your neck, and they had an AI model create something like what an MRI would do, but it's all just ultrasonics in water, really cheap. That is something I keep waiting to see more about, because idk if it has legs or not, but it sounded really neat.
In 2019 what was called a landmark study involving fMRI image reconstruction was published in PLoS Computational Biology.
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006633 Deep Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity
We have actually had the ability to reconstruct images like this since I think 2010 or so. It was [always] hyped as "mind reading" but back then it only worked when the image one looked at also exist in machine that was decoding the image. But the technology in 2019 gave us the ability to just have someone imagine a particular rudimentary shape, and in certain instances the machine was able to decode these images quite well I think, based on high resolution fMRI scans. Some say they can do it today in real time, when before it might have took an hour or so.
From the paper:
View attachment 16075
Red square. Green + sign. Blue X
Not perfect, but not that bad either.
It is pretty bad. If you had shown me these pictures and said a worm had done this: "We hooked up a worm with some sort of worm crayon that a worm could use, and hooked up the worm with a crayon to a brain scan machine, and when someone thought of a blue 'X', the worm drew that picture with its worm crayon," I'd say, "Not bad for a worm." That would be somewhat impressive.
But if there was anything to that experiment, from what I can gather (not being a technical person like our
@Right Divider here, who's got me on ignore (along with
@Clete also who's got me on ignore, just btw), not being a technical person, it seems to me that generative AI could probably get much closer than the worm with a crayon did.
But how nuanced could it get? Maybe it can really do well replicating a blue 'X', but maybe it couldn't ever get much more granular than that. But maybe angels could. Not like they're reading your mind, but like, the complex thought or plan is ambiguous to them in their angelic brain scan, but then they see you go to the flower shop, and stop at the candy store, to bring your sweetheart something nice, and now they can infer your thoughts unambiguously, maybe they tie together the angelic brain scan, with just surveillance footage, and know with a fair amount of certainty what you're thinking.
And just for the record, this is all being done in the context that God alone can actually just read our thoughts. Angels (nor demons) aren't being attributed with the ability to read thoughts, but that they could read brain scans and watch what we do, and be able to infer usually what we're thinking. This is all assuming you don't live your every moment as if, even if you're alone, you're never really alone. If you at any time think you're all alone and nobody's watching you, then probably the angels (and demons) know you pretty well.
