ThinksMarkedly wrote:cthia wrote:"Our test is inconclusive because the subject consistently used techniques to fool the detector. Even though we consistently warned him. But we are also trained to recognize the techniques. Regardless, the test is inconclusive."
The wife did not get closure as to whether her husband was guilty of infidelity.
That means he did not fool the polygraph. The result was clearly inconclusive. All you've shown is that there are techniques to not incriminate oneself, but not techniques to absolve oneself of blame. That's quite different.
Don't miss the forest for the trees. What it proves is that the machines can be manipulated. Proof of concept. How proficient one becomes at it depends on ones training.
What may be missed is the enormous resources that a government would have. I imagine that even I could learn to beat a lie detector quite easily if I owned a lie detector myself. Then I could provide myself with many hours of practice, honing my skills.
ThinksMarkedly wrote:cthia wrote:It also happens naturally. Some people would be psyched out at the very fact that it is a lie detector "test." Tests in general simply freak some people out. They can't remain calm. Some people freak out when taking tests at school even though they know the material quite well. Honor is one of those people when it comes to math.
At any rate, the ability to defeat the polygraph is self-documenting, by the very same reason that polygraph results are legally inadmissible in court.
Fair enough.
But unlike what we're talking about with polygraphs, with people being nervous and therefore screwing up the results or there even being ways to force incorrect conclusions, the treecat lie detection works just fine and reliably. That probably happens in the majority of cases because the subject doesn't know he's being interrogated in the first place, but we've seen treecat-mediated interrogations taking place. Two come to mind, both involving the same treecat: Harahap's original interrogation, when Clear Killer adopted him and became Plays with Fire, and when the duo went to interrogate the corrupt people aboard the slaver station in TEiF. In the first, Harahap did not know that treecats could be used as lie detectors; in the second, he deliberately exaggerated the treecat's capabilities to put the subjects on edge.
In each case it also took a fair amount of time for the Cat to come to a conclusion. A cat needs input. This input can be manipulated by a subject's controlled responses and mindset.
ThinksMarkedly wrote:cthia wrote:Anderle is an interesting case for certain, but how deeply is he ever questioned?
I don't think he was deeply questioned. But he came into contact with treecats often enough that if he were trying to dissimulate, that would have been picked up. If you're told "don't think about your password," you will be thinking of nothing but your password... So treecats would have picked up at a minimum that he was hiding something that he thought was important and may even detect that it's something that he was hiding from Audrey. That would warrant further attention.
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I am not sure if dissimulation will be necessary for a bodyguard. Certainly not of the garden variety MA breed. Remember, bodyguards are genengineered. Complete and total concentration is built-in to their programming. Their mind is not occupied with "gathering wool," or wandering. They have one track minds. Totally focused on the job at hand.
ThinksMarkedly wrote:cthia wrote:However, I am not so certain it will be difficult to devise a test. Just assume that emotions are the key. Even if they do not realize that emotions are what a cat can actually read. Emotions are what the polygraph measures. It should be obvious to an Alpha that emotions must be the missing link. Since animals normally have the ability to sense certain emotions. Like fear. And aggression.
Devising a test is not difficult. The problem is the feedback loop.
It takes way too long to gather data and react to it. It also comes in a trickle, because the MAlign can't subject a hundred different variations of treecat-fooling techniques to treecats and find out which ones work best. It comes contaminated by other data, since agents may not exposed to the treecats, or they may be intercepted by other means. Data may also be lost on the way, since the information pipeline may break down. And whatever data they get, they get as a binary pass or fail, whereas in reality it's a gradation.
Plus, they can't overuse that information pipeline, because it leads directly to Darius. If the intelligence services clue in to it, they'll monitor it and track it. Not to mention that if the intelligence services clue in, they can use counter-intelligence techniques and feed disinformation into the pipeline.
So in conclusion, they could do it, but not in the timeline that we know they're going to be forced to.
But you are only considering a brute force attempt. The MA oftentimes avoids the brute force attempt. They use their brains and not their brawn. Again, they might possibly be able to test the feasibility against their own tech, the suicide protocols.
ThinksMarkedly wrote:cthia wrote:True. But as I have stated several times upstream, that may not continue to hold true towards the "end game." A time when their tech should be used with reckless abandon. They may want a short victorious war.
Because that worked well for the peeps?
Benjamin Detweiler thinks it will take more than a century until the plan unfolds. He thinks that he won't be alive to see it and he should have a lifespan, even without prolong, of at least another 150 years. In that time, they could advance the technique, if not perfect it.
The MA does not a Peep make. No more than a Peep a Solarian make.
"Unfold" is a many splendored thing. It might be alluding to the very climactic "end game" involving the RF and their control over the Galaxy. But many other things could happen much sooner.
ThinksMarkedly wrote:cthia wrote:A synthetic brain can have no emissions because it can have no emotions. A computer can not be conscious. No consciousness, no emotions. There is no life.
That's not a given. In our reality, it's neither proven nor disproven. It may be against the religious precepts of any number of religions, but religions are not based on science, but faith. That means their precepts are accepted on face value, not based on experimental data. What you or I think the results of any such experiment will be if attempted is not the point. And whether we think experiments should even be attempted is neither the point...
In a work of fiction, the rules are suspended and it's only what the author says it is. If the author says it can happen, then it can.
Anyway, I said the synthetic body will betray no emissions that it wasn't designed to do. There's no reason it can't be designed to emit exactly what a treecat can pick up. We know there's a distributed organ in the treecat body that is a transmitter and receiver, so it stands to reason there's something being transmitted. We also know that humans can both transmit and receive that, somehow. So even if this synthetic body has no soul, it may still be able to pass muster and emit all the necessary noise that would make it be accepted as a real person.
Or like I said, if there were enough of those "oddities" in the population, one couldn't rule them all out as MAlign agents.
I agree, but with reservations and skepticism where time does not permit me to examine.
ThinksMarkedly wrote:cthia wrote:Man thinks that he can create life by creating consciousness and true intelligence.
But man doesn't think that an entity long ago could have beat him to it.
Whether you're right or not, from those statements we can't conclude that man can't repeat the feat.
Forest and trees!
"Repeat" implies that it, indeed, has been done before. And if it has been done before implies that there is a God. If there is a God then that nullifies any attempt you may make by the very definition of a God.
