notes-mindControlTaxonomy

I divide mind control into "hard" and "soft", with "quasi-hard" in the middle.

By "hard" mind control, I mean to rule out "soft" forms of mind control such as advertising, and to leave only those forms which can make you do things explicitly against your will (or, more likely, that can change your will against your will). Take, for example, the way that the protagonist's will is changed in 1984, or the way that people are ghost-hacked in Ghost in the Shell, or the way that people are hypnotized and made to assassinate someone in various popular movies.

There is a debate whether processes which can in theory be resisted by sufficient "willpower", even if this amount of willpower is extreme, should be classes as hard mind control. For example, if you are tortured over and over again for decades -- but your cognition never fails (as in 1984), then in theory you can simply resist the torture and never tell anything. However, it seems to me likely that the vast majority of subjects of such a procedure will break. So, in theory, it is worth preserving a distinction between truly hard mind control, and simply procedures to which all but a few "supermen" will yield; however, if one is more concerned with the probable outcome of the procedure, then these should be grouped together. I will reserve the phrase "hard mind control" for "true" mind control, for example ghost-in-the-shell style ghosthacking, and I will use the phrase "quasi-hard mind control" for things like extreme torture, and the phrase "soft mind control" for things like advertising. (note: where do tricksters like Darren Brown fit in to this classification? mere intimidation seems like it should be soft, but he was able to make people seem to forget where they were going on the train, which seems like an alternation of cognition and hence hard. I'll place him as quasi- for now).

I wrote this page to explain some terms for the page [1].