Not only that would be super cruel, it would also be pretty stupid, because how are you supposed to rehabilitate someone by basically just torturing them? And also, one of the good sides of prisons is keeping dangerous people away from their (potential) victims. Imagine if someone tried to murder you, went to jail, and then they got back out in 8 hours.
Are you saying that prisons actually reform people now?
I thought they were just private institutions that made insane amounts of money charging people 5 dollars for a pack of ramen and limiting their ability to visit family and friends
Prisoners get access to counselling, education, and a library right?
I do agree with you that the system is messed up, and making it a for-profit activity just seems plain wrong to me. That said, it’s undeniable that there is some attempt at reform no matter how under-resourced.
Hmmmm then why do they hold you past midnight so they can get paid for an extra day of you being there?
Reading comprehension is hard. They was referring to the prisons. And just because the prison itself isn’t private, doesn’t mean that everything inside it is run by the government.
I think it would rely more on fear factor. Like they put someone under for what feels like 2 months, so they are on the brink of giving up hope, then pull em out and go “alright now we’ll assess you’re status and determine whether to put you back in for 10 years”
I speculate it wouldn’t work on a variety of people though, as their brain could already be adjusted to altered time perception through the use of drugs. Even without hard drugs or Adderall, you can still fuck with your time perception using only weed and sugar (the food-- as in drink four cans of cola and get super baked immediately, then set 15 minute timers and get lost in your own head, see how long each of those 15 minutes feel)
Studies have shown that in most cases that you’d care most about, extreme punishment does not serve as an effective deterrent to bad behavior. Creating the Torment Nexus as a way to enhance prison sentences serves only to increase the degree of cruelty involved in our already vengeance-oriented justice system.
I’ll need to find these studies and review them. Intuitively, the little I know about psychology suggests that that an extreme enough negative punishment will almost certainly cause a trauma deterring the afflicted individual from repeating the targeted behavior. This is, obviously, an unethical practice that no licensed practitioner of any form would employ and certainly qualifies as Cruel and Unusual Punishment. I am not promoting it’s use by any means, but suggesting that to the best of my inadequate knowledge that it’s supposedly effective. Then again, some may argue that capital punishment was meant to be an effective deterrent, which was proven false.
Any studies you care to share? No worries if not, just thought I should ask before I go venturing. Appreciate the discourse!
It’s been many years since I read them, so I don’t know them off the top of my head. That said, as I recall the explanation was that:
most violent crimes are crimes of passion, and since they tend to occur in the heat of the moment people aren’t thinking about consequences
a significant amount of property crimes are acts of economic desperation and/or crimes of opportunity, where the consequences of being caught are either unimportant compared to the more immediate survival needs of the perpetrator, or not fully considered when presented with a tempting opportunity for quick gain
and as such, most of what people think of when they think of criminal activity isn’t well controlled by draconian punishment, and is instead better addressed by improving the general welfare of the most at-risk populations, and focusing incarceration on rehabilitating offenders so as to be able to safely reintegrate into society.
If I recall correctly, white collar crime is one of the few exceptions, since it tends to require quite a lot of planning and forethought to carry out… and if I’m perfectly honest, I’m fine with a billionaire CEO being sentenced to one hour in the Torment Nexus for every hour of stolen wages his company profited from, but alas, that’s not the world we live in.
Wait this could maybe be good if used very responsibly. When I had my last shroom trip, i was gone so long that I had to meet every single one of my friends again, but i had so much time to learn and think in that time span (it was also horrible). Dangerous concept for sure though lol
I once had a dream lasting months, ultra vivid.m, ending in a futuristic battle scene in which everyone around me was massacred and then I was killed last. Woke up, and three minutes had passed since I last looked at my phone.
I remember a long period of wandering the countryside. Long conversations with farmers over dinner, them letting me bed down in their barns or guest rooms. Doing a little chores for each one. I remember the feeling of excitement slowly growing as I got closer to the man I was tracking.
But maybe it was just memories that appeared in my head.
The battle scene alone was well over three minutes, and it was just the very end of the dream.
But you never know.
I do remember I woke up in a literal cold sweat. As in my skin was cold to the touch, and I was covered in sweat, and my heart was racing, and I was full of adrenaline and terrified. I’ve never woken up like that, and never had a cold sweat in my life outside of that.
This actually happens often for me now. I find that afterward it’s almost like coming down from a real psychedelic trip, for the entire day. And i have the clarity to recall memories from my childhood that i once thought lost, lasting the whole day
In my case it happened during the last weeks of my mother’s life. I was staying with her and taking care of her.
I was really bitter about it. I was in denial that it was the end, and I just saw it as I didn’t get to be with my friends and my new life in the city I’d moved to just out of college.
So I did a meditation, where I was doing something with my heart chakra, trying to remind myself to be grateful for my mother and this chance to see her, and trying to remind myself she was dying.
Uber driver, gotta go, upvote and ask me for more if you want rest of story.
I agree - figuring out how to take advantage of time dilation for therapeutic purposes would be very cool, and potentially quite useful. This is kind of what I hope comes from renewed research into psychedelics, being able to pick out the mechanisms for all the different effects and developing techniques to cherrypick just a few with therapeutic benefit with a much reduced risk of freak out. We may already be there re:time dilation alone with TCMS or something, idk.
But real talk - which do you see getting funded for wider use first, 5 year retreat in an hour, or psychic prison?
(Actually, saying it at loud it might be even odds, depending on the price tag folks can assign to the retreat)
Zero rehabilitative potential, but they could basically do this now by putting a prisoner in restraints and sending them on a nutmeg trip. Guaranteed horror with a complete loss of time perception. If purgatory were real, it would be a nutmeg trip.
It contains myristicin. Disclaimer up front that the best-case scenario is you don’t experience the trip and just get dry mouth and an upset stomach. It takes a lot of nutmeg, there’s a chance of poisoning since you likely won’t know the potency to begin with, and the Erowid vault is full of horrible experiences. Interesting to read though: www.erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Nutmeg.shtml
It’s super unpleasant both in the delivery (eating a sufficient amount of nutmeg for the effects is hard to do without vomiting), and also in experience. Buuut my experience was basically like a fever dream – really bad but not torture-level bad.
Overall I am glad I don’t do such stupid things anymore. Can’t remember the effects but I didn’t feel super good overall for the next months even iirc. Tachykardia i think it was and generally fucked up psyche for months
I still feel like vomiting when thinking about it, 10 years later so it must have been pretty bad
All species of Datura are extremely poisonous and psychoactive, especially their seeds and flowers, which can cause respiratory depression, arrhythmias, fever, delirium, hallucinations, anticholinergic syndrome, psychosis, and death if taken internally.
Yeah well shit we didn’t have Wikipedia back then I guess. Psychosis and delirium that sounds kinda it.
Omg I am reading the article and this stuff is right out of the Witcher Trial of the Grasses. Basically kinda lottery if the seeds will kill you or not because their toxicity depends on age of the plant.
Would Demolition Man count, due to the subliminal programming while frozen, or would the “put in cryostasis for 500 years” part kinda be the antethis of OP?
While that would indeed be awesome, that’s not the route they proposed. It’s more about slowing down the perception of time, rather than being able to actually do something peoductive during that.
Philosopher Rebecca Roache, who leads a team of scholars, explains two methods to this madness. The first involves psychotic drugs that distort a person’s sense of time.
With a simple pill or injection, prisoners may believe they’ve been incarcerated for much longer than any natural human life could allow.
The second approach Roach explains is a bit more complex. Option number two involves uploading human minds to computers (da f*ck?), and speeding up the rate at which the brain functions. On her blog, Roach writes: "[…] This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals’ lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time.” goodmenproject.com/…/new-technology-could-make-in…
Despite thinking, “wow that’s a disgusting way to see and treat humans”, and some obvious moral concerns (like, social isolation for what feels like 1000 years, which will fuck up most people badly), which make this feel like a black mirror episode, the mind-upload issue is technically extremely tricky. Even if we had the technology to “upload” the human mind, it will be a copy, a clone, not you individually. And if we don’t have an option to download the copy back into your brain, it will just be a waste of energy.
More importantly, an intriguing question is raised: After such a download, will this be you? Or just a copy of a copy and thereby another being which just replaces another one.
Another thing I find important to ask here: what’s the point of penalties? These suggestions seem to me like psychological torture rather than measures to “correct” social behaviour. In no way resocialisation seems to matter here. So we just fuck people up by that and unleash them onto society afterwards. Doesn’t sound good to me.
Sorry for not keeping my reply focused on your idea. I had some time to spare and this kept me busy.
The technology required to do any of this would allow for so much stuff, and their first idea is how to use it to imprison people? What the actual fuck?
With all the productivity increases over last 100 years, the ruling class finally realised that they don’t need as big a society as before in order to serve their needs.
As a result, they tried hiring Thanos. When that failed, they had an idea: enlarge the prisons.
so they trap you inside of the tsukuyomi from naurto, not the infinite one, but the one Itatchi had in one eye. Where you get trapped in a mind-prison and he tortures you for over 1000 years in the span of 1 or 2 seconds outside of that.
We should be using technology to make life easier for everyone, but instead billionaires are advancing technology to cause even more suffering and strife.
As I said before. Billionaires are going straight to the boiler room of hell for all the suffering they caused and continue to cause.
I agree billionaire bad but they’re not funding this, there are no billionaires funding this, there aren’t any billion dollar companies researching this either, nor is any state funding going to this from any recognized country. So far all the research on this has been carried out by journalists and screenplay writers, none of it as yet has been entered for peer review or clinical trials.
Where else could the money be coming from? Why else would they do something like this?
What non-profit would work on drugs to do that for that purpose if it wasn’t some kind of think tank or hedge fund putting money into a study like that?
They don’t, profit just makes this, the idea that serving 1,000 years in 8 hours is profits… It’s not any human along the way that has a choice. They will just be replaced in the machine. The machine with the only goal of making money. Nobody even uses the money. The money is used to make the killing machine bigger and span more lands
This just sounds like straight up torture with extra steps.
No rehabilitation, no isolation of dangerous individuals from the general population. I’m decidedly anti-incarceration but at least there are arguments for it in place of something functional and just.
This just doesn’t solve any problems and adds some new ones. It sounds unbelievably cruel.
As long as it’s a cheaper alternative, the massive unstoppable psychopath violence machine will develop and use options like this. But yeah let’s continue to give corporations more rights than humans and feed them actual energy and love too because what the fuck do i know, nobody has of course found a better alternative than hyper capitalism ever it’s not like I live in a country where tax and systems have made some of these horrors less or anything
Can I use this to make my 48 hour weekend feel like a 480 hour weekend?
No, because its a technological fantasy.
People can “lose time” such that they don’t realize how long they’ve been unconscious. But they can’t “gain time”. That’s not how brains work. You can’t get an extra six weeks to study for an exam an hour before the test. Nothing will let you do that. Its pure wizard-tier shit.
There are stories of people experiencing whole lifetimes within dreams, especially within comas, as well as hallucinogenic trips that seem to last many years.
The human brain is a lot weirder than we know.
And it should be deeply troubling that if we ever learn to manipulate this kind of time perception that some people want to turn it towards torture, and they could get state backing to do so.
If those situations can create strong memories about things that didn’t physically happen, then it seems like almost anything can appear to have happened from that individual’s perspective.
From the individual’s standpoint, once they are awake they can’t really tell the difference between having experienced X and having vivid false memories of experiencing X.
Maybe some kind of real time brain scanning/monitoring could help tell the difference.
The plural of “anecdote” is “data”, and this is a fairly commonly reproduced story. I don’t know if you understand just how much of psychology and medicine in general is literally just self-reports. If we refused to listen to anybody about their personal stories, we’d know next to nothing about the human mind, and there are absolutely ways to correlate certain states of mind to external measures like FMRI scans.
The “falling dream” is a fairly common reproduced story. But “we’re going to invent a device that gives you the falling dream” is a big claim and “we’re going to give you a heart attack in your sleep by inflicting the falling dream on you” is an even bigger one.
I don’t know if you understand just how much of psychology and medicine in general is literally just self-reports.
Self-reports substantiated with medical data to correlate the symptoms with real physical conditions.
You don’t rush a guy with chest pains into the ER, then skip the EKG.
And if the guy with the chest pains says “These pains feel like they’ve been happening forever”, you don’t put “forever” on his medical record under “onset of symptoms”.
there are absolutely ways to correlate certain states of mind to external measures like FMRI scans
States of mind are very different than conditions of physiology. And even they have their limits. The title card is pure fiction. And trying to tie it back to “a feeling I had when I woke up from a dream” isn’t any kind of evidence-based analysis.
You can now work 2,047 hours per week.
But don’t worry, you’ll be appropriately rewarded with a partially eaten slice of pizza (the CEO didn’t like it).
I know it’s a shitpost, but the idea behind something like this is counter to the point of rehabilitation. Civilization should move towards rehabilitation instead of punishment as the idea is that you want to integrate someone back into society. I am not sure inducing trauma and mental damage is conducive to rehabilitation.
Theoretically, if you had such technology, maybe you could use it to rehabilitate instead of punish. Being able to undergo months or years of therapy in a matter of hours could be extremely beneficial.
if someone could actually get new information and insight under something like this, why would we use it in a prison instead of putting people to study the whole of human knowledge and create demi-god wizards?
i’m not sure how this could really work. good therapy requires the person of the therapist, and it additionally takes place within the context of a client’s living. are there therapists willing to give up subjective years over and over and over? how does the client try new things, gain understanding without the feedback of their life between sessions? also - therapists seek information and process their work with clients between sessions.
on top of all this, i’m not yet convinced this would be psychologically healthy for either.
I think that the therapist(s) in this case would have to be AI. The person could be in their own little simulation, experiencing a reality tailored to addressing whatever psychological problems they might have. It’s all science fiction, anyhow. There’s no theoretical, let alone practical basis for this technology afaik.
There is though, it’s called time hallucinations and it fucking sucks when you’re sober. I occasionally get them. It’s not like everything is slow motion it’s more like you’re bored and this meeting is taking forever, but exaggerated and it takes normal activities and makes them that kind of boring.
Technology like this could actually be used to help the rehabilitation process by dilating time, and allowing the offender to be rehabilitated without actually wasting much of their actual life.
It would most likely be used for harsh punishment in this universe, but its nice to imagine living in a better one, sometimes.
I don’t think so. It probably just screws with the perception of time, I doubt it actually speeds anything up. If it did, we’d be able to use it for way more things than punishment, like for example, doing a deep delve into a subject in a matter of hours.
I’m like 99% sure it would just make the time feel longer without any benefit of consciousness. Kind of like certain drugs make everything feel like it’s slow motion, but you still don’t get superhuman reflexes from them.
I think you’re exactly right. I’m not in any way qualified to make this statement but, if I’m right, you can’t just make the brain “go faster” and get more useful time without time actually passing. Processes need to happen in the brain for thoughts to occur, and you’d have to somehow speed those up… I mean there are chemical reactions happening in your nerve endings, how are those going to speed up? Especially by a factor of >1000 as implied by the OOP!
Even though participants remembered their own falls as having taken one-third longer than those of the other study participants, they were not able to see more events in time. Instead, the longer duration was a trick of their memory, not an actual slow-motion experience.
Your memory is imperfect. But your actual capacity to perceive time is still limited by the facilities you use for that prescription.
After the attorneys for both sides finished their dog and pony show, the judge himself made each of us answer the following question:
What is the purpose of criminal incarceration?
A - Punishment
B - Deterrence
C - Rehabilitation
After all seventy five of us had answered, all of us who responded with anything other than punishment were dismissed. Even those who answered a combination of the choices. Nope. Punishment was the only correct answer.
To my amusement, this barely left enough people available to fill the jury box.
I followed the case. Guy robbed a convenience store. No death. No injury. Got fifty nine years.
That’s just emblematic of a broken justice system. We have to examine what is “justice” for any one case individually, and sometimes punishment may make sense, but even then its severity is determined by humane and ethical considerations. Justice systems can be reformed, the will to do so must be there—even if that means protesting till an objective is achieved.
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