Can they just sort out the housing price and cost of living so we’re not forced to break the law to survive and get their thousand year sentence? Or nah?
I think it was Confucius that said that society is best when the laws are simple and people understand the laws.
I mean what do we need with 5,000-year-old Chinese mysticism when we've got Elon musk shoving metal pellets into your medulla oblongata that can play ads at you in your dreams?
I’m pretty sure crimes like murder etc. are the ones that should be getting thousands year sentences. Has nothing to do with cost of living and housing price imo. I’m open to an explanation.
We just saw the episode where the wraith took over Kinko’s body and threatened to kill her if O’Brien didn’t reconfigure the comm relays. I thought, “Here’s your way out, Miles!”
I’m glad that O’Brien got so much focus on DS9 after being a side character on TNG, but man did they ever fuck with him.
But then if they did acknowledge all the shit the writers put him through they would have one seriously messed up officer who should probably be discharged.
I had to give up on The Black Mirror after that episode where they have to exercise to earn credits and are forced to watch advertising. Then that girl thought she could make it out by singing but had to do porn instead. Couldn’t watch anymore after that.
I mean wasn't season 1 episode 1 where we all watched a guy fuck a pig? Like if that wasn't enough to get you to stop then you probably should go ahead and watch the rest of the series.
Ya, I watched that one too and thought it was funny. Then for some reason the workout thing really got to me hard too. I was working at a bank as a manager that was literally scamming people out of their money/ homes and hated my life. Living in a shoebox and barely able to afford my apartment. I hated my life. It really hit me hard.
FWIW, I think that episode is one of the weakest early season episodes. It’s somehow both too explicit and not explicit enough, because their world doesn’t make any sense beyond simply “capitalism”. The rest are a lot more in the realm of existential horror and questioning the morality of things. Black mirror just isn’t a good medium for an explanation of why capitalism is evil.
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.
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).
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.
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?
Philosopher Rebecca Roache […] said, […] “you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence”
I can’t fathom why this is report-worthy. Was April 2014 such a boring month?
Maybe they didn’t have the source. Again, we’re on the shitpost community. I think it’s unreasonable to call someone a jackass because they don’t research the sources for every meme that they find and shitpost. Especially when they’re a power-user like OP and post 30-some times a day.
This philosopher hack has also written about eugenic BS aimed at sculpting humanity to have a smaller carbon footprint. I’m ok with op not actually linking to her crap.
As others have said, the rehabilitation aspect is dubious. It depends on what the person “experiences” for that length of time. If there’s therapy in time-dilation-space then sure go right ahead and sign me up as well. I’ll just Goku-it up in my chamber of time and space and work some shit out in time for my morning shit. But you and I both know it ain’t going to work that way. Prisoners will just be trapped in an empty void with only their own thoughts to keep them company, most likely rendering them insane. An infinite solitary confinement is just plain torture.
Edit: so I googled the article and its laughable how easily the author slides right in to dystopian fanfic. “This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals’ lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time.” Obviously.
One day Steve said: You know what? Keeping a prisoner a life for a thousand years is fucking expensive. What if we didn’t have to?
And from that conversation our company was born. Little did we know that death sentence is still a thing or that humans don’t even live that long. But boy did we scam some investors.
Naturally, this is the type of thing in sci-fi where we assume it’ll be used to generate massive amounts of income to benefit society in a magnificently short amount of time, and then some bastard comes around and says, “What if we incarcerate people for millenia?”
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
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