Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. You have the right to remain silent

We are told here in the United States

This is part of the famous Miranda warning that is given to

newly arrested suspects to remind them of some of their rights as

Enumerated in the US Constitution especially the Fifth Amendment the right against self-incrimination and

This is actually pretty common practice around the world that suspects cannot be forced to testify against

themselves is supposed to protect you against

Torture or forced confessions anything like that and there's other aspects of

rights that we have in the US Constitution and elsewhere that for example very famously in Roe v. Wade the US Supreme Court

Said that there was implicitly a right to privacy in the US Constitution given all the enumerated rights

It was sensible to say that these added up to a right to privacy

Your opinions about that particular judgment may differ

But the idea that governments cannot simply see everything we're doing read all of our emails

Tap all of our phone conversations etc. It is pretty well entrenched and for good reason

But what if the government could just read your mind?

What then are the limits that protect our right to privacy if the government could somehow know what you are thinking?

That might sound science fictiony, but it's less science fictiony than you might think because the technology is advancing

Today's podcast is not going to be primarily about the technology although we'll discuss that

It's going to be about the ethical and legal implications of

Neuro technology of the idea that we can have brain scanning devices that tell a

Listener something about what a person is thinking at different levels of

Specificity not even necessarily an implant, but in some cases as we'll hear

...