Standing at the front door, about to leave, Shane can't help blushing about something he just said. Monique notices. Because she's seeing him out, she can't look away; she doesn't want to appear rude. So she witnesses his embarrassment - what she reads his blush as showing, rightly as it happens.
But whatever did Shane say? That's a different post. We can maybe come back to it on another occasion.
The question, for now, is: did Monique invade Shane's privacy by looking upon the visible sign of his embarrassment? Imagine a different possible world in which some of your thoughts (don't worry, I wasn't meaning your thoughts - heaven forfend) just showed up in print, and occasionally images, on the little screens that we humans (in that different world) had for foreheads. You have an ungenerous thought and ping, there it is, revealed to the assembled company. Well, you'd have to wear something to cover your thoughts, just in case the wrong one appeared to the wrong person at the wrong time. But suppose you couldn't cover your thoughts, or at least not all of them. Suppose the world was such that every now and again, more or less randomly, a visible thought bubble appeared above your head with a fragment of some notion you were currently entertaining. Or that we each had our own personal mini-novelist, who would pop out upon a shoulder and describe aloud, with exquisite literary skill, what was going on in the head closely connected to that shoulder.
It would be not only a different but a more difficult world. Could you argue with your mini-novelist? 'Hey! That's inaccurate. It's not true. I did never.' Could you claim there'd been a malfunction on your screen or in your thought bubble? Suppose not.
These aimless musings are prompted by the news of a development in mind-reading thought to raise privacy issues - which of course it would eventually; because the concept of privacy has been formed on the basis of the world we actually live in and not of alternative possible worlds. The report also speaks of 'fears that a suspect's brain could be interrogated against their will, raising the nightmarish possibility of interrogation for "thought crimes".' One defence against this is to insist that there are no thought crimes - or, to put the same thing otherwise, that it should be an unbendable principle of law that there are no thought crimes. Unfortunately, once there are means of reliably reading people's thoughts, the danger of some thoughts being treated as criminal becomes a real one, unless all the world is by then securely under the rule of law, including that principle immediately aforesaid.
