Can you really be forced to do something you’re not willing?

[thomas432]

I know the popular consensus is that hypnosis can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do but wouldn’t that go against what people here have reported from the Curse files etc? Like people have reported getting out of hypnosis and feeling forced to be a certain way, even though they consciously didn’t want it any more. So can hypnosis really override your free will?

[Jackstock]

Sales teams wouldn't make any money if they couldn't convince people to buy things they don't really need.
In fact, most departments of every single company are devoted to swaying the thoughts and actions of other people. Human resources, public relations, marketing, sales, and even the CEO are all dedicated to the exclusive purpose of shifting thoughts and actions.
It's all "hypnosis" just the same. The only question is how good they are at convincing, how easily someone can be convinced, and how bad they do/dont want it already.

[Fizbin]

The most accurate (least inaccurate?) statement is that you can't be hypnotized "against your will". In other words, if you are actively fighting going under, it is much harder to get you there. Also, you probably cannot be hypnotized to do something so antithetical to your nature that there is no circumstance under which you would perform the act, hypnosis probably can't "make" you do it. However, any other statements in this vein are pretty much useless.
First, assume you believe that hypnosis is real, and can be induced at all.
From there, you can EASILY be hypnotized without your knowledge. This is not the same as being "against your will".
In trance, you can be generally be convinced that any circumstance that is physically possible is in fact currently true. So, any action you would take under those circumstances could also be induced.

[cloudstalker]

Old joke, attributed to a number of famous people. I'll use George Bernard Shaw.
At a dinner party, Shaw asked a woman next to him, "Would you sleep with me for 20 pounds?"
The woman replied, "What kind of woman do you think i am?"
Shaw said, "How about a million pounds?"
The woman demurred, and said, "Well, maybe!"
Shaw replied, "Now that we have established what kind of woman you are, all we have to do is negotiate a fee."

The entire field of AI is based on a mathematics of logic called "fuzzy logic". It is based on the fact that virtually any decision is based on multiple inputs, where the level of various inputs can change the relative importance than others. In the joke, by increasing the amount of money to a life-changing value, the inhibition against having sex for money becomes less important.

Bad news for people who maintain, "A limit is a limit!"

Addiction works much like this. Scientific thinking about addiction shifted when "crack" cocaine first became more widely available. Before then, the common wisdom was that cocaine was "only" psychologically addicting, not physically addicting (meaning that the body does not develop a tolerance to it, requiring steadily increasing doses to get the same effect). Turns out that there is a definite neurological factor to "psychological" addiction. Essentially:
- Pleasure is a major motivator of human behavior.
- The human brain is very good at adapting to regular overloads.

The latter is usually considered in terms of pain and discomfort; we see those who live in circumstances that we find intolerable, and they do so because their brains have adjusted to the pain/discomfort until it becomes considered to be "normal." But the same is true with pleasure; if the pleasure centers are overloaded, the brain adjusts to make the "normal". This means that things that otherwise would be pleasurable no longer provide enough stimulation to give the motivation, and the overloaded version becomes "normal".

And the pleasure overload (well, not as much as crack) can be achieved through hypnotic suggestion. Essentially, every time you edge towards the borders of a limit, you may push the border a little further. And there is no such thing as stepping over a border "just once"; once you step over a border, the border moves to a new point, ad you can chip away at a limit, one little step at a time.

Consider the following article on Buzzfeed, who used the Bambi Sleep files abusively to move his victims' limits. This is just an example of what can be done. There are many other ways limits can be broken.

It is not a matter of what your limits are. It's just a matter of negotiating a price.

[cloudstalker]

Forgot to post the link: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/je ... ambi-sleep