The only difference between “I did it because I wanted to” and “I did it because my enemy put a gun at my head” is in my memories… and that part is lost.
I could prepare for such situation in advance, and have a system like “everything that I do, unless I also mention it in my secret diary, I was forced to do by an enemy”. But then the same problem returns: the information about the secret diary itself; is this something that I invented, or something that I was forced to do by my enemy?
So, if I could keep some of my very old memories, I could somehow leverage some mechanism that I have prepared in advance. But if I lose literally everything, there is nothing to start with. No first information in the chain that I could trust to be made voluntarily by myself.
The only difference between “I did it because I wanted to” and “I did it because my enemy put a gun at my head” is in my memories… and that part is lost.
Physiologically speaking, there is in fact a difference—and this is a difference you can use.
If, for instance, your precautions include measures like sending yourself blood samples, it’s likely that you’d observe significantly higher stress hormone levels in your blood if you were coerced than if you were doing it freely. So if you measure high levels of stress hormones in the blood sample, you can be fairly sure some sort of coercion was involved.
The only difference between “I did it because I wanted to” and “I did it because my enemy put a gun at my head” is in my memories… and that part is lost.
I could prepare for such situation in advance, and have a system like “everything that I do, unless I also mention it in my secret diary, I was forced to do by an enemy”. But then the same problem returns: the information about the secret diary itself; is this something that I invented, or something that I was forced to do by my enemy?
So, if I could keep some of my very old memories, I could somehow leverage some mechanism that I have prepared in advance. But if I lose literally everything, there is nothing to start with. No first information in the chain that I could trust to be made voluntarily by myself.
Physiologically speaking, there is in fact a difference—and this is a difference you can use.
If, for instance, your precautions include measures like sending yourself blood samples, it’s likely that you’d observe significantly higher stress hormone levels in your blood if you were coerced than if you were doing it freely. So if you measure high levels of stress hormones in the blood sample, you can be fairly sure some sort of coercion was involved.