On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 12:55 AM, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote: > Say that you have been captured by the [totalitarian fiend of your choice], > and are tied up in a basement somewhere. The torture has begun, and is has > become clear that it will continue to get worse until you 'become one of > them'. > > Fortunately you have been supplied by your team with a 'Chalmers' device, > which allows you to know exactly what to say and do to convince your captors > that you have turned and become 'one of them' in earnest. Using real-time em > field sensitivity and quantum computing, the computational states are not > only analyzed, but predicted for everyone in the room so that you are > furnished with the best lines and gestures, sobbing, explaining, etc. > > The Chalmers device allows you to be a flawless actor. Is there any reason > that this wouldn't work in theory? What law says that acting can only be so > good, and beyond that you actually have to 'love Big Brother' in order to > seem like you do? If we had a device that would allow us to control our > bodies, emotions, and minds precisely and absolutely, why couldn't we use > that device as a mask?
The perfect actor might believe it or he might just be acting. Acting is top-down replacement, not bottom-up replacement. Bottom-up replacement would involve replacing a part of your brain so that you didn't notice any difference and no-one else noticed any difference. > Part II > > Instead of replacing parts of the brain with perfect functional replicas, > what if we used a hot wire to ablate or burn parts of the brain. If I burn > one region, you lose the power of speech. If I burn another, you lose all > understanding of physics and math. If I burn another, you go into a coma. I > can do different combinations of ablation on different subjects, but would > there be any case in which someone who was dead could be induced to speak or > solve math problems? Why not? I could replace the motherboard of a burned > out computer with any other compatible motherboard and expect to pick up > right where I left off. If I toasted a critical part of any computer, there > is no loss of potential functionality to any of the other parts, whether > that part is implicated in the boot up process or not. Just because a > computer won't boot doesn't mean that it can't be easily repaired. Not so > with a living organism. If you blow out a simple power supply in a > biological system, it will never run again - not even a little bit. > > What say ye? Replacing body parts that break down with artificial ones is well-established in the medical industry, and will become increasingly so in future as the devices become more sophisticated. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
