NoSoup

Art linked a very interesting article in this thread here.

Here is the situation - please choose an option.

Option 1) You continue to live life as it is now, with a physical body experiencing all things physical - including sex, pain, ect. You would live a typical life span.

Option 2) You basically are relieved of your physical self and exist only as a consciousness. Using the previous link as an exampe, you would be - in effect - a brain in a jar. However, you would be able to live for eternity and have access to any informational resources out there - such as the net, libraries, ect. to aquire knowledge.

Based on these short descriptions, which would you choose - and why?

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ironman

I'm curious about what answer would a paraplegic give...
I totally go for living the life as is, is just that i'm more of a player than an expectator.

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Pacifier

hmm not sure....at the end everything, every feeling and emotion is just a chemical reaction in your brain. So why a body?

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avhg1

I like my equipment a bit too much to give up. I would have to know more about the brain in the jar stuff. What interactions intellectually would you have with others? Do you still get to got to the tfp?

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Nefir

Well, if by "brain in a jar" you mean being turned into a cyborg, with the power of communication, vision, and movement, then I would definitely consider the possibility. Not now, mind you - I'm still young, and have lots to experience - but as an alternative to growing old and dying... maybe.

Being able to go on learning, creating, exploring, beyond the limitations of the human body... this appeals to me.

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superiorrain

I'll take the way it all functions at the moment. If you lived for ever in a jar where would be the fun in that. Also do you really need to know everything, to know everything would be depressing. If you were never to die, what would motivate you to live.

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zen_tom

It would have to be a pretty good jar, one I could move about at will, and manipulate external objects with, and be able to sense my environment, oh...it's a replacement body.

No, thinking occurs only as a consequence of the sensations of the flesh.

If you removed the cause, you'd kill the effect.

Giant Hamburger

I have always wanted to be just a brain in a jar but not immediately.
I would like to use what I have for another 20-30 years or so and then cash out.
Whenever my children are done needing me I'll be ready to go.
Basically, I want it both ways.

lurkette

Playing the devil's advocate here (and being a little pedantic), if you were literally a brain in a jar, someone could find a way to stimulate the centers of the brain that deal with motor skills and physical sensation and simulate corporeal experience.

Assuming that you really mean you're just pure consciousness, I'd choose a body experience with a normal lifespan since I tend to believe that the other option is, roughly, what we get as an "afterlife."

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ARTelevision

My sense is that what we already are is a brain in a jar (metaphorically - but essentially true).

The choice for me has always been obvious.
Who I am - if anything - is my mind.

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joeb1

We may be closer than we think.... Except in this case the brain is in a dish.
I would choose the feelings of the flesh for now. Who knows about the future though?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/02/b...ish/index.html

(CNN) -- A Florida scientist has developed a "brain" in a glass dish that is capable of flying a virtual fighter plane and could enhance medical understanding of neural disorders such as epilepsy.

The "living computer" was grown from 25,000 neurons extracted from a rat's brain and arranged over a grid of 60 electrodes in a Petri dish.

The brain cells then started to reconnect themselves, forming microscopic interconnections, said Thomas DeMarse, professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida.

"It's essentially a dish with 60 electrodes arranged in a dish at the bottom," explained DeMarse, who designed the study.

"Over that we put the living cortical neurons from rats, which rapidly begin to reconnect themselves, forming a living neural network -- a brain."

Although such living networks could one day be used to fly unmanned aircraft, DeMarse said the study was of more immediate relevance as an experimental aid to understanding how the human brain performs and learns computational tasks at a cellular level.

"We're interested in studying how brains compute," said DeMarse.

"If you think about your brain, and learning and the memory process, I can ask you questions about when you were five-years-old and you can retrieve information. That's a tremendous capacity for memory. In fact, you perform fairly simple tasks that you would think a computer would easily be able to accomplish, but in fact it can't."

Although computers can perform certain tasks extremely quickly, they lack the flexibility and adaptability of the human brain and perform particularly poorly at pattern recognition tasks.

"If we extract the rules of how these neural networks are doing computations like pattern recognition we can apply that to create novel computing systems," said DeMarse.

"There's a lot of data out there that will tell you that the computation that's going on here isn't based on just one neuron. The computational property is actually an emergent property of hundreds of thousands of neurons cooperating to produce the amazing processing power of the brain."

As well as enhancing scientific knowledge of how the brain works, the neurons may provide clues to brain dysfunction. For example, an epileptic seizure is triggered when all the neurons in the brain fire simultaneously -- a pattern commonly replicated by a neural network in a dish.

When linked up to an F-22 jet flight simulator, the brain and the simulator established a two-way connection similar to how neurons receive and interpret signals from each other to control our bodies.

Gradually the brain learnt to control the flight of the plane based on the information it received about flight conditions.

However, the brain still falls a long way short of the complexity of the human brain, which has billions of neurons, and Steven Potter, a biomedical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said a brain in a dish flying a real plane was still a long way off.

"A lot of people have been interested in what changes in the brains of animals and people when they are learning things," said Potter, DeMarse's former supervisor.

"We're interested in getting down into the network and cellular mechanisms, which is hard to do in living animals. And the engineering goal would be to get ideas from this system about how brains compute and process information."

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K-Wise

You should have made the choices exactly what they were in the title not this "Thinking is overrated-I'd take the sensations of the flesh" crap. As if thats the only reason people would choose physical Mortality. "Who wants to live forever?"

Asta!!

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oblar

i chose the sensations of the flesh for one reason..

living for an eternity would be boring.

now given the mental or the physical for the same period of time, i would probably go mental... no pun intended *grin*

LeviticusMky

I would never ever choose immortality. The human brain just isn't set up for it. I live through the assumption that I will at some point cease to be.

The only way that I would accept an indefinite life span in a jar is if two conditions were met:

1) I could choose when I wanted to stop "living" at any time.

2) I would have the opportunity to interact with others in a meaningful way, and be able to control a non-physical body, similar to the situation in the "Matrix" except with full knowledge of the fact the my physical body is gone and that I exist only as data.

If I were simply given the opportunity to live forever in some sort of gigantic library, I would definately turn it down. I would go insane.

Macheath

I agree with those who are saying that physical sensation could be simulated by stimulating the brain. As to whether I could live as intellect without any sensation, emotion or feeling...I don't know. No human has ever lived in such a state. Perhaps feeling and sensation are actually inseperable from what we know as consciousness.

You could also ask whether a person would conversely desire a life of great physical and emotional pleasure devoid of any sense of intellectual curiosity or access to knowledge and wisdom.

Blackthorn

I think the assuption that the premise of the question was either or for the first option was invalid. It includes both - a life in the physical world as well as a brain and intellect for a short duration. The or side of the equation is simply an everlasting intellect. Personally - I don't want to know me at 10,000 years of age in intellectual terms. I prefer to live and learn, see, hear, smell, taste, and touch in the physical world. Any existance without this is not living. So -- I choose both for the short duration that I'm given and I choose every day to exploit that to it's fullest potential.

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