The article mentions Soviet jigsaw experiments on dogs, like reanimating dead dog heads [1] and grafting two dogs on to each other having one circulation [2].
How would we go about confirming this was more than propaganda?
Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?
41–50 of 201 posts
Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
A colleague went on once about Star Trek transporters: what if they worked by "scanning" a person, sent that data over the airwaves, then, made a perfect copy of somewhere else (sourcing new molecules from wherever) — would this copy believe they were the original? He went on: suppose you kill the original — did you "transport" the person? Star Trek creeps me out a little now.
A rule could be made that memories can only be moved and not copied. Copying memories could be made illegal punishable by mandatory formatting.
rules are made to be broken as they say
Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?
#43Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
A colleague went on once about Star Trek transporters: what if they worked by "scanning" a person, sent that data over the airwaves, then, made a perfect copy of somewhere else (sourcing new molecules from wherever) — would this copy believe they were the original? He went on: suppose you kill the original — did you "transport" the person? Star Trek creeps me out a little now.
I'm off the opinion that transporting is pointless from a selfish point of view: your duplicate will get to Jupiter or wherever, and think they're you, but your consciousness will stop so you will never get to experience it. I don't know what experiment you could do to prove this either way.
You can also apply the same argument Pre and post deep sleep or anaesthetic
Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?
#45Ethical and moral considerations aside, this also has some interesting philsophical implications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
A colleague went on once about Star Trek transporters: what if they worked by "scanning" a person, sent that data over the airwaves, then, made a perfect copy of somewhere else (sourcing new molecules from wherever) — would this copy believe they were the original? He went on: suppose you kill the original — did you "transport" the person? Star Trek creeps me out a little now.
Bones, the MD actor on Star Trek, avoided the transporter whenever possible. So he wasn't convinced it was a good idea.
Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
A colleague went on once about Star Trek transporters: what if they worked by "scanning" a person, sent that data over the airwaves, then, made a perfect copy of somewhere else (sourcing new molecules from wherever) — would this copy believe they were the original? He went on: suppose you kill the original — did you "transport" the person? Star Trek creeps me out a little now.
I always imagine this will be the divide between rich and poor in the future. The more expensive technology will break the person down and send their atoms to the destination to be reconstructed, it will be slower but it will be the same person. The less expensive technology will scan the person send that data and they will be printed out from a a futuristic atomic printer in a process that kills the original. I imag…
You are presupposing that there is a material difference between these two. Whenever you have a discontinuation of your conscious experience (for example, when you go to sleep and wake up), you can view that as one person disappearing, and a copy waking up in the morning. In fact, unless you believe in a transcendent soul as the seat of consciousness, it must be equivalent.
So, when you step into the teleporter, you can perfectly equivalently think of the person that will come up at the other side as a "copy" of you, or "future you". Let's say that the teleporter doesn't affect the local copy, it just creates a remote copy. What reason do you have to care more about the local copy than the remote copy? Why are you imagining that hacking the body up into tiny pieces, sending the pieces, and reassembling them would be any different from just killing the local copy and sending the information away? You'd still die and another person would be assembled on the other side.
Now, if you do believe in a transcendent soul (I don't), things get much more interesting. In fact, teleportation in this way would amount to experimentation of this hypothesis. If humans have unique souls given to them by some god at the moment of birth, then copy teleportation should not be able to produce two copies - either one of the body copies would not be conscious at all, since one of the bodies would not have a soul, OR the two bodies would be completely different in personality, as one would have the original soul, and the other would have the new soul, which would be a completely different person. For the "move" style teleportation, the risk would be that the disassembly process kills the body and causes the soul to be separated, so that the reassembled body ends up being soul-less and doesn't function, or is inhabited by a different soul, so it must act differently.
Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?
#47Is there such thing called transplanting a body? I thought it would be transplanting a brain because brain is part where memories etc live? Yea there are some philosophical queries but you know ...
> brain is part where memories etc live?
As far as we know. But we really know so little and there's a lot of interesting work being done regarding the networks of nerves in other parts of the body.
It's extremely likely that the brain is where most of the memories are stored, things like your name and age and so on. It could turn out that a lot of other types of memory, like muscle memory or emotional memory, are more distributed.
Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's already a gap in you consciousness when you sleep. Is that any different than arriving as the copy?
I feel it's more like a gap in memory. We are usually not trained to remember our dreams. Even if I'm waken up in a non-REM phase, there is usually a kind of remembrance of how I felt during sleep. Edit: Made my statement more vague. There is definitely more to sleep though than turning consciousness off and on again.
That is a technical point about sleep. Replace it with coma, general anaesthesia, or short death followed by reanimation, and the argument stays.
Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?
#49Is there such thing called transplanting a body? I thought it would be transplanting a brain because brain is part where memories etc live? Yea there are some philosophical queries but you know ...
> brain is part where memories etc live? As far as we know. But we really know so little and there's a lot of interesting work being done regarding the networks of nerves in other parts of the body. It's extremely likely that the brain is where most of the memories are stored, things like your name and age and so on. It could turn out that a lot of other types of memory, like muscle memory or emotional memory, are mo…
What do you mean by distributed? As in memories are not stored in the brain or are stored in the brain but in different pathways?
Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?
#50Until we figure how to hack nerves, I guess being paralyzed from the neck down would suck less than being dead? (also, it's less final!)
I'd take my chances, certainly.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-29645760
https://futurism.com/neoscope/genetic-engineering-paralyzed-...