**"A Bodiless Future? Any Objection? "**

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I love that too. And sometimes definitely want to.

but...... the interesting thing is that neuroscience is finding more and more evidence that without our bodies there wouldn't be "much" left of our brains/minds, that in fact our bodies are PART of our minds. As you pointed out, sand, and the implications are enormous seeing how our bodies are less and less active.

Charles Wolfe :"The mind IS embodied; Perception is also proprioception. The texture of the physical world is an irreducible component of brain-mind activity". "Vision and Touch are the essence of the fully realised human relation to reality". "It's all about physical sensation".

Rodney Brooks :" The brain is not the central planner, but possesses a scaffolding which is inseparable from the external world". Experience and understanding and memory are encoded in our bodies, not just our brains.

William Greenough and James Black writing in Developmental Behavioural Neuroscience , refer to "Induction of Brain Structure by Experience". The substrates of Cognitive Development. They found that in rats exposed to environments with differing amounts of physical interaction with objects that those rats who had to engage physically with their environment learned more and developed more neural connections than rats faced with tasks involving little or no movement.

Conceptual and linguistic structures are shaped by perceptual structures.

Schwoebel et al. 2001. says" The body in pain affects how the mind works". For instance if have an injured right arm, mental manipulations of objects requiring an "imaginary" use of the right arm are adversely affected, and problem solving is slower.

If we carry on removing the body from our interaction with the world, it is possible that we would lose certain/many mental experiences and faculties.

It is possible that the sedentarisation of the last 100-150 years has already had an effect on our mentalities and capacities.

An interesting if long paper on subject "Dimensions of Embodiment" is at : http://zakros.ucsd.edu/~trohrer/thebodyinspace.pdf
References also at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodiment & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognitive_science

a very readable and thought provoking newspaper article is at:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas ... here_think

( I was struck by what the article says about how gesticulating , and other apparently meaningless movements while thinking help us to solve problems. .... )

Last edited by ouinon on 08 Mar 2008, 8:26 am, edited 5 times in total.

I find it all very interesting too. The western world has an extremely brain/mind-centric view of what it means to be human, but the reality is that the brain is just another organ. An extremely important organ, but it's not all there is. Your body isn't an appendage that dangles off your head. It's just as much you as your brain is. Remove any parts and you change the whole in unexpected ways.

It's also interesting that cartesian dualism has had such a big impact on psychology and computer science, even among people who are not religious. Some people still think that a symbolic computer model alone will be enough to form a human-equivalent AI. But I suspect Rodney Brooks is right, and the interface to the world is just as important as the model itself.

I wonder what would/will change about the way we think. I wonder what differences there are in how/what the brain thinks if there is little or no body/movement from childhood.
Was reading an article ( educational psychology paper) about how physical disability in children affects their cognitive development. There were lots of references to "delay" and "limitation", etc, but no indication of what this "delay" and "limitation" etc actually looked like. Anybody? From personal experience, or from reading?

There was no suggestion that perhaps there might be positive,( or at least intriguing,) aspects to the differences, in the same way as is often the case when referring to autism.

The odd thing is that society seems to be choosing to put/encouraging everybody into "wheelchairs". Does immobility change the way one thinks? ( apparently it did in the case of buddha! )

Just from my own experience the answer is yes. Definitely. Who else?

Probably was more to began with and some ability has been lost due to lack of survival advantage. More sources than just that, what is fishy is the large range of 250 gigabytes to 250,000 gigabytes. It is a possible range throughout different humans I guess, but it is large.

Also interesting, I read a research article about the human eye that it has about 15 megapixels resolution on average. Human ear can hear a delta of 3 decibels without expecting it. Olfactory determines resonance structures and bond energy of molecules. Cells, tissues, & organs correspond to a level of nanotechnology we haven't achieved yet. Basically, robots and computers suck compared to us when you look at all the integrated technology we are made of.

I'll want to bring up a notorious SF convention, that of a mind disembodied and housed within a machine. A ghost in the machine. When the consciousness is popped out of a human body, could there be any kind of machine in which it could reside with no ill effect? The mind as we know it is wholly without dimension or measurement. And of course it's much more than raw data. It can be agreed that the metaphysical mind is not tethered to the brain, which is meat, which can be laid out on a coroner's table.

Can the unknown energy of the mind be co-opted and made to function inside an artificial vessel? And if so, would it be to the detriment of the bodiless person? Or would the loss of the biological input-output system cause the mind to "crash?"

Well?

Well, the wide range was really only a guess because they don't know where the upper limit of memory is- no one seems to have reached it yet.

The question is how this range was experimentally determined.

Sounds like Robocop...

I would say the brain would probably be an interdimensional interface if that were true. I think that what is known as the "soul" or "spirit" would be what is in God's image. In Genesis other non-plant creatures are called Nephesh Chayyah or "living souls", I would argue that they would have similar being but not the same as human souls which are made in the Imago Deo.

Robocop wasn't entirely bodiless FYI. I think he was basically a torso. Robocop2, OTOH, was a purely cybernetic being. Do we ever really find out just how much of Murphy's original body survived?

Series died, thus the answer is "no."

Damn I'm still thinking about RoboCop.

Imagine trying to rehabilitate a human mind after the body it belongs to has been mostly obliterated, replaced with heavy unfeeling hardware. The mind/body connection accounts for more in this equation than people may realize. The continous input/output cycle of neural impulses throughout the body's neurons would have catastrophic effects if permanently
"taken offline," vis-a-vis insanity.

Even if someday, somehow, some machine could redraw most of the nervous system with artificial analogues, still doesn't mean the mind would be able to adapt. Ever. Most likely, the person would go crazy for want of flesh & bone. Murphy did have to battle to keep his wits.

People who receive prosthetic limbs say they can still feel the missing limb after the accident or whatever ... Phantom Limb Syndrome. Sensation occuring in an amputated limb. If most of my body had to be amputated and replaced with one huge shiny OCP prosthetic, I wonder if I'd be able to feel my fingers.

I thought that the ghost in the machine referred to the spontaneous emergence of something new, and unpredictable, from systems of a certain level of complexity. A mind put into a machine would not be that, because it would not have emerged from that machine.

But the term is useful because it's a reminder that in any machine less complex than the human body the mind probably could not exist, not for very long, unless richly endowed with language/symbols to compensate for the loss of body data/reference points, and even then probably not for ever, because it would not have its necessary substrate of complexity. It might disappear, into thin air.

But what about restricting/constricting/thinning down the body-machine bit by bit. How much could you remove before provoking a "crash"?

Flotation tanks are supposed to produce the effect of a partial loss of the body. Even then the person's proprioceptive system will actually keep them in touch with their body. Would need for someone with poor proprioceptive system to try it. From my experiences on occasion of waking up in a room so dark could not see where i was, it is a pretty freaky experience. And that wasn't in a tank of water.
experience; people using virtual reality mask and gloves feel pretty panicky until "connect "with their "new" motor and visual functions. I suspect breakdown is very likely in case of removal of all neural connections, if anything called a mind is left at all.

But you don't need to posit such extreme sci-fi scenarios, because the evidence is already there; reduced mobility in animals produces different cognitive capacities. Our bodies ARE part of our minds. Take our bodies away and perhaps you produce a different being.

The mass use of cars, TVs, computer games, and other technology which induces "sit-still' behaviour, is literally a kind of mind-control. It's not the content, the information, the pictures on the screen, that are important, except as carrot, it's getting people to sit still for hours and hours on end. What kind of thinking does it promote, and does it look like it's going to contribute to an even more complex human social organism?

Last edited by ouinon on 08 Mar 2008, 3:48 pm, edited 9 times in total.

If you disconnect a computer from its peripherals but still keep it powered and on, it will still run but it will having nothing to do except processing. The video board, sound board, etc, would be unnecessary for this purpose however. A human brain by itself would also have no method of reproduction, so natural selection would be invalid.

And if science were about increasing our vocabulary/language, constructing more scaffolding to hold up a mind-without-a-body, ( or at least without an active one) manufacturing a whole extra layer of symbols, densely interconnected, ( like a body, a cell body ), PLUS the neural intake-output system to go with it.

All the people who now who feel as if they've had a limb cut off if their computer crashes, etc. Recent acute viral infection meant had to get someone to reinstal system entirely; it was "away" less than 48 hours but i was bereft. I kept discovering myself in the middle of thinking, "I'll just check what..", "I'll see what x says about..", "I wonder if i can find that on..", etc. My thinking process had become tangled up with the internet.

Just because pure symbol-processing systems are no good at producing artificial intelligence doesn't need to mean that they can't, in combination with an artificial "neural relay" system, provide a reasonable prosthetic device for an "intelligence" wanting to disincarnate to a certain extent, or...?

The aim of artificial intelligence is to get a robot to interact with "real life" as a separate/autonomous unit, but perhaps humans want to go the other way.

Disembodiment topic

I do not think I would want to be disembodied any more than i would want to be disemboweled, even though I already experience a sort of mind/body schism due to dyspraxia. However, I am not certain that such disengagement is any more probable, though, in theory, it is possible. Based on the posts here, I do not see it as practical, but, I am not authority.

It is interesting, and I hope more informed members post in that I may give the matter more consideration.

To boldly go where the body may not. Good topic.

oh, Yikes! I really don't want all my fantasies fulfilled, thanks anyway!

Merle