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

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Science is currently ( in the first stages of), centralising the business of sensing/the work of our senses, observing/measuring our environment for us, detecting relationships between physical data.
Technology is taking over most production work. ( motor functions), and also responds to more and more service requirements.

It is possible that some time in the next 1000 years use of science may result in many bodies becoming mere petri-dishes for brains/consciousnesses, ( the process has already started), which would work at a wide variety of "video games", not only trad fantasy ones, (as many people in the far east already do; known as "goldfarmers", grinding to level up for richer western players who can't be bothered to, etc,), but also online financial systems, information cartels/data wars, etc, and pay for entertainment; simulated sensory pleasures, aswell as brain-services, body-fuel etc etc.

Some/a certain number of bodies might continue to have some relevance. For producing and raising children, for example. And perhaps people would have to use their bodies until a certain age simply to establish certain wiring,...or not.

Do you like the sound of this future? Why, or why not?

Would there be any reason to get upset/feel sad, as our bodies gradually reduced to mere cushions and fuel cells for our brains?

I think using humans or animals for experiments is, in many cases, wrong. I can't really make sense of your thread, so that is all I could get out of it. Do you have a link for this?

Sounds too much like the matrix movie to me...

Yes, I believe that one day, soon, we'll be nothing but floating brains in jars.

No link at the moment, just my brain!!
I'm not talking about vivesection, or live animal experiments.

What i am referring to is something already happening, which is that as humans become radically less physically active their brain wiring changes.

In the same way as increasing use of complex language from 10,000 BC onwards probably drastically changed the way our brain evolved/develops/wires-up in childhood, so the massive changes in physical activity patterns of humans in the wake of so many scientific and technological advances may already be having a significant, and widespread, effect on how our brains develop.

From babyhood, even from before, the body is in general subjected to very different stimuli nowadays compared to the pre-industrial age. More and more people in the west lead mostly or entirely sedentary lives, which means that for babies in utero as for babes in arms and also toddlers there is far less physical movement stimulation to encourage the development of the proprioceptive system.

Neuroscientists etc have discovered that enforced/habitual immobility in childhood ( early schooling is just one factor, another is the TV, another the car....),results in changes to the proprioceptive system development, what they describe as "poor" development.

The brain makes fewer or less rich or less reliable connections with the body. And this has been found to have an effect on various other important aspects of mental functioning. (I can't remember exactly what right now, but i read about it in connection with the effects of immobility in school on childrens growing brains).

As if in responsive compensation for this technology-induced change of physical expression, science is developing more and more sophisticated methods of measurement of those very things which way back we used our eyes and ears and sense of smell to detect. Our environment.

I am suggesting that just as increasing language use may have had a massive effect on our relationship with the world, science may be in the early stages of making our bodies redundant and, perhaps most disturbingly/interestingly, changing our brains in doing so.

Last edited by ouinon on 07 Mar 2008, 5:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I've posted the thread in PPR because i think there are philosophical, ( at least), implications.

Science and technology may be having more effect on the nature of the human being with their inducements to immobility than any immediately foreseeable genetic engineering.

WHAT exactly might the effects on the human brain be?

I think that one of the main "side-effects" of having a bodiless brain is that the capacity for logical reasoning, intellect, memory and general IQ will grow because we wouldn't have to waste brain space on bodily functions. From the early stages of brain plasticity and organization, more energy will be directed into thinking and thought, as it'll be all we'll do anyways.

There would be no need to learn how to walk, ride a bike, be social, and have a controlling center for out automatic responses such as breathing.

We would be closer to a computer.

I think I've heard the the human brain has around 250 trillion bytes storage and can do about 1 quadrillion computations per second already, but I suppose that would be for background processes and not for conscious math/logic.

What I've read claims that the human brain has essentially infinite storage capacities.

The brain's an interesting organ.

How? Does it store the extra in hyperspace?? The brain is made up of a finite number of molecules, so how can it store an infinite amount of data?

All right, I just checked my AP Psychology textbook, and here's what it has to say:

So, while there theoretically would be a limit on how much memory we can store, it seemingly is so high that no one has yet managed to reach that limit in order to even find out what it is. For all intents and purposes, we have infinite memory capacity.

So, a trillion to a quadrillion bits, converting to a range of 250 GB to 250,000 GB roughly.

Something seems fishy about that estimate. Why would the human brain evolve that kind of memory capacity if it's never used? What possible survival/reproductive advantage could it give over someone with, say, 1/10 of that capacity? It sounds a lot like the popular myth that humans only use 10% of their brain.

What kinds of assumptions did they make in coming up with that number? The human brain is nothing like a computer, so they must have made a lot of them...

I want to take away the 'almost' part. I would rather be like in "Cocoon" where they just zip off their skins and are light beams within.

Merle

I was broadly on the machines side in the Matrix, so I think that kind of future is appealing if the model of program was run was something akin to "Better than Life" (From Red Dwarf, Better Than Life is a computer simulation of reality with the exception that it reads your mind and fulfills all your fantasies.)

The concept that the body is merely a vehicle for the brain is misconceived. In evolution, the body and brain evolved as a unit and the interaction of body-brain is far more complex than merely that of a mechanical adjunct to the brain. There are many "thinking" aspects of the body that contribute to the function of the whole. No doubt some of the mechanical aspects can be provided with advanced capabilities but the body is far more useful than a petri dish and very deeply involved with not only the thinking of the brain but also providing it with motivations and pleasures of prime importance to the creature as a unit.