The Mind Needs Stimulation

A human totally deprived of bodily senses does not do well. After 12 hours in a sensory deprivation tank (where one floats in a body-temperature saline solution that produces almost no skin sensation, in total darkness and silence, with taste and smell and the sensations of breathing minimized) a subject will begin to hallucinate, as the mind, somewhat like a television tuned to a nonexistent channel, turns up the amplification, desperately looking for a signal, becoming ever less discriminating in the theories it offers to make sense of the random sensory hiss it receives. Even the most extreme telepresence and virtual reality scenarios we have presented avoid complete bodylessness by always providing the mind with a consistent sensory (and motor) image, obtained from an actual remote robot body, or from a computer simulation. In those scenarios, a person may sometimes exist without a physical body, but never without the illusion of having one.

Notes:

From Hans Moravec's "Pigs in Cyberspace"

Folksonomies: cognition perception

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/law, govt and politics/legal issues/human rights (0.126333)

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The Transhumanist Reader

Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: More, Max and Vita-More, Natasha (2013-03-05), The Transhumanist Reader, John Wiley & Sons, Retrieved on 2015-03-19

Source Material [books.google.com]

Folksonomies: medical transhumanism