It’s not about the computers. This individual has demonstrated he has no regard or respect for others property, and may very well go on to commit other more serious crimes if he gets away easily with this one. Others may also feel encouraged to imitate what he did if there are no serious repercussions.
The great thing is, he also flushed his future down the drain, at least outside of India (every visa application in the world asks you about past criminal convictions).
Or to use a more apt metaphor, he zapped his future into smoke.
So much of the life coaching industry reeks of this crap. Follow any 20-something “life” coach these days and you’ll probably be treated to a stream of flowery feel good quotes that remind you to stay positive at all times.
Eventually these little hits of positivity aren’t strong enough and some seek out expensive coaching services that give you much larger dosages of the same shit while you pretend to work through your problems.
I don’t see why they bothered drugging the brains. Even if they became conscious, the pig’s bodies are dead and gone. There is nothing to feel, one is simply alone with their thoughts, perhaps even dreams.
You have no way of really understanding the magnitude of endless existential dread or physical pain a disembodied brain might perceive, which I think is the primary concern of ethicists.
In order for these sorts of experiments to be ethical with an apparent consciousness we definitely need BCI technology that can simulate input / output stimuli, at least reasonably.
It sure seems like patterns of cortical activation (or something like that) could be compared to some sort of waking standard to take a very good measured guess at some point.
Fear of being blind and alone, unable to even draw a breath to bleat out a cry for help perhaps? Plus, the pig WAS dead. Even if they are just alone with their thoughts, there probably was some trauma surrounding become an ex-pig.
Technically, the medical community only considers physical injury with the term 'pain', but there is growing consensus that pain can be more general (especially considering it is often subjective). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2952112/
All response experience exists within the brain, yes, but it is only ever made possible through external stimulus. The brain itself doesn't feel anything, but generates those feelings as a response to events outside of itself.
"If it seems strange that nerve signals coming from the back can represent vision, bear in mind that your own sense of vision is carried by nothing but millions of nerve signals that just happen to travel along different cables. Your brain is encased in absolute blackness in the vault of your skull. It doesn’t see anything. All it knows are these little signals and nothing else. And yet you perceive the world in shades of brightness and colors. Your brain is in the dark but your mind constructs the light." — David Eagleman in his book Incognito.
Without the nerves connecting your toe to your brain, you are unlikely to feel the otherwise agonizing pain of having had stubbed it against a coffee table.
Phantom limbs can cause/have pain, partly from the lack of expected predicted feedback. I cannot begin to imagine what sort of chaos, in the dynamical sense, a non-existent body would cause and how that would be represented in the parts of the brain that calculates how to interpret it.
But parts of those nerves are there; you can't really shave them off, they end inside the brain.
Think of it as taking a microprocessor in a circuit and disconnecting every one of its pins except those providing power. How would that microprocessor behave? It's various I/O pins aren't gone, their state and response just became somewhat random.
Your sensory inputs remained connected at all times. That absence is unprecedented in its whole, but we do know that amputated members can hurt, and not just the stump.
Well I'm sure you doing the thought exercise is the same as killing yourself and then reviving yourself 4 hours later to see if you feel any pain, we should all really defer to your scientific ethical expertise in the future.
Just because your brain is where all feelings 'exist' doesn't mean you have the ability to manifest it at will. But the brain does plenty of things to us that we don't want. I don't think excruciating pain would be something a brain-in-a-jar would feel - but it's possible that being deprived of all sensory connections would cause things to get weird quickly. Sort of like phantom limb syndrome!
I've been hurt in dreams, in ways that do not appear to have been the real world poking through. It's never been great pain, but it's been real pain or something very close to it. There's also phantom limb syndrome [1]. It's not hard to imagine whatever mechanism is in play there could run even more unfettered when there is no feedback from the body at all.
We do not know that simply being severed from your body is simply experiencing no sensory input of any kind, and actually have a lot of reasons to expect that would not be the subjective experience for very long.
(Bizarrely, the dream pain has nothing to do with anything in real life that should have been pain. Apparently my subconscious is fine with dismemberment or stabbing or whatever, but what really bothers it is removing my orthodontic spacer from the roof of my mouth, which apparently it feels is me trying to remove the roof of my mouth. Subconsciouses are weird.)
Oh, good point about pain in dreams! I have also experienced this. I used to have a lot of lucid dreams, where I was often aware of being in a dream. I somehow hurt my left shoulder and was suddenly in excruciating pain. I woke up and my shoulder felt just the same as in the dream, very bad. I quickly examined myself for injury and finding nothing, the pain very quickly went away. I guess I cannot say for sure that it was not physical pain leaking into imagination land but that is certainly not how it felt.
Pain is registered by nerves connected to the brain, and given that phantom pain happens even when those nerves are truly gone, its definitely possible the pig brain could interpret it as pain. This is pretty new territory to make strong statements about
Perhaps the fact the the brain was disconnected from the body was a major factor in why no signs of consciousness were recorded. Consciousness may be the byproduct of a living body sending signals to a living brain.
> Consciousness may be the byproduct of a living body sending signals to a living brain.
Might be, but unlikely. Both our medical and legal (executions) experience shows that most parts of the body can be removed or paralyzed without impacting consciousness. It really seems like the obvious model - that the brain alone is the center of consciousness - is the correct one.
That's quite the extraordinary claim. Is there any evidence to backup that assertion? As far as I'm aware nobody knows what a living brain detached from the body actually experiences.
When you are working in software, you are not “sitting at a desk”, you’re sitting at the helm of the future. All of the advancements and evolution of mankind and life on this earth have led us to the creation of civilization’s most important tool: the computer. And as computers weave more into the fabric of our world and everyday life, those who master them wield power like Gods. There’s no place I’d rather be.
I've spent a lot of time in software and I am looking to exit so I can spend more time away from the desk, but I have to say - this is a great attitude to have!
Excuse my outburst, but I'm wondering when these social network algorithms are going to realize: I don't follow "interests", I follow PEOPLE.
If you want to show users random news and gossip, then make a fucking news website already.
It's like if you build a chatroom, except instead of simply showing things that people in the current room are saying as they say it, it mostly pulls in vaguely similar stuff that people in other rooms are saying, and then sorts all messages in order of whoever is the most popular or says the most relevant keywords.
By making it more of an interest-based network, they further increase the interest-based siloing of users, making interest-based advertising more effective and more expensive. Like David Auerbach wrote about in Bitwise, the modern technology economy has now become about labeling users. The more labels you can apply, the more ads you can sell.
Having said that, I do agree with another comment I saw here in that, if I am following someone in the software architecture space, I care 0% about their political tweets, and if I follow someone in the Formula 1/motorsports space, I really don't need to see their thoughts on golf.
Facebook worked initially because you were 'following' people you knew in real life, but having users siloed into very small groups according to real-life personal connections makes it hard to sell targeted ads. Hence all the expansions we've seen there (not to mention, of course, the tracking they do extra-facebook). Twitter meanwhile has always been in sort of a weird spot. You end up "following" people you have zero real-world connection to, based solely on their knowledge on a certain topic. But you end up also having to wade through everything they post -- what they eat, their bad memes, their product endorsements, whatever.
It works great for celebrity fetishism, okay for news and reporters (who tend to mostly stay out of non-job-related posts on official accounts), and fair to poor for everything else in my opinion. It's definitely the social network whose appeal I understand least. It just feels like a warehouse of people all talking very loudly at each other about random topics.
> Having said that, I do agree with another comment I saw here in that, if I am following someone in the software architecture space, I care 0% about their political tweets, and if I follow someone in the Formula 1/motorsports space, I really don't need to see their thoughts on golf.
Absolutely, we need tags, and the ability to make them opt-in or opt-out for followers. So I can file ^food as an opt-in, and people who don't care about that can ignore them and just get the ^programming ones. Right now, followers and friends are all lumped together and so while friends follow you for life updates, followers generally only care about what you can do for them, eg your work. It's draining to try and manage multiple accounts. Some followers may find the side stuff cool, too.
I think it would need to intrinsically commit another crime in the course of operation.
Like some sort of horrific machine which obtains shape information by head crushing and then stating if the now crushed head was recognized. Needless to say there is no reason to do that.
It is almost certainly for self-protection. Responding seriously in response to someone's sarcasm or snarks is a fool's endeavor. The person doesn't care and their only interest is to score cheap laughs at the cost of lowering the level of discourse.
