Potpourri
The Unburdened Mind Ever think one of your co-workers was a psychopath? Odds aren’t bad — about 1% of everyone is.
Wonderland: re-creating children’s drawings as photos.
Embodied cognition — humans don’t think by brain alone.
An sf story I read a while back included people being teleported by representing their bodies as data, transmitting the data, and creating a physical body based on it at the destination. Conventionally, the data was compressed by using templates for various body parts, instead of representing every nuance of the real parts. In the story, one such transmission was taking a long time due to the transportees having insisted on foregoing compression. “There’s something awfully precious about making sure you have your very own small intestine,” the narrator said.
It’s a good line, but I’m not sure that it’s a precious concern after all.
There's a difference between needing a small intestine and needing your very own small intestine.
People who've received artificial hearts report a flattening of their emotions, presumably because the feedback loop between emotional state and physiological response is broken. But people who've received transplanted hearts don't have this problem; in a sense, one heart is as good as another. This suggests to me that a sufficiently detailed template ought to work.
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on
February 27 2008 17:41