Oh, and to post another “what would you find interesting” query, since I found the replies to the last one to be interesting. What kind of crazy social experiment would you be curious to see the results of? Can be as questionable or unethical as you like; Omega promises you ve’ll run the simulation with the MAKE-EVERYONE-ZOMBIES flag set.
Raise a kid by machine, with physical needs provided for, and expose the kid to language using books, recordings, and video displays, but no interactive communication or contact with humans. After 20 years or so, see what the person is like.
Try to create a society of unconscious people with bicameral minds, as described in Julian Jaynes’s “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, using actors taking on the appropriate roles. (Jaynes’s theory, which influenced Daniel Dennett, was that consciousness is a recent cultural innovation.)
Try to create a society where people grow up seeing sexual activity as casual, ordinary, and expected as shaking hands or saying hello, and see whether sexual taboos develop, and study how sexual relationships form.
Raise a bunch of kids speaking artificial languages, designed to be unlike any human language, and study how they learn and modify the language they’re taught. Or give them a language without certain concepts (relatives, ethics, the self) and see how the language influences they way they think and act.
Raise a kid by machine, with physical needs provided for, and expose the kid to language using books, recordings, and video displays, but no interactive communication or contact with humans. After 20 years or so, see what the person is like
They’d probably be like the average less wrong commenter/singularitarian/transhumanist, so really no need to run this one.
I’ve noticed that some of the Pacific Island countries don’t have much in the way of sexual taboos, and they tend to teach their kids things like:
Don’t stick your thingy in there without proper lube
or
If you are going to do that, clean up afterward.
Japan is also a country that has few sexual taboos (when compared to western Christian society). They still have their taboos and strangeness surrounding sex, but it is not something that is considered sinful or dirty
I am really interested in that last suggestion, and it sounds like one of the areas I want to explore when I get to grad school (and beyond). At Eliezer’s talk at the first Singularity Summit (and other talks I have heard him give) he speaks of a possible mind space. I would like to explore that mind space further outside of the human mind.
As John McCarthy proposed in one of his books. It might be the case that even a thermostat is a type of a mind. I have been exploring how current computers are a type of evolving mind with people as the genetic agents. we take things in computers that work for us, and combine those with other things, to get an evolutionary development of an intelligent agent.
I know that it is nothing special, and others have gone down that path as well, but I’d like to look into how we can create these types of minds biologically. Is it possible to create an alien mind in a human brain? Your 4th suggestion seems to explore this space. I like that (I should up vote it as a result)
Point 1: I’m not sure what you mean by physical needs. If human babies aren’t cuddled, they die. Humans are the only known species to do this.
A General Theory of Love describes the connection between the limbic system and love—I thought it was a good book, but to judge by the Amazon reviews, it’s more personally important to a lot of intellectual readers than I would have expected.
I’m not sure what you mean by physical needs. If human babies aren’t cuddled, they die. Humans are the only known species to do this.
I’ve heard that called “failure to thrive” before. Yes, we’d need some kind of machine to provide whatever tactile stimulation was required. Given the way many primates groom each other and touch each other for social bonding, I’d be surprised if it were just humans who needed touch.
A lot of animals need touch to grow up well. Only humans need touch to survive.
A General Theory of Love describes experiments with baby rodents to determine which physical systems are affected by which aspects of contact with the mother—touch is crucial for one system, smell for another.
I should warn you that Julian Jaynes’s theory may be more like science fiction than science. It’s interesting speculation but it’s still a very controversial theory (which is why I’d love to test it). Daniel Dennett has written a couple articles talking about how he’s adapted parts of Jaynes’s theory into his theories of consciousness, and his books discuss some of the experimental evidence which sheds some light on similar theories about consciousness.
I’d like to put about 50 anosognosiacs and one healthy person in a room on some pretext, and see how long it takes the healthy person to notice everyone else is delusional, and whether ve then starts to wonder if ve is delusional too.
I’d be really curious to see what happened in a society where your social gender was determined by something else than your biological sex. Birth order, for instance. Odd male and even female, so that every family’s first child is considered a boy and their second a girl. Or vice versa. No matter what the biology. (Presumably, there’d need to be some certain sign of the gender to tell the two apart, like all social females wearing a dress and no social males doing so.)
The concept of the berdache might be relevant. The link is just to a Google search on the word, as the politics surrounding it leave me uncertain what to believe about the subject.
Ursula LeGuin has written a short story with a premise that’s not quite the same, but still interesting. (The introduction is the useful part, there—the story excerpt cuts off before getting anywhere terribly interesting.)
I’d like to know how many people would eat human meat if it was not so taboo (No nervous system so as to avoid nasty prion diseases). I know that since I accidentally had a bite of finger when I was about 19 that I’ve wondered what a real bite of a person would taste like (prepared properly… Maybe a ginger/garlic sauce???).
Also, building on Kaj Sotala’s proposal, what about sexual assignment by job or profession (instead of biological sex). So, all Doctors or Health Care workers would be female, all Soldiers would be male, all ditch diggers would be male, yet all bakers would be female. All Mailmen would be male, yet all waiters would be female.
Then, one could have multiple sex-assignments if one worked more than one job. How about a neuter sex and a dual sex in their as well (so the neuter sex would have no sex, and the hermaphrodite would be… well, both...)
Edit: I better stop biographing for a while. I’ve led a life that has been colorful to say the least (I wish that it had been more profitable—it was at one point… But, well, you have a link to what happened to the money)
I’d like to know how many people would eat human meat if it was not so taboo to eat human meat.
In other words: If there were no taboo against eating human meat, how many people would eat it?
From what I remember of the bite of finger, it had a white meat taste. Sort of like pork-turkey… I guess kinda like a hot dog (only it had no salt on/in it beyond the sweat that was on the hand).
I do think that human meat would stack up against Pork and Turkey as a delicious meat. Maybe if we ate condemned criminals. They would spend their time in prison before their execution fattening up. (OK, I realize that I am getting really out-there morbid now).
Cannibalism is a subject that fascinates me though. I have often wondered about fantastic settings in which the only thing that existed to eat was other people. Say, a planet in which there existed no other life forms at all. No plants, microbes, animals, etc. The Planet would have water, or maybe springs that had a liquid that contained nutrients that weren’t in human meat… And, it would have people. So, the people would be the only things to eat, and the only things out of which tools could be made.
I do actually have a series of stories based upon this premise written. It was an interesting thought experiment to think about the types of cultures that could arise to deal with such a dilemma. And, if the inhabitants didn’t know that any other life existed, (and had some cultural memory of the expression You are what you eat) then they might consider it a horrid idea to eat anything but people (should they eventually discover that other people from other planets eat dumb animals and plants that cannot even think.
If You are what you eat, then eating a stupid immobile plant or a flatulent stupid bovine would seem like the ultimate in self-condemnation.
I have often wondered about fantastic settings in which the only thing that existed to eat was other people. Say, a planet in which there existed no other life forms at all. No plants, microbes, animals, etc. The Planet would have water, or maybe springs that had a liquid that contained nutrients that weren’t in human meat… And, it would have people. So, the people would be the only things to eat, and the only things out of which tools could be made.
Isn’t that the Short Story where the first two Superluminal astronauts arrive at a planet that contains a giant ocean and just one island, that is surrounded by a dark black line.
The dark black area turns out to be algae and people’s remains, and a crowd of people wander the island’s coast eating either the algae or each other.
I don’t see a very large similarity (but then I am looking at it from much more information about the place than you), as those people had no real developed culture or solitary food source. I was surprised to read it when I did, because it did come close to my idea (I first thought of this idea in 2nd grade when we had a nutritional lecture: “You Are What You Eat”). I spent three weeks wondering when the cafeteria was going to start serving people. I figured “I am a person. If I am what I eat, then I must eat people to continue being one.” The teacher had to call my parents when I asked her directly about when we would start eating people or, if “This was only something grown-ups did.” My mother did her normal “How could you do this to me?!”, and my father did the “Look what you’ve done to your mother!”
The Culture that I envisioned was large and highly populous, and the whole point of life was to eventually be able to give your meat to your family (although, many children are eaten if they don’t live up to standards). They build cities out of mud and bone, and use glass for some tools (created by burning bone and intestinal gasses created in special people who are nothing but huge guts. These people also produce other chemicals in different metabolic processes, but the point is that a whole class of person exists that is nothing but a chemical factory. These people usually have most of their cortex removed as well, so they are basically vegetables. They use the neocortex of these people as artificial memory devices).
There are other groups on this imaginary world as well, who are much less “Civilized” and predatory. They all live under ground in tunnels that are constantly being dug so that the people on the surface cannot locate them and exterminate them (as they upset the status quo of the surface civilization).
The “Planet” also have a rather unusual topology. From the surface of the planet, it is an infinite plane that continues on in all directions (except for up and down. Down leads back up, and up leaves the surface in a physical as well as temporal direction). There is an event horizon around the planet (it looks like a planet from outside this event horizon), that, once penetrated, reveals the planar surface that is directly below the point of contact of the event horizon. So, there are an infinite number of such surfaces on this planet.
But, you are correct. It does have a few similarities to Bordered in Black
It’s not circular. One might pose the question of how many people in cultures where eating pork is taboo would eat it if it weren’t taboo. Conversely, there’s no taboo against eating smoked salmon that I know of, but I can’t stand the stuff.
In this sort of environment, Jeffreyssai poses the question: “Find what is valuable in religion.”
Among the false starts that he will instantly slap down are responses that say what is non-valuable or pernicious (“This was not the question. Do not waste our time rehearsing irrelevancies known to us all”), evolutionary explanations of religion (“What is valuable, not what merely happened”), religiously motivated good works (“we do superior works without”), and any concept of useful lies.
Oh, and to post another “what would you find interesting” query, since I found the replies to the last one to be interesting. What kind of crazy social experiment would you be curious to see the results of? Can be as questionable or unethical as you like; Omega promises you ve’ll run the simulation with the MAKE-EVERYONE-ZOMBIES flag set.
There are several that I’ve wondered about:
Raise a kid by machine, with physical needs provided for, and expose the kid to language using books, recordings, and video displays, but no interactive communication or contact with humans. After 20 years or so, see what the person is like.
Try to create a society of unconscious people with bicameral minds, as described in Julian Jaynes’s “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, using actors taking on the appropriate roles. (Jaynes’s theory, which influenced Daniel Dennett, was that consciousness is a recent cultural innovation.)
Try to create a society where people grow up seeing sexual activity as casual, ordinary, and expected as shaking hands or saying hello, and see whether sexual taboos develop, and study how sexual relationships form.
Raise a bunch of kids speaking artificial languages, designed to be unlike any human language, and study how they learn and modify the language they’re taught. Or give them a language without certain concepts (relatives, ethics, the self) and see how the language influences they way they think and act.
They’d probably be like the average less wrong commenter/singularitarian/transhumanist, so really no need to run this one.
Before I spend a lot of time writing a response: Was this a joke?
So, one result of this experiment would be/is a significantly below average ability to distinguish humor from serious debate…
Or significantly below average ability to signal whether something is humorous or serious. ;)
What Adelene said. I’m afraid it isn’t very funny. :-)
I’ve noticed that some of the Pacific Island countries don’t have much in the way of sexual taboos, and they tend to teach their kids things like:
Don’t stick your thingy in there without proper lube
or
If you are going to do that, clean up afterward.
Japan is also a country that has few sexual taboos (when compared to western Christian society). They still have their taboos and strangeness surrounding sex, but it is not something that is considered sinful or dirty
I am really interested in that last suggestion, and it sounds like one of the areas I want to explore when I get to grad school (and beyond). At Eliezer’s talk at the first Singularity Summit (and other talks I have heard him give) he speaks of a possible mind space. I would like to explore that mind space further outside of the human mind.
As John McCarthy proposed in one of his books. It might be the case that even a thermostat is a type of a mind. I have been exploring how current computers are a type of evolving mind with people as the genetic agents. we take things in computers that work for us, and combine those with other things, to get an evolutionary development of an intelligent agent.
I know that it is nothing special, and others have gone down that path as well, but I’d like to look into how we can create these types of minds biologically. Is it possible to create an alien mind in a human brain? Your 4th suggestion seems to explore this space. I like that (I should up vote it as a result)
Point 1: I’m not sure what you mean by physical needs. If human babies aren’t cuddled, they die. Humans are the only known species to do this.
A General Theory of Love describes the connection between the limbic system and love—I thought it was a good book, but to judge by the Amazon reviews, it’s more personally important to a lot of intellectual readers than I would have expected.
I’ve heard that called “failure to thrive” before. Yes, we’d need some kind of machine to provide whatever tactile stimulation was required. Given the way many primates groom each other and touch each other for social bonding, I’d be surprised if it were just humans who needed touch.
A lot of animals need touch to grow up well. Only humans need touch to survive.
A General Theory of Love describes experiments with baby rodents to determine which physical systems are affected by which aspects of contact with the mother—touch is crucial for one system, smell for another.
I just read about #2 on wikipedia. Wow. Science is so much weirder than science fiction.
I should warn you that Julian Jaynes’s theory may be more like science fiction than science. It’s interesting speculation but it’s still a very controversial theory (which is why I’d love to test it). Daniel Dennett has written a couple articles talking about how he’s adapted parts of Jaynes’s theory into his theories of consciousness, and his books discuss some of the experimental evidence which sheds some light on similar theories about consciousness.
I’d like to put about 50 anosognosiacs and one healthy person in a room on some pretext, and see how long it takes the healthy person to notice everyone else is delusional, and whether ve then starts to wonder if ve is delusional too.
I’d be really curious to see what happened in a society where your social gender was determined by something else than your biological sex. Birth order, for instance. Odd male and even female, so that every family’s first child is considered a boy and their second a girl. Or vice versa. No matter what the biology. (Presumably, there’d need to be some certain sign of the gender to tell the two apart, like all social females wearing a dress and no social males doing so.)
The concept of the berdache might be relevant. The link is just to a Google search on the word, as the politics surrounding it leave me uncertain what to believe about the subject.
Ursula LeGuin has written a short story with a premise that’s not quite the same, but still interesting. (The introduction is the useful part, there—the story excerpt cuts off before getting anywhere terribly interesting.)
That is indeed an interesting variation of the premise. (It does feel a bit contrived, but then again, so does my original.)
I’d like to know how many people would eat human meat if it was not so taboo (No nervous system so as to avoid nasty prion diseases). I know that since I accidentally had a bite of finger when I was about 19 that I’ve wondered what a real bite of a person would taste like (prepared properly… Maybe a ginger/garlic sauce???).
Also, building on Kaj Sotala’s proposal, what about sexual assignment by job or profession (instead of biological sex). So, all Doctors or Health Care workers would be female, all Soldiers would be male, all ditch diggers would be male, yet all bakers would be female. All Mailmen would be male, yet all waiters would be female.
Then, one could have multiple sex-assignments if one worked more than one job. How about a neuter sex and a dual sex in their as well (so the neuter sex would have no sex, and the hermaphrodite would be… well, both...)
After your prior revelations and this, I’m waiting for the third shoe to drop.
Then shoes could be dropping for quite a while...
Edit: I better stop biographing for a while. I’ve led a life that has been colorful to say the least (I wish that it had been more profitable—it was at one point… But, well, you have a link to what happened to the money)
Hey, no linking to people’s revelations without their permission.
Isn’t that circular? Not eating human meat is the taboo.
A better way to have said that would be
In other words: If there were no taboo against eating human meat, how many people would eat it?
From what I remember of the bite of finger, it had a white meat taste. Sort of like pork-turkey… I guess kinda like a hot dog (only it had no salt on/in it beyond the sweat that was on the hand).
I do think that human meat would stack up against Pork and Turkey as a delicious meat. Maybe if we ate condemned criminals. They would spend their time in prison before their execution fattening up. (OK, I realize that I am getting really out-there morbid now).
Cannibalism is a subject that fascinates me though. I have often wondered about fantastic settings in which the only thing that existed to eat was other people. Say, a planet in which there existed no other life forms at all. No plants, microbes, animals, etc. The Planet would have water, or maybe springs that had a liquid that contained nutrients that weren’t in human meat… And, it would have people. So, the people would be the only things to eat, and the only things out of which tools could be made.
I do actually have a series of stories based upon this premise written. It was an interesting thought experiment to think about the types of cultures that could arise to deal with such a dilemma. And, if the inhabitants didn’t know that any other life existed, (and had some cultural memory of the expression You are what you eat) then they might consider it a horrid idea to eat anything but people (should they eventually discover that other people from other planets eat dumb animals and plants that cannot even think.
If You are what you eat, then eating a stupid immobile plant or a flatulent stupid bovine would seem like the ultimate in self-condemnation.
Larry Niven, “Bordered in Black”. Sort of.
Isn’t that the Short Story where the first two Superluminal astronauts arrive at a planet that contains a giant ocean and just one island, that is surrounded by a dark black line.
The dark black area turns out to be algae and people’s remains, and a crowd of people wander the island’s coast eating either the algae or each other.
I don’t see a very large similarity (but then I am looking at it from much more information about the place than you), as those people had no real developed culture or solitary food source. I was surprised to read it when I did, because it did come close to my idea (I first thought of this idea in 2nd grade when we had a nutritional lecture: “You Are What You Eat”). I spent three weeks wondering when the cafeteria was going to start serving people. I figured “I am a person. If I am what I eat, then I must eat people to continue being one.” The teacher had to call my parents when I asked her directly about when we would start eating people or, if “This was only something grown-ups did.” My mother did her normal “How could you do this to me?!”, and my father did the “Look what you’ve done to your mother!”
The Culture that I envisioned was large and highly populous, and the whole point of life was to eventually be able to give your meat to your family (although, many children are eaten if they don’t live up to standards). They build cities out of mud and bone, and use glass for some tools (created by burning bone and intestinal gasses created in special people who are nothing but huge guts. These people also produce other chemicals in different metabolic processes, but the point is that a whole class of person exists that is nothing but a chemical factory. These people usually have most of their cortex removed as well, so they are basically vegetables. They use the neocortex of these people as artificial memory devices).
There are other groups on this imaginary world as well, who are much less “Civilized” and predatory. They all live under ground in tunnels that are constantly being dug so that the people on the surface cannot locate them and exterminate them (as they upset the status quo of the surface civilization).
The “Planet” also have a rather unusual topology. From the surface of the planet, it is an infinite plane that continues on in all directions (except for up and down. Down leads back up, and up leaves the surface in a physical as well as temporal direction). There is an event horizon around the planet (it looks like a planet from outside this event horizon), that, once penetrated, reveals the planar surface that is directly below the point of contact of the event horizon. So, there are an infinite number of such surfaces on this planet.
But, you are correct. It does have a few similarities to Bordered in Black
Wow. Did elements of this appear in your mind during one or several bad trips?
It’s not circular. One might pose the question of how many people in cultures where eating pork is taboo would eat it if it weren’t taboo. Conversely, there’s no taboo against eating smoked salmon that I know of, but I can’t stand the stuff.
Perhaps he means how would it stack up in deliciousness against beef, chicken, fish, etc..
In this sort of environment, Jeffreyssai poses the question: “Find what is valuable in religion.”
Among the false starts that he will instantly slap down are responses that say what is non-valuable or pernicious (“This was not the question. Do not waste our time rehearsing irrelevancies known to us all”), evolutionary explanations of religion (“What is valuable, not what merely happened”), religiously motivated good works (“we do superior works without”), and any concept of useful lies.