[extropy-chat] Fragmentation of computations

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 10:24:40AM +0100, BillK wrote:

> To pick a bigger nit, I understood that the sensory deprivaton
> experiments showed that a human brain without stimulation rapidly
> descends into chaos that can hardly be called consciousness.

You can package observers into a virtual environment, which is
more than enough stimulation. In fact, you need a lot less
resources for the virtual environment than for the observer,
at a guess down to few % of what you need for an observer.
 
> I suspect also that as the stimulation from outside is what causes
> brain pathways to grow and change, that over time there would be
> severe physical changes in the brain.
> 
> Some researchers go so far as to phrase the claim that without an
> outside world to communicate with, the human brain cannot exist.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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