From: Ed Murphy (emurphy42_at_socal.rr.com)
Date: Sat Nov 16 2002 - 18:49:35 PST
----- Original Message ----- From: "Ed Murphy" <emurphy42_at_socal.rr.com> To: "FRC" <frc_at_trolltech.com> Sent: Friday, November 15, 2002 7:29 PM Subject: Re: Proposal 196:G > I vote AGAINST 196:G. > > > -- > Ed Murphy <emurphy42_at_socal.rr.com> "I'm not sure I can go through > http://members.fortunecity.com/emurphy/ with it. Leave, I mean." > > Now some random filler text to appease the mailing list software. http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98 .html Physical fundamentalists, however, must agree with René Descartes that the world we perceive through our senses could be an elaborate hoax. In the seventeenth century Descartes considered the possibility of an evil demon who created the illusion of an external reality by controlling all that we see and hear (and feel and smell and taste). In the twenty-first century, physical science itself, through the technology of virtual reality, will provide the means to create such illusions. Enthusiastic video gamers and other cybernauts are already strapping themselves into virtual reality goggles and body suits for brief stints in made-up worlds whose fundamental mechanisms are completely different from the quantum fields that (best evidence suggests) constitute our physical world. Today's virtual adventurers do not fully escape the physical world: if they bump into real objects, they feel real pain. That link may weaken when direct connections to the nervous system become possible, leading perhaps to the old science-fiction idea of a living brain in a vat. The brain would be physically sustained by life-support machinery, and mentally by connections of all the peripheral nerves to an elaborate simulation of not only a surrounding world but also a body for the brain to inhabit. Brain vats might be medical stopgaps for accident victims with bodies damaged beyond repair, pending the acquisition, growth, or manufacture of a new body. The virtual life of a brain in a vat can still be subtly perturbed by external physical, chemical, or electrical effects impinging on the vat. Even these weak ties to the physical world would fade if the brain, as well as the body, was absorbed into the simulation. If damaged or endangered parts of the brain, like the body, could be replaced with functionally equivalent simulations, some individuals could survive total physical destruction to find themselves alive as pure computer simulations in virtual worlds. -- Rule Date: 2002-11-17 02:52:52 GMT
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