What a freaking game!!!  I'm neither a King fan or a Laker fan but what a game and what a series.  Robert Horry drove what would have seemed like a knife into the Kings in Game 4 but the Kings came back with Mike "Ice for Blood" Bibby sinking a clutch basket with 8 seconds left.  Wow, this is becoming an awesome series.  Even though I'm from Dallas, I'm glad the Mavs lost, they never could have done to the Lakers what the Kings have done.

Completely unrelated to that, I'm playing around in the file structure for Radio.  Hoping to make this a little less generic.  Fun to play regardless.

He claims that what the scientists are doing is deception because the experiment "dissociate[s] explicit schedule variables such as cues and rewards from the physical variables that are normally associated with their delivery." But this seems to bring up the question of what is reality, both to the rats in the experiments and to me?

In one sense, reality is an objective thing, the earth, the universe, etc. If I cease to exist, this reality will continue to be there. However, the rats and I both have another reality that we experience, that of the neurochemical impulses in our brain, reacting to "physical variable" in the former reality.

However, if my experience of eating peanut butter frozen yogurt is basically the neurotransmitters in my brain telling me that I'm eating peanut butter frozen yogurt, how is the actual physical "eating" different from an implant stimulating the exact same synapses to make me "think" that I'm eating frozen yogurt when in fact I'm not?

I think this is one of the problems with Saletan's argument. We do way worse things to rats. I know. I was in a graduate pyschology program where one of the major fields of study was how pain impulses were activated in the brain. This involved destroying a part of a rat's brain, doing things to it that would normally inflict pain reactions, and measuring the responses. In order to make sure the correct area of the brain was destroyed, the experimenter, or his unfortunate graduate students, would then break little mister Rat's neck, cut out his brain, freeze it and examine it for the desired effects.

I for one, would much rather have some experimenters stimulate synapses to make me think I was eating peanut butter frozen yogurt than destroying part of my brain and breaking my neck to make sure they did it right.

This reminds me of the guy in The Matrix who knew his steak wasn't real, that the computer was just telling him that it was, but that he liked it and preferred it anyway. We as humans think that the actual physical experience has to be better than "just" the neurotransmitters and chemicals causing the experience but I don't think we can know that for sure.

Enough with the rambling. . .this was incoherent enough.
9:58:14 PM  permalink  What do you think?  []  trackback []