The future is here
And it’s asking, “Who moved my cheese?” This first “cyborg” is operated by a mouse brain — actually, a number of mouse brains stitched together. I love technology — and I’m surprised to find that this little video saddens and frightens me.
I couldn’t help thinking about the mouse’s “soul” — which I find I do believe in, as we understand it, and which is housed (or manifested) by the brain, at least while it’s “here.” (Clearly, I need to do some further thinking about this. Because I haven’t yet squared the functions of the brain with the location of “the soul,” against my other belief: in an afterlife.) In any event, watching the “cyborg” scurry about, I had the same response I’m sure everyone will: That it looked like a mouse trying to find its way out. Which made me think that that is a sad, lonely, and tortuous experience for the mouse. I say this also realizing that I’m personifying a thing that I’m not sure is “alive,” and that I’m also not sure how to define “life.” This, against the context of an often human-seeming robot beating two “Jeopardy” champs handily last week. We’re all going to have more and more of our assertions challenged by Artificial Intelligence and artificial/organic symbiosis.
Thoughts about that?
It’s not the response I would have expected from myself.
February 24th, 2011 at 7:44 am
My first reaction was similar to yours. Then I reminded myself that I eat animals. It seems a bit hypocritical on my part that I condone & participate in the use of animals for food, but am taken aback by the use of animals for research. And further, that the use of animals for research seldom occurs to me (though I imagine I gain from it) except when it’s brought to my attention, as in this video. Would I feel differently if I think about the rat as a white lab rat, and then think about it as some big ol’ Norway rat in the sewers of L.A., or even someplace in my apartment? I definitely wonder about the kind of people who, in the name of science, technological advance, research, whatever, are capable of cutting up a living (presumably) rat in order to harvest its brain’s neurons. Is that different than the butcher who cuts up the cow or chicken that I eat? Do I wonder at the kind of person the butcher is? I don’t have answers, and the questions probably won’t drive me to change anything in my life, but it’s an interesting set of thoughts.
I don’t believe in the rat’s soul, or in my own, other than that which is everything, which is all I do believe in. Everything is everything, which sounds like a quotation from some sly guy in an early 70’s film being cool, but it is how I see things. You, me, the rat, the scientists, Saturn, the past, the oceans, bacteria…all one. And I don’t believe the rat neurons that form the “brain” of the “cyborg” have any consciousness…although, how would I know?