= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
CuSithBell comments on Rationality Quotes August 2011 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (176)
^Wrong. Actually what we can do to rats is very limited compared to what we can do to humans. As for what we can do with humans... Together, even the sky is not the limit anymore: we pierce through it with our XXX. Also, wrong: in an absolute sense, we "can" do to humans the stuff we do on rats, but there are reasons, beyond ethics, why we don't. It's just. Not. Convenient.
My reading was "neurological manipulations that reveal the frailty of the rat mind would work on humans, thus our minds are also frail".
My first thought was of the robot controlled by rat neurons, though I know the quote predates this technology.
It seems like your read is close to what he had in mind. Here's the preceeding paragraph, it's from an essay on what makes cyberpunk:
"Human thought itself, in its unprecedented guise as computer software, is becoming something to be crystallized, replicated, made a commodity. Even the insides of our brains aren't sacred; on the contrary, the human brain is a primary target of increasingly successful research, ontological and spiritual questions be damned. The idea that, under these circumstances, Human Nature is somehow destined to prevail against the Great Machine, is simply silly; it seems weirdly beside the point. It's as if a rodent philosopher in a lab-cage, about to have his brain bored and wired for the edification of Big Science, were to piously declare that in the end Rodent Nature must triumph."