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Romashka comments on Open Thread, January 4-10, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: polymathwannabe 04 January 2016 01:06PM

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Comment author: Romashka 08 January 2016 09:02:59AM 1 point [-]

And yet textbook anatomy is my best guess about a body when I haven't seen it, and all deviations are describable compared to it. What I object to is the norm of treating phenomenology, such as the observations about magnets and eye color, as more-or-less solid background for predictions about the future. If we discuss, say, artificial new brain modules, that's fine by me as long as I keep in mind the potential problems with cranial pressure fluctuations, the need to establish interconnections with other neurons - in some very ordered fashion, building blood vessels to feed it, changes in glucose consumption, even the possibility of your children cgoosing to have completely different artificial modules than you, to the point that heritability becomes obsolete, etc. I am not a specialist to talk about it. I have low priors on anybody here pointing me to The Literature were I to ask.

I think seeing at least the bones and then trying to gauge the distance to what experimental interference one considers possible would be a good thing to happen.