Raise a kid by machine, with physical needs provided for, and expose the kid to language using books, recordings, and video displays, but no interactive communication or contact with humans. After 20 years or so, see what the person is like.
Try to create a society of unconscious people with bicameral minds, as described in Julian Jaynes’s “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, using actors taking on the appropriate roles. (Jaynes’s theory, which influenced Daniel Dennett, was that consciousness is a recent cultural innovation.)
Try to create a society where people grow up seeing sexual activity as casual, ordinary, and expected as shaking hands or saying hello, and see whether sexual taboos develop, and study how sexual relationships form.
Raise a bunch of kids speaking artificial languages, designed to be unlike any human language, and study how they learn and modify the language they’re taught. Or give them a language without certain concepts (relatives, ethics, the self) and see how the language influences they way they think and act.
Raise a kid by machine, with physical needs provided for, and expose the kid to language using books, recordings, and video displays, but no interactive communication or contact with humans. After 20 years or so, see what the person is like
They’d probably be like the average less wrong commenter/singularitarian/transhumanist, so really no need to run this one.
I’ve noticed that some of the Pacific Island countries don’t have much in the way of sexual taboos, and they tend to teach their kids things like:
Don’t stick your thingy in there without proper lube
or
If you are going to do that, clean up afterward.
Japan is also a country that has few sexual taboos (when compared to western Christian society). They still have their taboos and strangeness surrounding sex, but it is not something that is considered sinful or dirty
I am really interested in that last suggestion, and it sounds like one of the areas I want to explore when I get to grad school (and beyond). At Eliezer’s talk at the first Singularity Summit (and other talks I have heard him give) he speaks of a possible mind space. I would like to explore that mind space further outside of the human mind.
As John McCarthy proposed in one of his books. It might be the case that even a thermostat is a type of a mind. I have been exploring how current computers are a type of evolving mind with people as the genetic agents. we take things in computers that work for us, and combine those with other things, to get an evolutionary development of an intelligent agent.
I know that it is nothing special, and others have gone down that path as well, but I’d like to look into how we can create these types of minds biologically. Is it possible to create an alien mind in a human brain? Your 4th suggestion seems to explore this space. I like that (I should up vote it as a result)
Point 1: I’m not sure what you mean by physical needs. If human babies aren’t cuddled, they die. Humans are the only known species to do this.
A General Theory of Love describes the connection between the limbic system and love—I thought it was a good book, but to judge by the Amazon reviews, it’s more personally important to a lot of intellectual readers than I would have expected.
I’m not sure what you mean by physical needs. If human babies aren’t cuddled, they die. Humans are the only known species to do this.
I’ve heard that called “failure to thrive” before. Yes, we’d need some kind of machine to provide whatever tactile stimulation was required. Given the way many primates groom each other and touch each other for social bonding, I’d be surprised if it were just humans who needed touch.
A lot of animals need touch to grow up well. Only humans need touch to survive.
A General Theory of Love describes experiments with baby rodents to determine which physical systems are affected by which aspects of contact with the mother—touch is crucial for one system, smell for another.
I should warn you that Julian Jaynes’s theory may be more like science fiction than science. It’s interesting speculation but it’s still a very controversial theory (which is why I’d love to test it). Daniel Dennett has written a couple articles talking about how he’s adapted parts of Jaynes’s theory into his theories of consciousness, and his books discuss some of the experimental evidence which sheds some light on similar theories about consciousness.
There are several that I’ve wondered about:
Raise a kid by machine, with physical needs provided for, and expose the kid to language using books, recordings, and video displays, but no interactive communication or contact with humans. After 20 years or so, see what the person is like.
Try to create a society of unconscious people with bicameral minds, as described in Julian Jaynes’s “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, using actors taking on the appropriate roles. (Jaynes’s theory, which influenced Daniel Dennett, was that consciousness is a recent cultural innovation.)
Try to create a society where people grow up seeing sexual activity as casual, ordinary, and expected as shaking hands or saying hello, and see whether sexual taboos develop, and study how sexual relationships form.
Raise a bunch of kids speaking artificial languages, designed to be unlike any human language, and study how they learn and modify the language they’re taught. Or give them a language without certain concepts (relatives, ethics, the self) and see how the language influences they way they think and act.
They’d probably be like the average less wrong commenter/singularitarian/transhumanist, so really no need to run this one.
Before I spend a lot of time writing a response: Was this a joke?
So, one result of this experiment would be/is a significantly below average ability to distinguish humor from serious debate…
Or significantly below average ability to signal whether something is humorous or serious. ;)
What Adelene said. I’m afraid it isn’t very funny. :-)
I’ve noticed that some of the Pacific Island countries don’t have much in the way of sexual taboos, and they tend to teach their kids things like:
Don’t stick your thingy in there without proper lube
or
If you are going to do that, clean up afterward.
Japan is also a country that has few sexual taboos (when compared to western Christian society). They still have their taboos and strangeness surrounding sex, but it is not something that is considered sinful or dirty
I am really interested in that last suggestion, and it sounds like one of the areas I want to explore when I get to grad school (and beyond). At Eliezer’s talk at the first Singularity Summit (and other talks I have heard him give) he speaks of a possible mind space. I would like to explore that mind space further outside of the human mind.
As John McCarthy proposed in one of his books. It might be the case that even a thermostat is a type of a mind. I have been exploring how current computers are a type of evolving mind with people as the genetic agents. we take things in computers that work for us, and combine those with other things, to get an evolutionary development of an intelligent agent.
I know that it is nothing special, and others have gone down that path as well, but I’d like to look into how we can create these types of minds biologically. Is it possible to create an alien mind in a human brain? Your 4th suggestion seems to explore this space. I like that (I should up vote it as a result)
Point 1: I’m not sure what you mean by physical needs. If human babies aren’t cuddled, they die. Humans are the only known species to do this.
A General Theory of Love describes the connection between the limbic system and love—I thought it was a good book, but to judge by the Amazon reviews, it’s more personally important to a lot of intellectual readers than I would have expected.
I’ve heard that called “failure to thrive” before. Yes, we’d need some kind of machine to provide whatever tactile stimulation was required. Given the way many primates groom each other and touch each other for social bonding, I’d be surprised if it were just humans who needed touch.
A lot of animals need touch to grow up well. Only humans need touch to survive.
A General Theory of Love describes experiments with baby rodents to determine which physical systems are affected by which aspects of contact with the mother—touch is crucial for one system, smell for another.
I just read about #2 on wikipedia. Wow. Science is so much weirder than science fiction.
I should warn you that Julian Jaynes’s theory may be more like science fiction than science. It’s interesting speculation but it’s still a very controversial theory (which is why I’d love to test it). Daniel Dennett has written a couple articles talking about how he’s adapted parts of Jaynes’s theory into his theories of consciousness, and his books discuss some of the experimental evidence which sheds some light on similar theories about consciousness.