Ok… I can be a first principles thinker too.. but the idea behind this phrasing is chilling. “This study answers a long-standing question about whether people

Ok… I can be a first principles thinker too.. but the idea behind this phrasing is chilling. “This study answers a long-standing question about whether people with complete locked-in syndrome – who have lost all voluntary muscle control, including movement of the eyes or mouth – also lose the ability of their brain to generate commands for communication.” Did they actually for a fucking moment think that the human mind’s ability to undergo cognitive processes, to have the cognitive desire to communicate… would somehow just switch off when the last vestiges of control to voluntary muscles got “unplugged” … it’s the human brain not a fucking toaster or an Xbox or something… for fucks sake, that’s either the worst wording choice possible when trying to appear smart in an interview or the person saying it needs to step away from their research, maybe even their entire career, for a while, walk in the woods, connect with some other human beings, maybe read some basic introduction to philosophy material like the Tao of Pooh… This is the sort of “question” I imagine an AI like GLADOS constructing tests to investigate, not a genuine “primary hypothesis” a human should have. Sure, you can say it in the “other neat stuff my experiment might learn” part of the proposal, so for now I’m going to just hope this was one of the many daily moments where smart people say stuff extremely creepy because they are too divorced from the experience of wider humanity and don’t realise how creepy/stupid they are sounding.