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Good point. Perhaps it's not so much the idea itself that upsets me as the way it is presented. I'm all for promoting research and understanding and I could se

Good point. Perhaps it's not so much the idea itself that upsets me as the way it is presented. I'm all for promoting research and understanding and I could see a role for this in a classroom, but they way this is being sold is far too toy-like for me. If you can just order an "augmented" cockroach off the internet to mess around with, it becomes a commodity or product and there is not much left to learn from it. I also think that, although you are not actually taking over the body or brain of the cockroach, you are definitely taking over (a good deal of) its perception of reality, however primitive that may be. The fact that cockroaches can learn to ignore the artificial impulses and "escape the Matrix", so to speak, makes me feel only slightly less uncomfortable about doing this on a large scale.

akiselev 13y ago
For some reason the control issue doesn't really phase me as much as the habituation of invasive procedures on animals. At least in school kids don't kill the frogs they dissect; it's no more than a desensitized piece of green beef to them. It's probably because I don't view it as "escaping the matrix." The neural system of a cockroach is relatively simple but they're patching into a very small portion of it. We can't tell what the real side effects are but for all intents and purposes, you're sending it a signal that is equivalent to, say, someone touching your left or right ear. Except the cockroach's sensitivity is dialed up and the antenna are one of their primary navigation sensors so it's more like flashing a big wall to the left or right off your vision. Here you get into issues of complexity and intelligence and I'd rather avoid that. Let's just say that to generate an equivalent response in humans, you'd have to do a massive patchwork on the brain, far more invasive (imo) than what they're doing to the cockroaches. The fact that the cockroach so easily habituates to such massive stimuli should actually tell you a lot about how unphased and how simple its nervous system is. Only in cases of total neuron death/disconnection (spine or neck break ripes the neurons in the spinal cord causing paralysis) can most pain and other "danger sign" signals be totally cut off in humans. For example, you will get acclimated to normal house smells pretty fast, but usually not to smells of sulfur/rotting eggs because of an evolutionary adaptations. The more complex a nervous system is, the more difficult it is to habituate specific stimuli artificially(generally speaking). In the cockroach the neurons connecting the antenna to the rest of the brain are very simple and can be habituated by just stimulating them to release neurotransmitters over and over again. After a while the cockroach just ignores the sense, like you would ignore sight if it was pitch black, instead focusing on sound.

akiselev 13y ago

For some reason the control issue doesn't really phase me as much as the habituation of invasive procedures on animals. At least in school kids don't kill the frogs they dissect; it's no more than a desensitized piece of green beef to them. It's probably because I don't view it as "escaping the matrix." The neural system of a cockroach is relatively simple but they're patching into a very small portion of it. We can't tell what the real side effects are but for all intents and purposes, you're sending it a signal that is equivalent to, say, someone touching your left or right ear. Except the cockroach's sensitivity is dialed up and the antenna are one of their primary navigation sensors so it's more like flashing a big wall to the left or right off your vision. Here you get into issues of complexity and intelligence and I'd rather avoid that. Let's just say that to generate an equivalent response in humans, you'd have to do a massive patchwork on the brain, far more invasive (imo) than what they're doing to the cockroaches. The fact that the cockroach so easily habituates to such massive stimuli should actually tell you a lot about how unphased and how simple its nervous system is. Only in cases of total neuron death/disconnection (spine or neck break ripes the neurons in the spinal cord causing paralysis) can most pain and other "danger sign" signals be totally cut off in humans. For example, you will get acclimated to normal house smells pretty fast, but usually not to smells of sulfur/rotting eggs because of an evolutionary adaptations. The more complex a nervous system is, the more difficult it is to habituate specific stimuli artificially(generally speaking). In the cockroach the neurons connecting the antenna to the rest of the brain are very simple and can be habituated by just stimulating them to release neurotransmitters over and over again. After a while the cockroach just ignores the sense, like you would ignore sight if it was pitch black, instead focusing on sound.