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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 f
by 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.