[Wittrs] Re: Avatar and Mind Teleporting
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:03:38 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@...> wrote:
> ... let me throw you some cat nip Stuart.
>
> Saw Avatar. Thought it was pretty damn good. But the central flaw in the
> sci-fi seemed to be the fact that the "I" never slept.
>
Glad you saw it. It really was pretty cool. Tight and resonant thought he story
was a bit simplistic. I was surprised that I really liked the 3-D aspect. I
thought I was going to dismiss it but it really did add to the experience.
I agreed with you about that peculiarity though I didn't think it was a (or
the) "central flaw". My beef was with the idea that they could project their
minds out of one body and into another. On the other hand, I thought the
concept of the flora of the planet (a moon really) being all connected via
billions of tiny tendrils in the way neurons are connected in brains was
fascinating!
> For those who didn't see it, here's the idea: you have a human for whom an
> alien "Avatar" body can be engineered (out of merging DNA and > who knows
> what else).
Yeah, I couldn't figure out why they even had to merge the DNA if all they were
doing was projecting minds into bodies!
> The human can then crawl into something that looks like a tanning bed, put on
> a helmet thingy, go to sleep, and have his mind enter the Avatar. It's an
> interesting concept, because it steals from the "white light at death"
> stories. You go to sleep and follow the white light. Instead of arriving in
> heaven, you are in the Avatar's body. When the Avatar (you) go to sleep in
> that body, you return to the tanning bed. In other words, it's body sleeps
> while you are awake, and your body sleeps while it is awake. In neither
> instance, however, are "you" asleep.
>
> Here's the flaw: the "I" never sleeps; only the body does. It would be
> different if the Avatar was a dream. Then the sleep of the "I" would be
> considered quite intense. (Probably a lot of growth hormone release too). But
> as it is in the movie, there now is no subconscious. It's been eliminated.
> Imagine always being awake in one of two bodies. (And it being true). This
> should be the cognitive equivalent of sleep deprivation.
>
If the mind is body dependent as some of us have been arguing here!
> Surely sleep is not just for the body.
>
Yeah but you could argue that it was less a matter of projecting the mind as of
replicating the patterns of the connections in one brain within another via the
use of some kind of microwave thingie, rather like a radio broadcast. Seems
farfetched to me but internally consistent at least. In that case, while
memories are passed back and forth, as is the sense of self, the minds in the
two bodies aren't really the same at all though they don't notice the
difference.
But then, as Dennett says, a lot of stuff happens in our brains that we never
really notice!
SWM
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