For me “How long could I get away with driving like an ABSOLUTE ASSHOLE all the time before I lost my licence or had an accident.” Speed limits, red lights, stop signs… forget them all. Every day I have to drive sensibly and obey the law because without my licence I dont have a job, and every day I see at least one person driving like an absolute moron and I wonder…
What happens if you put a lightbulb in your ass
Nothing until you start rubbing your feet on the carpet to generate current to light it up.
I’ve broken traffic laws most of my life, and I still have a driver’s license. So, you can drive like a partially reasonable asshole indefinitely if you have the skill to pull it off.
I’d like to see GMO humans. I want to see how far we can elevate our species using science. It’s completely unethical, but there it is.
Oh I’m no saint. I set my cruise control at 10km/h over the speed limit, I punch it through orange lights and I sometimes roll through stop signs.
I’m talking about full blown fast and furious wannabe swerving lanes, running reds and racing literally everywhere.
This describes my brother in law. Granted, he’s better than he used to be about 10 years ago, but he grew up in a small town, got to know all the cops pretty quickly, did a little jail time here and there but still has his license. He’s totalled many vehicles, spent some time in ICU and still drives like a bat out of hell.
How is that unethical? If anything i say it’s unethical to let us languish in these horrible bodies when we can work towards something better.
Most people are very opposed to eugenics and genetic modification of humans. There is infinite opportunity for unexpected disasters along the way to perfection, and it’s extremely apathetic to be okay with subjecting a sentient creature to the possible ramifications of unexpected outcomes.
Most people are only opposed to eugenics (as you’re using the word) because of a very narrow application. A rare few get genetic engineering and capitalism mixed up, which at least makes sense, i wouldn’t want musk choosing who gets a generic upgrade or how an augmentation is implemented.
And i find it abhorrent that people are just fine with letting our entire species suffer the nightmare of random chance that is our bodies. Sure it’s surprisingly good for a system that only selects for whatever fucks the most, but we can and should eventually do better.
The movie gattaca does this well. No murder or cleansing. But you can have a natural birth or IVF with the Impurities stripped out. “The best of you.”
“Dirty” people were limited to shit like janitors and all high paying jobs would sneak a test in to filter out anyone “un-pure”
Raise a child on their own without any exposure to language. Could be interesting to see how their perspective on the world develops.
I think this was done? Long time ago, maybe in an Russian orphanage or something? If my memory serves me well, those kids all died, despite even having food etc…
Edit: might be confusing that with lack of social interaction. But either way, here’s some reading for you
Yes that experiment was raising babies without human touch. Apparently it’s essential for development.
What happens when we reverse Earth’s rotation.
I’m fairly certain that there’s a What If video on this by the XKCD guy, Randall Munroe.
While interesting I feel that one is more “Hilarously impractical” than anything else.
Lois Lane gets rescued.
Genetic engineering. We have the technology at this, point. What’s getting in the way are some very dated ideas of ethics.
Raise a kid in a sensory deprivation chamber, with one exception: a monitor that only shows gen alpha brainrot videos. When they’re like 14 drop them off in a populated area and see what happens
Realistically would just end up a developmentally stunted invalid. There was an example from some book, I don’t remember which, where there was a SE Asian woman who lived with her family and had a baby.
The family was ashamed, so they forced the girl to keep the baby by itself in the attic. She would go to work most of the day, and come back to take care of it when home. That was the total extent of interaction and stimulation the baby got. It ended up being severely stunted and never learned to talk.
Essentially young children need human interaction which includes warmth and constant validation, caring for, etc
If you interrupt that in any way, you end up with a feral child who is permanently stunted.
How far can you strip down the human body until it can’t survive anymore. Assisted feeding and breathing is okay. Adjustable room temperature too.
Arms, Legs? Gone. Can we get rid of the skin? Probably, if the room is the right temperature? Bones? Most of them aren’t needed, are they? Some organs surely can go too.
Basically, what is the bare minimum needed so the body and the mind still more or less work.
You should watch Johnny Got His Gun if you haven’t. Not quite as extreme but kind of similar theme.
That’s what the video to One by Metallica is based on, isn’t it?
No, that’s a landmine victim. ‘One’ is an antiwar song.
“Landmine has taken my sight, taken my speech, taken my hearing…”
I guess someone forgot to tell Metallica when they were writing the song that it wasn’t about a landmine.
And I guess someone previously forgot to tell Dalton Trumbo when he wrote ~Johnny Got His Gun~ that it wasn’t an anti-war novel.
And then they forgot to tell him again thirty-two years later when he directed the movie adaptation, Johnny Got His Gun.
And then, worst of all, they forgot to tell the directors of the music video that “One” was anti-war and Johnny Got His Gun was about a landmine and that using scenes from the film in the music video wouldn’t be thematically appropriate.
Damn, there were a lot of missteps! Good thing you set it all straight!
Correct, they bought the rights to the movie to not have to continually pay royalties for it.
Yo, same what I was gonna to comment.
It would be fascinating to see if we could archive a “brain in a jar” by this.
Even more when considering that a big bunch of non-brain neurons are in the belly-area. So would it affect how we think?This was the topic of an episode of the podcast That’s Absurd, Please Elaborate, which I highly recommend. Unfortunately I can’t find the episode right now. https://thatsabsurdshow.com/
Hey! Somebody figured out the plot of the seminal sci-fi novel, “Don’t create the torment Nexus”!
So, firstly, may I suggest you check youtube for one of the now many ‘Adventures of Torso’ type videos done in Kenshi.
But as far as keeping a ‘minimum viable’ human actually alive?
You could remove limbs, but you would still have to have a method for them to eat and urinate and deficate.
You… almost certainly could not remove all skin and keep someone alive for very long.
For starters, they’d bleed to death. Secondly, the pain of existing without skin would probably literally kill them or drive them to try to kill themselves. Thirdly: Skin prevents infections, you’d have to keep them in basically a totally hermetically sealed room or container.
Bones? A de-boned human?
Well there’s almost certainly not a way to remove all of your spinal bones and skull without causing death or immensely serious paralysis and/or brain damage.
Sure you could remain alive without all your limbs if you have caretakers, you can survive without your lower jaw as well… You can maybe? survive with the loss of a certain high percentage of your ribcage, but probably not with the entirety of it and your sternum removed.
Organs? Well, brain, heart and liver are almost certainly mandatory.
Though you can remove portions of your liver and it can still function and regrow to some extent…
…and portions of your brain… though you’ll lose cognitive abilities, memories and basically become braindead but still technically alive at some point.
Assuming we are just removing things and maybe hooking you up to various kinds if life support tubes and not replacing organs with some kind of mechanical or genetically engineered equivalent:
I think you can survive without any kidneys if you are constantly on dialysis, but its far better to have at least one.
Similarly: Lungs, you need at least one.
You can have your stomach and intestines and bladder partially removed or reshaped, but not entirely.
You can survive without eyes… and a gallbladder and a thymus and a spleen and an appendix and your tonsils… and your adenoids, and your sex organs, but you’re gonna need a great deal of monitoring and bloodwork and hormone balancing and what not.
How do I unimagine that?
For this you don’t need a human, Can start with monkeys.
Disclaimer: I don’t want this experiment to happen.
Forgot the name, but the one where they had a mock prison where half the subjects were guards with special treatment and the other half were prisoners. Though I’d be trying to figure out how to eliminate the whole “power corrupts” stuff, not just sitting back watching what happens as people die.
The Stanford Prison Experiment. But it shouldn’t be taken seriously, it was terribly done, biased and unscientific
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/
Could be interesting to run something similar under actual experimental conditions, if that was doable
It’s regrettable that it became part of “psychology 101” (in a general sense).
Can you imagine how much misinformation is piggybacking off these “facts” about human nature?
Isolate a bunch of babies together, with food etc, and see how they develop their own language and society.
Not exactly the same, but suggests probably it would not turn out well. https://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsules/histoire_bleu06.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experiments
I already knew about Psamtik’s experiment but I thought I had a bigger memory of it than what I was able to find quickly. There’s a good starting place if you want to look deeper but I’m not that interested
Really interesting idea.
I silently lament that this experiment cannot be done at least once every couple weeks. I think it would be the most fascinating experiment to observe. Watching a new language develop naturally in real time!
A bit contemporary, but I’d like to have studied what it takes to break someone of illusions that were fed and forced on them externally, e.g. schooling, TV, social media and other forms of cultural imprinting and propaganda.
We’ve all had that “what would it take to get this person to realize how far off base they are?” question, it would be fascinating, in a no-holds barred experiment testing various solutions and combinations to find out which is the most effective.
E.g. someone believes climate change isn’t real because (x,y,z irrelevant). No amount of written evidence is effective to people who don’t understand the scientific method, so would it be videos, traveling to acutely affected places, having polar bears removed from all zoos, baseball bats on their knuckles when they make a logical fallacy?
It would be interesting to then categorize the types of delusions or illusions and then prescribe treatment based on these results.
I think this one could be done ethically, even make a good TV show.
Parts of it could be done, but it would always stop at “the subject is uncomfortable”, which is the whole point of why changing someone’s mind against delusions, illusions and propaganda is hard. They don’t want to, so without some treatment experiments that would certainly not meet today’s medical and/or psychological standards, we wouldn’t get an answer to many questions.
You could make a TV show sure, but all the wrong people would tune in.
I want to totally impoverish the 50 richest capitalists to see if they could “bootstrap” themselves out of it for real.
Okay, so there’s nothing unethical or dangerous about that (they are capitalist parasites, not humans), but it would still be interesting to see.
Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd already published the definite paper on this.
Only unethical if you oppose animal testing.
It may not be possible, but I want to gradually replace a person’s brain piece-by-piece with the same areas from other brains and see if they retain their sense of self when none of the original brain remains.
We can satisfy this curiosity with a fair amount of scientific evidence.
Of course, most regions of the brain are so densely and variably interconnected that the technical difficulty of “replacing parts” precedes the ethical consideration by many, many years. But we do have a great deal of evidence for how our subjective sense of self is affected by “losing/removing parts” of the brain. Patients are often unaware of change unless evidence for it is overwhelming, and even then are adept at healing/reconciling instinctively. It appears that this is just something brains have evolved to do.
So while the technology (and sheer artistry) required to match and “stitch” these networks is quite staggering, basically magic, it is theoretically possible that a patient could have every part replaced without recognizing any continuity errors in the chimeric stages, until one day they wake up as a completely different person.
The brain of Theseus!
How would you know if your sense of self is changing? Surely you always feel like yourself else you wouldn’t be you…?
And keep the old pieces, in the end assemble them back together and see what the differences are
I’d give everyone a device that allows them to take photos of themselves and their lives, and then instantly post them online. Other people would be able to rate and comment on how well or badly they think someone is doing, based on these curated snapshots of their existence. In this experiment, people could also scroll through endless streams of these ‘highlights,’ constantly comparing their lives to others. To spice it up, I’d introduce a feature that allows people to see how many likes or comments other posts are getting, so they can feel great or miserable about themselves in real-time.
Oh boy, have I got good news for you!
Interesting twist… Its now mandatory.
That’s fucking stupid, and you’re stupid, and you should feel bad, because you’re bad.
Did I do it right?
Cloning is the first one that comes to mind for me. If you could somehow avoid the horrors of the process of learning a reliable methodology the result wouldn’t necessarily be unethical.
We can do sheep. And thus pretty much know how that would go for humans.
Testing a ton of medication for pregnant/breastfeeding women. So much medication I couldn’t take, simply because it’s not considered ethical to have the studies done, since it could affect the baby in all sorts of ways. Which we can’t clear up without the studies. So annoying.
