Re: Foresight Recon?

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu May 15 2003 - 01:49:36 MDT

  • Next message: Anders Sandberg: "Re: Foresight Recon?"

    On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 10:10:53PM -0700, spike66 wrote:
    > What if one injects a sedative into one
    > carotid artery, and one hemisphere of ones brain
    > is asleep, and one had half an erotic dream, what
    > would happen?

    I think I have a partial answer to that. The supraspinal
    erectile control system
    (http://www.ahc-net.at/uprima/ed2/ed2_4a.htm) is on the highest
    levels controlled by lateralised structures like the amygdala.
    But the medial preoptic area and even more the periaqeductal
    grey matter are medial. Hence they will likely (and this is an
    assumption, I would like to see some evidence) be activated if
    one side of the brain gets aroused, and pass it on downwards.
    Once PAG gets active, it inhibits the the nucleus
    paragigantocellularis (love that name) which seems to act as a
    kind of lock on the spinal reflex systems, and the rest runs
    itself. On the other hand, the lateral preoptic area seems to be
    very involved in erection during REM sleep.

    However, the amobarbital method seems to cause a state
    corresponding to deep sleep or even lower in the affected
    hemisphere, so we might need some other regimen to bring on
    dreaming. Which incidentally is usually accompanied by ascending
    activations from the brainstem, which might be experienced as
    very odd by the awake hemisphere. Fascinating.

    Transhumanist relevance? We need to learn how to control and
    enhance our midbrains, and allowing lateralized emotions might
    extend our emotional repertoire in a fascinating way.

    > If the market and google form two members of the
    > holy trinity, what is the third?

    Evolution?
     
    > How did the diet thread get so huge?

    Too much calories? I mean, too much carbohydrates. No, it ate
    refined sugars! Absolutely not, it was due to meat. What about
    caloric restriction?

    > If we somehow accidentally discovered a seventh
    > quark flavor, wont the physicists be majorly screwed
    > up? Would they attempt a cover-up? Would we call
    > it still-more-strange?

    The X-quark? The truth is in there (in the hadrons).

    -- 
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
    asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
    GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
    


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