Monday, June 14, 2010

Brain-in-a-Jar!

Well, my actual website is now fully operational. I assure you, it is quite deadly. A lot of the content from this blog has been copied over there already, not sure if I'll move the rest or not.


Right now we have a couple of articles, weekly columns, bi weekly webcomic. Soon we'll have some videos up there too. So go there... go there now. Add it to your favorites. Share with your friends.

Please... I beg of you. For the love of all that is good, visit my site. Now back to the old and out of date blog you've somehow found:

Man, look at that thing. It’s a brain in a jar. I’ve always felt that as a villain, a brain in a jar is a little lacking in the intimidation department:

DM: You enter the darkened room cautiously, on a pedestal in the center, emitting a pale green pulsating phosphorous light is… a BRAIN IN A JAR!
Thief: I knock it over.

As you may have heard, stem cell research is growing all sorts of human body parts on the backs of rodents. I was going to track down some links and stuff to interesting news articles for you to read, but then got sidetracked and found myself looking at pictures of treeman (and now that I’ve seen it I must share). Seriously though, stem cells. Brain-in-a-jar. These things are linked… at least, they are to me.

We can grow any organ using stem cells, so I was thinking, could we grow a brain? The obvious answer is yes, we could grow a brain. The problem is that we could not teach that brain anything, or that it would be very very hard to so. If we could manage a way to simulate and manipulate memories and dreams, we could teach a brain in a jar. We could hook it up to a network of cameras and have it operating a whole building or something. The building would be alive!

We discussed the problems with this at length, and someone who knows a whole lot more about the human brain than I do feels as thought the brain would be suicidal and it would end in disaster, which it probably would. The part that I thought was super cool is that the idea of a brain controlling a building should be pure science fiction, but that we’re getting close to a point where it almost seems feasible.

That shit is whack.

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