Scientists Achieve Mental Body-Swapping

SpaceAdmiral notes the news that scientists have succeeded in convincing experiment subjects that a mannequin's body is their own, and even feeling at home in the body of someone of the opposite sex. The effect could prove useful in virtual reality applications and in robot technology. Here's the paper on PLoS ONE.

Re:Ghost in the Shell

[sexconker]

Ghost in the Shell is trash.

The first one is your typical hyper-complicated (to make it seem intelligent when it is in fact simply ridiculous) anime with ridiculous robots and sexy female combatants.

It's great for action and style, but terrible for sci-fi. Anyone who says it's deep or has any meaning is either delusional, or has never seen any sci-fi ever.

Everything after (Innocence, Stand Alone Complex, whatever else they crank out) is utter trash, on the level of SAW sequels.

Sorry.

Re:I thought I saw this already

[DeadManCoding]

True, we are subject to psychological trickery. But the test are pretty conclusive, as I actually RTFA. If a human brain can perceive an artificial body as it's own in the psychological and physiological sense, it gives researchers a great deal of more research to do. This allows us to "place" a human brain inside an artificial body and still retain full abilities without major psychological damage. That's a serious trick to perform, as once we lose that ownership of the body, behavior can be significantly modified.

I Will Fear No Evil

[Ender_Stonebender]

I've corrected the subject line of this post to the Heinlein reference [wikipedia.org] you were looking for (instead of just modding you down, which would have been rude).

Re:Ghost in the Shell

[Y.A.A.P.]

At the same time, it makes me wonder even more if the Major's original organic body may in fact have been male, with little to no adaptation discomfort after the procedure...

If you read the original manga and got the pages to fill in the abridged portions from the English version, then you wouldn't wonder about it. The Major was originally female.

It's one of many themes about what defines our humanity amidst the cybernetic changes that the manga successfully explores (albeit circuitously in many cases) where all of the animated versions failed miserably (as in the original manga is not "hyper-complicated trash").

The specific sequence for this is one in which the Major is enjoying some virtual vacation time with two female friends. Batou jumps into the Major's head to inform her about developments of an op-in-progress.

The abridged version has the Major and her two friends enjoying time on a boat on the water. When Batou jumps in, the Major berates him for the serious interruption and back in the real world he looks appropriately beaten-down.

In the un-abridged version, the Major and her two friends have moved into full-on girl-on-girl action. Batou jumps into the Major's head in the middle of this and almost loses his real-world lunch since the sensations are ones that a guy shouldn't be feeling and are rejected by his brain.

And, oh yeah, the Major chews out Batou because he was told not to jump into her head during downtime. Back in the real world, Batou looks appropriately beaten down.

Re:What the heck happened to meta-moderation?

[multisync]

I used to meta-mod every day, now the metamods and user pages have become so bloated and unwieldy I've lost all motivation to participate

I wasn't meta-moderating quite that frequently, but I did try to make time to do it at least once a week. Since the new system was put in place I hardly bother any more.

As far as the moderation system, I abandoned that a couple of years ago. There is so much abuse that goes unchecked that I just browse at -1 and skip past the comments that I think are trolls or flame bait or whatever. I've also unchecked the "willing to moderate" box in my preferences, although that has more to do with just not having the time most days to skim the summaries and comments, let alone read the articles and make an honest attempt to do a good job of moderating.

The user page changes are just bizarre, and the page is different every time I visit it (which isn't very often lately). They seem to be trying to get to the point where your comments appear with the summary of the article they were attached to (leading to the 'bloat' you noted). The last time I visited there were summaries from article that I never commented on, so they had no relevance to me. They seem to be still developing this new user page, but rather than wait until it is finished, they have essentially made us all beta testers.

Why am I given the choice to rate my own comments '+' or '-'? Am I really going to rate my own comment '-'? Also, the style sheet seems to be messed up, at least in Firefox. Rather than the white text on a green background they were using when they first made the change (ala Idle), it is now white text on a two-tone background that fades from grey to white, making the text unreadable. In IE, it's white text on a green background. I don't know, maybe I've done something to Firefox, but it wasn't like this the other day.

Maybe I'm just resistant to change, but I can't see anything positive about these changes.

dupe, dupe, dupe -- in all senses of the word

[mccoyspace]

Dr. Henrik Ehrsson sure is basing his research career around this topic. And every time he publishes a paper basically saying the same thing as the last, the press jumps all over it as the realization of some sci-fi dream. check out the google news archive [google.com]. I think the research is fine as far as it goes, but it seems very much in the neighborhood of simulator rides [wikipedia.org] and dummy head recording. [wikipedia.org]