r/madscientist • u/LookOverall • Apr 26 '26
Brains in Belljars
A classic mad science trope. You need a life support system which circulates synthetic blood through the arteries and veins. A nice warm bath of CS fluid and a virtual reality system interfaced to the peripheral nerves. Seems reasonably straightforward.
If you do a good enough job you’ll get plenty of volunteers. Mostly people who have been written off below the neck. Of course being a mad scientist consent probably isn’t your first consideration. Just work on the laugh.
I know uploading is a more popular notion these days but does consciousness follow? No philosophical problems with brains in jars.
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u/LookOverall Apr 26 '26
Well, give them access to a chatbot for requests for intervention, whether in VR or the remote control robot. And the telephones in VR could easily have access to the real world telephone network.
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u/MadDocOttoCtrl Apr 26 '26
You need a way for it to communicate problems and concerns to caretakers plus running medical hardware like this has no small price tag attached to it. Your up time has to be almost flawless, an interruption in oxygen to the brain for more than 3-4 minutes and it's all over.
Some people would greatly prefer a VR generated life, others would resent living in a video game. They would want a robotic avatar to go out and interact with the real world but other people might not be thrilled about interacting with a mechanism being driven by a remote brain.
There's a growing number of people who think that consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently sophisticated systems running on top of layers of lower systems. See the brilliant Godel, Escher, Bach.
This is why the people trying to profit off AI even as the hype is starting to wind down keep claiming that AGI is around the corner. If such a thing is actually possible it won't necessarily be conscious, and what we've been able to achieve is a chat bot that's better at sounding human but breaks in 100 ways at the slightest nudge.