More on VR for consciousness hacking
I was talking to Biff today about uses for various senses in the VR consciousness hacking idea. It occurred that smell is very low-bandwidth, but strongly tied to memory, and thus might be useful for maintaining state across multiple sessions.
Also, apparently Terence McKenna was also interested in using VR for similar purposes. I'm not sure if that makes the idea more or less credible.
In other news, the laser glove is about 80% done; all I need to do is wire it up. I need to talk to some sort of EE person about how to do this without exploding the lasers from overcurrent.
Professor Koch, with regards to smell : "Thats like a thousand dimensional vector space..." so, its not actually low bandwidth considering the breadth of chemicals that can be detected.
ReplyDeleteAre you going to tag everything as "strange loop"?
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, I think that, yes indeed, McKenna's being interested in the same thing as you will make you less credible in the eyes of at least some people, and I also think that's a pity. I even have a fairly elaborate pseudotheory about the role of crackpots in science to explain this that I should expound on some time...
"I even have a fairly elaborate pseudotheory about the role of crackpots in science to explain this that I should expound on some time"
ReplyDeleteI'd be interested in reading that actually.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091001091752.htm
Seems tangentially related to this post, but doesn't rely on olfactory mechanisms.
I'm presently working in an olfaction lab. It seems boring from day to day, and I'm not as productive as I should be. I think it was Biff who suggested that we should build an artificial wine critic nose and sell it to rich people.