For me “How long could I get away with driving like an ABSOLUTE ASSHOLE all the time before I lost my licence or had an accident.” Speed limits, red lights, stop signs… forget them all. Every day I have to drive sensibly and obey the law because without my licence I dont have a job, and every day I see at least one person driving like an absolute moron and I wonder…
I want to see how far you can push performance of the human body, and make the results compete against each other. All the bonkers whacky surgeries you can think of: limb lengthening, bone strengthening, replace their organs with bigger, stronger versions.
All the drugs: hgh, steroids, any performance enhancing substance you can pump into an athlete.
Have sports scientists raise children so that they’re born into a dedicated training regime for running or swimming.
Then make them compete against each other in the trans-human olympics. I want to see someone do the 100m in 3 seconds, I want to see someone not have to come up for air during the freestyle, I want someone to throw a javelin 2 miles, I want bioengineered mutants doing gymnastics routines
A bit contemporary, but I’d like to have studied what it takes to break someone of illusions that were fed and forced on them externally, e.g. schooling, TV, social media and other forms of cultural imprinting and propaganda.
We’ve all had that “what would it take to get this person to realize how far off base they are?” question, it would be fascinating, in a no-holds barred experiment testing various solutions and combinations to find out which is the most effective.
E.g. someone believes climate change isn’t real because (x,y,z irrelevant). No amount of written evidence is effective to people who don’t understand the scientific method, so would it be videos, traveling to acutely affected places, having polar bears removed from all zoos, baseball bats on their knuckles when they make a logical fallacy?
It would be interesting to then categorize the types of delusions or illusions and then prescribe treatment based on these results.
I think this one could be done ethically, even make a good TV show.
Parts of it could be done, but it would always stop at “the subject is uncomfortable”, which is the whole point of why changing someone’s mind against delusions, illusions and propaganda is hard. They don’t want to, so without some treatment experiments that would certainly not meet today’s medical and/or psychological standards, we wouldn’t get an answer to many questions.
You could make a TV show sure, but all the wrong people would tune in.
I want to totally impoverish the 50 richest capitalists to see if they could “bootstrap” themselves out of it for real.
Okay, so there’s nothing unethical or dangerous about that (they are capitalist parasites, not humans), but it would still be interesting to see.
Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd already published the definitive paper on this.
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Developing a wireless brain-electronic interface. I believe it will be not so bad if the development is non intrusive.
What happens if you put a lightbulb in your ass
Nothing until you start rubbing your feet on the carpet to generate current to light it up.
Forgot the name, but the one where they had a mock prison where half the subjects were guards with special treatment and the other half were prisoners. Though I’d be trying to figure out how to eliminate the whole “power corrupts” stuff, not just sitting back watching what happens as people die.
The Stanford Prison Experiment. But it shouldn’t be taken seriously, it was terribly done, biased and unscientific
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/
Could be interesting to run something similar under actual experimental conditions, if that was doable
It’s regrettable that it became part of “psychology 101” (in a general sense).
Can you imagine how much misinformation is piggybacking off these “facts” about human nature?
I’ve broken traffic laws most of my life, and I still have a driver’s license. So, you can drive like a partially reasonable asshole indefinitely if you have the skill to pull it off.
I’d like to see GMO humans. I want to see how far we can elevate our species using science. It’s completely unethical, but there it is.
Oh I’m no saint. I set my cruise control at 10km/h over the speed limit, I punch it through orange lights and I sometimes roll through stop signs.
I’m talking about full blown fast and furious wannabe swerving lanes, running reds and racing literally everywhere.
How is that unethical? If anything i say it’s unethical to let us languish in these horrible bodies when we can work towards something better.
Most people are very opposed to eugenics and genetic modification of humans. There is infinite opportunity for unexpected disasters along the way to perfection, and it’s extremely apathetic to be okay with subjecting a sentient creature to the possible ramifications of unexpected outcomes.
Most people are only opposed to eugenics (as you’re using the word) because of a very narrow application. A rare few get genetic engineering and capitalism mixed up, which at least makes sense, i wouldn’t want musk choosing who gets a generic upgrade or how an augmentation is implemented.
And i find it abhorrent that people are just fine with letting our entire species suffer the nightmare of random chance that is our bodies. Sure it’s surprisingly good for a system that only selects for whatever fucks the most, but we can and should eventually do better.
Raise a child on their own without any exposure to language. Could be interesting to see how their perspective on the world develops.
I think this was done? Long time ago, maybe in an Russian orphanage or something? If my memory serves me well, those kids all died, despite even having food etc…
Edit: might be confusing that with lack of social interaction. But either way, here’s some reading for you
Yes that experiment was raising babies without human touch. Apparently it’s essential for development.
Cyborg-like implants. I want titanium joints and UV vision and magnetic field sensors and charging my phone by laying it on my belly. Uncap each finger to reveal a small tool: screwdriver, USB key, cutting blade, etc.
Note that none of that includes or requires a constant connection to a network/internet. I want to augment my interactions with the real world, not replace them with a virtual world.
I’ve looked forward to this most of my life, but given how things have changed, I would never do it. There’s no way these implants wouldn’t be subscription based, and spy on everything you do. Oh, you forgot to pay your enhanced eyeball subscription? Now you’re blind, motherfucker!
Oh boy do I have an 80’s cartoon for you…
Go-go-gadget…
What would power these implants?
Linux, most likely.
Giant Qi charging pad on your bed.
The power of SCIENCE!
It may not be possible, but I want to gradually replace a person’s brain piece-by-piece with the same areas from other brains and see if they retain their sense of self when none of the original brain remains.
We can satisfy this curiosity with a fair amount of scientific evidence.
Of course, most regions of the brain are so densely and variably interconnected that the technical difficulty of “replacing parts” precedes the ethical consideration by many, many years. But we do have a great deal of evidence for how our subjective sense of self is affected by “losing/removing parts” of the brain. Patients are often unaware of change unless evidence for it is overwhelming, and even then are adept at healing/reconciling instinctively. It appears that this is just something brains have evolved to do.
So while the technology (and sheer artistry) required to match and “stitch” these networks is quite staggering, basically magic, it is theoretically possible that a patient could have every part replaced without recognizing any continuity errors in the chimeric stages, until one day they wake up as a completely different person.
The brain of Theseus!
And keep the old pieces, in the end assemble them back together and see what the differences are
How would you know if your sense of self is changing? Surely you always feel like yourself else you wouldn’t be you…?
Isolate a bunch of babies together, with food etc, and see how they develop their own language and society.
Not exactly the same, but suggests probably it would not turn out well. https://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsules/histoire_bleu06.html
I silently lament that this experiment cannot be done at least once every couple weeks. I think it would be the most fascinating experiment to observe. Watching a new language develop naturally in real time!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experiments
I already knew about Psamtik’s experiment but I thought I had a bigger memory of it than what I was able to find quickly. There’s a good starting place if you want to look deeper but I’m not that interested
Really interesting idea.
Raise a kid in a sensory deprivation chamber, with one exception: a monitor that only shows gen alpha brainrot videos. When they’re like 14 drop them off in a populated area and see what happens
Realistically would just end up a developmentally stunted invalid. There was an example from some book, I don’t remember which, where there was a SE Asian woman who lived with her family and had a baby.
The family was ashamed, so they forced the girl to keep the baby by itself in the attic. She would go to work most of the day, and come back to take care of it when home. That was the total extent of interaction and stimulation the baby got. It ended up being severely stunted and never learned to talk.
Essentially young children need human interaction which includes warmth and constant validation, caring for, etc
If you interrupt that in any way, you end up with a feral child who is permanently stunted.
make a fallout shelter and have some isolated communities there live off purely of either one of meta, apple, or alphabet products (or any large enough multinational like nestle).
all for the science of understanding addiction and brand cultism.
Gorillas on steroids. How bulky can these magnificent already bulky beasts get?
Oh, I like this one.
Mind you Ive seen a cranky Silverback at the zoo, one with an extra gram of test and tren a day would be utterly fucking terrifying, also the roadrage would be something to behold… dibs not being the poor fucker giving it its shots.
Look up a shaved silverback… them mofos are scary.
Most big animals that are already properly scary with fur dont improve when shaved.
Roid rage comes from excess estrogen production, not from testosterone. I’d assume that a managed steroid treatment for a gorilla would include estrogen blockers.
Yeah, and if you want to climb in there and take his bloods and administer the androgen blockers you are welcome to.
How far can you strip down the human body until it can’t survive anymore. Assisted feeding and breathing is okay. Adjustable room temperature too.
Arms, Legs? Gone. Can we get rid of the skin? Probably, if the room is the right temperature? Bones? Most of them aren’t needed, are they? Some organs surely can go too.
Basically, what is the bare minimum needed so the body and the mind still more or less work.
For this you don’t need a human, Can start with monkeys.
Disclaimer: I don’t want this experiment to happen.
You should watch Johnny Got His Gun if you haven’t. Not quite as extreme but kind of similar theme.
That’s what the video to One by Metallica is based on, isn’t it?
Correct, they bought the rights to the movie to not have to continually pay royalties for it.
No, that’s a landmine victim. ‘One’ is an antiwar song.
“Landmine has taken my sight, taken my speech, taken my hearing…”
I guess someone forgot to tell Metallica when they were writing the song that it wasn’t about a landmine.
And I guess someone previously forgot to tell Dalton Trumbo when he wrote Johnny Got His Gun that it wasn’t an anti-war novel.
And then they forgot to tell him again thirty-two years later when he directed the movie adaptation, Johnny Got His Gun.
And then, worst of all, they forgot to tell the directors of the music video that “One” was anti-war and Johnny Got His Gun was about a landmine and that using scenes from the film in the music video wouldn’t be thematically appropriate.
Damn, there were a lot of missteps! Good thing you set it all straight!
This was the topic of an episode of the podcast That’s Absurd, Please Elaborate, which I highly recommend. Unfortunately I can’t find the episode right now. https://thatsabsurdshow.com/
