alt Hacker NewsI read Lilly's Programming and Meta programming in the Human Biocomputer as a young man. Left me with a lot of questions, etc.
That you replied to this post, indicates you may be familiar with Lilly?
Anyway, if you have any published writing on even vaguely related subjects, eg your comment, perhaps post a link. I will read it. If you weren't aware, he spent a fair amount of time with Feynman, who if I remember correctly, was fond of the isolation tanks. Some very interesting content from that era, especially before Sandoz cut them off.
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I still need to finish that book.[0] Well, and move back to Holland, I suppose! They have pretty good float tanks there, among other things :)
That's funny about Feynman, I didn't know that.
I've read bits and pieces of Lilly. The most interesting thing I remember is that he was trying to establish two-way communication between humans and dolphins. I recall he was building some kind of computer system for the purpose, but I guess he was about half a century too early.
I guess in our age the more pressing question would be learning to figure out how to communicate with the machines. That's probably going to turn out to be more important in the long run.
[0] The bit that stayed with me is the one that he repeated in interviews. The physical body imposes definite limits. That always seemed a little arbitrary to me, from the point of view of pure consciousness, it's not clear to me why it should be that way. Or to flip it around, you can transcend the limits of the mind, but then what effect does that have on "external" reality? Does it just make you less bad at decision-making, or is there a deeper effect?
(And while I'm at it... Something that bugged me about simulation theory, if the outside is probably simulated, why wouldn't the inside be too? Sounds a lot cleaner than having a bunch of brains floating around in a data center.)
The isolation-experiment-based research is not new and didn't originate with Lilly. AFAIK, it was first recorded (and possibly also originated) with Avicenna (Abu Ali Ibn-e Sina is the full, correct name).
And he was not an Ayrab (Salmon in his intro CS book claims Al-Khuarezmi was an Arabic scholar--which is false and made me lose all respect for Salmon as an educator. If he got such an elementary fact wrong, what else is there that could be incomplete?)
PS: Yes Alkhuarezmi wrote in Arabic, but he was not an Arab. All classical Persian scholars at the time were fluent in Arabic as it was the lingua franca of science, medicine, philosophy and theology.