If you could see through other eyes, how long till you are no longer you?

Awesome idea. I want to be a hot looking panther.
But to answer you question. I would have no real idea since its not something that can be done. Plus I would have no idea if an orca eats to survive or because he really likes the taste of seals. I suppose if he really enjoys it, I would sense his excitement but I doubt I would actually feel anything, except glad its not me. However if feeling is possible than I would love swimming in an ocean and possibly the hunt.

I suspect that it would be impossible to translate the experiences of an orca mind into ones that humans would comprehend, signals would have to be dumbed down to correlate, or wired up to completely unrelated human senses.

For example, assume for argument’s sake that an orca has 1000 times the smelling capability of the human. That would mean that either you have to compress the signal by a factor of 1000 and destroy most of the data in much the same way that compressing a jpg makes the image blockier or wire up that signal to a human mental process that can handle it (perhaps the human auditory processing center is sensitive enough to handle that amount of information). In this 2nd case, you’d be able to receive all of the subtle nuances, but you’d be experiencing the orca’s smells as sounds so that would be like an acid trip or something.

@Pandora You just have to indulge me on the possibility of this ever being done. I do not find believeing it a great stretch, even though we currently do not know how. It does apprea the interface is electro-chemical, and therefore should be reducible into understandable and replicable physical stimuli.

My first though as I dreamed of this was have exciting it would be to swim so fast, and with such grace and seeming ease.

@gorillapaws You may be correct, but I really doubt it. I think it would take time to learn the interface, just as it does when a newborn starts taking control of their body and learning to see, hear, move. etc. It might only wirk with a child, though. Adults who have been isolated from humans through their childhood and have not learned to talk can never learn to talk. They act as if they are not even aware of others around them.

@ETpro Not saying it is totally impossible. In the 1800’s if you told them we could travel to space or xray people, you would’ve been considered a loon. However, I’m just saying that I would have no idea how long it would be before I lost myself. People have survived on drugs that gave them halucinations for a long time and still recover. Of course most of the actual damage to personality comes from the damage that these drugs do.

@ETpro ok so think about how you would wire up a spider’s 10 (or however many) eyes to interact with the human’s optical processing center that’s hardwired to only handle 2. I guess you could try to somehow average the vision of the left and right sets of eyes or something like that, but I really doubt it would be at all comparable. It’s also, probably not the case that the brain would somehow grow massive quantities of new optical processing brain tissue in response to that extra information (because Brains don’t behave this way to my knowledge).

To think of it another way, let’s say a person has a defect in the brain such that their optical processing center can only handle black and white. If you gave them special mechanical eyeballs that would send color signals to the damaged optical processing center, they would still see in black-and-white, and all of the color information passed in from the mechanical eyeballs would be lost.

@gorillapaws I didn’t say it would be easy, and certainly the less we shared in common with the other creature, the more difficult it would get. Too bad, that, because having the opportunity to be a spider or a bee or box jellyfish would be utterly fascinating.

Optic and aural connections would be particularly challenging, because we have nearly as many nerve bundles going out to thise sensory organs as there are coming into our brains. How the work is an incredibly complex interaction between the sense organ and the brain. That is why after cataract surgery, it can take a month or more for your vision to fully stabilize at the improved level. You have to unlearn all the compensatory behavior your brain had slowly become accustomed to.

@ETpro I’m not saying it would be hard as in challenging-but-doable, but hard as in trying to get video to show up on your nightstand clock-radio hard. The only way I see this working is if they actually grew the appropriate brain tissue to link up to in your brain, but in this case the solution to the original “I“ness problem becomes pretty apparent.

@gorillapaws We have already crafted prosthetic devices that can be controlled by thought triggering nerve signals which the machine picks up. I think it is only a matter of time till we can actually do interfaces to closely matched creatures. Working out the use of a spider’s or a fly’s compound eyes might take a bit longer—as in maybe eternity. That’s my educated guess.

Maybe not a direct answer to your question, but it’s relevant.

In 1972 I wrote a futuristic paper for a senior English seminar that made use of a 21st-century innovation of a literary medium. I invented (in the paper) a device called a consciofactive (cfax) that amounted to a helmet you could connect to your microelectrode brain implant. This would let you experience the same brain stimuli that the author of the “novel” had programmed into it, just as if it were actually happening to you. While you were taking the cfax experience, it would be as if you were the character in the novel.

One result of this was that everyone who had taken the same novel had, for a time, been the same person. This mental/emotional/psychic commonality had the side effect of creating bonds among people who had literally undergone one and the same experience—in effect, they had been the same person.

There were social, interpersonal, and psychological consequences to this that the creators and authors had not anticipated. If my memory serves me, I believe I gave it credit for becoming a factor in world peace.

An assumption that I made was that while your brain was under the complete control of the script programmed into the cfax, you were not you at all but the character in the novel. In other words, the moment you started inhabiting the being of the fictitious character, you were that character and not yourself. It was only after you ended the session and came out, now having the memory of it within your own mind, that you could process it from the point of view of “you” rather than “him” or “her” or “it.”

@Jeruba What a fascinating thought. Thanks so much. Very germane.

When we go to an iMax movie and see a screen 40 feet away from us giving the impression we are on a roller coaster, doesn’t our heartbeat speed up. Sure it takes suspension of disbelief to not “know” we are actually sitting quite safely in a theater seat many feet away from the chaotic action. But almost all of us experience the fear. Imagine how much more compelling the transportation of self would be if nothing more than motion of our seat and wind rushing into our face were added.

You are still you, your perspective has changed, nothing more.

The I is the sum total of it’s knowledge, so therefore when knowledge increases the I increases until it become perfection but is always and still will remain One.

@kess that was precisely what I was thinking. And as to how realistic it is that we can take on a view through other eyes, how many of us can honestly say that, while reading the admittedly low resolution representation of being an orca, which really amounted to nothing more than a few strange symbols arranged in horizontal rows on a computer screen, we did not get some sense of being an orca gliding effortlessly through a clear blue sea?

If it’s that easy to take a step into a remote cranium, how much more compelling would it be to experience every thought, feeling and sensation that other creature does? How much would such a compelling experience reshape who I am or you are?