I would think the life support for the Brain-on-Rack would consume at least the energy of a body. No change to entropy would result since entropy is already pretty constant here. I'm trying to figure out whose purpose is served by feeding a simulated reality to such a setup, or by feeding a real one (senses provided by real artificial bodies that sense real things, not a simulation at all) to said BoR.attofishpi wrote:Our reality tells us we have a system called a human body which appears to be an extremely complicated gloop of matter capable of consciousness. The example i used suggesting ones brain could be on a rack and fed the inputs of the five senses, was just that, an example. The example i used was to provide a simple method for how the human consciousness could exist, without the need to lug a lump of matter around (the human body) and hence make the entirety of its existence, much more efficient.
Assuming the former (the latter is not really any simulation), perhaps this stems from a purpose of maximizing the quantity of human experience, a strange goal, since we'd not really be human. I could torture animals without the moral weight of actually hurting anything. I cannot think of a way to distinguish a good from a bad life. So again, whose purpose might this serve? Certainly not the poor saps on the rack. Maybe just a way to rid ourselves of the welfare class without killing them.