If I was living in coffee, and someone started drinking it, I'd be doing everything I could to interrupt them

Jeeze, just because you choose to ignore Miss Manners' adivce on the proper etiquette involved when someone starts drinking the fluid in which your scientifically preserved head is floating...

Well how freaking rude is it to just walk up and start drinking someone's head coffee? Sheesh.

Just for the record, what does Miss Manners' advise when someone starts drinking the fluid in which your scientifically preserved head is floating?

I like to know these things.

"Excuse me, sir, but you appear to be encroaching on my fluids. Please desist."

How am I supposed to say that, pray? I'm literally over my head in coffee! I can't talk! I can't even use sign language!

I think when someones given you head it's only polite to offer them coffee.

"Blub blub blub BLUBITY BLUB, blub!"

Maybe the head is genetically engineered to produce sonar? In which case, "Eeeee! Eeeeeee!"

Genetically engineering speech out of females is a silly thing to do. Because that pretty much puts the onus of raising the children onto the males, something I suspect the chauvinist males wouldn't like very much. Because, hello, how do you raise a child without being able to bellow CHARLES WALLACE MURRY! RETURN YOUR BOTTOM TO MY VICINITY THIS MINUTE SO I MAY WHACK IT AT MY LEISURE! To say nothing of the warning child and/or car that they are in danger of colliding. To say nothing of being able to answer, "What's for dinner?" for the eleventy-millionth time. To say nothing of being able to moan loudly during sex.

Speech [and its non-auditory visual equivalents] am good. Large populations without capacity for speech am a really big pain in the butt.

Also, sex with people who don't understand "A little to the right, dear... OH, GOD, YES!" Probably not as much fun.

Burrell - seriously trying to rationalize it? You mean as in "this is a good thing". Or "this is route we should go".

As in, this is an intellectual puzzle worthy of contemplation: what would consciousness be like if it were completely separated from a physical body?

I’d also include in the same category things like cryogenically preserving someone’s head (separated from the rest of body) in the hopes of transplanting it onto another body and reviving it one day. Same idea vis a vis consciousness=identity=brain and brain alone.

But in a weird (and bizarre and horrifying)way it sounds like the ultimate in asceticism.

I think that’s part of it, Cindy. Or a kind of terrifying embodiment (so to speak) of the mind/body split. [As Jim says a bit later.]

I don't see anything male about the head in a jar thing ... it's about sentience, about consciousness, isn't it?

I just haven’t read any work by a woman treating the idea in the same way. I’d love to look at some, if you have any.

One of my favorite essays on the idea is by Lyotard of all people (given that he sometimes makes me want to throw the book accross the room). I think it's called "Can thought proceed without a body?" and he basically answers it "no," but in a very interesting way.

It's The Matrix, kinda, isn't it?

I’d have to say no. One of the most interesting things about The Matrix to me is that they don’t forget about the body at all. Its presence is key, both to the humans and the AI.