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The Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has conducted experiment that use Virtual Reality techniques to make someone feel that they are having OBE's, or out of body experiences... http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17564-outofbody-experiences-help-bring-avatars-to-life.html Nothing too surprising here, but a cool effect that will only become enhanced through further experimentation. Eventually, subjects will say "wait a minute, how is this different from reality?" 
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Rank: Advanced Member
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Does a controlled OBE suggest free will in that other dimension? There are many a great Scholar who has wrestled with the challenge that "free will" even exists:
Paul Bloom
Antonio Damasio
Albert Einstein
Sam Harris
V.S. Ramachandran
Lee M. Silver
Baruch Spinoza
Mark Twain
Kurt Vonnegut
to name a few.
As you know, I and others in this forum have been very interested in the potential for creating artificial general intelligence – general intelligence meaning not mere computational intelligence – those calculating machines that have been smarter than humans for almost 100 years. But, real make a choice, feelings, self-aware intelligent machines.
Which gives me pause to ponder: perhaps we also are just some form of artificial intelligence experiment. Perhaps that is why we strive so hard to achieve some higher form of enlightenment. We are locked in this “multiverse” living our program over and over, where the Programmers hope that some day one or more of us shall really become “self-aware” in the fullest sense.
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