Some things i've recently thought about and discussed with people

If you have a living brain that's separated from a body, does it have a consciousness? What is that beings experience if there is a conscious inside that living brain? We judge death by the moment your heart stops, but should we judge it when the brain stops?  They say that after your heart stops, your brain keeps going for a bit. If hours in dream time can be merely minutes in real time, could those few minutes of extended brain activity by your eternity? Could you live a kind of extended lucid dream that becomes the rest of your infinite existence?

In Ribofunk...

Humans have figured out and mapped out exactly how the brain works and people consume drinks that have a wide spectrum of results. Some of them sound like they have the effects of some of the hard drugs we have today. However they don't really seem like drugs in Ribofunk; they're actual molecules and proteins and whatnot that affect your brain in a specific way. Today we have legal and illegal sets of drugs and in the book there's legal and black market juices with varying levels of affects. Both sets of juices are on a whole other level than the drugs we have now though, and I think it's interesting that we all freak out about the conscious altering affects of several current day drugs, and in Ribofunk these alterations of being are perfectly normal. In the future will we learn to tap into the great unused portions of our brains and of our conscious'? How much of a greater scale of thinking and existing is there that we just haven't accessed yet?

The idea of one giant north american union is really interesting. and from the sounds of things so far, Brazil seems to have dominated south america. Nearly all unchartered land has now been claimed in our world. Where/when will the next power and land shifts take place? There's no where to colonize so will the most powerful countries end up taking over the smaller countries around them? How would North America function under one government? It seems to me that too large of an area usually means a big difference in the types of people living there. Too many different people with conflicting wants and needs will not lead to a successful government. the US on its own is already divided. Someone told me that the read a poll where 50% of americans said yes they think the country is divided and 50% said no. Ah the irony. We're even divided on if we're divided. How would a large mega continent government manage to function?

The part of Ribofunk that has really stuck out to me so far was when a white man and a black women were conversing about how they are free to interact now because of the splices. The fact that there's a lower level of being had made blacks finally equal. The black woman commented that the splices were less than human afterall though. But this rings a bell since slavery was justified with the assumption that africans were less than human and therefore meant to serve man. It's interesting how Ribofunk projects this into the future and shows the pattern repeating once again.

What is normal? What is abnormal? Normality is just a concept we made up to organize people into categories. "normal" is a fluid concept though because what is normal changes with time and location, and also just from perspective to perspective. What about people with disorders like ADHD. Are they normal the way they are? Or when they're on riddilin or aderol to counter their "abnormalities" and conform them? Would the world be better if were all just some form of abnormal? Or would that just become the new normal? Are we trying to make everyone "normal" like in Vonnegut's story where they handicap everyone to make them all equal? Who says abnormal people are necessarily at a disadvantage and need to be made normal to have a real life? Maybe they are the normal ones and the unaccommodating society they live in is what's abnormal.