Biological Enhancements – The Mind/Machine Interface

I think, and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine, just as the good doctor intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams, the sensibility of the machine invades the periphery of my consciousness: dark, rigid, cold, alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.

Alpha Centauri

Amber, like most of the postindustrialists aboard the orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, is in her early teens: While their natural abilities are in many cases enhanced by germ-line genetic recombination, thanks to her mother’s early ideals she has to rely on brute computational enhancements. She doesn’t have a posterior parietal cortex hacked for extra short-term memory, or an anterior superior temporal gyrus tweaked for superior verbal insight, but she’s grown up with neural implants that feel as natural to her as lungs or fingers. Half her wetware is running outside her skull on an array of processor nodes hooked into her brain by quantum-entangled communication channels – her own personal metacortex . . .

Accelerando

Quantum-entangled communication means when one bit changes, another changes simultaneously. It happens in every day life, in a more balanced way. As an aside, uranium exists as a mineral in harmony, as a part of the whole. When taken out, isolated, and separated from the rest of life, radioactive decay happens and the surrounding environment turns toxic. Same thing happens to create table sugar. Sugar beets are boiled and refined until the forms acceptable to the human mind is created. That is, little white cubes, sand like, having no taste, only a stimulant to the mind. Why no taste? Just buy some molasses and see what you’ve missed. What monsters modern economic structures can create in the name of “shelf life”, “profit margin”, and “food safety” through pasteurization.

Putting the aside aside, and putting what’s left over aside, is the issue from the previous post. Thoughts can cross, just as the sea can cross, from the painting to its environment, from the machine to the brain. I, for one thing I can vote for, would elect to let the machine take over the 98% of my thoughts that are repetitive. Then I can devote my self to wholly creative pursuits. It’s like writting a novel without having to remember what happens next in the plot, because it’s just one thought away. Then I can do something totally outlandish, say, reverse the fate of the character, with a new thought I create. The machine then churns, and I get a perfectly consistent plot. In this way, my work is wholly creative. This, by the way, is how a eudaimoniac society functions.

However, let’s return to the 2% of the thoughts that are non-repetitive, dynamically generated. Do thoughts generate thoughts? If so, the world is created by our thoughts, and our meaningless thoughts are showing us a meaningless world. The previous sentence included. Now you have no hope, absolutely none, of escaping it.

The other alternative, of course, is to twist reality. This is where value and money comes. Here, this will be the answer to all of your life’s questions/problems. Here, buy this and you will be better than everybody else. It will make you ★ “special” ★. All it really comes down to is the foundation of our materialistic society. Science takes on an “objective” view of reality, itself not included in the picture, and says thoughts are created by stimulus. Pav Lov rang the bell every time before feeding the dogs. He rings it many more times without the food, and the dogs still come. That is the basis of the predictable universe. The universe is governed by certain laws, although your thoughts are totally meaningless. Physicists like Stephen Hawking since Aristotle’s time are still trying to model the universe with meaningless thoughts.

But wait a minute! I now come to a contradiction. The kind allowed by Plato in a proof. Quantum entangled bits means the cause cannot be separated from effect. As you are get out the coat, a thought comes that you should fetch the umbrella. Next minute, it rains as you take a step out the door. That’s quantum entanglement. Where did the tought come from? Where did the rain come from? (more details in Schrodinger’s cat) Now science has the fundamental assumption of cause and effect, in which certain stimulus causes a determined set of behavior. By contradiction, a twisted reality (which means a fake reality) cannot exist.