> Imagine if we could connect your brain directly to a computer. Imagine if you could do things like instantly and precisely recall any Wikipedia article, any news story, any mathematical formula. Imagine if arithmetic goes from a skill you learn to a thing your brain does with 100% accuracy.

You're talking about transferring information FROM computer TO brain. We have no idea how to do it.

Transferring information FROM brain TO computer is achievable with modern tech (and that's what this link shows), but not vice versa.

The awesome thing is that our brain is great at learning how to use and make sense of new inputs. The big one being literacy, you never think about it but you learned to interpret strange little patterns first as sounds that you hear in your head and then as entire concepts like “cat” or “happy”. The same can be said for spoken language or mathematics or musical notation. I don’t doubt that the human brain will have little trouble learning that X pattern of electrical inputs to a group of neurons means “cat” or the sound of A or even an image of a bird. It won’t come instantly and it won’t be identical to the thing it represents without wiring directly into the visual or auditory regions but it will give us a new sense and a new language.

It’s not really all that good at taking in new inputs, at least if our brains are anything like other mammals. There have been experiments where animals have certain senses depraved (eye sewn shut, for example) early in life, and then opened after their brain had fonished developing. Their brains never «learned» to take in the new sensory signals afterwards. At least not to the extent of a regular individual with all their senses since birth.

I’d be more interested in studies on people who have been deaf from birth and received cochlear implants later in life.

Yep, famously done with two kittens, one with agency to move and the other paws dragging on the ground - it was effectively blind and did not react to stimulus because it did not create meaning.

I remembered those body modifications where people insert small magnets under some finger's skin.

After a while a new feeling arises...

At least half the value or learning arithmetic is that it shapes ones neural network in some fashion in a way to make it better at certain types of thought. Skipping that learning process presumably skips those physical changes as well.

We could train our "soft" neural networks very efficiently with a computer interface. Maybe not as fast as dedicated software neural networks, but the human mind responds very quickly to feedback loops (sometimes destructively).

Which makes me wonder, what will an overtrained brain look like? What kinds of illnesses are we unleashing on the world by attaching an interface like that directly to the brain?

My pet theory is that anxiety is an over trained brain reaction.

In a lot of recovery circles there's an underlying concept of "getting out of your head" where the methodology that arises in each circle attempts to get a person to leave the circular thoughts in their heads and do/think something else.

I think this is why psylocybin is so effective for depression: it induces a state of plasticity in the brain that gives someone an opportunity to fill in the ruts they had been mentally pacing in.

Transferring information TO BRAIN is sort of the raison d'être of computers.

This comment FROM brain TO computer, FROM computer TO computer, FROM computer TO your brain.

It's awesome.

I think the point is that this brain computer interface speeds up the from-brain-to-computer part of the interface. The from-computer-to-brain transfer is the same old fashioned way.

We have perfectly good analog inputs, I'd rather we start with improving those rather than open the digital 6th sense box.

How much can you improve the human ear? More importantly how much can you improve the speed with which you perceive with the human ear and actually understand and retain information from it? You can probably double it’s efficiency. But can you make it take in information with perfect clarify at 10x the rate? 1000x? A direct interface into the brain could hypothetically bypass the ear entirely. And there is precedent for this already: we went from pointing and grunting, to speech, to writing, to digital writing, to the web. Imagine what it might have been like for me to convey this message to you if we lived in a hunter gatherer society before human speech was a thing? Now flip that forward: what specialized tools could we use to speed up communication more? About the only things we have left are real time translation devices and an AR capable of augmenting what we are looking at with relevant labels and articles. Beyond that we have no place to improve without inventing a radically new way to interface, and in nature you either improve or you die. Nothing stands still and neither will this.

Lets start with some nematodes and work our way up. Would probably need to own a Cyber-Scooby before having some digital inputs implanted.

Yes that’s true. But I think two way communication is a goal for a lot of research and whole orders of magnitude more difficult, likely not impossible.

But much more speculative. Just because we can imagine something doesn't mean science can/will achieve it. Brain-to-computer communication seems much more straightforward to achieve from a technical perspective, and has enough potential to revolutionize aspects of our lives on it's own.

Actually, and fortunately, it is impossible. This sort of brain model was preemptively debunked by Kant in Critique of Pure Reason and other works.

I think it's pretty hard to argue that any philosophical work, regardless of how important or impactful or insightful it is, can "debunk" anything.

> Imagine if we could connect your brain directly to a computer.

Please, no. I’d just get even more frustrated at how slow the damn thing is.

I'd argue we already connected ourselves to computers, and we're just using the safest but slowest adapters available right now.

We could argue on "safest", but definitely the compromise on speed, ease of use and safety that I can think of that I’m the most comfortable with

I'm curious, what would a solution look like that's even safer than a touch interface (mouse, keyboard, screen) or voice?

Well, removing audio and images, leaving only text, would make it safer.

I, and probably many others, wouldn’t have stumbled upon some of the things I have. They thankfully are now only blurry memories to me, even though merely evoking them still is nauseating.

It would also dramatically reduce the impact of much of the bullshit content out there, since words appear to have much less emotional impact than images (and appear to be much less appealing), and thus be safer to society as a whole.

A text-only interface would also be much less useful and much more annoying to use.

> since words appear to have much less emotional impact than images

To some. My imagination is quite good and as a child I consumed vast quantities of print media. A lot of it wasn't appropriate for a child to consume.

Sure. It can already be a lot. Some of my worst nightmares come from my own imagination.

But we’re talking safer, not absolutely, perfectly safest.

Also, how would you compare that to the close-up picture of an Iraqi soldier burned to a crisp by a Hellfire missile, hanging out of the carcass of his scorched vehicle, staring straight into your eyes with his charred, empty eye sockets?

Or suddenly being confronted, at 12 years old, by dozens of neatly aligned child pornography thumbnails after clicking on some unclearly named link when exploring I2P, FreeNet and TOR because "decentralised", "anonymous" and "censorship-resistant" networks seemed "cool"?

There’s a reason crap people’s magazines are full of pictures, paparazzi photos can be worth what they are, and websites with a photo of a smiling human (and a clear CTA) convert better than those without.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Same here, as evidenced when one rainy Saturday afternoon the family were all together after lunch, grandparents drinking tea, me cross legged on the floor reading when I innocently asked the room “hey, what does cunt mean?’

Grandma turned puce and dad snatched the book from me, wtf are you reading?

James Herbert’s Rats trilogy. Aged 8.

Warped ever since.

Text is plenty.

I couldn't understand why my parents didn't like me calling my brother an orgasm after I had read the term in a book and liked the sound of it :)

There is so much about it that I think would be wrong, difficult, bad and we as a species can’t even imagine what it would be like. How do you install an ad blocker on an interface like that?

Very good question.

Regarding the ad blocker, one thing I definitely can’t wait for are true AR glasses that could act as a real-life ad blocker.

Being out in the street doesn’t mean I have in any way agreed to being constantly drowned in and have my attention stolen away by all this bloody noise.

The notion of a neurally connected Facebook or Google scares the heck out of me. Apart from the countless petabytes of data they would collect, just imagine a world where the powers that be can actually tap into your thoughts, perhaps even implant ideas that they think you should have. At a certain point, we lose our individuality and become subsumed by the global AI, game over.

But before that distant dystopian point is reached, I do hope we develop ways for paralyzed people to regain sensory control and live normal lives.

> At a certain point, we lose our individuality and become subsumed by the global AI, game over.

In a way, we already have. Each and every one of us is constantly influenced by and influencing untold numbers of people, and most beliefs and knowledge are more or less "standardised".

Most people follow the school -> (college ->) 9 to 5 -> retire consensus, and even those who believe themselves to be outliers actually behave how outliers are expected to behave, all of us furthering the goals set by others, some of which died have even died long ago.

Actual individuality is quite rare and usually expressed at a very small scale.

I think your identification of individuality and a measure of uniqueness is a mistake.

We're not individuals apart from others, the others are presupposed. The I is an abstraction in the sense that it presupposes social terms to understand itself. You need a reference, like culture, to be correctly understood as "alternative" (although 'peripheral' in terms of some specific aspects is more correct).

If you're not in a community at all, you're not going to reproduce.

Actual individuality is merely recognizing the exercised autonomy by an agent. You are still an individual even when you behave according to existing mores you did not create.

(The extra social esteem bestowed to relative difference is a cultural trend and a historical phenomenon. It does not determine our species, only our current conditions and predicaments.)

I fail to see how your arguments contradict my words.

Each ant constantly exercises it’s autonomy. Would you nonetheless argue that it has any individuality in the way the gp intended the word?

I make two points that "contradict" here:

Primarily, I argue that we're a social species and cannot employ individuality without a culture and community. This contradicts any notion of being artificially programmed by a deus ex machina. On the contrary, we program and reprogram each other reciprocally and continuously. A strong AI shaping of human kind would be parasitic to existing practice, not a new thing. Kind of like how propaganda presupposes a practice of telling the truth.

Second, and perhaps wrongly so, I address the seeming notion of difference being a moral good; a sentiment I interpret in your final sentence. I might very well have misunderstood it.

Being different is not good, in and of itself. Striving to be different seems to be a recipe for unhappiness, because the internal resources cannot explode the context without a major risk of ending up in social vacuity, where your actions are systemically misinterpreted and the individual itself misinterpret his or herself on the rebound.

The so-called historical individual in Hegel , Nietzsche's grand most free of all superman, relies on contingent reality to succeed; in other words, the successful "being different" is a harmony of the individual's actions and intentions with existing but as of yet unexpressed social trends. Again, individuality presupposes sociality, completely opposing the view that "true individuality" is so rare.

It's unfair to the ant to talk about them in human terms, and I am not an expert in ants. But a human being expressing her taste is an expression of her individuality, even though it's exactly the same thing "everyone else" think as well. What matters is that it expresses her as an individual, not that it differs from the majority.

How would individuality be expressed at large scale, anyhow? Funny thought.

By figuring and trying out new ways of being instead of seeking to conform to archetypes.

By trying out new ways out of repeating situations and creating new behaviours instead of either repeating the same habits or trying to adopt someone else’s response to them.

At an individual’s scale, those would be large and have big impacts.

Much more so than the colour of my living room’s wall, my type of car or defining myself by wearing either shirts or T-shirts and trying to impose on everyone else what I consider to be professional or unprofessional.

What's so dsytopian about that?

>Imagine if you could do things like instantly and precisely recall any Wikipedia article, any news story, any mathematical formula. Imagine if arithmetic goes from a skill you learn to a thing your brain does with 100% accuracy.

I don't think this will be that big of an advantage. I know the first 20 digits of PI off the top of my head, but if you ask me to do something with this information it will still take some time. Having to look up the first 20 digits online would probably be a small portion of that time.

You can have instant access to information, but processing can still take time. I think the arithmetic part is actually more interesting. Being able to look at a table of numbers and running a statistical analysis on it would be very useful.

At the same time though, I think all of this is way harder than we think. Look at programming via voice. The current best UI for it is still pretty lackluster.

> You can have instant access to information, but processing can still take time.

You likely have processing power in your pocket. With efficient brain-to-computer and computer-to-brain interfaces, the processing part could be taken care of too; just externalized.

We would probably end up being a lot _worse_ at things like arithmetic though, since we'd use external processing for even more things (I do believe we're already loosing in things like memory and simple processing by having access to a smartphone at all times).

> He rips off his headset and goes to unplug the computer because fuck this game, all the DLC clearly ruined it.

> The most poignant scene I can think of: in 2001 A Space Odyssey, the character flies on a Pan-Am spaceship to the moon, and then goes into a phone booth to make a phone call.

Interesting that you commit the same fallacy as the parent talks about: you talk about all this complexity in biotech but then assume that there's going to be a headset with a computer in order to connect to the simulation, rather than it being directly implanted into one's brain.

I added that for a bit of color :)

eXistenZ (1999 film) was a mindfuck when I saw it.

But yeah, I think we're getting closer and closer to a true hivemind. It would have to suppress the individual personality, otherwise a lot of people will likely go insane.

Of course, it could be that's acceptable losses or they're cut off from the "advanced civilization" and left to live somewhere far from the cities.

That is, of course, if half the planet isn't flooded and turned into desert by then.

Stephen Baxter's book Coalescent shows how a human hive mind could form via an set of circumstances that could be enforced or simply arise due to the environment. His "eusocial evolution" is a pretty damn creepy idea!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent

> Now take it a step further. Inside the simulation someone introduces Hard Seltzer. The in game year is 2021 and a player just read that some NPC somewhere had just created a brain/computer interface. He rips off his headset and goes to unplug the computer because fuck this game, all the DLC clearly ruined it.

Lmao. Hard seltzer isn’t that bad

It’s proof we are in a simulation. What else but a random item generator could have come up with it?

Other countries had it for years. It's called alcopop in the UK and chuhai in Japan (except theirs goes up to 9%.)

"Alcopop" always sounded like a fake word to me but they also insist on calling vaccines "jabs".

This reads like an Asimov story! He really did have some very well informed predictions that seem accurate even nowadays.

> Now take it a step further. Death isn’t death. Like the paradox of rebuilding a ship one plank at a time, your mind stops existing in your body and occupies a collection of other bodies.

Douglas Hofstadter talks about this in "I am a Strange Loop" [1], but he argues that our 'soul fragments' as he calls them are a representation of ourselves in others. Depending on how large of a fragment they hold in our brain, we can perceive the world as they do, and think as the other person. They get to experience the world through us, in a sense, given that we 'allow them to'.

It is an interesting idea, and helps reconcile the death of our loved ones.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp...

Great post, I enjoyed reading it. To take these ideas further, Permutation City, by Greg Egan.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

I read Permutation City recently and found it in line with what we talk about now, which is so impressive for its time (1994). From OP:

> Now take it a step further: your mind is now a part of a collective globally connected network. The boundary of where “you” exist and where the rest of the world exists is erased. You can feel what other people feel.

This reminded me more of a book I've read online [1]. The synopsis doesn't do it justice, but shows the concept:

> All minds are networked together. Everyone collectively votes to punish or promote anyone for the slightest thought. Cater to your orbiters, and they'll vote to give you candy or slaves or even governorship of a metropolis. Challenge or defy your orbiters and ... well, good luck with that. You'll be down-voted until you die.

[1] https://www.wattpad.com/story/84753330-city-of-slaves-sff-co...

> Now take it a step further. People want to get away from this hive mind concept.

Why would they?

All the preceding paragraphs sound like Borg collective, but hey, if it's voluntary, it actually doesn't sound bad. As long as we can keep adtech away.

Yeah... if it's voluntary.

Working is voluntary.

Sure, you want to move to a farm far away from all the madness or you want to sit in a workshop designing robots all day, but you need money, so you "volunteer" to work some job you barely tolerate in or near a city for all of your best years.

The ads are just constant slaps in the face.

You should check out the Nexus series :)

Or watch Forbidden Planet - "Monsters from the Id"

> Now take it a step further: your mind is now a part of a collective globally connected network.

I think you just described the Borg from Star Trek