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Colonizing the Mind

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Transhumanism - Engineering the Human Condition

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Abstract

With a metaphor destined to become very famous, in 1942, the famed neurophysiologist Charles S. Sherrington defined the brain as “the enchanted loom.” As well as being a scientist, Sherrington was also a poet, and he never missed the opportunity to combine his two passions, coloring brain activity with poetry. And it is truly enchanted, that bizarre kilogram and a half of matter that lies behind our eyes, which, for some unknown reason, is capable of thinking. Not that we have not tried to understand the brain; indeed, especially in the last two decades, thanks in part to magnetic resonance – which has given us the opportunity to look inside of this biological puzzle – our knowledge on the subject has grown considerably. But the mystery remains, as we see now.

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Notes

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    C. S. Sherrington, Man on his nature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1942, p. 178.

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    Electrical stimulation of the brain is as old as neurology itself. If, in 1870, Eduard Hitzig and Gustav Fritsch showed that electrically stimulating dogs’ brains produced bodily movements, in 1874, Robert Bartholow did the same with regard to human beings. Well-known are the experiments conducted between the ‘50s and the ‘70s by the famous Spanish physiologist José Delgado, who managed to achieve a certain control of human and animal behavior through electrical stimulation. The scholar invented the “stimoceiver,” a radio-controlled microchip implanted in the brain and capable of transmitting electrical impulses for the purpose of modifying basic behaviors and sensations, such as aggression and the perception of pleasure. Later, Delgado wrote a rather controversial book, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society. In it, the author claimed that, after having tamed and civilized the nature that surrounded him, man had to civilize his inner self – obviously through procedures similar to those he had studied. See J. Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, Harper and Row, New York 1969.

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  18. 18.

    This affirmation could, however, be objected to by asking why, since the Self is illusory, one must go through so much trouble to preserve or copy it.

  19. 19.

    See Bruce F. Katz, Neuroengineering the Future. Virtual Minds and the Creation of Immortality, Infinity Science Press, Hingham 2008.

  20. 20.

    P. Moore, Enhancing Me. The hope and the hype of human enhancement, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester 2008, p. 61.

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  22. 22.

    P. Moore, Enhancing Me. The hope and the hype of human enhancement, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester 2008, p. 56.

  23. 23.

    Ibid. p. 57.

  24. 24.

    This is an idea proposed by Transhumanist Keith Henson, who called it the “Far Edge Party.” Cf. https://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.h.keith.henson

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  28. 28.

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    http://www.minduploading.org/

  30. 30.

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    P. D. Hopkins, Why Uploading Will Not Work, or The Ghosts Haunting Transhumanism, «International Journal of Machine Consciousness», Vol. 4, n. 1, 2012, pp. 229–243.

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    K. Sotala and H. Valpola, Coalescing Minds: Brain Uploading-Related Group Mind Scenarios, “International Journal of Machine Consciousness”, Vol. 4, n. 1, 2012, pp. 293–312. http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/S1793843012400173

  36. 36.

    See J. C. R. Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis, “IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics,” Vol. HFE-1, pp. 4–11, March 1960. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html

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  38. 38.

    The ideas of DARPA in this regard are numerous, as can be seen in the special documentary produced by them, The Future of Augmented Cognition. http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/augcog2007

  39. 39.

    http://exocortex.com/

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  41. 41.

    D. Pearce, The Biointelligence Explosion. How to self-improve organic robots will modify their own source code and bootstrap our way to full-spectrum superintelligence, 2012. http://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/

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    Bruce F. Katz, Neuroengineering the Future. Virtual Minds and the Creation of Immortality, Infinity Science Press, Hingham 2008.

  43. 43.

    George A. Miller, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information, «Psychological Review», Vol. 101, No. 2, 1956, pp. 343–352. Recent studies seem to have shown that this “magic number” is less than seven; most likely, it is no more than four. http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/peterson/psy430s2001/Miller%20GA%20Magical%20Seven%20Psych%20Review%201955.pdf

  44. 44.

    T. K. Landauer, How much do people remember? Some estimates of the quantity of learned information, «Cognitive Science», 10, pages 477–493, 1986. http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/1986v10/i04/p0477p0493/MAIN.PDF

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    http://www.transvision2007.com/page.php?id=260

  46. 46.

    Michael Anissimov, Top Ten Cybernetic Upgrades Everyone Will Want, http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2007/01/ten-transhumanist-upgrades-everyone-will-want/

  47. 47.

    E. Yudkowsky, What is Seed AI, 2000, http://www.singinst.org/seedAI/seedAI.html

  48. 48.

    N. Vita-More, Wisdom [Meta-Knowledge] through AGI/Neural Macrosensing. http://www.natasha.cc/consciousnessreframed.htm

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  1. Gorizia, Italy

    Roberto Manzocco

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Manzocco, R. (2019). Colonizing the Mind. In: Transhumanism - Engineering the Human Condition. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04958-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04958-4_7

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