A few weeks ago during class we began exploring the topic of context with regard to spoken language and the written word, and the vectors through which these modes of communication can travel. We experienced first-hand how unsettling it can be to blur the lines between verbal, face-to-face conversation, technology-enabled conversation via a computer or writing utensil, and written words that are not conversation so much as they are the products of thought processes in a distant person’s head that they have converted into written language for anyone to access. Then I started thinking about how technologies have advanced to the point that, as long as a piece of information is uploaded onto the Internet, it doesn’t matter how distant or obscure someone is. You can still experience their thoughts within a tiny fraction of time that it might take to track down a hard copy of that information. So in a sense, the Internet is the ever-expanding collaborative result of a mass upload of the minds of the human race; with the added benefit that you don’t have to be a psychic to read it. And every time someone takes a piece of information from the Internet they have just downloaded a part of the collaborative mind into their own. When I incorporated the concept of language metaphorically corresponding with the physical behaviors of parasitic organisms, I started wondering if this concept of uploading and downloading information could be taken from the biomass at large and used at the level of the individual. What if we could figure out a way to download one person’s mind and upload it into another person?
It’s a vague statement, I know, but I don’t think that it’s as far-fetched as you might initially think. There’s lots of technologies out there right now that are capable of doing part of what would theoretically be necessary in order to achieve this goal. For instance, functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI) machines are able to actively view the activity of neurons in the brain because of a material composed of oxygenated hemoglobin (deoxyhemoglobin) chemically bound to glucose molecules that is injected into the subject’s bloodstream. The deoxyhemoglobin acts as a visible marker and the glucose is used by the neurons that are currently expending the most energy. So when one area of the brain is working harder than the rest, glial cells (support cells in the nervous system) transport the glucose to that area to supply those neurons with sustenance and that area lights up on the fMRI since the deoxyhemoglobin markers are bound to the glucose molecules. If we could isolate a signature pattern of movement of neurons while a subject is learning a specific piece of information, we might be able to replicate that singularly unique pattern. The problem is that an fMRI won’t give detail at a cellular level so it wouldn’t be able to give us that pattern on it’s own. However, an oscilloscope has the capability of transducing the action potential at an individual neuron or junction between two neurons into a readable pattern for the computer, which then transduces it again into a comprehendible pattern on a screen. If an fMRI could be enhanced with the ability of an oscilloscope to pick up minute electrical impulses and take that information and transduce it into a set of each individual neuron’s activity during the event, perhaps it could yield a list of all the activity in that part of the cortex and collaborate it into an electronic copy that the computer can read and replicate. Of course the list would be very, very, very long but that’s okay because just like we trust that a typed sentence will be the same on one computer as it is on another computer once the information is sent, we would also rely on this computer to act as a volume manager in which every single idiosyncratic electrical impulse would be saved exactly as it was recorded.
I’m the first to admit that this is a rough and fairly implausible concept, especially with our current level of understanding about the human brain. It would be a process that would have to record all neural activity in the brain that was related to the process of external stimuli being received, understood, and passed on to memory storage which results in a new connection or multiple connections being formed at the cellular level. Since brain damage can cause you to forget things, and we can see brain damage, I would be willing to bet that there was neural connection in that part of the brain, prior to the damage, that we would be able to notice was no longer intact after the brain damage, if we had known how to locate and identify it.
This is where the signature pattern comes in. If a pattern could be isolated that was specific to the neural connection(s) pertaining to a piece of information, it could be electronically documented. If it were saved as a electronic file, that process could then be reversed in order to re-create an exact copy of what would essentially be a neural program that, once installed would instigate a set of neural commands that would induce precisely the same neuronal activity in that area of the brain and create a copy of that event in the new brain. This would, of course, require the invention of another highly technical and most likely improbable piece of equipment that would basically function as a reverse-oscilloscope. Where a normal oscilloscope detects, transduces, and presents neural activity to us, the reverse-oscilloscope would detect the stored neural program from the computer, transduce it back to neural signals, and present it to the cortex.
If successful, the brain that received this information would then theoretically have the same neural connection(s) as the original cortex did. In this case, it would not just be like reading the same paragraph as someone else, it would be like reading the same paragraph, while sitting in the same chair, at the same time, wearing the same clothes, remembering the same memories inspired by the paragraph, with the same people sitting around you, receiving the same amount of additional information from the same lecturer, at the same lecture, feeling the same emotions, for the same reasons, and noticing the same distractions as the original reader of the paragraph. It would be an exact replication of the both the external and internal context in which that paragraph was stored in the original brain. The significance of this is that information is constantly distorted by differences in context and interpretation from one person to another. If you could identify and record a piece of information such as what happened during a specific event directly from the cortex of an eye-witness and transmit that event in the form of a neural program into the brain of someone who wanted to know what had happened during the event but wasn’t there to witness it, this would be the closest that we could ever get to preserving the exact details and context of the event.
Then we have to ask: what would the result of this neural programming process coming into existence and perhaps even being popularized one day be? In this case it could potentially make the Internet and maybe even language, as we know it, obsolete. A mass availability of technology like this could yield volumes and volumes of files, each containing information about a specific thing directly from the brain of the person who witnessed it, or wrote it, or thought of it, depending on what the thing is. Libraries would become museums dedicated to the remembrance of the written word since reading and writing would no longer be necessary or optimal for obtaining information that came into existence in or near the instigation of neural programming because all information pertaining to knowledge, medical advancement, current events, fiction and non-fiction stories, etc. would be catalogued in a master computer, or possibly multiple computers, that would represent the informational archives of the future.
In addition, crimes like murder and rape would be easily documented and accessible, so long as the perpetrator could be found and the neural connection(s) relevant to the event downloaded into an electronic file. Prosecution would then be a simple matter of uploading this file into the brains of the jurors and the judge. But what would the lawyers do then, you ask? Well that brings me to the definite negative consequences of neural programming. Just like with any other computer program, someone will inevitably figure out how to hack or re-write neural programs. This would be the new job description of a lawyer, and chances are they would be illegal since court representation would no longer be necessary. It would be this new breed of lawyer’s job to access and download the event from either the persecutor’s brain or the master computer, re-write it, and re-upload it as seemingly the same file before it could be viewed as evidence. On an even greater scale, this kind of technology could be the ultimate biological warfare or terrorist attack. If some diabolical hacker figured out to write a computer virus equivalent within a neural program and uploaded it into the public archives in the place of some particularly popular neural program (like a neural you-tube video or something), it could destroy the central nervous systems of every person to access that file and upload it into their cortex.
What it comes down to is that history, as we know it, might be wrong because we only know what the people who recorded it or re-told it wanted us to know. This is also true for every event that wasn’t witnessed first hand, and every conversation that you didn’t personally hear. This is the loss of context that occurs with each removal from the primary source. We live in a world of human language but this inevitably means that we also live in a world of distortion. So if we could download the human mind, we would be able to replicate and propagate context.
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