My cranium is open source?
Project: The great enhancement debate, Polytopia

A response to Wildcat's "My cranium, my castle?"


Thank you Wildcat for the interesting post. Indeed the prospect of accessing one's private experiential space is a very plausible future scenario, and indeed it is a matter of deep concern. The concern however is not about the issue of privacy but rather about the profound impact such mind probing technologies will have on social structure and on the individual. In science fiction literature, scenarios that include full noetic (coming from noose the Greek word for mind) reading, memory erasing and editing, memory transference, experiential filters and other even more radical options, are abundant. (The Golden age trilogy, Pandora star, Total recall, Mind scan, Permutation City, and Johnny Mnemonic, just to name a few).

Interventions in individual memory and cognitive functions enabled by technology, seem inevitable. However in the question of privacy and security, the same technologies that create the problem are also those that will offer solutions. Mental firewalls, external secure storage of experiential memories. Sensory and cognitive filters interfaced to the brain are already in the horizon.

The value of privacy is not derived solely from our sentiments, but rather from its significance in the evolutionary playground.
Privileged access to information stands at the basis of many important evolutionary advantages of living organisms from viruses and bacteria to humans and complex human organizations. Hiding and seeking, attacking and protecting privileged access to information, are therefore very ancient activities in the evolutionary playground. In the human realm, technology is continuously pushing the limits of this playground. The human mind is but a new frontier of the this evolutionary game.

It is my belief the same technology that threats our privacy and cognitive liberty will also provide the means to protect both. In this sense technology's influence is on the very definition of the playground rather than biasing the game. In the light of the evolutionary perspective however, the ethical issue here needs refocusing and creative approach, and our very concepts of privacy and cognitive liberty must be augmented and given a new significance not in the light of the past but in the light of a future profoundly transformed by technology. This conceptual shift is necessary if we wish to meet this future on favorable terms.

Where might such new ethical approach come from? It seems that an interesting step would be to identify the kind of change we are about to face. Heinz Von Foerster, one of the pioneers of cybernetics, noted that our nervous system has about 100-200 million external sensors, but five orders of magnitude more internal sensors, neurons sensitive to changes in the behavior of other neurons, that is. It follows that we are about 100,000 times more sensitive to ourselves than to anything happening around us communicated by raw sensory signals. The difference in degrees of interconnectivity is what significantly sets the brain as a private domain. It seems that the main impact of technology is primarily in the change it introduces to interconnectivity (can also be described in terms of bandwidth), and the difference in interconnectivity. This impact can be addressed in many domains of which the web is of course prominent. Our mental privacy and cognitive liberty depend first and foremost on the difference of interconnectivity. Moreover, the very concept of the individual, as currently understood, depends on the difference in interconnectivity. Once this difference changes, i.e. internal states of the nervous system are becoming increasingly accessible, our very notion of privacy, privileged access, cognitive liberty and individuality should be reassessed.

Bottom line is that in the future the very definition of individuality will probably be derived not from the arbitrary conditions of one’s biological makeup, but rather how one is connected and to what. The degree of individuation will depend on difference in interconnectivity and this will become the subject matter of our ethical debate.

On top of that, privileged access to information and controlling the degree of interconnectivity will certainly be correlated to the computation power available to the individual. The degree of individuality and privacy available will critically depend on computation power and bandwidth. The ethics of the future if so will probably deal with regulating interconnectivity, the flow of information, and the computation resources necessary to establish a basic domain of experiential privacy. Becoming interconnected minds who share all such resources might become an increasingly attractive existential option. It might be the end of individualism as we know it.

Tue, Apr 8, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: The great enhancement debate, Polytopia

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