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An electromagnetic monster

What if you could connect your brain to a mobile hard drive and run it on your computer. If so, would the computer be able to think and feel like a sapiens? Would the computer be you? 




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

 

9788280877369In Yuval Noah Harari's book on the history of humanity, Sapiens, called the last and 20. the chapter "Homo sapiens' finally". The chapter is a pandang to Huxley's Brave New World and Spielberg's Jurassic Park – and what is going on in many American laboratories at the time of writing, is enough to give us backwards, all the while the biotechnological revolution not only puts "an ear of cattle cartilage cells on the back of a mouse", but also, as a researcher at Havard University suggests: "Now that the Neanderthal genome project is complete, we can implant reconstructed Neanderthal DNA into a sapiens egg cell and thus produce the first Neanderthal child in 30 years […] Several women have already offered to be surrogate mothers for the Neanderthal child."

But there is more, much more, as it has been in the books of science fiction writers for so long. We've heard of this strange creature, the Kyborg Castle, which is a crossover of organic and inorganic materials like humans with bionic additives; what started with glasses, dentures, pacemakers, artificial hands and feet after stepping on mines or being injured in road accidents, in other words prosthetics, but now Harari writes about something completely different and very sophisticated: “The last generation of hearing aids will be sometimes called 'bionic ears'. The device consists of an implant which absorbs sound through a microphone located in the outer ear. The implant filters sounds, identifies human voices and transmits them to electrical signals that are sent straight to the auditory nerve and on to the brain. ”

Bionic arms. Now it is not only Huxley or Spielberg's eerie world that we see the outline, but Cameron's Avataruniverse – it is the complete replacement of the body. If not so long, it is the head that is replaced, who are we then, without the head, or with another's brain, not just changed, but converted neurological to another brainstem? And everything inside the head comes with – who are we then? Something new in the extension of the action history of homo sapiens, or what we call the soul, unless the labors are so cynical that they do not care about the soul, only the organic and the inorganic; that is, if the bionic works, and with the Neanderthal in mind, if anyone is crazy enough to be provoked, via a homo sapiens, who feeds a Neanderthal fetus, and by implanting bionic arms – "American electrician Sullivan lost both arms to the shoulders of an accident in 2001. Today he has two bionic arms [...] The special thing about Sullivan's new arms is that they rule with thought power "- on an adult Neanderthal, for" for example, bionic arms can be made much stronger than the organic and make even a world champion in boxing feel like a weakling ”.

Eye prosthesis and kyborghai. But all this also has a practical side of the good, before the military turns this into something else and can become a cruel weapon: "Retina Implant", which is a German company, is about to make another type prosthesis; a retinal prosthesis that can help blind people regain some of their vision. It is a microscopic chip placed into the patient's eye, and photocells “absorb light that strikes the eye and convert it into electrical energy, which stimulates the intact nerve cells in the retina. The nerve impulses from these cells stimulate the brain, where they are transformed into vision. So far, this technology allows patients to orient themselves in the room, identifying letters and even recognizing faces. ”

DARPA, the directorate that manages the US Department of Defense's research and development projects, is on the cusp, it is said, of turning insects into coastal citizens; this is really a new world – for me, not for the US weapons engineers, for them this is the foundations of the finds, to have a fly or cockroach implanted with electronic processors so they can fly, light and land anywhere, while on the floor, up to the shoe soles of a North Korean general, or on the wall of the Russian Embassy anywhere in the world, if not in the office of a Russian five-star general, under the roof like an organic fly or myhank, film and record the sound between the general and his superior. In the movie Eye in the Sky by Gevin Hood (2015) Helen Mirren plays an English officer who leads an attack on a terrorist cell in Kenya. To get into a house, the English defense, via an on-site agent, uses a mutated beetle from a cellphone to fly into the house and from a beam to film the whole thing that is being returned to Mirren in England and their allies in the US .

Or at sea, to develop – I kept writing "educate" – coastal sharks, as marine scientists dream of "being able to identify electromagnetic fields underwater created by submarines and mines by leveraging the shark's natural ability to detect magnetism, an ability that far exceeds some man-made detectors. "

If not long, it is the head that is replaced – who are we then, without the head, or with another's brain, not just changed, but converted neurological to another brainstem?

War Curriculum. Viewed in light – if not in the shadow – of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's comments about the control society, these technological innovations are something completely new – and it is not just control that is about, but about a sophisticated nuisance, a nuisance we do not experience as a nuisance, but rather as a liberation from something we do not know what is. The plague has been transformed into a liberation, as if curing all the world's sickness always brings – if not with it – a downside, a military level, which makes it very large of the smallest formats. Being able to keep certain tumors in check will certainly also open up to a terrible weapon that does not hunt for metastases, but to hidden, inside, secret thoughts, and what was once a book title on something that was motionless is the first thing to fall : "But you never get my thoughts."

And it becomes almost parodic if it is true – as I read, if it is not a parody of the taste – that it would and mad the book of Deleuze and Guattari, which is almost a piece of anarchist pondering, A thousand plateaus, is used for teaching at the Israeli war school, as another type of strategy for how to attack an enemy who has no idea what is happening; Like French theory, the new key is to fight both the inner and the outer enemy – but I have no idea how it is possible; it must be like cultivating a war game in which the unpredictable causes the enemy to get lost and have no idea what to do, and in this uncertainty and hesitation there is a head start. Soon it is Walter Benjamin who becomes the syllabus of a war school.

What could a war school use for Walter Benjamin? His reading of Kafka or Proust, if not Baudelaire, or any of his fiction books that One-way skirt street or Childhood in Berlin, if not his work on Paris, if not travel letters from Oslo and Bergen to take the Hurtigruten? Then he gives up his allegorical reading, as if two of our largest cities have a format that does not clothe an allegorical reading: "Things are pure: Three is three, brass is brass, brick is brick. Cleanliness drives them back into themselves, making them until the margin is identical to themselves. ” And then he arrives in Svolvær: “The streets in Svolvær are empty. And behind the windows, the paper rolls are pulled down. Do people sleep? It's after midnight; from one dwelling the voices are heard, from another the sounds of a meal. "

Like a more dressed-up Walter Benjamin would be easier to use than the one alleging Paris and the city's flamboyant living Baudelaire, Harari gets the final touch in his descriptions of a new world: "Imagine if you could connect your brain to a mobile hard drive and run it on computer. If so, would your computer be able to think and feel like a sapiens? And would it be you or someone else? What if computer programmers could create a whole new but digital brain made up of computer codes, I-feeling, consciousness and memory? Would it be a person if you ran this program on your computer? Would you be charged with murder if you deleted it? "

Who controls such a bionic brain, and what can it accomplish? Installed in a killing machine, apparently disciplined, before it, along with its kinsmen, wipe out homo sapiens, like the dinosaurs once gone – and so that Foucault's last words in his famous book The order of things becomes a truth without modifications: "That man will be blotted out, like a face carved in sand at the beach."

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