What might brain implants do to humanity?

I wrote this in February 2016, before I knew of Neuralink’s existence. It was in response to the following question:

What are the biggest ways in which the world 20 years from now will probably be different from today? What are the biggest “X factors” (changes that are not probable, but are possible and could be huge)?

Implants + Internet = ImplanTelepathy™!

Batman Forever' (1995) and the Brain Drain Moment | That Moment In

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Is it possible for the Internet to one day gain consciousness?

A recent Quora answer I wrote:

Sometimes I wonder if Quora bots are conscious! 🙂

I often think about whether the internet could become sentient… and also whether it is already! But the most important question is this: how would we tell one way or the other? Perhaps each of us is like a neuron in the internet’s hive brain.

Neurons and brains are separated by a gulf of scale, structure, and complexity. How could a neuron ‘know’ that the brain it is part of is conscious? How could a brain know if a neuron (or group of neurons) is conscious? It may be an unbridgeable gap. And the same sort of gap may exist between humans and the internet. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, if the internet could talk we would not understand it.

In any case, the internet doesn’t even have a ‘mouth’ or a central communication device. How do we decide what the internet is ‘saying’? I could imagine a future in which ‘analysts’ read into the internet’s dynamic trajectories in the way astrologers read into the stars’ trajectories.

Sometimes I think of consciousness as an irreducibly social phenomenon. Consciousness may be the ‘fire’ produced by the ‘friction’ between different intelligent agents that each have partial knowledge of the world. Perhaps the test of whether the internet is conscious involves encountering an alien internet. Perhaps when civilizations from two different planets interact, their ‘planetary consciousnesses’ (or internets) interact in a way that their inhabitants only have a dim awareness of.

Is it possible for the Internet to one day gain consciousness?

Where do thoughts come from?

Here’s my answer to a recent Quora question: Where do our thoughts come from?

Thoughts come from nowhere! And from everywhere! I think both answers contain an element of truth.

Subjectively, our thoughts come from nowhere: they just pop into our heads, or emerge in the form of words leaving our mouths.

Objectively, we can say that thoughts emerge from neural processes, and that neural processes come from everywhere. What I mean by this is that the forms and dynamics of thought are influenced by everything that has a causal connection with you, your society, and your species.

We don’t know exactly how thoughts emerge from the activity of neurons — or even how to define what a thought is in biological terms (!)— but there is plenty of indirect evidence to support the general claim that the brain is where thoughts emerge.

The neuronal patterns that mediate and enable thought and behavior have proximal and distal causes.

The proximal causes are the stimuli and circumstances we experience. These experiences have causal impacts on our bodies, and are also partly caused by our bodies. The forces inside and outside the body become manifest in the brain as ‘clouds’ of information. In the right circumstances these nebulous patterns can condense into streams of thought. We can add to these identifiable causes the mysterious element of randomness: that seemingly ever-present “ghost in the machine” that makes complex processes such as life fundamentally unpredictable. Perhaps randomness is what provides the ‘seeds’ around which the condensation of thoughts can occur.

The distal causes are our experiential history and our evolutionary pre-history. Our experiential history consists of the things we’ve learned, consciously and unconsciously, and the various events that have shaped our bodies and our neural connections in large and small ways. Our evolutionary pre-history is essentially the experiential history of our species, and more generally of life itself, going back all the way to the first single-celled organism. The traits of a species are a sort of historical record of successes and failures. And going even further, life ultimately takes its particular forms because of the possibilities inherent in matter — and this takes us all the way to the formation of stars and planets.