On the intellectual potential of brain implants

The forms of apperception, to use Kant's terminology, for it is readily translated into English, are distributed over different areas of our brain, which possess the curious trait that electric currents that conform to the natural data format of the form of apperception in question enter, possibly after a period of adaptation of a couple of days, our mind as apperceptions of that form. If you see the world through a horizontal mirror that turns the world upside down, your visual cortex will turn it back upside up after a couple of days and if you plug a matrix of pins that electrically recreate a greyscale image directly into the visual cortex, a blind(folded) person will again start to vaguely, depending on the number of columns and lines of pins, see its surroundings after a couple of days.

This is well known now for some time. Hence brain research aims to find the natural data formats of forms of perception where they are not as obvious as in the case of images, sounds, for instance, are not simply represented by wave forms, but compressed into pulses, owing to the way in which we create time.

Other than images and sounds the tensions by which we control our muscles have been studied, exoskeletons having fascinated the public imagination since James Cameron's Aliens. However, the focus of this post is on the intellectual and not the physical potential of brain implants.

Notions have also been studied, but they are more complex and less localised, complex notions, that is, like that of an apple, what could have been predicted based on what Plato wrote in the seventh letter.

Now, the intellectual potential of brain implants is to understand all natural data formats and use them to monitor and control all brain activity and that includes notions and feelings and tastes and smells and pain and temperature and all other being in space and time as a perceiving, wanting and acting entity related assessments.

So what is that good for?

1. More direct and more encompassing telecommunication (films that not only shine and sound, but also taste and smell and inflict pain and... but we're leaving the area of communication here...) and
   
2. emotional and intellectual control (of police officers, soldiers, agents of any kind...)
   

One model to maximally exploit this is of course portrayed in The Matrix. But that is about controlling people, not increasing their potential. So, in what way can our potential be increased by these two uses? Well, we have words to communicate our intellectual assessments and music for our emotional ones, that is they are languages, and so are gestures, and any of our languages might be considered wanting, and brain implants credibly promise more precise communication, but then again the re-interpretation of our thoughts might also be a good thing, something that clarifies them. More intriguing would be a group consciousness like the Borg in Star Trek: First Contact supposedly have. Actually, a computer could scan all thoughts and then create their synthesis and force that synthesis back into the individual brains (I am the beginning, the end. The one who is many. [...] I am the collective. [...] I bring order into chaos. Now, is that cryptic?), which would react to it, what would be scanned again and so on, but considering our limited ability to hold thoughts, the only way that this would actually work is if the central computer not so much synthesises as compartmentalises our thoughts, in which case we would have to mostly act without knowing the (exact) reason, which would after all explain the weird detachedness of the Borg.

Our relation to God is of course not very different, though we probably understand more of His plans than we would of the central computer's. Mind you, the only thing that needs research in this quest are the natural data formats, the rest of the technology exists and the conceptual understanding of its use as well.

However, just like in The Matrix the machines could do better than using human bodies for batteries, the Borg queen could do better than using human brains for compartmentalisation, so there's really no reason why we should consent to becoming subprocessors.