I’ll Experiment on my own Brain When the Singularity Comes.
I’d like to be able to play around with my own brain, switching on and off various disabilities like prosopagnosia, also known a face-blindness, the inability to recognize faces.
According to Steven Pinker in “How the Mind Works” brain damage can cause all sorts of interesting and illuminating disabilities. One may lose the ability to recognize *anything*. He gives an example of someone who could draw a perfect and highly detailed picture of a bird while looking at a photograph of a bird, while not being able to recognize it as a bird. Amazing. What an interesting experience that would be. What insights into the nature of consciousness it would give, not in the abstract, but in one’s face, so to speak.
Maybe one day it will be commonplace to temporarily be like this. Blind sight. Inability to attend to anything on one’s left, being split into two or more people by having one’s brain temporarily separated into into two or more parts. And things we haven’t thought of. If so, this could reduce the strength of various illusions we have about ourselves and our brains.
If consciousness is an illusion, I want to know it, and if, when the technology makes it possible, a lot of people start doing these sorts of self-experiments, including temporarily creating all sorts of illusions and/or delusions, it could be the death knell for the illusion of consciousness.
Eliminative materialism may become not just an abstract idea but a visceral personal experience. This could mean the end of consciousness as we know it, and that might explain the Bayesian/anthropic question of why we are alive now, and not at some time in the future, whcn there are not billions of people, but quadrillions.
Imagine being able to have any experience, including not knowing that it was an illusion, due to selective temporary removal/suppression of memories.
Imagine being able to remove completely one’s fear of death, or sense of self. Imagine being able to subjectively be under the impression of anything at all. By this stage of technology, we’d have the ability to live forever, too.
The singularity if and when it arrives could provide all this more or less immediately. It’s pretty mind blowing.
