<-- Physical Eschatology | Transhumanist Terminology | Posthuman -->
Imagine, for a moment, that our biotechnological knowledge
has exploded; that we routinely make changes to our selves and to the
organisms that surround us that can only be described as Godlike. Uplifting
chimpanzees to near human levels of intelligence; controlling the growth
of trees at such a fine grain that it is possible to simply grow a living
house; releasing swarms of engineered bacteria to cleanse the world of the
billions of tons of toxins poured into landfills, rives, oceans, and the
air above us. That sort of thing.
Also imagine that we have achived similar levels of skill with computer software
and hardware. Uploading of entire human minds to advanced computer
networks is possible; digital organisms have become endemic
and ineradicable, spreading just like normal biological organisms through
a highly automated environment; this is a society with technologies beyond anything imagined
in The Matrix.
If we assume the prior levels of technology have been attained, we can try
to imagine some of the specific applications that they imply and what those
applications would mean for the human condition. One of the most obvious
that comes to mind is the ability to learn new skills extremely rapidly,
a la the previously mentioned Matrix's uploads of new skills and abilities
(think Keanu saying, "I know Kung Fu").
The bio-infomatic organ that makes this possible is the pidgin brain. It
loads experiences, bits of knowledge, physical skills, or anything else
that can be encoded in tne neural medium into a staging area (the pidgin
brain proper) from whence it is loaded into the individual's core persona.
This process involves assimilating the new information into the permanent
neural structures of the individual.
The term pidgin brain is also sometimes used to refer to a device that can
communicate with some sort of standard neural interface and that contains
some particular set of information. In this usage it is closer to being
what we would recognize as a book, only meant for people with a far
more efficient form of communication than written language.
The only real world usages I've been able to find of this term are in the
archives of the mailing lists maintained by the World Transhumanist Association.
<-- Physical Eschatology | Transhumanist Terminology | Posthuman -->
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