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Deep Brain Stimulation
I just saw an article about how a brain pacemaker revived a man who was a ‘vegetable’ for 6 years. Previously deep brain stimulation (DBS) was used to treat Parkinson disease, clinical depression, etc. While brain stimulation as concept is around since 1940s, until now there was not enough knowledge and techniques to identify where in the brain confuse or abnormal signals are generated, nor how to implant at millimeter accuracy electrodes near these areas. Note that this is quite different as the historical brain stimulation, is not just to excite the brain, but to re-tune and re-modulate signals. As for the side effects, literature reports: apathy, hallucinations, compulsive gambling, hypersexuality, cognitive dysfunction and depression. If DBS could revive a vegetative human, it would be very interesting what it can do on a (clinical) normal human being, just think of:
- Penfield mood organ of ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ by Philip K. Dick
- Tek a computerised mind-altering drug, from ‘TekWar’ by William Shatner
- memory implants as in ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ by William Gibson
- SimStim entertainment and cyberdeck consoles as in ‘Neuromancer’ also by William Gibson
If you think it will take ages to get there, just bypass the normal lengthy treatment adoption in western countries, get your electrodes implanted somewhere in Honk Kong, a smuggled brain pacemaker and load your favourite russian firmware on it. Once you have the electrodes the rest is just as Steve Jobs said about the iPhone and the iPod: “it is just software.” Oh, wait — be careful what you load on your brain, use a barrier maze to protect you from ghost hacking and beware of black ICE when you go online.
Black Iron Prison
I was browsing the National Secular Society site, and from there Concordat Watch site and other articles — including the fact that the Pope Benedict’s plans to revive the Latin Mass. And I recalled a dreadful truth: “The Empire Never Ended” from ‘Valis,’ the book of revelations by Philip K. Dick…
Ah, and what about the post title? The Black Iron Prison is a concept of an all-pervasive system of social control postulated in the Tractates Cryptica Scriptura, a summary of an unpublished Gnostic exegesis included in VALIS.
“Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra– or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it.”
- Philip K. Dick, Valis, London; Gollancz, 2001, pp. 54 – 55