[ExI] Subject: neural interface reply

[Ben]

William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:

 > Well that's a lot of ideas and no mistake

I know!  And I haven't even mentioned the programmable immune system, 
the refactoring of quite a few biological functions, organ-building, and 
a bunch of other things.


 > though I think I'd rather stay all biological if I lived in the future.

Well, are you all biological now?  Do you count your fingernails and 
hair as biological?  They are not composed of living cells.  What about 
your bones?  They contain living cells, but are not themselves alive.

My vision for a 'Mk2' body involves a lot of biological parts and a 
fully-intact brain, but a radical reorganisation of the body so that it 
will be much easier to maintain.  My main objection to the way things 
are is that we can't repair or replace any existing parts without doing 
damage that has to heal afterwards (statistics on the number of people 
killed by the operations meant to save them would be interesting).  
Wouldn't it be better if we had bodies that were designed to be 
maintained?  I'm not thinking of a 'brain in a robot body' or a 'brain 
in a jar' kind of thing here, but a fully-functional body that was a 
hybrid of the best of both worlds, the biological and the technological 
(and when I say 'fully-functional', of course I really mean 'vastly 
superior'! ;>).


 > All of this may be greatly complicated ... glia... etc.

I'm not proposing any changes to the brain at all.  My idea involves 
replacing the peripheral nervous system with a synthetic alternative, 
but leaving the brain itself strictly alone (until we know more!).

 > And increasingly we are learning that the body helps to control the 
brain -
 > like the bacteria in our guts in very recent research.

Yes, that will be an interesting area of investigation.  Made a lot 
easier by the architecture I'm proposing, which would preserve those 
kind of interactions, but make them much more amenable to observation 
and experimentation.

Ben Zaiboc