Hack your mind

At your own risk

2 minute read

Suppose you could directly self edit your own mind. I think there should be a big sign that says, “Enter at your own risk.” I’ve often considered the hypothetical of what if I myself were able to “hack” my mind, in whatever form my mind was - meat or otherwise. Suppose I wanted to adjust the weightings I give various sensory inputs and the connections they make. Suppose I wanted to change my tendency to overeat (presuming I was still made of meat). Suppose I wanted to forget some traumatic event completely, or other even more intensive changes.

I think any change is risky, but I’d try to keep it to minor weighting threshold and scaling changes and carefully evaluate as I go. Of course, that’s kind of what we do naturally… Major changes though… scary. Mostly in terms of unintended consequences, especially those not immediately noticed. When you tug a connection, it impacts so many others. The danger of getting something wrong is high.

Let’s suppose you had backups though, so you could restore your “self” if needed… How would you know whether or not you needed to restore from backup (essentially killing you as you are now, current state - but I’m guessing the impact from that would be less at this point in one’s experience and capabilities)?

Unintended consequences of the edit could be immediate, or not. They could be dramatic or exceedingly subtle. It’s not clear how well you’d know. Then again, we continually edit, reinforce, and have unintentional changes to our mind all the time anyway. We still consider ourselves us from moment to moment - but sometimes after certain edits[*]Such as some incidents involving strokes, tumors, illnesses, or direct brain injuries. we don’t, or alternately we do, but others don’t consider us to still be the same person.

It’s an interesting thought to me, what makes the rolling knot of connections that is me, me, even as the knot changes via its own feedback and via external changes. I lean towards the view of the mind is the wave form itself, not the material that carries the wave. It brings to mind the Ship of Theseus paradox, but the what is mind topic should have its own post.

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