Why Stop Thinking of the Human Body as a Computer

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Over the past decade, science has made significant headway with the creation of brain-controlled prostheses, and more and more research promises that one day we may be able to slow the aging process. Many people generally believe that technological optimization of the whole organism is not far off.

For example, in April, Facebook representatives announced plans to create a brain-computer interface that allows users to send their thoughts directly to the social network without touching the keyboard. The company hopes to deliver this revolutionary product within a few years. And Elon Musk recently announced that he is opening a new company, Neuralink, which will develop brain implants, including for mind reading.

These are admirable goals, of course, but it's not that simple. The human body is not a computer. It cannot be hacked, flashed, programmed, or updated.

Let's take at least the most "computer" part of the body - the brain. The human brain does not store or process information in the same way that computers do. Gray matter has no automatic settings to rewrite bad memories, as in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The entrepreneurial approach does not apply to biology

Of course, research in this area is ongoing. For example, scientists hope that brain-computer interfaces will help in the treatment of mental illness. For example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a $ 65 million project to develop a method for treating mental illness using implanted electrodes. The study has been going on for more than a decade, but it is still unclear which areas of the brain are most appropriate to stimulate to treat each disease.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs looking to try their hand at biology bring their characteristic ideals of hacking into the field.

In just two years, Facebook experts are going to determine whether their idea is feasible to send messages directly from the brain to the screen at a speed of 100 words per minute. Currently, the maximum typing speed with an implant in the brain is about 8 words per minute. High performance communication by people with paralysis using an intracortical brain-computer interface. …

Elon Musk believes that the first Neuralink brain-computer interface will appear within a decade. And this is despite the fact that technologies that read information from the brain are still no more than a fantastic project. Today, we can measure only a fraction of the neural activity required to connect an entire human brain to a computer or telepathically communicate.

Yes, in 2009, scientists from the University of Wisconsin at Madison successfully conducted an experiment: they published a short message on Twitter using the Massively Parallel Signal Processing neurocomputer interface using the Graphics Processing Unit for Real-Time Brain – Computer Interface Feature Extraction. …

“But with an email or a Facebook post, it's much more difficult to do,” says Justin Williams, who led the study. - It only seems to us that sending an email is easy, but imagine how many thought processes are involved in this: you need to fill in the lines with the subject and addressee, then write the letter itself. From a biological and technological point of view, it is very difficult."

Recently, for the first time, a person was able not only to control a prosthetic hand with the help of the brain, but also to feel how this hand moves A World of Awesome Mind-Controlled Prostheses Is Closer Than You Think. … However, we are still very far from understanding how the 100 billion neurons in the brain and the 100 trillion connections between them work. And even more so far from creating technologies capable of connecting them all to a computer.

Yet the technology industry's “this must be done” approach is pervasive.

The human body is more than a well-oiled mechanism

Comparison of the human body with a machine has become a habit for a long time. In the 16th century, the creation of mechanisms that work with springs and levers led to the fact that many thinkers, including René Descartes, began to call man a complex mechanism. In the 19th century, the German physicist Helmholtz compared our brains to the telegraph. In 1958, mathematician John von Neumann stated in his book Computer and the Brain that the human nervous system is "digital in the absence of evidence to the contrary."

With the development of technology, metaphors changed, but the message remained the same: the human body is nothing more than a complex mechanism.

But this is not the case. And this view of the body becomes especially dangerous when they try to combine biology with computer systems. We risk starting to treat our body - in all its complexity, fragility and mystery - as a machine with which we compare it. We run the risk of promising the impossible and wasting time, money and patience on research divorced from reality. We risk in the process of paying with our health.

After all, we are still living beings, not soulless machines. And this must not be forgotten.