by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright July 2014
Humans have enjoyed altering how they think -- mind altering -- since the beginning of the species. People do their mind altering in many ways. Some examples that are popular today are ingesting chemicals such as alcohol, going through long monotonous rituals such as meditation, engaging in intensive celebration such as religious revivals and rock concerts, engaging in strenuous physical activities such as getting a runner's high, and doing scary things to get an adrenalin rush... many ways.
Something else that has been around just as long is people being judgmental about other people's mind altering practices -- some are seen as OK, some are admired, and some are seen as seriously threatening.
This will be a discussion about some of the new ways mind altering will be done in the Post-Snap environment, and how they will be judged.
The Post-Snap world is going to be a different place in many ways. The number of ways to mind alter is going to increase, and the social circumstance in which the mind altering takes place will change. A vivid example of this difference is driverless cars. If a person doesn't have the opportunity to drive around drunk, this reduces the hazard of drinking. Will this change how the community feels about drinking?
Because of all the coming changes, there will be big changes in both what is possible in the way of mind altering, what abuses are possible, and the judgments the communities will make about what are good ways and what are dangerous ways to mind alter.
Mild altering is something all communities are judgmental about. But the practicality of those judgments which call for prohibition are often poor, as in, they don't succeed in stopping the practice or transforming how it is practiced into some acceptable form. Example: The contemporary War on Drugs has been long, expensive and futile.
This habit of warring on some mind altering styles has been around for a long time, and isn't going away Post-Snap. Temperance Movements, the predecessors to the War on Drugs, started forming in the late 1700's in response to technologies which made hard liquors such as gin and whiskey quicker, cheaper and easier to produce, which made their use and abuse more widespread.
The long tradition of temperance movements, with their long tradition of not solving the alcohol abuse issues, was followed by the War on Drugs not solving recreational drug abuse issues. This long tradition indicates the community enjoys being judgmental on mind altering way too much to give up on criminalizing some forms Post-Snap. And some of those criminalized forms will be wildly popular.
What will change are the details. There will be more cures for traditional mind altering abuse. There will be more fads that explore new ways. Young people will be constantly searching for new ways of mind altering, as they have been doing now for decades. And some of the ways they discover will deeply scare some older people.
Some of the current hazards will become anachronistic. In an era of ubiquitous driverless cars, mixing driving and mind altering will only happen by deliberate choice, not by unfortunate circumstance -- getting home from the bar will never involve a person driving, drunk or sober, but driving an ATV in some off-road setting with beer in hand can still happen.
The Communications Revolution is going to produce devices that input more intimately into the brain. Smart phones are going to keep getting smaller and more wearable. Completely implanted versions will become common Post-Snap. These intimate connections to the brain are going to open up all sorts of new communicating possibilities. As described elsewhere, other senses such as smell, taste and touch will be part of the communication stream, With such an increase in capabilities will come all sorts of new mind altering possibilities. When the implants start communicating with brain instincts and emotions, this is pretty classic mind altering.
What will be controlling these implant signals will be handled by various processors. These processors will be watching what is happening in the brain and using that information to decide how to apply more or less implant output to the brain. Monitoring these processors is the first way in which cyber is going to become part of mind altering. As cyber becomes intelligent in its own right, it can intervene in this communication process, and make more sophisticated choices in what the implants output to the brain.
One big difference between implants and traditional mind altering techniques is speed and control. When a person gets drunk by drinking alcohol, there is a delay of many minutes between consumption and effect, and there is no way to quickly turn off the effect. The affected person has to wait it out and sleep it off. There are also unwanted effects, such as poor judgment and hangovers. In the same vein, meditation takes time and training, and getting a runner's high takes a lot of running, and the runner has to have the skill and physical capability to achieve it.
With implants, starting and stopping effects will be much faster and much more controllable. Those implants that mind alter by directly stimulating neurons can turn effects on and off within seconds. Those that mind alter by releasing synapse stimulators and inhibitors, such as endorphins, will also be fast, but take minutes rather than seconds for effects to kick in or cease.
In sum, implant-based mind altering will be much easier to initiate, faster turning on and off, much more customizable to the person, and able to produce a much wider range of feelings and experiences. It's going to be like the difference between hunting with Stone Age spears and hunting with modern rifles.
As we have more and tighter connections between the cyber senses and the human brain, the definition of mind altering is going to change. The early use for implant communication will be communicating simulations. Simulations will steadily become more realistic. But crisper reality is just one option of what cybers can show humans. Another option is showing scenes and images that are impressionistic and abstract -- think of the difference between looking at a Vermeer painting and a Van Gogh painting. As the skill at showing impressionism increases, some of those impressionistic options are going to feel a lot like mind altering. When that happens the community is going to start making choices about what is appropriate for certain community members, such as children, to experience and what should be forbidden.
This issue of regulating images is nothing new. This is movie rating and game rating extending into these new capabilities. But when the image producers are cyber, and have their own intelligence, then this gets tricky to regulate. These cybers will be customizing their output so it is different for each human. How can a regulator knowledgeably make judgments in such a customized process? Particularly after the cybers have mastered lying-to-humans abilities? And adding to this mix is the privacy issue: are cybers going to show strangers -- the regulators -- what they show their "personal humans"?