Neurohacking

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Feb 26 2000 - 17:46:11 MST


john grigg wrote:
>
> Eliezer wrote:
> My neurohacking knowledge isn't exactly theoretical.
> (end)
>
> Share with us your methods to neurohack yourself! I would like to see just
> how different/same it is as compared to other cognitive enhancement
> techniques I am already familiar with.

"Neurohacking", by definition, refers to a hardware alteration to the brain.
Software counts for a great deal on a day-to-day basis, especially
self-awareness software, but it is not significant on the scale of
"neurohacking", just as neurohacking is not significant on the scale of "superintelligence".

Since augmentative neurosurgery hasn't hit the mainstream, you can
probably guess that I'm talking about a natural perturbation. See:
http://pobox.com/~sentience/algernon.html

Deliberate neurohacking these days is confined mostly to
pharmeceuticals, which are neither powerful enough nor sufficiently
localized to achieve genuinely Algernic - in the sense of "You just
can't *get* that without the tradeoff" - ability.

I know how the fountain of smart works in my case, and with a bit of
research I could probably localize and duplicate the perturbation, but I
don't think that current legislation allows me to share. Also,
neurohacking probably has to start in infancy or very early childhood
for full effectiveness.

But in answer to Spike's question: I "figured out all this stuff"
because I had a chance to see it from the inside, and I could do it at
age 16 because I'm a neurohack.

-- 
       sentience@pobox.com      Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
          http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
                 Member, Extropy Institute
           Senior Associate, Foresight Institute


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