From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sat Mar 06 1999 - 08:38:47 MST
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
> Anders Sandberg wrote:
> >
> > More suggestions?
>
> Well, now that Algernon's Law 1.1 is out, I can join in.
>
> If an advanced civilization has published the neuroanatomical targets,
> neurohacking can be done with a small 1980s shop (or even earlier, but
> direct electrical current can produce chemical byproducts in the brain).
> If you're willing to take casualties, you can learn the targets on a
> pretty low budget. I don't know whether you'd want Specialists or
> people with Reengineered emotions in the campaign, but, realistically
> speaking, they'd be there on any Libertarian colony. Once there are a
> few high-profile successes with neurohacking, nobody is ever going to
> give it up.
Actually I have them, but not on Atlantis as it is currently written
up. There was another colony, named Jerusalem. It was colonized by a
coalition of fundamentalist christians who believed that the lack of
Second Coming in 2035 was a sign to go somewhere else. They set up a
colony, behaved overall as you might expect, and were eventually
toppled in a coup by the second and third generation colonists who
renamed the planet Dionysos and went in the other direction, aiming
for hedonism instead. Anyway, after *that* got a bit stale, methods
for mental design began to appear. Originally they were based on
drugs, mysticism and psychological tricks, but the area became more
and more of a science. Eventually, the psychodesigners could just
about insert any personality, emotions, values or mental states in
their clients. As you can guess, Dionysos is a rather "liquid" place
in 2350, where the basis of identity is regarded as the experiences
one has had rather than personality or values.
While of course drugs and neurohacking are completely legal just about
anywhere on Atlantis they haven't advanced equally in that
direction. There are definitely people with fun stuff in their brains,
but research hasn't been that heavy for various reasons (mostly
because large projects are trickier to fund and insure than small
ones, putting an emphasis on small-scale applied science and
technology). Other notable colonies in this respect are Arcadia,
where Culture-like drug glands are fairly common and Unity, a
religion/megacorporation/colony that broke away from the TerraNova
colony to become a borganism.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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