‘This . . . this isn’t real?’ Neo asks Morpheus in the film The Matrix, as they stand facing each other. Between them sit two apparently age-worn couches, a small table and an old-fashioned tube TV. There is nothing else anywhere around, above or below, but whiteness. Complete whiteness. This is the first time Neo finds himself, knowingly, in a simulation. He asks this question as he runs his hands along the back of one of the couches, clearly registering believable sight, touch and texture. Morpheus replies in a manner that displays how well he knows the truth. ‘What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.’
Doesn’t that send your mind into a spin? Our individual reality is an accumulation of the things we’ve experienced and of the things we sense. Some similarities we have with technology lie in the fact that just as robotic sensory devices collect real-life information about their environment, encode the signals into streams of ones and zeros, and send them to a computing system to process (as we saw in Chapter 4), our own bodies do something extremely similar. We take in information about the real world through our five major senses, which convert the information into streams of electrochemical signals to send to the brain, and it is there that the signals are processed into sense and meaning. Earlier I talked about using these systems as models for our own tech, but just how well are we able to control our senses and, in effect, our reality? How can we hack our senses and trick our mind?
This comes back to biomedical technologies and how sensory signals can be fed to our brain. I’ve decided to categorise the possibilities into four technologically facilitated levels. They’re levels of progression just like a computer game simulation, because hey, we can’t prove we’re not living in one.
Many current technologies that simply stimulate our senses, e.g. TV, music, haptic vibrations
Advanced technology that bypasses the mechanics of our senses and sends similar signals through the various nerves to the brain, e.g. cochlear implants, bionic eyes
Technologies we haven’t yet achieved that could plug sensory information directly into the brain, e.g. virtual experiences the mind interprets as reality
If our existence transcends our brain but we can still sense. We’ve well and truly crossed over into sci-fi territory by this point.
Our perception of reality, our individual experience of reality, is a funny thing. Take our vision, for example. It’s limited. Electromagnetic radiation is a spectrum of waves that carry electromagnetic radiant energy at different frequencies, and propagate through space as radio waves (at the low-frequency end of the spectrum), microwaves, infrared (IR), light (the parts of the spectrum we can see), ultraviolet (UV), X-rays and gamma rays (at the high-frequency end). The visible spectrum of light that our eyes can see only accounts for a small slice of the various electromagnetic frequencies, with IR and UV light just outside our visual range.
Figure 8: Electromagnetic radiation and frequency
Figure 9: Levels of sensory hacking (SH-4)
When light comes into our eyes, they convert it into a stream of electrochemical signals that are sent along the visual nerves to the brain. The brain processes these signals and constructs them into a form that gives us our sense of sight. Our brain is, in effect, locked in a dark jar that we cannot see, taste or touch. It is continuously fed all sensory information by electrochemical messengers that encode the information coming in through our senses, then are run to our brain for it to interpret.
In the case of our eyes and vision: Level 1 sensory stimulation includes computer monitors stimulating our sense of vision as our eyes observe the screen; Level 2 sensory bypass involves technology like a bionic eye bypassing the natural sensor that is the eye and sending signals along the optic nerve to the brain; Level 3 sensory injection is further into the future where the technology sits inside the skull (likely implanted in the brain) to feed vision, injected straight into our perception of reality; and Level 4 posthuman sensing encapsulates how we might see in a philosophical future if we have transcended our biological body, perhaps existing in a virtual world and having transferred our consciousness into a computer.
Let’s explore each of these levels in more detail.
The stimulation of hearing is quite easy. We seem to have had an amazing grasp of it throughout history, with and without the use of technology. When we sing, play instruments, play music through speakers or headphones, we stimulate our sense of hearing.
Our hearing is an intricate little system for transferring soundwaves into electrochemical signals that can be sent to the brain. It starts with the soundwaves being concentrated and collected by our ears (the visible part of our ear acts like a satellite dish). They then move through to the eardrum, causing it to vibrate. The movements are translated through small bones in the middle ear that move through to the cochlea. This is like a snail shell deep in the inner ear, full of fluid and tiny, delicate hair cells. These hairs run along the inside of the cochlea and are stimulated by soundwaves to sway and move. Low frequencies are slower, deeper sounds like what you’d expect from a massive demon of the underworld, and high frequencies are faster, high-pitched sounds like you’d expect to hear from a fairy. These different vibrations flow through the interstitial fluid as movement inside of the cochlea and are absorbed by the fine hairs within, each responding to different frequencies.
When those fine hairs are stimulated, they create electrical impulses that are shot up the auditory nerve to the brain. So when we listen to music through headphones, this is the culmination of many, many generations of humans realising they can hack the auditory part of the brain in a pleasurable way, by stimulating our sense of hearing.
Our developments at this level over the past century have mostly come in the form of bionic ears to bypass the mechanics of our hearing when damaged, bionic eye research to do the same for our vision and nerve feedback from bionic limbs. These designs tend to bypass the sensor itself, instead sending their own signals through the relevant nerves to the brain. To possess such technology is to be partially cyborg. Again, we’ll take hearing as a great example here, because it has had the most success in sensory bypass to date. Unlike a hearing aid, which firmly sits at Level 1, as it basically amplifies sound to make it louder, the cochlear implant is an auditory-bypass system and so has earnt its place here in Level 2. The genius of this design is to completely bypass the mechanics of how we hear for people who have more severe hearing impairment than a hearing aid can assist with.
The cochlear implant (also known as the bionic ear) takes a different, amazing, technological approach to the mechanics of hearing. The first component is a device containing a microphone that sits on the skin behind the ear. The microphone picks up sound and digitises it. This digital signal can be processed to bring out the most relevant types of sound, like the voices of people talking to you, while dulling out arbitrary background noise that might interfere. This sound data is then converted into radio waves and transmitted through a little circular disk, magnetically connected on the back of the wearer’s head. The radio waves are received by the cochlear implant under the skin, converted into an electrical signal and sent to a snake of electrodes that has been pushed into the cochlea. The different frequencies of sound will cause their associated nerves to fire, sending electrical signals directly up the auditory system to the brain. This whole process has largely bypassed the mechanics of the ear and hearing system.
This level is synonymous with the beginnings of the transhuman era, where we become integrated more and more with our technological tools, our machines and our AI.
Now, Level 3 is one we have not yet reached. It will require a significantly advanced understanding of our own brain and how it works. It will also require advanced technology to control the brain directly. The concept here is of plugging virtual worlds and streaming experiences directly into the mind – like the Matrix, minus the whole humans-becoming-slaves issue. It’s an astronomical leap forward from Level 2 technology that stimulates the nerves carrying signals to our internal CPU, to Level 3 technology that overrides the sensory system, injecting the brain directly to hear what we want it to hear, see what we want it to see. This level represents the future we have not yet reached. It’s well and truly down the pathway of the transhuman era: a philosophical time we are approaching in which biology and technology interweave and the human condition, intellect and physiology is transformed. This advanced Level 3 technology might sound scary and the stuff of futuristic fantasy, but that was once the case for bionic implants, flying vehicles, robotics, AI or even personal computing devices. Just because Level 3 hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it isn’t possible or won’t become reality within a generation. On the contrary, I believe we will see these concepts come to life. But do we really want it (even if it comes without the slavery)? If being able to live a virtual life of adventure beyond the body’s capability is on offer, particularly in the future of palliative and end-of-life care – some people would choose the transformation with such science and technology to continue experiencing a different form of life.
This concept of injecting our senses seems like a moonshot development and one currently not quite within reach. So, are there possibilities even further beyond this? Well, we could go a quantum leap further to Level 4, which no longer even involves a brain. This is the point in the road where you’ve reached a large road sign that reads, ‘Welcome to the Posthuman Era’.
This philosophical era at some arbitrarily distant point in time and space is where our imagination can really start to run wild. In the posthuman era, humans will have transcended their traditional physical form and will likely no longer be ‘human’ by our current definition. There is much speculation concerning whether posthumans and humans could co-exist in this era, but the idea is that our advancements in fields such as nanotechnology, AI, biotechnology, gene sequencing and digitisation or quantisation of humans, could eventually lead to a merging of human and AI, or an uploading of consciousness. We may then live on as a new form of human – experience, thrive and consume in a completely different fashion, possibly sustainably and possibly in a manner that can ensure our survival, in some form, well into the future. This is a concept that of course brings up significant debate, from existential, philosophical, ethical and religious standpoints.
However fanciful this era might be, it has nevertheless been a dreamt-up future for our advancements at the intersection of humanity and technology. And that means that Level 4 must be noted in this list as what lies beyond Level 3, no matter how wild the concept. It is the level where the human can sense without a physical brain. In the case of consciousness-uploading, you may find yourself in an avatar form in a virtual fantasy world, looking around and listening, moving and touching, smelling and tasting. Yet you will no longer own a physical, biological form in the real world. You will be completely virtual. Computing and storage systems upholding such technology would still need to exist and be maintained in the real world, powered by energy systems of the future, going beyond super-efficient solar cell technology and well into what I’d say are two holy grails of future energy: hydrogen-fusion energy generation coupled with ultimate forms of energy storage – think super batteries. Upkeep, security and maintenance of these systems would be a role for advanced AI (with robotic systems) to allow all humans the option of living on virtually.
We could keep our populations and reduce our burden on the earth – death as such will be drastically reduced, but we sacrifice reproduction in the process. So not all humans will take this path, or make the move later in life. Posthumans that have moved into virtual worlds will require Class I avatars, which I’ll discuss in Part V of this book. Unlike in The Matrix, where we’ve had a virtual world plugged into our minds and pulled over our eyes unknowingly, here we instead accept these lively virtual worlds as another form of reality, and plug ourselves in willingly. We would require guides to help us navigate whichever of the seemingly infinite created worlds, holidays, explorations, challenges and adventures we would want to experience. There will always be endless things to do, and still plenty of purpose that we create for ourselves.
You will sense these worlds in a similar way to the biological systems of Level 1 or the technological systems of Level 2. Signals that represent the sense will be sent to your mind through your brain, only now your brain is also virtual. Your virtual senses get virtually collated and constructed, and your virtual consciousness experiences them, in a not too dissimilar way from how your current biological senses are biologically collated and constructed and your biological consciousness experiences them.
What could possibly be beyond this? It’s like trying to think about what’s beyond the edge of infinity. I imagine that we would have to exist as pure energy and still be able to sense our surroundings. Many believe this already happens after death. So that level crosses over to the other side. Beyond biology. Beyond technology. Into the realms of spirituality and religion. Realms I will not include here with the advancing technological levels of sensing.
What this framework of levels does tell us is that we are in the infancy of our available sensory hacks, since the majority of our technologies in this space currently fall into Level 1, and some senses are still lacking here as it is. Apart from hearing, Level 2 technologies are still in the very early stages.
What we do know is that our evolving technologies that continue to bridge the divide between human and machine are advancing and growing in number. You might think you wouldn’t be interested in going down this path, but think about this. Would you accept replacing a damaged organ, sensor or limb with a technological counterpart? When these options become more readily available and successful, and you require a replacement to survive, the response probably becomes quite simple.
