An interesting thing occurred to me. Suppose that the human is an engineered species and they simply don't know they can drop to a command prompt and modify the structure of their being. It wouldn't be reasonable to make it easy to do so for obvious reasons. It isn't all that strange a thing. People are considering sending humanoid robots to space and it is a natural progression to send a compressed image. A single strand of DNA can code for an organism and so the weight requirements of a space vehicle is reduced. If knowledge can be compressed to a matrix which is impressed on the neural structure, then the process is complete and if material are available and a suitable environment is present, the fully formed biological entity can be produced from a very small starting base.
So if the system failed and the imprint of knowledge got damaged, it would deliver a blank slate. The robot, cyborg, being or whatever you wanted to call it, would have no idea that it had an off switch or a USB port.
Organs are being grown on templates and it seems reasonable to me that a three dimensional matrix could be produced that served as a growth template for neural connections and that nerve stem cells integrated in that environment would follow a guide path which would then make the appropriate connection for a specific consciousness. I don't even consider this a great technological leap. The foundations of the techniques are already in place and it would be a simple matter to test this with mice or flies or some other species. It would allow the organism to be born with a complete set of programmed knowledge. So it seems that another threshold is crossed and if you want to know the quick key to drop to the shell of being, RTFM.
The future is certainly going to more and more odd in comparison, very much like the differential gravity of orbiting a neutron star. The δ Experience of changing rate of change makes it always more unusual than the last leap. If a person can be born with 50 years of school and experience and language as a given, it would sure save a lot of wasted redundant time. So what then is the Δ?
ADDED: There are several concurrent systems that exist in the organism and one of them is immunity to various biological agents. This is programmed after the entity is formed with killed agents in the form of vaccines. In Vivo it is programmed by the host system. Some immunity is passed at the origin and some is programmed at a later date. It could be considered that immunity is a language all its own. The training of the immune system functions very much like a programmable system and in fact it is a virtual CPU. It is possible to create monoclonal antibodies with an organism. I have done this in the lab. Cell sorters are another interesting device.
ADDED MORE: It would seem that a single compressed organism transport as a space vehicle would be far beyond our technology, but in fact it is just a blink away. The idea of quorum sensing allows an organism to exhibit various different personalities based upon the environment and its progression in that environment. It is another type of programming and the system can have a very large base of library functions carried with the simpler organism. A simple organism will degrade over time if the DNA is not selected in the growth phase. The concept of genetic distance and conserved sequences is related to this idea. It seems that this is just another way of programming and though the language is fraught with syntactic nonsense and complication, it is programmable and will be programmed as surely as vaccines exist. The question of consciousness and existentialism will simply be ignored as there is no real consequence of not defining it. It was a concept that was devised and communicated, but it is inadvertently linked with an emotional cue and so it isn't really a concept, but a reaction+concept complex. I can combine concept and emotion and , in some ways , that is what art and music entails. An interesting thing in that vein ( or maybe artery? ) is that the occurrence of order in the notes of music that evoke emotion can be modeled with Markov Chains.
ADDED EVEN MORE: Consider now that I have the programming skill to do such a thing. Organisms can live as spores for 100's of millions of years. So I will play at Andromeda strain. A space craft final velocity as it is currently managed depends on the ratio of payload to propellant for its final velocity. So if my payload is an engineered quorum sensing biological sequence designed to initiate the process on contact with a suitable environment then I can project a vast array of potential scenarios and let the best fall out. It seems to me that this is most certainly already true and that within the universe, this process is in progress. The future is only as real as it is observed and understood. Even within the biosphere of the Earth there are organisms that defy imagination and they are discovered with great regularity. So I would say that Andromeda is with us and so are all the galaxies and a person need only open their eyes to the certain projection of being that will almost certainly ensue. A completely programmable robot on Mars is far better than some billion dollar delay that wastes the lives of everyone. Even if a good Linux system were used for a craft, that would be better. Intelligent updates that happen while the machine runs. Duplicates that can be communicated with on Earth that serve as test cases for an upgrade. So the stars are but a blink away, thus, let us blink and be represented.
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