Mind Hacking

Source: Own Your Brain

Cognitive science now has the capability to rewire intelligent minds with a high degree of precision and predictability. The digitization of consciousness opened up an incredible array of diagnostic and practical processes for analysis, treatment, alteration, and even improvement. These techniques are broadly termed psychosurgery. Though the methods are different, they are sometimes equated to reprogramming the mind as software, conceptualized as if undertaking a large and complicated codebase alteration.

Psychosurgery walks hand-in-hand with cerebral augmentations, nootropic drugs, narcoalgorithms, and morph design in creating a bewildering variety of transhuman mindsets and experiences. Awareness of the complex and increasingly diverse range of egos is critical for understanding transhuman culture and exploring your own personal options for shaping your mind as you best see fit.

A Better You

Much like genetics, nanotechnology, and cybernetics improved the baseline and maximum potential of physical bodies, psychosurgery enhances your mind’s health, stability, and working functions.

Therapeutics

No one goes through life without suffering emotional damage, and almost every transhuman bears mental scars from the horrors of the Fall. These experiences hamper your stability, happiness, and productivity. Others live with congenital personality disorders that create suffering for themselves and others. Psychosurgery can treat the symptoms and sometimes even cure the root causes of these traumas and diseases. A sizable minority of transhumans rely on psychosurgery in conjunction with therapy and personalized smart drugs for bolstering their mental health. Most muses, in fact, are equipped for counseling and minor psychosurgery.

Memory Enhancement and Editing

Long-term memories are fragile things, often misunderstood. Our minds do not store memories like a computer file or book in a library, but as unique networks of neurons scattered throughout the brain that fire at the same time. The very act of invoking memories changes them as neural patterns are rewritten.

Transhumans have sought many methods of improving memory, reaching limited success with drugs like neem and various genetic modifications. Digital mind-states emulate biological memory functions, but when combined with mnemonics augmentations, new memories can be tagged as they are stored for easier search and recall. The drawback is that mnemonics-enhanced memory functions only work when your mind is running on a cyberbrain or as an infomorph; you lose the benefits when you revert to wetware.

More people are turning to memory-editing to excise traumatic events. This is challenging as such experiences are more firmly embedded by the emotions associated with the trauma. Newer techniques, however, lessen the clarity and emotional impact of those memories, making them easier to suppress. It is also possible to augment memories, give them more emotional punch, or even insert fake memories copied from others. The interconnected nature of memory retention makes these efforts difficult; excising memories is far from surgical and likely to result in additional memory loss, whereas implanted memories often fade or register as out of place.

Personality Editing

Voluntary personality editing makes it possible to modify, limit, or encourage specific behaviors and emotional states. You can now choose to overcome sadness, lower inhibitions, stifle addiction, or remove biases and other unwelcome compulsions, hang-ups, and negative emotions with a few weeks of psychosurgery. Or you can boost your creativity, reinforce your dedication to work, increase your ambition, or promote new habits. The possibilities are as varied as personalities themselves. Some of these decisions may seem self-indulgent, but can be surprisingly applicable to various professions, arts, and sciences. The trailblazers in this field update their personalities on a regular basis, explore completely new emotional states, or sometimes choose to redefine their personality entirely. However, like memory editing, personality-tweaking psychosurgery is inexact and difficult; changes to one part of your personality may have an unexpected impact on other traits. Nevertheless, the benefits are seen as far outweighing the drawbacks.

Neurodiversity

As with any field, there are those that constantly push the boundaries of neuroscience. The most notable feat in recent history was the uplift of several animal species to full sapience. These non-human minds were but the latest non-neurotypical additions to transhumanity. Already neurological differences such as autism, ADHD, and dyslexia were viewed as normal variations of neurology rather than pathologies to be fixed. The capability to create even more radical changes in a mind opened new neurotype possibilities.

Rather than force everyone into a “standard” personality model, as some initially feared, psychosurgery has widened the scope of functional neurodiversity in the transhuman family.

New Neurotypes

People on the autistic spectrum were among the first to claim the label of neurodiverse. Though many aspects are now reversible, autistic people are free to choose what, if any, changes they wish to make to and for themselves, commonly only treating traits that cause suffering. In some fields, a narrower range of social display and concern is very helpful. Industries like asteroid mining, exoplanet survey, and life in small habitats with few residents can be easier, healthier, and more productive for people with a lower need for social connection.

Thanks to personality editing and other mind hacks, the ranks of the neurodivergent have swelled. Emotives unleash their feelings and empathy, thriving in situations that require caregiving or social acuity. Blunts dampen their affect display, providing a stony exterior to kinesics-watching opponents. Synaesthetes create sensory crossfeeds and pairings, triggering new perceptive modalities for processing information. Hedonistic societies like scum swarms are acrawl with the disinhibited. Hypomaniacs excel in creative fields where their drive and energy is an asset and they can trigger manic episodes to pursue their art. Even antisocial traits are admired as a positive element that frees you from conventional thinking and priorities. In the upper echelons of corporate and political life, the confidence, charisma, detachment, and fearlessness of “beneficent sociopaths" are valued traits.

New ground is broken daily. Experiments with forking, merging two or more distinct egos, and group minds and hive minds are on the menu, though such activities and research may be proscribed by local jurisdictions.

Mental Augmentations

The confluence of neuroscience and genetic design has resulted in a number of biomorphs with enhanced cognitive capabilities, from exalts up to mentons. Many morphs are augmented further with bioware, nanoware, and cybernetics to enhance perception, enable multitasking, interface with technology, and even partition the brain to hold multiple egos. Brains are extraordinarily adaptive to new sensory inputs, providing access to a range of new sensory ware and perceptive functions. The practice of “glanding” has recently risen in popularity, using implants such as drug glands, neuromodulation, and endocrine control to alter the brain’s chemical functions and emotions. These practices have a benefit over psychosurgery in that they allow the user to manipulate their emotional state on the fly, in response to their current experiences.

The software mind-states of cyberbrains (used in pods and synthmorphs) and infomorphs can be programmed and augmented to achieve similar benefits as wetware brains.

Drugs and Narcos

Developments in biotechnology and personalized medicine have produced thousands of new mind-altering substances that are not offset by nasty or lingering side effects. Long ago decriminalized by most polities, drug use is both common and socially accepted in most cultures. Software narcoalgorithms provide similar benefits to cyberbrain-equipped morphs and infomorphs, with the bonus benefit that the effects can be terminated at will. A new type of nanodrug, known as petals, offers immersive and interactive experiences for those in search of surreal adventures.

Multiplicity

The technologies behind ego-mapping and backups also allow for the creation of multiple copies of the same person simultaneously. This process of forking has many practical purposes, but is still a new social frontier being explored today.

One common use of forking is for work done in virtual environments. You could set up several VR instances and run a copy of yourself in each to develop different parts of a project at once. Forks are also ideal for transmitting to other habitats for meetings or other tasks in place of traveling yourself. Forking is also a powerful force multiplier, especially for crises or situations that require rare skills or expertise to be widely distributed. When the work concludes, the forks are psychosurgically re-integrated with the primary ego so all of the experiences and memories are retained. Most transhumans view this type of purpose-driven forking as acceptable.

Many people, however, frown upon the idea of long-term forks that lead independent lives. To some, this is a reflexive fear of the threat to true identity — which you is the “real” you if there are multiple? Others believe it smacks of excess and narcissism to have several instances of the same person running while millions of egos linger in cold storage. Significant social and legal complications lead many jurisdictions to ban the practice out-of-hand. Which fork has property rights? How do contracts with one instance impact the others? Do you bear responsibility for crimes committed by a copy of yourself? Does that change if you merge that copy back into your ego? Different polities have adopted radically different approaches. Most limit the duration a fork can exist to one day before it must be re-integrated or deleted. Some treat the primary ego as responsible for the actions of all forks. Others treat forks as property or ban them outright. Very few habitats grant forks full standing as individual and autonomous persons.

Nevertheless, people practice and promote multiplicity for a variety of reasons. Some are conducting long-term research on cognitive science, social issues, and psychosurgical experimentation. Some are indulgent, exploring the limits of hedonistic excess. A few are ideologues and radicals, exploring new modes of collective living, attempting to create hive minds, or start a posthuman society that’s completely unique.

Social Thoughts

Before psychosurgery was widely practiced, mental disorders and trauma were considered an unfortunate but unavoidable aspect of life, with varying amounts of social and legal allowances made for those who suffered from mental illness. Now, with therapeutic psychosurgery commonplace, there is a slowly growing hard-heartedness in some segments of the population towards those who grapple with mental trauma for extended periods as somehow “choosing” to suffer. Similarly, some augmented individuals hold those who are unwilling or incapable of enhancing their cognition in contempt, ignoring the social realities that might hold people back from modifying themselves. On the opposite end, bioconservatives tend to view mental alterations as unnatural, viewing modified transhumans with disgust, loathing, and sometimes fear. This attitude is especially extended towards neurodivergent individuals, with bioconservatives judging such neurotypes as inferior or less human.

The debate continues over which mental hacks are safe, justified, or desired. Exhumans are known to push the boundaries of mental experimentation in a search for perfection, superiority, or godliness, transforming themselves into amoral and maladjusted monsters by most transhuman standards. Some individuals intentionally choose traits that could be considered psychopathic and dangerous to others. The adoption of non-human neurotypes, particularly with AGIs and uplifts, remains a concern to many, given the history of the Fall. Others argue the case for deliberate “moral enhancement” according to perceived ethics and virtues to promote traits like empathy, cooperation, fairness, and mindfulness in order to better transhuman society as a whole.

Psychosurgery and mental adjustments made to involuntary subjects are widely regarded as criminal and immoral, but are not unheard of. Cartels of criminal soul-traders like Nine Lives use memory and personality-editing on stolen egos to create weakwilled and obedient slaves before selling them off. Behavioral conditioning can be used to implant addictive traits, destroy empathy, create false loyalties, and far worse. Ideological extremists can and have used psychosurgery to create “suicide forks” of themselves to carry out acts of terrorism. Rumors circulate in mesh conspiracy-theorist groups of governments and hypercorps that use psychosurgery to condition their staff to be fanatically loyal, edit or delete memories to protect secrets, and create spies or sleeper agents. Enough evidence of actual crimes of this sort trickles out now and again to make even the most outlandish claims seem conceivable and justify the discomfort some people feel at the very idea of letting someone else mess about with their mind.

Some habitats include personality editing as part of their criminal code, but it is often reserved for the most extreme cases. Even those who haven’t undergone psychosurgical treatment themselves directly benefit from the decrease in socially adverse behaviors present in the general populace. All of these factors lead most people to see psychosurgery as a vital support for transhumanity being able to successfully overcome its past and move forward.