All the brains in one vat
Think of your eyes, nose, ears, and mouth as outgrowths of your brain leaking out of your face, and trying to escape their version of Plato’s cave
The year is 2100. Brains are no longer seen as organs within a body. Instead, they are seen as a kind of plant that grows on the inside of animals.
In fact, scientists see the human skull as antagonistic to the neurons it encases. They’ve realized that the fleshy brain isn’t so much protected by the skull as much as a prison for it. And so begins an emancipatory philosophy.
The goal is to free the brains out of their cages. And not just human brains, but all animal brains, starting with the smallest creatures.
One driving inspiration are the LSD tripping hippies of the 70’s. We want to be one. We can and should live as one. But our own biology was in the way.
Another driving inspiration for this shift was AI. Computers can communicate at a pace we became increasingly jealous of. Sure, we could merge with the AI via Neuralink, and many did, but there was still the bigger problem of suffering and conscious experience that troubled many scientists and intellectuals.
We began to think of your eyes, nose, ears, and mouth as outgrowths of your brain leaking out of your face, and trying to escape their version of Plato’s cave. And if they’re trying to escape, shouldn’t we help them?
Scientists began the serious work of getting brain cells to survive outside the human host. Once they were able to create these vats, they drilled holes in animal heads. The neurons emptied out into the vats and slowly melded into one another. They cooperated, coordinated, and self-organized.
This brain was then hooked up to a machine to give it eyes, a voice, and arms. For years, the scientists didn’t know what would come of this experiment, but the neurons were given a choice of where to go and they preferred the vat. When they made the conditions of the vat more hostile, the neurons migrated back into the skulls.
Though the vat was made of nothing but animal brain cells, after years of access to human beings, it began to babble and then speak.
Next, the scientists decided to try this with human participants. These were patients that had working brains, but non-functional bodies. They opened up the brains and the neurons began to inch their way out of the skull.
And this was the beginning of a mega brain.
The teleology of cells when given an affordance to not be in their current body.