he Mindchip
The the Mind chip is implanted at the back of the skull, on the primary visual cortex, just above the cerebellum: the movement center of the brain. In all vacs, the feed-forward tendrils that spider into the cerebellum can control movement via remote signals received in the chip.
There are two possible sites for the the Mind’s visual interface, the so-called mindscreen: where shapes and colors are projected across the vision. The easiest and cheapest place to connect is at the striate cortex, located near where the chip is implanted at the base of the skull.
But there is a down-side to intercepting vision so late in the processing stream. Vision, of course, starts with light-and-color-sensitive rods and cones in the retinal, and fire electrical signals through the optic nerve. Shortly afterwards, in the optical chiasm and the lateral geniculate nucleus, they interface with human emotional system.
Human emotions are located in the part of the brain that we share with all mammals, and part of the reason why they exist is to make us aware of our body’s needs and desires. Emotions create the underlying “state” or “feeling” of consciousness. Hangry people can think about whatever they want, but their bodies are pulling them toward food via hangry emotions.
The fanciest part of the visual system: colors—orientation, shape and contrast, edges and movement, these things all happen in the cortex—the finally evolved part of our selves. A part of ourselves that’s like a mod on top of an earlier brain that worked just fine to keep mammals alive. And that’s also where we become “conscious” of vision. (You may have noticed that emotions intercept vision earlier, “pre-attentionally.” Our bodies are aware of aspects of vision before we are able to focus upon them.)
Consciousness, located in the pre-frontal cortex with tendrils that read and write to most of the areas of the brain, gives us the capacity to centrally monitor and influence what’s going on across the entire brain.
And this, in some sense, is what the Mind is. An alternate consciousness.
But I digress. Or at least give the appearance of digression on my way to my central point.
Vision is integrated with emotion, immediate reflexes, circadian rhythms, and location of objects within visual space via high-contrast analysis. Behavior and emotions are part of the same circuits, being our brain trying to influence our body to do things.
It turns out that the cortex could do without some of that lower-level processing. But what you end up with is a two-dimensional readout that’s unintegrated with emotions. It doesn’t ever “feel” right. And that’s what it feels like when you jack straight into the striate cortex, the cheapest and fastest place to get the job done. And this is what everyone with a chip has in common.
But the so-called lucid implant interfaces with the visual system early, in center-rostral part of the brain, the optic chiasm, where visual information can influence and be influenced by a whole range of bodily connections. This makes it possible to completely and fully control dreams.
As integros grow older and consume more and more of the pharmaceuticals that guide the threading of the fiber-optic cabling that makes up the interface system of the brain (more on this later), the Mind’s tendrils integrate even more deeply with the emotional centers in the brain. Read and write tendrils extend throughout. This means that the emotional system of integros can be manipulated and guided, but because of the number of connecting fiber-optic cables, the pull of these emotions is suggestive rather than compulsory, increasing in power as the subject ages and the number of cables increases.
And lúcidos too (those vacs with a lucid implant), through operation, can purchase more of these pharmaceuticals until their emotional systems are fully wired. But these tendrils are read-only because the chaotic nature of brains long-formed by lucid dreaming without emotional afferents means that imbibing the red-glowing proteins that make it possible to read would yield little of value. These people have lost touch with reality and their minds no longer generate semantically-relevant mindnet data.
For integros, the purpose of this connection is to yield semantically relevant results. This is due to the nature of the Mind as an artificial intelligence: it evolved from the Query Daemon, and therefore woven into its core-coded life-drive is the desire to probe to the deepest limits of knowledge, to render all things indexed and searchable.
This creates a curious bending of humans to the will of the sentient internet, and in fact a warpage of all politics, culture, and economy.
And so the most valuable integros are ones whose brains are fully known to the Mind, ones whose neural response to inputs are linked to previously known and indexed neural architectures.
It is computationally expensive to crack the Mind of and integro, and this is why integros must “choose” to become a part of the Mind. Is this investment of both pharmaceuticals and computation a worthwhile investment?
Pharmacology
Something must be said here of the pharmacology that makes this whole thing possible.
As of 2016, it is already possible to control the firing of neurons with light-gated ion-channels.
Let me unpack this for you. Each cell in your body, neurons included, has a strand of DNA that tells that cell what to manufacture and how to behave.
Now, a virus can be created that injects alternate DNA plans into a cell that change the structures that the cell (in this case a neuron) will manufacture.
Turns out that if we target neuronal cell, say, in the striate cortex, we can cause those cells to produce little tiny gateways through the cell wall which open or close when green, red, or yellow light is shone upon it. Some might let in positively-charged ions (called channelrhodopsins), and others will let in negatively-charged ones (called halorhodopsins) , depending on what snippet of DNA has been injected by the virus.
As you may or may not know, when a neuron fires, it’s electrically charged. Neurotransmitters are little ionized particles that cause neurons to become electrically charged (and also those things which electrically-excited neurons release). I bring this up because if you can cause a neuron to become electrically excited, it causes that neuron to fire (release neurotransmitters). You can do that directly with current (electrodes) or you can do that as I’ve suggested above, with the light-gated ion channels, or channelrhodopsins.
The upshot of this is that we could, this very day, cause select neurons in the brain to fire or be less likely to fire, if we could only get light to them!
And there are other proteins that can be injected for expression, bioluminescent proteins that glow when the neuron is electrically excited. This means that we could actually watch neurons firing.
So, with these tools we can stimulate, suppress, and read neuronal activity… if only we could shine light into the brain and watch what happened. If only we could train the brain to build fiber-optic networks!
This is where I’m going to dive in deep and lose some of you. If you trust me enough to suspend your incredulity, you can just stop reading.
Three different types of implanted *rhodopsins* (light-gated ion channels):
* Blue channelrhodopsins are light-gated ion channels that allow only cations, (negatively-charged molecules) to cross the cell membrane of an neuronal cell body and thereby depolarize and move a neuron toward action potential (firing), upon absorption of blue light.
* Yellow/green halorhodopsins are light-gated ion pumps that allow positively-charged chloride ions to pass the neuron’s cell membrane and polarize the cell, making it less likely to fire.
* Red bioluminescent proteins glow in the presence of electricity and therefore emit red light neurons are negatively charged and are moving toward firing.
Note: it’s important that the color-spectrum of the light-emitting bioluminescent proteins be entirely different from either flavor of rhodopsins, or a feedback effect would occur.
But how do we carry the signal from neural regions to the chip and back? The making of fiber-optic cables is a time-consuming manual process requiring intense heat. Obviously a twenty-foot heated lathe cannot be inserted into the brain.
It turns out that the Euplectella aspergillum, also known as the “Venus flower-basket” sponge, directs silica polycondensation at neutral pH and room temperature. That is to say, it makes glass-like fiber-optic structures naturally using a protein called glassin.
Future scientists have created light-seeking bacterial colonies that use glassin to lay down silica fiber-optic cables, directing the path of this cabling toward red luminescence.
Specialized oligodendroglial cells attracted to silica formations wrap these formations in opaque myelin sheathing.
As the these pathways grow, subjects ingest viruses targeting specific brain regions, causing red bioluminescent proteins to be manufactured on target neurons. These proteins pulse red at a specific frequency, and the light-attracted designer bacteria build silica formations toward the specific pulse-frequency of light being emitted.
When they reach their specially-pulsing light, these bacteria release a payload of three viruses: one that kills the designer bacteria, another that causes the cell to produce a protease that breaks down the blinking proteins, and a final virus that causes the manufacture of normal, non-blinking bioluminescent proteins at the site of the silica cable connection.
Before the bacteria die, they create a last layer of silica that repels oligodendroglia, exposing a microscopic area of glass to detect light being emitted nearby and carry the signal back to the chip or to release yellow and blue light that can stimulate or agonize nearby neuronal cells that have rhodopsins implanted.
The growth of the silica cables in the Mind must be perfectly timed, so throughout an integro’s life specific payload-bearing viruses are ingested orally at certain times.
Silica in the blood cannot pass the blood-brain barrier in the quantities that are necessary. So there is a small pop-out chamber at the back of the brain into which a silica suppository can be inserted and utilized by the glassin-laying bacteria as they move up and down the length of the cable like termites building a nest.
In the end, we have a second center of consciousness that can monitor and influence the brain as it works, connected to the Mindnet.