Exploring Transhumanism Through Sports: Neuralink Experiences

[GTOM]

I am working on a story, one of the topics it discovers is transhumanism.
What do you think about the following part describes watching sport with neuralink?

"She watched the dronecatcher match. Many possible viewpoints was offered, she decided to see and feel things through a favorite player. Since every brain is unique and different from each other, like the quantum cores of developed AIs, it was impossible to exactly transfer thoughts. However the more time she spent receiving the player's brain waves, the more she felt she was in the stadion, running and sweating, massive doses of adrenalin pumping through her veins. At the end of the game, after the player's team won, she felt really awkward, when the player looked at his really nice girlfriend."

With a similar method, really realistic virtual reality can be created too, however i speculate for my story, that due to long syncronization/customization process and expensive hardware, holo/4D movies are still popular.

 

[scottdave]

It flowed well for me. I was able to figure out what was going on in this scene fairly quickly, being that I had no context. Just fix the couple of spelling mistakes, and it'll be great.

 

[stefan r]

... she felt really awkward, when the player looked at his really nice girlfriend."

Would she "feel awkward"? Could be she would feel really aroused by the low cut shirt. The weirdness would come later when she has a memory of being turned on by someone she would never be turned on by. Really awkward would be seeing her sister cheer leading at the game.

 

[GTOM]

Would she "feel awkward"? Could be she would feel really aroused by the low cut shirt. The weirdness would come later when she has a memory of being turned on by someone she would never be turned on by. Really awkward would be seeing her sister cheer leading at the game.

Well i am still speculating on that part, should she just feel excitement, or due to different organs chemistry etc that feeling couldn't be translated correctly, and feel something alien.

 

[stefan r]

I suggest figuring out where in the process each black box enters "the mind". I'll try 4 levels but you could probably contrive more steps or use fewer for simplicity.

1) The ball player's retina sees an orange basketball and sends a signal on optic nerves. Intercepting there would not be much different than a helmet camera. Except that the image will contain the ballplayers vision [near/far sighted, stigmatism, lens opacity etc) and it will not be orange if the ball player is color blind. This would be quite handy for a blind spectator. The ballplayer could observe the cheerleader busts and the spectator could believe the ball player was watching the cheer routine.

2) The optic nerve leads into the visual cortex. From there what you see gets very filtered. You see(notice) lines/edges clearly even though the pixel intensity may be low. Motion also becomes far more "visible". Sometimes we do not see things that happen right in front of us. Performance magicians take advantage of this. The image from the visual cortex gets sent to several other parts of the brain.

3) We see faces in objects that are obviously not human, rock formations, clouds etc. Most people have an abnormal ability to recognize/remember faces they know at long distances. So for instance you could pick out "the guy who walked across the parking lot" from a police line up. You would not be able to pick "the shrub growing at the edge of the lot" from a similar police line up. The part of the brain that recognizes people's faces is not the same part of the brain that avoids colliding with someone/something. You can drive across the parking lot without hitting the pedestrian or the shrub. There have been people with strokes(or other local damage) that lost one brain function but not the other. Your "neuralink" could tap into multiple visual brain areas or just one.

4) Conscience recognition is a final step. In our example the the ballplayer becomes fully aware of the cheerleaders bouncing bust and parts of the brain are stimulated. If you are recording a bigoted ballplayer he might see a racial slur and a non-bigoted spectator would also see a racial slur. This would be seeing things from someone else's perspective. I am not sure how that would effect your brain. Could you use that to "treat" racism? I do not know.

My impression of neuralink, Elon Musk's company, was that they are aiming for something in the #2 range. If we are talking about transhumanism then we can talk about #3 and #4 too. A fiction story gets a lot more interesting with conscience getting transmitted not just sensory data. The short story you seam to be emphasizing the experience of feeling.

Well i am still speculating on that part, should she just feel excitement, or due to different organs chemistry etc that feeling couldn't be translated correctly, and feel something alien.

The "organ chemistry" may not be too much of a problem. All humans have the same organ connections to the brain. When fetuses develop they produce different organs but the nerve lines sprouted the same. Man nerves and woman nerves pass through the same/similar spine and connect to the same part of the brain. A #2 xxx link could transmit the sensation felt by nerves. Contact with ballplayers little toe would cause spectator to feel something touching her little toe. A #3 xxx link could transmit a pleasant sensation coming from the toe. The spectator could want more toe contact. Or conversely ball player could kick something causing pain in his toe but decide he did not care and keep running anyway. Spectator might be tormented by the same pain that ballplayer disregards. A #4 xxx link would make spectator feel an itchy foot in the same way that ball player feels an itchy foot. Spectator feels that the itch was satisfied by the scratching at the same time and with the same magnitude of relief that ball player feels.

 

[Drakkith]

I am working on a story, one of the topics it discovers is transhumanism.
What do you think about the following part describes watching sport with neuralink?

"She watched the dronecatcher match. Many possible viewpoints was offered, she decided to see and feel things through a favorite player. Since every brain is unique and different from each other, like the quantum cores of developed AIs, it was impossible to exactly transfer thoughts. However the more time she spent receiving the player's brain waves, the more she felt she was in the stadion, running and sweating, massive doses of adrenalin pumping through her veins. At the end of the game, after the player's team won, she felt really awkward, when the player looked at his really nice girlfriend."

With a similar method, really realistic virtual reality can be created too, however i speculate for my story, that due to long syncronization/customization process and expensive hardware, holo/4D movies are still popular.

The concept seems fine, though I'd work on the structure, grammar, and "flow" of your writing.

It is, in my opinion, much more important to find a particular spin on an idea and stick with it so you can focus on the story and the characters instead of whether the concept is as accurate as possible. Obviously it has to be believable, but as long as you don't butcher some basic physics you're usually fine. In any situation where you are making up future technology you will have those who don't believe it works the way you've presented it. While it's important to look at their criticism and decide whether it is something critical to your idea, it's much more important to treat your idea in a consistent manner in-universe and to take your idea to its logical consequences in the context of how it affects society a large. Or at least far enough to present a decent story.

 

[GTOM]

The concept seems fine, though I'd work on the structure, grammar, and "flow" of your writing.

It is, in my opinion, much more important to find a particular spin on an idea and stick with it so you can focus on the story and the characters instead of whether the concept is as accurate as possible. Obviously it has to be believable, but as long as you don't butcher some basic physics you're usually fine. In any situation where you are making up future technology you will have those who don't believe it works the way you've presented it. While it's important to look at their criticism and decide whether it is something critical to your idea, it's much more important to treat your idea in a consistent manner in-universe and to take your idea to its logical consequences in the context of how it affects society a large. Or at least far enough to present a decent story.

Looks like i can't get on without professional translator, otherwise it is a draft. Thanks to ideas i got here i throw that part about really awkward because he has different organs, and rather focus to how strange it to feel like someone else, even if it conflicts your own feelings.
Consistent application yeah, i portray neuralinks with the merits of helping education, training, lie detection (organized crime would have really hard time if world were less corrupt) droning, entertainment, discipline programs in prison. Disadvantages that high quality VR is expensive, takes a good time of sync to correctly interpret and manipulate brain signals, also it can be confusing to feel like someone other, or addictive, so it should have a minimum age limit.
I wonder whether i have missed something?