Daydreaming is a crucial part of my thought process. Sometimes it directly contributes to my work, offering new ideas when I get stuck, but mostly it’s self-serving and purely for entertainment. Sometimes it’s both. I used to think “daydreaming” was insufficient in describing the experience, but I reconsidered it after remembering how awesome dreams are. The major difference I make between daydreaming and regular dreaming is the level of control, and even then the lines can blur (spoiler: I used to be way into lucid dreaming).
“Oh, you know. Just exploring what I perceive as an infinitely large thought space where anything can happen according to my conscious and subconscious desires.”
The way I describe daydreaming - programmable rules, “infinite” storage space - somewhat resembles a Turing machine. We don’t explicitly define the states required to run the simulation because we don’t need to. They’re inferred, but imprecise. What we lack in precision, however, we make up for in imagination. Most of us don’t actually take the time to mentally compute precise values for measurable things like distance or color because it’s not necessary when building a reasonable model of something. We need a ballpark estimate, not 64-bit floating point values. For example, I can imagine what it would look like if the force of gravity flipped and everything in the room fell to the ceiling without solving physics or collision equations. We automatically apply our experiences and knowledge to any mental scenario. This is also why I win every argument I ever have in the shower when I’m by myself.
I had more time for daydreaming before grad school, but before grad school I used to say that I had more time for daydreaming before college, so you can probably see where that goes. Realistically, I probably spend about as much time per day on it as I ever did. There was a lull during college; the time was reallocated to prioritize computer shit. After years of learning and practice, I’m gradually earning back my daydreamer certification.
Long before I saw The Matrix, I yearned for brain-computer interfaces. It was one of my very first daydreams - the kind that distract you long enough during school to get in trouble. The original thought came to me when I was about 6 years old. I had just gotten the hang of using the mouse AND keyboard simultaneously, but I had plenty of room for improvement. Ultimately, I wanted to play Warcraft with my mind and overcome the limitations of my physical form. For a very long time, this was the extent of my wishes. That’s a bad thing. When an idea stops developing in my daydreams, it becomes boring and eventually gets replaced with something more stimulating. That’s not exactly breaking news for anyone who is human, but it drove me nuts when I was younger. In the past few years, the brain-computer thing started to return in a big way.
It began with Snow Crash, a staple for cyberpunk fans. I’m hesitant to use that genre name, as people always argue about this shit. Call it what you like - I’ll call it an awesome cyberpunk novel. The technology described in the text was a wet daydream - a diurnal emission - for someone who had just been given a piece of paper that symbolized some level of competency in programming computers to do things. I don’t like sharing too many details about books for fear of ruining someone’s first contact, so I’ll leave it as highly recommended by me, Nick.
In real life, I paid more attention to news stories on prosthetic limbs and robotics. Every week, slashdot would have a new story on a team that had either built a stronger, lighter, more responsive robotic hand, or slapped it into some human and made the damn thing actually work. Later, I saw a study that reconstructed video clips from brain scans using some clever applications of machine learning and data mining. Mind-controlled helicopters were next, then most recently, the story of a guy who moved another guy’s body parts by using a brain-computer-brain interface. Turns out we aren’t stuck in read-only mode after all! This was the article that got me thinking about the next steps.
See, we can hold a conversation, if...
We can speak the same language or have a reliable translator
Vocabularies should be reasonably compatible
We possess the emotional intelligence necessary for not only expressing ourselves, but understanding others
We use a medium compatible with the message contents. Available options:
Face to face (audio, visual, touch)
Phone or VoIP (audio only)
Text (written note, email, instant message)
You don’t have to be a programmer to understand that a lot of that shit can go wrong. Humans are exceptional at compensating for limitations - emoticons, italics, memes - but at the end of the day, I’m still attempting to capture an expression that resides in my brain using symbols that hopefully mean something to you and translate correctly so your understanding of the expression is (functionally) equivalent to mine. You don’t know how I feel just because I told you. Instead, you know what you think I feel based on your translation efforts and my attempt to symbolize what I actually feel.
Thankfully, humans excel at this, but there are still no guarantees. Some of the biggest arguments I've had with people were because of simple misunderstandings. What if you could instantly feel how I felt? How would our communication change? I would love to see a brain-computer-brain interface where the users could relay abstract thoughts or emotions without saying a word. When I talk with my wife, I wonder where the depth of our thoughts ends. If I tell her I’m feeling a little sad one day, I usually don’t explain that it’s because the eventual heat death of the universe signifies that everything we do is meaningless, even though the life and time we have as a species until then is incredibly valuable and important, so it’s not really that bad, but it’s still kind of bad. If I don’t share that information, then all you know about that transaction is that Nick’s feeling a little sad. Who cares? Chalk it up to brain chemicals and get back to work! If you know the reason behind it, does it make a difference?
Do the details even matter? If they matter, should they be shared? Part of the beauty about being alone in your own brain is not having to explain yourself to yourself. I’m given the freedom to express myself at my disclosure. Moreover, I’m not sure I could stomach letting anyone besides my closest friends feel my every impulse, and I’d only be game for it on my good days. But the prospect of “truly” feeling how someone else feels, without losing anything in translation, is enticing. I say “truly” because I imagine that even a direct link would be problematic. Even if the technology is perfect, the individual neurological differences between participants could make raw messages wholly incompatible. Instead, they must be forced through personal calibration filters before they can be understood. And even if the transmission is flawless… do you really want to know the reasons and feelings behind someone’s words?
That’s only the beginning. Long-term brain storage, human brain simulation, transplanting memories… There’s much to see, if we’re lucky. All warnings and implications aside, I’d love to try this in my lifetime. I’m hopeful that we’ll see it, although I hope that the old-fashioned way is still an option when it comes to sex.
-Nick owes thanks to Isaac Asimov and William Gibson for the inspiration to write this post.
