Happy New Year to all who are following my blog. This year, I hope to cover a little over what I went over last year, and discuss some aspects of how transhumanism can have an impact with our environment and cultures so we can figure out how to correct nature’s mistakes, like HIV and AIDS, diabetes, cancers, creating and taking down cell receptors responsible for addiction and physical dependence, and more.
So, let’s begin. I have been thinking about how people of younger generations don’t get the meaning of respect, that instead of evolving we are (d)evolving because people are out for image to satisfy their own flesh, and not one another. Of course, John Locke pointed that out several hundred years ago, but it has become more wide-spread, just like strokes and other things meant for older people are prevailing among teenagers. Now, I have done plenty of scientific investigation as to why these things happens. It turns out that many people have rewired their genetic coding that produces neurosteroids and such that makes proper mental development. It is not only the fact that we are capable of rewriting our genes, but our environment and culture plays an influence, like how much repetition and nurture we have had, and, even as babies, how much we have been breast-fed. It also depends on how stable your families were, how much positivity you have received, and how personal you have taken negative criticism. All of these play a role on how your thought patterns will turn out in the end. These are called the walks of life, or your schemas. Some experience anxiety problems, depression, irritability, and more. I have been trying to look at ways to induce such problems and then get rid of them so we can widen our world view. I have heard that people with too much dopamine gives them illusions like hearing voices of people they talk to a lot, or those of strangers. How does this work for people who have never heard in their life? I have never heard voices in my life, but I would be interested in knowing of a way to ingest something that will do it temporarily, but the voices should be saying positive things about me. Now, as exciting as all this might sound, I want to remind all of you that these scientific findings can help enrich our society so that we wouldn’t have ignorant people questioning those in the minority and accusing them of faking it. A lot of them just tell you the obvious, but hardly don’t get into depth.
Ever since I started paying attention to the news full-time in 2008, I found it quite stupid that we have prisons, and we spend time sending criminals to be locked for a costly sum, and then killing them if they do not reform. Many people think it would be dystopian or immoral to send these criminals to science labs to have their brains altered, their body chemistry permanently altered using engineering techniques, and possibly a technique to induce total amnaesia-like characteristics. In a way, you are rewriting their personality. You are using science to turn a bad person into a good citizen. However, something must motivate a person for killing another person. I was wondering, could it be possible to restore a dead person to life if we could salvage their DNA? Their personalities may be the same as the old person, but they wouldn’t have the same memories. They may look the same to you, but something will remind you that it is not the exact person, because they would have to learn everything. They would be relearning the old person’s memories, since this is a clone of the person who was murdered. I have asked people from varying religions, and most of them think it is due to choices a person can make. In dystopian societies, people are prevented from making their own choices so that they would not regret their mistakes in the community. I think we all should have the freedom to make our own choices as long as we have the proper balance in our system to deal with the consequences.
How does a person manage to be motivated to committing a crime when they take drugs that has them physically addicted? What does it mean to be high, buzzed, blazed, etc? Does it cause them to lose total awareness of their surroundings, and make the person act as if they were sleep-walking? Many universities have been looking at the biological and physiological causes of physical dependence to see if we could come up with a cure, not only for alcohol, but for the opioid epidemic, as well. In cases where nicotine is inhaled or applied using a skin patch, scientists were trying to create new cell receptors in the brain to see if they could stimulate the reward system by using the right key, if you imagine the receptor as a lock. Many people describe it as having a feeling as if something exciting were about to happen (this is how yellow and white light makes us feel). People also say that babies are addicted because of those cell receptors being transmutated into their genome, but that only gives me one question. How will that baby know, when old enough that they are addicted if they have never taken that drug before? It turns out that our body can develop tolerance to any drugs, whether they have an effect on the brain, like Propranolol. If you suddenly stop taking it, you would experience withdrawal symptoms. Will it feel like having this extra sense that you are hungry, but no matter how much you eat or get enough air, there is something that you can’t seem to get unless you stimulate those receptors or destroy them all at once? I heard that there were some studies that examined the relationship between cravings, proteins, hormones, and which emotions are related to them.
Ever since I wrote up that short article on vocal analysis, I came up across something very interesting called the voice of the castrato. When I analysed the harmonics of these voices, they came out with very unique characteristics that make them sound neither male or female. They have their own way in terms of how they sound. They underwent a lot of training once they have been castrated before puberty, but they grew exceedingly tall, pale-skinned, and most had no muscular build, and many lost bone density. They weren’t trans because they didn’t undergo hormone replacement therapy, they were just prevented from developing secondary sex characteristics. In the GLBTQIA community, in the arts encyclopedia, they were called the castrati, Italian for castrated in plural form. Scientists have been looking at how to recreate the once dead voice into a live voice by using what we know about sound.
A few days ago, I came across some naturopathic literature that had several techniques of treating things like thyroid problems that are sometimes the cause of depression and anxiety, metabolism problems and such, and how we can treat them using amino acid therapy rather than use medicines that do more harm than good. I once asked, are such emotions enhanced by drugs even though they are context-dependent? For example, if I drank coffee every day and felt fine, but one day I was worrying about something unrelated..would the caffeine enhance that anxiety? I have also been trying to see if there were naturopathic neurologists working on a cure to low and high-grade haemorrhages and seizures. That brings me to talking about the split-brain patient. When a person has no way of connecting the two halves of the brains together via the corpus callosum, they end up having unusual visual reactions, and several patients could draw shapes with each hand independently. Sometimes, people are startled to see that their hand, the one not intended to be used, is moving and grabbing objects. Is there a more humane way of cutting off the electricity between the regions and the two halves without using surgery? I thought that if we could attach these to sighted people, we could temporarily deprive them of vision and visual memory, or hearing to simulate deaf-blindness. Since the year 2009, it has been discovered that we have done a lot of misdiagnosing on people whom we thought were in a coma, but who actually turned out to be fully-conscious and completely paralysed but unable to respond to any kind of stimuli, yet their brain works very well and were still able to perceive and reason. What if a brain transplant could give them deparalysis? Sergio Canavero was talking about doing just that in 2017, but it wouldn’t work for a brain injury, only a body one.
How I plan to do deep-brained stimulation without cutting into the brain and implanting electrodes is going to be the hard part, but when I researched, I discovered I could look at several different inventions and see if I can apply physics to these. We know that the brain uses glucose for fuel. So what if we charged this radioactive fuel with a positive charge, and once the body has been polarised, then all we need do is discharge it in the right part of the brain. We are fortunate that outer-brain stimulation can be achieved because the electricity and magnetism could go through the scalp and skull. That’s why we have devices like the neuron-engineering and transcranial magnetic stimulation device, which I think some day will help blind people how to see. In a science-fiction story, it was suggested that if we used this energy, we could figure out if the mind can be altered and carried across the electricity between a body that has been negatively charged and vice versa. The problem is that the mind is not just stored into one part of the brain. The mind is distributed everywhere, which is why mind-uploading would be extremely hard to do, even body-swapping without any form of transplantation. So, what gives parts of the brain responsible for identity? Can we use light-sensitive proteins to map out memories?