One of the many unique and bewildering promises held by nanotechnology is the ability to ‘upgrade’ our brains. IE; make them faster, increase memory capacity.  Since I first heard this notion, it’s gripped my imagination, it sounds so… sci-fi, yet somehow very possible and real. I’ve never been a truly spiritual thinker, and I think that’s why I had so little problem with the idea of a ‘post-biological’ human. Many people think of our bodies as sacred perfect temples or as something that could never be improved upon, but I’ve never had that idea (dare I say… conceit?).
I want to think faster, I want to remember everything I do and be able to call it up in no time at all. I want to be able to do seven things at once and still have some spare brain power to multiply 24,567 by 678,903. Our current brain-computer interface technology is messy, big, and inefficient… implanting a chip in your brain. I don’t want to implant a chip in my brain, but the fact that we can do it (brain computer interface) is really a stunning achievement.
But what I’m interested in putting into my brain, (well… i’m not in line for testing or anything… when and if they work all the bugs out, of course) nano-bots, are not so invasive. There’s no surgery, just computer guided super-neurons that intermingle with and (again I use the word) upgrade our brains.
I think it’s important to point out that the terminology ‘nano-bots’ really misrepresents what this technology is. Once we get down to the molecular level, these ‘nano-bots’ are made of the same atoms as the organic molecular machinery that symbiotically work together to form our bodies. It’s not like I’ll have micro-sized robots in my head, this is more like a redesign of the neuron. A more efficient design.
But then I got to thinking that perhaps how fast time moves will be directly affected when, or if, we are able to increase the speed of our minds. I was bored this morning and watching some video’s on youtube explaining Einstein’s theory of relativity. It was nothing I didn’t already know, but it really drove home the fact how ‘fast’ time ‘moves’ is all based on perspective and perception. “Time flies when you’re having fun,” they say, it also speeds up and slows down depending on how fast you are moving through space. So time is anything but fixed, especially when it comes to how we perceive it.
If, for example, it only takes you 5 seconds to count to 1000 when an unaltered human would take about 500 seconds (made up numers), does it still ‘feel’ like five hundred seconds to you, even though any clock will say only five seconds has passed? How will we perceive the amount of time that has passed? And if we are continually improving and upgrading our brains to go faster and faster, will time continue to ‘slow down’ in this way? Could the advent of these technologies literally mean the end of ‘time’, at least, as we know it? Some great new understanding of how what time is and how it works (or even what it is, for that matter).
This whole idea of a radical shift in time perception is almost incomprehensible. However, we do have a basis for comprehending it, as we already have some control over our perception of time. Spend an hour watching your favorite show and compare it to spending an hour staring at your computer mouse. Which one takes longer? From your perspective? Under the influence of certain psychoactive chemicals (be safe now!!!), you can sometimes experience quite radical shifts in time perception.
Experiencing time from different perspectives could give us new ways to study and understand what time is… I can’t even speculate on the ramifications… time travel? Â Stopping time? Â I know there is much research into time going on already, especially in the quantum physics world.
This is all speculation, really just an attempt to imagine the future, an attempt at greater understanding. But knowing that we have such wonderful mysteries to unpuzzle fills me with elation. The great conundrum of the unknown. That’s one thing religion can’t offer, the unknown. Religion is all about knowing, stripping the ability to wonder away from people. Wherever a non-theist sees remarkable unknowns to probe and study, a theist sees God. I have to say I kinda feel bad for them.
Time, and it’s passing is one of the most fascinating unknowns, in my opinion. It is often referred to as another dimension, or the fourth dimension, which makes sense, in a way. We often refer to spacetime, because the two are inextricably linked, though we all know there is some fundamental difference in how we experience the two. You have to move through time in order to move through any of the three spacial dimensions. However, it seems to me that there is something fundamental about our understanding of time that is missing. And that’s great. I wonder how long it will take us to figure it out.
