Neurotechnology as applied philosophy

Short thread summarizing a neurotech talk I gave at Edge Esmeralda last week:

I generally think people overestimate the degree to which neurotechnology is engineering, rather than alchemy. We don’t have a paradigm, and this makes the field challenging to navigate

The best navigational aids are treasure maps — some major landmarks of what sorts of conditions exist, and where the good spots are. Most of the good treasure maps are old

I like to think of neurotech as “applied philosophy” — you’re making a philosophical judgment about what kind of thing we are, and a value judgement about what we need more of, or less of

I offer some ideas for companies/projects. One of the simplest is an AR app to infer how many “Nature-Seconds per Hour” (NSpH) you’re getting, by calculating the fractal dimensionality of your visual field

Very simple model:
FD ~1.4-1.6 is recharging

https://aeon.co/ideas/feel-good-fractals-from-ocean-waves-to-jackson-pollocks-art

I’d also like to see someone built a very simple Apple Watch app that synchronizes heartbeats. If you send your heartbeat to your girlfriend’s watch, and she sends hers to your watch, what happens?

There’s a lot going on with bioelectricity nowadays, but I think there’s a lot of unexplored stuff too. If you break your arm, you put it in a splint so it can heal. If you break your electromagnetic field, maybe we could rig up a splint for that too

I’m working on a follow-up to Principles of Vasocomputation — but I’ll just say I suspect there’s a lot of potential tech there

Finally, I’d like to see people view neurotech as ultimately a poetic endeavor *in all senses of the term*. Neurotechnology should be aesthetic, a statement of who we are and what we find most beautiful. @PropheticAI definitely gets it