<-- Physical Eschatology | Transhumanist Terminology | Posthuman -->


Imagine, for a moment, that our biotechnological knowledge has exploded; that we routinely make changes to our selves and to the organisms that surround us that can only be described as Godlike. Uplifting chimpanzees to near human levels of intelligence; controlling the growth of trees at such a fine grain that it is possible to simply grow a living house; releasing swarms of engineered bacteria to cleanse the world of the billions of tons of toxins poured into landfills, rives, oceans, and the air above us. That sort of thing.

Also imagine that we have achived similar levels of skill with computer software and hardware. Uploading of entire human minds to advanced computer networks is possible; digital organisms have become endemic and ineradicable, spreading just like normal biological organisms through a highly automated environment; this is a society with technologies beyond anything imagined in The Matrix.

If we assume the prior levels of technology have been attained, we can try to imagine some of the specific applications that they imply and what those applications would mean for the human condition. One of the most obvious that comes to mind is the ability to learn new skills extremely rapidly, a la the previously mentioned Matrix's uploads of new skills and abilities (think Keanu saying, "I know Kung Fu").

The bio-infomatic organ that makes this possible is the pidgin brain. It loads experiences, bits of knowledge, physical skills, or anything else that can be encoded in tne neural medium into a staging area (the pidgin brain proper) from whence it is loaded into the individual's core persona. This process involves assimilating the new information into the permanent neural structures of the individual.

The term pidgin brain is also sometimes used to refer to a device that can communicate with some sort of standard neural interface and that contains some particular set of information. In this usage it is closer to being what we would recognize as a book, only meant for people with a far more efficient form of communication than written language.

The only real world usages I've been able to find of this term are in the archives of the mailing lists maintained by the World Transhumanist Association.


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