Consumer VR is Here

[Dark Jaguar]

Not necessarily, there's really no interface short of directly trying to tap into it. Further, altering the actual neural connections isn't so straightforward. There wouldn't be a way to send commands to "write over" this or that section "Eternal Sunshine" style, for example, simply due to the way brains work. They don't really have a typical "write" command, and learning in general is accomplished through gradual repetition, most likely having to do with certain chemical reaction chains which reinforce and so on. Brains really do work on a completely different level than circuits, so the typical programmatic method of "attack" just wouldn't work. Interfacing would involve making modules that can respond to requests from that neural mass. The neural mass (what's left of it after the surgery) would still be doing what it wants, but if the implants are well-made, they'd cooperate with it. The module wouldn't be able to "overwrite" neurons, but it could still feed false data to the brain, and maybe brainwash someone over a longer period of time, if done in a subtle way the person wouldn't notice. Look at it this way, when we see a typical optical illusion, we know our senses are lying to us and are generally able to cope without buying the lie. A more subtle optical illusion would be one that didn't tip off the rest of our brain that something was "wrong", not until it was too late. I suppose an optical illusion would be an example of a brain "hack".

I'm still terrified at the potential for human suffering that mastering the human brain could unleash. It's an issue that will need an absolute and uncompromising solution, because it's one thing to torture someone to death over the span of months (about the worst thing a person can do to another person in this world), and another to torture someone for an accelerated billion years of actual "burning in a lake of fire" accompanied by an implanted sense of guilt over that particular psychopath's interpretation of what sins the victim committed, all in the span of a few seconds so that it's literally impossible to "stop" the torture before it's already done it's full cycle. The sheer scale of that level of human misery is so far beyond anything in our experience that we really need to think long and hard about what needs to be done to make such a thing effectively impossible BEFORE we reach that technical level. What I'm saying is that sort of thing CANNOT happen, EVER, and if we can't find a way to prevent it, with a population in the billions, it will happen at least once, and it would be better for our race to go extinct than to allow it to pass.

I'm being pretty harsh here, but I just can't suffer that possibility. It's just beyond my ability to stomach.