[Essor Nougier]

From "Nanomedicine, Volume I: Basic Capabilities".

Read, and if it strikes a chord, ponder.


Like ants oblivious to the collective purpose of their colony, the billions of neurons in the human brain are all busily buzzing, wholly ignorant of the emergent plan. This is the physical, mechanical world of our electrochemical hardware. People also have thoughts, feelings, emotions, and volitions, a higher level in the data processing hierarchy which in turn is equally oblivious of the brain cells. We can happily think while being totally unaware of any help from our neurons. But nanomedicine will give us unprecedented systemic multilevel access to our internal physical and mental states, including real-time operating parameters of our own organs, tissues, and cells, and, if desired, the activities of small groups of (or even individual) neurons. Diverse parts of our selves previously closed to our attention may slowly conjoin and enter our conscious awareness.

Will this access promote an integrated identity or lead to hopeless confusion, or worse? Marvin Minsky, in his collection of essays The Society of Mind, persuasively argues that our selves or identities are in fact networks of semi-autonomous neurological "agencies" which sometimes cooperate and sometimes compete with one another. We think of ourselves as singular "persons," but we also experience "conflicting desires" and "differing viewpoints" within our minds that are, in Minsky's view, a direct experience of the multiplicity of our brain's neurostructures. Other models of the human mind suggest that our internal mental states, prospectively transparent via nanomedical augmentation, are diverse and intricate; Julian Jaynes is one of many writers who have drawn attention to profound dichotomies between the two cerebral hemispheres. The component-oriented personality models of Freud (e.g. ego/id/superego), Jung (e.g. archetypes), and Rank (e.g. will/counterwill), and the identification of 4541 distinct personality traits by Allport and Odbert warn us that full access to our brain's architecture could be perilous.

More seriously, most of us suppose that we are endowed with free will. But if choices by free will are simply the resolution of conflicts of neurological subsystems, and we become consciously aware of those subsystems and are able to intervene in their processes, do we run the risk of runaway instabilities at the deepest levels of what we presently call our "minds"? Will we find that these instabilities are profound counterparts to the maladies we currently designate as epilepsy, or psychosomatic illnesses? In any redesigns of our brains which would involve opening doors to, quite literally, the ultrastructure of our thoughts, we could become "naked to ourselves" in ways that we can only vaguely speculate about at present. Along with any other dangers we might encounter, this will raise entirely new issues of the proper role of psychotherapy and the sanctity of personal privacy.