Practical transhumanism: Augmenting sensory perception - what we can do

Hi all, this and the previous post is going to be part of an ongoing series of posts of mine about practical transhumanism - what you can do today to expand your capabilities and become transhuman.

Previously, I addressed the question of augmented creativity and this is a wonderful thing to do, but it only truly uplifts people from regular intelligence to greater intelligence. Current technology is only capable of unlocking greater cognitive potential for the most part, not truly adding new cognitive capacity.

In this article however, I will discuss how you can become truly transhuman: that is, how to enhance yourself with abilities that unaugmented humans simply can never have.

Adding a new sensory input for EM fields

One of the simplest ways to augment sensory input is to add the ability for perception of EM fields through the use of subdermal magnets. Quite simply, if you have a magnet implanted in your finger tips then when exposed to an EM field it will vibrate at the same frequency and excite the mechanoreceptor cells in your skin enabling you to feel the field.

This is something that has various practical uses, but it's also somewhat of a novelty for many people too and has the "cool" factor. It also inspires a sort of automatic horror in some people and some practical concerns about the pain involved in subdermal implantation.

Practically, finger magnets are famous in the biohacking community for rejection and the rejection rates of this particular type of implant is very high - I know from personal experience what this can be like as i've had them reject twice from my own body and plan to reimplant with a different procedure to avoid the issue recurring in future.

If you are crazy enough to do this DIY, there are guides online on sites like biohack.me and I encourage people to read them if they want to do this themselves. Make sure that whatever you implant is coated properly (Titanium Nitride is the gold standard, but magnets coated in this material are difficult to obtain, if anyone wants to buy one from me get in touch - I make no warranty as to the coating performance though and this is at your own risk). You also need to ensure that surgical tools, the implant itself and your skin and general environment is as sterile as possible.

For the actual procedure, the classic technique is to use a scalpel to make an incision in the finger and then use another tool to open up a "pocket" in the subdermal layer, insert the magnet into the pocket and then use sutures to close and this is how most people do it. While healing, it is important to keep it clean and use antiseptic to avoid infection, and to seek medical advice if the area does actually become infected.

Personally I intend to use a modified procedure for the next time I reimplant magnets: using an RFID injector needle to make a VERY small incision and literally inject the magnet. This is because the wound will close up far faster, making rejection and infection less likely - it is likely that the wound will not even need sutures and I intend to simply dress it with sterile gauze and bandage while healing.

Let's look at another augmentation you can get next, this one is unusual in that it is a commercial product.

Adding awareness of the compass

A commercial company by the name of "Cyborg Nest" has released a product they call the North Sense, it is based on a simple enough principle: the device attaches to the body via bellbar piercings and gives tactile feedback when one is facing north.

https://cyborgnest.net/

This sounds incredibly trivial, but it does have one major benefit: it radically improves one's sense of direction, and thus makes navigation through complex environments easier. If you tend to get lost a lot trying to find places, this may be a worthwhile upgrade to make.

Installation involves 2 subdermal bellbar piercings for the mounting system and this is a procedure any piercer or bodymod artist can do for you. In that sense, it is more accessible to the masses than the finger magnet implants, but I myself do not intend to get it.

Upon asking the company if there is any schematic and firmware source code available for their device (a requirement for any implant or augmentation with active electronics for me), they stated that it could be dangerous to release this information since the device "works with the brain".

Suffice to say, this does not inspire confidence in me, but the device itself appears well-made and if you are interested I encourage people to get one.

Expanding visual perception

This is a much more radical idea, it's in this article only because it can in fact be done, but it is highly radical to most people, here's a project that tested adding near infrared vision to the human retina:

http://scienceforthemasses.org/infrared-project/

Put simply, you cut out Vitamin A from your diet completely and replace it with a compound that responds to a greater portion of the EM spectrum.

This is not without its problems: it requires cutting out ALL food and drink with the exception of a highly controlled product such as Soylent (with vitamin A removed). While this may be worth the tradeoff to some, the psychological effects of eliminating normal food completely are undesirable. The SFM project that tested this idea did get results though:

https://scienceforthemasses.org/2014/08/20/initial-success/

It is feasible that something could be done with pharmaceuticals in this area, but that is only speculation on my part.

A summary and some thoughts about the future

I've presented here 3 practical upgrades to human sensory perception that will make you truly transhuman - able to do what unaugmented humans can not do. For further expansion of human sensory perception the future holds a lot of potential as I did not list other possible methods I did not consider practical for normal people.

As neuroscience develops we should be able to find other ways to get information into the brain and I believe a defining moment in history will be when we finally solve the neural coding problem (the question of how the brain organises information and encodes it in neural firing patterns and dendrite structure).

In the nearer term, direct neural stimulation without solving the neural coding problem could be used to add perception of other aspects of the world around us. One possibility is adding the ability to sense the strength of wifi networks by directly stimulating nerves based on the signal strength, but there are 1000s of such possible ideas.