Pause

It was never my intent to make this page a clothesline for events in my private life, and it will not become one, but something very important in my life occured recently that is at the same time intimately related to this subject.

A few hours after my initial post here, my half-brother passed away. He had spent the last eight years in a persistent vegatative state due to head trauma suffered in a car accident at the age of 18. His entire brain was deprived of oxygen for several minutes, so we were told, but the primary injury was to his midbrain. Although our mother was sure that he continued to have moods and preferences, and that he sometimes expressed these to her through various cues, he was never again able to communicate or respond in any clear, consistent way to the rest of us. It is frustrating still not to know whether he was “there” after the accident, and if so, how much of him remained. His outward appearance was of one left exhausted by an endlessly troubled sleep. I dearly hope that was not what he experienced for the last third of his life.

He had been an extraordinarily kind and well-meaning friend, as those at the funeral attested, and had faced the world with humility and wonder, and a good deal of introspection.

Over the past few years, I gradually became interested in the more-or-less speculative cluster of topics that includes neuro-enhancement, brain-machine interfaces, nootropics, enhanced perception and so on. I became convinced more recently that the best hope for continuing and building upon our civilization (such as it is) will be found through improvements to ourselves — the expansion of our cognitive, creative and moral powers — via whatever methods we develop and feel comfortable employing at that moment. To this end I have enrolled in a degree program to study intelligence, the brain, and AI.

And yet, one reason for taking this path — and which I felt a bit embarrassed to admit — was to be in close contact with new research on brain rehabilitation, in the hope that I might be able to recommend something to relieve his condition as soon as possible. He had remained in remarkably good physical condition for years, beating the odds in rather dramatic fashion. Most often, patients in his state succumb to a respiratory or other infection within two years. I began to believe he would be around for several more years, long enough to out-wait the development of an effective treatment. He will not.

Because of his unexpected passing, I ended up dropping my classes. I have since enrolled in new ones. And I have returned here to reaffirm my intention to learn and inform about the topic that holds the greatest promise for enlarging and improving human experience.

But despite all the visions of wide, sunlit prospects ahead for those whose awareness will range beyond the merely human, I will never forget the imprisonment within a dimmed and narrowed reality that victims of retardation, head injury and senile dementia suffer. May we find cures soon.