A heart from one body

Each is an augmentation. Each raises the same question.

A heart from one body beats in another. A cochlear implant carries sound into a brain that could not hear. A neural link reads a paralysed person’s intent and moves a prosthetic hand.

Each is an augmentation. Each raises the same question. What has the window become, and is it still itself? A window, in this work, is one self-reading life: one person.

This is the fourth of five chapters about the body. The first was about keeping a body running. The second, about editing a body before the person in it can choose. The third, about authority over your own mind. This one is about extending a body. One chapter follows: the end of life. The test set up in the chapter on medicine runs here without being derived again.

This chapter reads the corridor at the level of the body’s build. The corridor is the range of states your body can keep running in. The build is how your parts are joined, and how they read each other. The book calls it the architecture.

Here the build is widened, rebuilt or extended. The additions are ones the body’s own growth would never have produced.

First, what “reading yourself” means. You read your own state. You model where you stand. You commit to a path. Then you read again. The book calls this the self-reading loop. It is what makes you an operator: a reader who can say no.

The chapter reads two kinds of augmentation.

Augmentation that widens your corridor, while your control keeps pace with what it supplies, is maintenance. It is upkeep, at the level of the build.

Augmentation that supplies faster than your control can keep pace breaks the loop by which you read yourself. It is parasitic, at the level of the build.

Parasitic, in this work, means shrinking another’s room when nothing required it, or loading on them a cost they cannot carry.

The constraint has a name. The book calls it impedance matching. Your modelling must be able to take in what the augmentation delivers. Your modelling is your running reading of where you stand and what you are joined to.

Where your modelling can take in what arrives, the augmentation is permitted. Where it cannot, the augmentation is refused.

This chapter stands on the one interior: the awareness in me is the awareness in you. The full argument is in Ø Dissolutions, Chapter Six. The page One Awareness on the wall is about it alone: the420code.org/one-awareness/

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 8 — Transhumanism and the Augmented Window. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/08-transhumanism-and-the-augmented-window/. The film, Bandwidth does not upgrade you: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-8.1 to APP-8.5.