Whenever I read oblique discussions of prostheticizing the entire nervous system and subjecting it, unquestioningly to various 'improvements', I'm reminded of Hopkins being stuck in the buffer in Freejack. In Freejack, it's understood that identity cannot sustain indefinitely in such a buffer. But in our real future, we may not be able to recognize identity as having deteriorated, especially if it comes to be framed as 'purified' or 'optimized' or something like that.

It's a fair question why we should cling to identity at all if it means we can never be 'purified', 'optimized', 'integrated', etc. But I might also ask what is the point of transcending our current concept of identity if it neither poses any biological advantage nor truly preserves the most rightly valued aspects of biological personality and cognition.

Worst of all, I have just spent 5 years contemplating a cyber-reality in which the personalities of my McD drive-thru customers are preserved, immutably or perhaps even magnified or exaggerated in some way. The best case scenario I can see that includes something like that is one in which such 'people' are systematically deprived of their awareness that the new world is different from the old world, and in which they are thrown into an endless permutation of bizarre earthly dramas for the amusement of the next higher level of lowbrows (maybe including me?).

Surely, to try to 'fix' these 'people' in the next realm would or at least should be met with the maximum level of resistance, as their entire reason to exist is so thoroughly tied up in the feeling they get from getting away with self-destructive behaviors.

From a humane standpoint, the best we may be able to do for them is to utterly withhold any form of prosthesis that may allow them to 'transcend', or maybe to put them into some kind of sinusoidal buffer where they perpetually drive around McD, eating and getting hungry again by the time they get to order a few seconds later.

As for the nano-goo, if it can be used broadly to manipulate cell function in almost any way imaginable, should we expect it will be used to alleviate Big Mac Attack, or to perpetuate it, or both? There may be no answer to the moral question of what constitutes 'abuse' of such technologies once large aspects of organismic behavior have been handed over to various feedback loops with 'elective regulators' and whatnot, greatly ambiguating constructs like 'personal intention'.

But I have to ask these questions in some way if I can, no matter how much distant cyber-historians maybe at me when I'm long gone.