Sometimes I think I’d rather be a machine

Replace the misfiring lump of water and fat in my skull with plastic and wire, cut out all the shit that doesn’t work or works only to hurt me.

People are just an emergent property of the meat they inhabit, millions on millions of individual insensate analog signals summing up to one thinking, feeling human being. This is directly provable, change the meat, change the signal, change the person.

People wake from periods of unconsciousness with personalities shifted, addictions gone or reinforced, memories missing.

Unconsciousness is not just sleep, UNconsciousness, a lack of conscious, a temporary death, reversed by a reboot from the meat, sometimes the reboot isn’t completely successful.

If I am just a gestalt made of noise, static burning in synapses wrapped in bone and muscle and fat, what parts of me are really uniquely me?
What parts can I strip out and replace and still be considered a person?
If I go past that point and come back before it do I regain personhood or am I forever considered neutered?

Why should I not elect to strip out anger, or sadness, regret, gluttony, bad memories, my sex drive, my drive for self preservation?
What part of person hood is encoded in despair, or the feeling of hunger, or frustration, or jealousy?

These are not unique experiences, they are not even uniquely human experiences.
They are just states, points on a wave, some combination of electro-chemical signalling interpreted as unpleasant by the ghost they partially construct.

Why is it wrong to intervene to change the interpretation?
Why is it wrong to turn those signals off, or to completely swamp the signal in noise, drown out negatives with other less painful negatives, with a torrent of false positives?

Is it wrong?

People attempt to do just this all the time, in a million clumsy ways, they drink and smoke and fuck and fight and cut and bite themselves.
They abuse sleeping medication, they give themselves dementia hammering down deliariants and drown themselves in drink, they kill themselves, or fail in the attempt and come out changed, disabled, aphasic, blinded, different.

They take pills prescribed by “professionals” that sand the surface off their soul in order be able to deal with work and life and the sound of the electrical wiring in the walls so they can trudge through a world not made for people like them well enough to not die of starvation or brutalisation or end up on the streets or in prison or hanging from a doorframe.

What will the world be like when these crude methods are surpassed, when we can intervene directly and change the signal?
I think such technology could potentially be enormously beneficial, but I don’t believe that potential will ever be realised, perhaps for the monied few able to access such treatment without strings attached it will be, what about the rest of us?

There is no nation state or economic entity extant on this earth that has the wellbeing of the patient as the core concern of mental health treatment.

I do not believe this is likely to change.

What will the world be like when the answer to anxiety is having your fear response flicked off, when the solution to struggling with sex or intimacy is having the desire cut out of your head?

Stuck in a shitty job? No way out? Life not worth living? Your employer and your doctor have a solution, sign here on the dotted line, one quick surgery, artificial happiness, don’t worry, you can pull double shifts everyday to pay for it, really, we’d be happy to help.

Just stop receiving the signals, switch those experiences off, don’t worry about what’s making your body broadcast them in the first place, don’t try and change the world, be happy.

Or you’ll be made to be.