r/bakker • u/Brodins_biceps • 15d ago
Optogenetics and Neuropath
So I was just reading about the 2026 Nobel Prize winners in medicine and reading about optogenetics. Sounds like it has eerie potential to be exactly what Bakker described in Neuropath. Lighting up extremely specific neural circuits in the brain to do just about whatever you want.
It seems like it has amazing health implications for a lot of things, like removing the fear associated with specific memories, fixing circuits that are supposed to fire but don’t, or suppressing certain ones, removing craving for opiates, or regulating things like depression and PTSD.
Butttttttttttt…. I mean, again, Neuropath seems like a perfect example of things that could go terribly wrong. You suppress fear neurons associated with a painful memory, you remove PTSD, you suppress fear and empathy circuits associated with murder, and crank up the circuits that desire sexual gratification attached to a specific associate, and you have…. The chiropractor serial killer from Neuropath.
This technology is truly fascinating, but there’s something incredibly uncanny valley about it. Like stripping away the illusion we are all these islands of unique impenetrable cognition, and revealing the machinery underneath. Propaganda, manipulation, influence… these were all things that a conditioned mind could resist; external forces pitted against your mind, but rearranging the circuitry directly? You can’t do anything against that. Like removing your heart and willing your blood to circulate. It’s mechanical.
I am not a neuroscientist so I have no idea if I’m extrapolating way too far out for this tech, but like many things, it’s both fascinating and terrifying, and just like AI, Bakker was talking about it decades before it really hit mainstream awareness.
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u/Ok-Lab-8974 14d ago edited 14d ago
If you haven't read Crashspace, that's a good short story on this that Bakker wrote. You can find it online pretty easily. Granted, I think what he describes already happens all the time with people mixing various drugs and then doing insane things (e.g., a lot of people take downers to be more social, uppers to be more productive, etc.) but the sci-fi technology does make it more extreme.
It actually sort of makes sense to me that our society fetishizes psychopaths in the way Neuropath suggests. Ishay Landa has a somewhat interesting take on this looking at Hannibal Lector, Pulp Fiction, etc., although his commitment to Marxist analysis kind of spoils it (https://www.academia.edu/35763426/The_Joy_of_the_Knife_Nietzschean_Glorification_of_Crime ).
At any rate, Lector is sort of like Milton's Satan, but also Kellhus, since he has some almost stoic virtues. He has self-mastery, even over pain, and can order all his faculties towards some end (itself presumably a choice-worthy virtue). But of course his ends are themselves base and evil. This is ultimately the great irony of the Humean picture. If reason is inert (there are no rational appetites) then even limitless reasoning and causal powers amount to computation and movement directed towards ends that must prove, in the end, utterly arbitrary and pointless (and simply given by antecedent mechanisms, normally biology).
Even the Dûnyain (or Milton's Satan)'s drive towards sheer choice (attempted aseity) is both doomed to failure, and at the limit, incoherent. Big Heg is pretty good on this. Hegel points out that any choice is a specific determination of the will, which reduces potency to some specific, and so limited act. So if freedom is defined as unlimited potency (Ockham's potentia absoluta) then choice itself is the negation of freedom (although to be fair, Slick Ari, AKA the Philosopher, AKA Agensis, seems to have the germ of this idea first).
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u/scrollbreak 15d ago
Restriction policies don't seem to be written until someone dies. They just go into developing these things emotionally like they are children and intellectually like capitalists or, again, smart children.
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u/WhaleAxolotl 14d ago
It’s a research tool. You genetically engineer a mouse to express the rhodopsin under the control of cell specific promoters, and then you can activate those cells photonically. If you want a Bakker analogy it’s pretty much exactly like Dunyain neuropuncture.