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by truncheon 3432 days ago
The title of this article is click-baity in its abuse of the vague, subjective word "consciousness."

"[blank] is already happening" is a trope, in wired's headlines, that gets reused frequently, to provoke exasperation. Wired probably advises writers with an internal style guide, since their tone has remained pretty consistent over the years.

The article is a lot of hype. There's a mix of several separate concepts brought into play, with anecdotal details, to produce an emotional effect.

Without explaining the differences between the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system, ideas are presented to confuse such differentiation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_nervous_system

The article touches upon advanced ways to interface with the peripheral nervous system of the body, in particular the extremities, addressing paralysis and amputation.

The article is not about the brain itself, although witnesses within the article explain their personal experiences. It isn't about machines becoming alive. It isn't about replacing the mind with a computer.

It's mostly about advanced ways of restoring sensation and motor control, with computer systems that remap connections beween damaged nerves. The external stimulation of nervous tissue does not translate to a migration of human experience from a biological system to a machine.

1 comments

Thanks for the summary.

I've noticed I started to avoid clicking links with titles I perceive as overly dramatic or emotional. I wish there was a browser extension providing community-sourced alternate titles and tl;drs for every news article on hover.

With a headline like this I just go straight to the comments, vast majority of the time the signal-to-ratio is far better.
I’m pretty sure there was one made by a HN member. First result in DDG is this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tldr/giepilabiomhl...