[fgkramer]

This following is completely unfounded, but I think that it would become a stigma to those who got it.

We are all driven by chemicals and everyone has their own preference on how to release dopamine and any other chemicals, be it exercise, drugs, alcohol, anything you can imagine. Getting a button to trigger such a strong response would mean a certain division in society, those who seek pleasure the new way or those who want to keep with the traditional way.

Overall I think that facilitating this would give people a huge (maybe too big) escape from reality and would certainly be abused.

Robin Cook had a plot about this (triggering orgasm-like responses on brains) many years ago in his book Brain:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/529804.Brain

[Funes-]

>Getting a button to trigger such a strong response would mean a certain division in society, those who seek pleasure the new way or those who want to keep with the traditional way.

Isn't this already happening to a certain extent--and progressively getting worse? I think there's an ever-increasing chasm between people who occupy their leisure time with digital entertainment engineered to be an easy--and highly addictive--dopamine fix, and people who try to enjoy more mindful activities. The latter option is, of course, incomparably harder.

[tachyonbeam]

The reward circuitry in the brain is very much fundamental to how we operate and what motivates us in life. This is why drugs can be so life destroying. People tend to restructure their life so that they can keep getting that reward, at the expense of everything else.

It's something that's maybe hard to understand unless you've done drugs. I used to go out raving and do MDMA a lot. At the peak I was doing it almost every weekend. Until I found myself going out alone and looking for opportunities to go out, even if nobody I knew was going or the party wasn't good. I thought I really liked dancing, but I eventually realized, my brain was looking for an excuse to put me in that environment where I would typically do drugs, even if I actually knew going out that night would be a shitty experience. In other words, when you mess with your reward circuitry, your brain will begin to "lie" to you to guide you back to situations where you will get more of that reward. Your way of thinking will shift, and you might not even notice.

I personally don't think there is any way that brain implants can hook into our reward circuit and be used in a safe/responsible way. At least, not if the users themselves have direct control. The only way it could maybe be used sustainably is to reward certain behaviors in a way that the person themselves doesn't have control over, but that's a whole other dystopian can of worms. Personally, I think brain implants might fuck up society beyond recognition. Imagine if people could turn their sex drive on or off at will, or stop themselves from falling in love, get over someone instantly, make themselves love their miserable jobs. Sounds great right? Except we'll stop being human, we'll become machines.