Brain Mods. Quarantine by Greg Egan is the novel to read while we await the first real brain modifications to be sold on the internet. Before going to bed you spray some vial content into your nostrils, and clever nanomachines are carried into your brain. You lie awake a little thinking about the nanorobots finding their way inside your brain. Whether they will make a perfect mod, - or make vital brain centers into neural spaghetti.... When the nanomachines have rewired parts of your brain - You'll be the same you've always been - with a new career, and new allegiances, new values, new capabilities - that's all.... Lets face it, everything you do changes who you are. Eating changes who you are. As does not eating. So, neural mods change peoples values. So, a little moral nanosurgery creates a whole new person - hey, its a free world? Following Greg Egans lead its pretty clear that some brain mods are pretty impossible to live without: "P3", which is designed to confine your thinking to certain useful states of minds - making boredom, distraction, emotional agitation a thing of the past. "Boss", which helps you decide what is good for you. "Hypernova", which takes online gaming to new levels. "RedNet", which makes it possible for you to see infrared and plug into mainframes. Or whatever they gave our hero of "Quarentine" - something that makes you join the police force, lose your spouse - and rewire your brain, so you don't give a fuck. Surely, humans make choices all the time. We "murder" the good people we might have been. But, in Egans world its worse than that. Here, human perceptions have decimated the universe. Life really is nothing but a constant slaughter of versions of ourselves. So, it should be no surprise then that "Quarantine" ends up with a brain mod that can help us stop murdering all the possibilities of SuperSpace. I.e. Quantum mechanics tells us that atoms are revealed through their effect of on scientific instruments. Before the measurement Quantum mechanics tells you that e.g. an atom exists as a superpostion of many states. The atom is both here and half way to the Moon. The act of measurement has the effect of collapsing the wave function - and determining where the atom "really" is. In quantum mechanics it is an ongoing discussion why the act of measurement collapses the wave function - remember, Schroedingers cat, dead or alive.... In Egans book the solution is that the collapse of the wave function happens inside the brain. It follows that you could get a brain mod that stops the brain from collapsing wave functions. And not only that - but allows you to change the relative strengths of eigenstatens - and hence change the probabilities of experiments final outcomes: "She has shown us precisely how we can cease collapsing, regain our Godliness, and rejoin the rest of superspace". Wonderful stuff. Simon