Wetware (brain)

This article is about Wetware relating to the brain. For other uses, see Wetware (disambiguation).

Wetware is a term drawn from the computer-related idea of hardware or software, but applied to biological life forms. Here the prefix "wet" is a reference to the water found in living creatures. Wetware is used to describe the elements equivalent to hardware and software found in a person, namely the central nervous system (CNS) and the human mind. The term wetware finds use both in works of fiction and in scholarly publications.

The "hardware" component of wetware concerns the bioelectric and biochemical properties of the CNS, specifically the brain. If the sequence of impulses traveling across the various neurons are thought of symbolically as software, then the physical neurons would be the hardware. The amalgamated interaction of this software and hardware is manifested through continuously changing physical connections, and chemical and electrical influences that spread across the body. The process by which the mind and brain interact to produce the collection of experiences that we define as self-awareness is still seriously in question.

Origin

Though its exact definition has shifted over time, the term Wetware and its fundamental reference to "the physical mind" has been around from the mid-1950s. Mostly used in relatively obscure articles and papers, it was not until the heyday of cyberpunk, however, that the term found broad adoption. Among these first uses of the term in popular culture were the 1987 novel "Vacuum Flowers" by Michael Swanwick as well as several books from the hand of Rudy Rucker, one of which he titled "Wetware". "... all sparks and tastes and tangles, all its stimulus/response patterns – the whole bio-cybernetic software of mind." Rucker did not use the word to simply mean a brain, nor in the human-resources sense of employees. He used wetware to stand for the data found in any biological system, analogous perhaps to the firmware that is found in a ROM chip. In Rucker's sense, a seed, a plant graft, an embryo, or a biological virus are all wetware. DNA, the immune system, and the evolved neural architecture of the brain are further examples of wetware in this sense. Rucker describes his conception in a 1992 compendium "The Mondo 2000 User's Guide to the New Edge," which he quotes in a 2007 blog entry. Also, early cyber-guru Arthur Kroker used the term in his 'RU wetware?', a text on his "ctheory" website in 1993.

With the term getting traction in trendsetting publications, it became a buzzword in the early 1990s. In 1991 Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink organized the 'Wetware Convention' in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which was supposed to be an antidote to the "out-of-body" experiments conducted in high-tech laboratories, such as experiments in Virtual Reality.

Timothy Leary, in an appendix to Info-Psychology originally written in 1975-76 and published in 1989, used the term "wetware", writing that "psychedelic neuro-transmitters were the hot new technology for booting-up the "'wetware' of the brain". Another common reference is the saying, "Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers." The numerical allusion is to a classic 1957 article by George A. Miller, The magical number 7 plus or minus two: some limits in our capacity for processing information, published in Psychological Review in March 1956, Volume 63, Issue 2, Pages 81–97.

See also

• Brain–computer interface
• Cybernetics
• Cyberware
• Intelligence amplification
• Liveware
• Meatspace
• Neurotechnology
• Wetware computer

External links

• Rat-brain robot aids memory study
• "Illegal Knowledge" A text about wetware written by the writers' collective of which Lovink was a part