3.1 KiB
Brain Software
Brain software, also brainware, is kind of a fun idea of software that runs on the human brain as opposed to a typical electronic computer. This removes the dependency on computers and highly increases freedom. Of course, this also comes with a huge drop of computational power :) However, aside from being an entertaining idea to explore, this kind of software and "architectures" may become interesting from the perspective of freedom and primitivism (especially when the technological collapse seems like a real danger).
Primitive tools helping the brain compute, such as pen and paper or printed out mathematical tables, may be allowed.
Example of brain software can be the game of chess. A chess master can easily play the game without a physical chess board, only in his head, and he can play games with someone else just by saying the moves out loud. He may even just play games with himself, which makes chess a deep, entertaining game that can be 100% contained in one's brain. Such game can never be taken away from the man, it can't be altered by corporations, it can't become unplayable on new hardware etc., making it free to the greatest extent. Many other board games and pen and pencil games, such as racetrack (pen and pencil racing game suitable for one or many players).
One may think of a pen and paper computer with its own simple instruction set that allows general purpose programming. This instruction set may be designed to be well interpretable by human and it may be accompanied by tables printed out on paper for quick lookup of operation results -- e.g. a 4 bit computer might provide a 16x16 table with precomputed multiplication results which would help the individual execute the multiplication instruction within mere seconds.
Yet another idea is to make a computer with architecture similar to the typical electronic computers but powered by human brains -- let's call this a human computer (not to be confused with people whose job was to perform computations!). Imagine that after a societal collapse we lose our computer technology (i.e. the ability to manufacture transistors and similar key components), but we retain our knowledge of computer architecture, algorithms and the usefulness of computers. As a temporary solution for performing computations we may create a "computer made of humans", a room with several men, each one performing a role of some computer component, for example an ALU, cache and memory controller. Again, a special instruction set and a set of tools (such as physical lookup tables for results of instructions) could be made to make such a human computer relatively fast. It might not run Doom, but it could possibly e.g. compute some mathematical constants to a high precision or perhaps help find optimal structure of cities, compute stresses in big building etc. In such conditions even a slow calculator could be immensely useful.