hard sci-fi + speculative design roots
︎ The BPCI-R system inherits from a succession of speculative IoT neurotech prototypes, rooted in a hard sci-fi scenario that maps physiological processes of visual perception onto geometric mathematical space. This mapping embosses naturally dispersed gaps between conscious, semi-conscious, and unconscious modes across multiple agents into a coherent "transreality" — a perceptual state that would naturally exist under "new physics" in the distant future, but is here reverse-engineered for a depicted near-term future through a neuro-ocular interface. The result enables fluid trespassing across the gradient of realities, from physical to synthetic.
The scenario, first presented as a 2018 design practice-led thesis, explores a speculative socio-psychological landscape featuring multiple realities of varying "densities," where citizens remain unaware of one another due to the granular diversity of glocal mental clusters – from cyborgs to psychonauts. This fragmentation arises from interactive neuro-cognitive dynamics in sensory processing and belief modulation, prompting the need for cross-reality communication to ensure long-term planetary sustainability.
Within this context, the framework posits a deliberate recalibration: positioning evolutionary mechanisms and synthetic augmentations as coequal partners in development, safeguarding ongoing engagement with our biological capacities. Rather than transcending biology through hardware cyborg enhancement, this orientation pursues biological exploration itself – drawing philosophical inspiration from Max Tegmark's "Mathematical Universe" hypothesis (specifically, his Level IV multiverse proposal that mathematical structures constitute fundamental reality).
It emphasises a self-sustaining dynamic of "juxtaposition versus addition," framing the next technological frontier as post-biotech: engineering not biological materials themselves, but the informational and organisational patterns that govern how those materials self-organise, communicate, and compute — a domain accessible by interfacing with biology's existing computational architecture.
These artistic predictions today manifest as expressions of bioengineering and consciousness engineering.
First might be termed a "wet cyborg" – a biologically anchored, technologically augmented organism whose primary computational and communication substrate is living tissue, interfaced through bio-hybrid connections. Unlike traditional cyborgs that augment biology with electronics, the wet cyborg makes biology itself the computational medium.
As we probe these layered biological and informational consciousness substrates, the contours of post-biotech begin to emerge experimentally through the establishment of a new reprogrammability scale.