Abstract

This essay discusses simulation as an optimal vehicle for brain plasticity, a primary and distinct area of neuroscience and essential to human enhancement. By speculating on second-order enhancement cybernetics, the essay links the three-dimensional, virtual world of the Metaverse to, and frames the practice of enhancement as taking place in, an epoch of plasticity. An arguable key issue of simulation and enhancement is the tension between desire and feasibility: a desire for greater than human attributes and what is technologically feasible for designing such post-biological attributes.