Yes, in principle why not?

: OK, so we know that genetics isn't the sole determining factor in a person's
: consciousness. But could a genetic mechanism be built to override a
: person's personality?

Yes you would have to craft the human brain to be a general purpose personality runner and then run personalities on the brain. Treat personalities as programs run on the hardware.

But what we understand of the brain so far is that the hardware determines the personality and that changes to the hardware make changes to the personality.

With the exception of programmable gate arrays - computers don't work by rewriting the hardware. But maybe we shouldn't let ourselves be too constrained by an analogy. Maybe, in the haloverse, the personality programs do rewrite the hardware.

How do multiple personalities share space in the one brain? What is the context switch time? If it involved radical rewrites then one personality couldn't have a real time chat with another. And yet they do. (If I remember correctly)

So we are back to assuming a generic, multi-personality capable brain with fast context switching.

And, funnily enough, I've heard of people with multiple personalities and you could say that this was a misfiring of the Librarian's multiple personality hacks. The people who have this don't have memories of 100,000+ years ago. OTOH some people claim that they have lead other lives...

I feel dirty taking this as EVIDENCE that Bears ideas are possible. It's all a bit woo-ish and very new age and un hard science - its not even soft science - it's virtually homeopathy! :-) It is magic wearing science lipstick.

I can't categorically state that it is impossible but I really don't like it. I don't read the fiction and feel a warm contented glow and it certainly doesn't feel like hard science fiction.

And if L could make such a brain then she wouldn't have had to shoot the Didact. She could have just given him a glass of water to drink and turned him into the person that she wanted him to be.

: OK, how would I do it? Well, I'm not sure about 343i, because I doubt they
: care about the science enough, but I would have made the Librarian's Geass
: into a sort of biological radio.

: The captured humans, like Lord of Admirals, would have been uploaded into the
: Domain. Meanwhile, on Earth, Humans would have a structure in their brain
: (Not an organ per se, but a part of the brain's architecture) that acts as
: a receiver tuned to a particular channel. Like a Precursor-built OnLive,
: the Domain receives stimulus from a Human brain, does the processing that
: lets the Geass-memory 'think', and transmits the results back to the Human
: victim.

Using the Flood's magic telephone, the same one that Cortana used to contact the Chief. And instead of having the personalities running in the brain - they run in a virtual brain hosted by the domain and the results of the simulation are fed into the brain.

Why should native personalities be special? Maybe we could all be incorporeal and are just tied to a meat puppet for a while. OK, that's an old idea and probably is how many people think that we work. It's souls.

So Bear's ideas have a veneer of novelty and wear science lipstick but, to me, they are based on old ideas and old ways of thinking. But that could be a good thing for many people because then the ideas resonate with what they already think.

I probably don't like them because they conflict with my world view. It could be simple prejudice.

: This is similar to a Forerunner 'hindbrain'. Though the Forerunner's
: understanding of what the Domain was left much to be desired, they knew
: something about the process that let them interact with it. This led to
: synthetic Domains, which were used to disseminate information and
: protocols within secure facilities. Humans interact with these systems on
: a most rudimentary level. When someone innately knows which button to
: press to extend a bridge, you've seen a synthetic Domain in action.

Makes more sense than the idea that we innately know Forerunner writing and understand Forerunner UIs.

: *Checks watch.

: Hmmm... Started writing fanfiction fifteen minutes after I sat down to
: theorize... I'm slowing down.

: Anyhow, since the Domain was destroyed when the Halo Array fired, all Humans
: get are echoes. Sometimes this manifests as Deja Vu or strange dreams.

: So, if the Domain is gone, why does the Librarian's ghost claim to have
: steered our evolution? Well, I'm going to assume that she's not
: grandstanding and claiming credit for the natural progression of our
: methods of waging war, and submit the following explanations.

: -The ghost was made after the Librarian learned that the Domain was the
: Organon. She is therefore unaware that her progenitor's plan was
: successful, and is assuming that the invention of powered armor and
: genetic augmentation was the result of her schemes.

What plan? I have forgotten or I just missed it. I'm doing a reverse Sherlock - I'm more interested in remembering that the earth goes round the sun :-)

: -The Domain is partially intact and is rebuilding itself, enough that the
: Librarian's backups can guide us in a manner that is infinitely more
: discrete than the methods we saw in the Forerunner Trilogy.

: -After learning that the Halo Array was going to kill off the Domain, she ran
: down to the Voi installation and put in what is widely considered to be
: the hardest night's work ever. She rebuilt a synthetic Domain so it's
: signal could reach out across all of the solar system, and then modified
: our Geass to prevent us from leaving Earth until we had unwittingly build
: the means to carry our Geass with us to the stars. The result is the
: Assembly, which steers Humanity in accordance with strings even it doesn't
: know that it dances upon.

: Thoughts?

Anyone with the ability to rewire our brains to become fast context switching multiple personality players could do anything. Given that level of competence how could she ever fail?