Wetware can be defined as the processes of the brain and nervous system, and is derived from the concepts of ‘hardware’ and ‘software’.

     The first reference to the term wetware that I can find is in the novels of Rudy Rucker, one of which he so entitled "Wetware". Rudy Rucker was a science fiction writer and a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at San Jose State University in the 1980s. A quote from him in reference to wetware, "... all sparks and tastes and tangles, all its stimulus/response patterns – the whole biocybernetic software of mind."

     Today you can find countless references to the word in both fiction and nonfiction, and mainstream media is slowly instantiating it into their vocabulary.

     You can also find several misuses, our perhaps just drifting meanings, of the term. For our purposes the totality of wetware needs to be discussed.

     The physical brain itself is a beautiful creation, far exceeding in complexity anything humanity could hope to create on its own. Within four weeks of conception an embryo begins producing half a million neurons every minute. Soon the neurons will begin establishing synapses, or connections, at a rate of two million a second. And although neuroscientists would say that the brain doesn’t reach full maturity until somewhere in the third decade of life, an important development of cognitive science is the appreciation for the plasticity of the human brain, possibly extending our entire lives.

     The important question now, for wetware consideration, is the link between the physical brain and the ‘mind’. This question still fills voluminous tombs of scientific literature, with much left for debate, how the electrochemical properties of the physical structure lead to the collection of experiences we define as self-awareness. A new concept, specifically the term wetware, was required in order to accurately describe this system. It is in many ways a integration of "hardware" and "software" that exceeds the definition of those individual terms.

     It is the link between the physical brain and the 'mind', the unique exploitables created by the integration of the hardware and software concepts, that a wetware hacker will utilize in the effort to reverse engineer attainable subsections of this most multifaceted of constructions.

     It is the desire of a wetware hacker is to take advantage of the physical interface with the brain, visual and auditory perception, along with direct electromagnetic manipulation, to alter the mind, at least temporarily.

     Of primary interest are the concepts of sensory perception, pleasure and pain ‘centers’, and the function of memory. I use the idea of ‘centers’ loosely, as more and more research sheds light on the function that distributed cognition plays.

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