Immortality in Three Easy Steps
Your death, should it happen, will be a tragedy. Your friends and family will suffer a loss. You’ll miss out on discoveries and inventions that will make life better. And if you die before the jetpack is invented, you will never feel the thrill of flying.
Fortunately, you do not have to die. Technology may grant you eternal life.
Step 1: Live a While Longer
Even if the technology to grant immortality takes a hundred years to come, you might be able to stay alive until then.
Better artificial hearts and cancer treatments may let you live until more advances come. One such breakthrough might be growing a new body from one of your stem cells. Your brain would be transplanted into this fresh, healthy body. Advances to prevent Alzheimer's, strokes, and brain tumors will extend the life of your brain until an even later advance comes along, which might be brain preservation through freezing or other means.
Preservation will be appropriate once your brain shows the earliest sign of failing. Finally, when the technology to grant eternal life arrives, your brain can be brought out of its preserved state.
So what technology will you be waiting for?
Step 2: Replicate Your Mind
You will need a machine that scans your brain. Scanning tools can already see connections between individual neurons and can even watch them communicate in real time. One brain has already been mapped. A computer model exists of a roundworm’s 302 neurons and every connection between them. Brain scanning is improving exponentially―the resolution doubles every year. Eventually, a scan will be able to capture every neuron and connection in your brain. The information collected will be transferred to a computer, one that can do everything a brain does. The computer will possess your memories, skills, thoughts, feelings, and personality. That is to say, it will contain your mind. This computer will operate within an artificial body with limbs, eyes, and everything else the brain expects to be attached to. Already, the artificial brain of the roundworm with 302 neurons operates an artificial body.
But will your own artificial brain and body be “you”? Let’s find out by conducting four thought experiments.
Let’s say you were to enter a room containing two beds. You lie on one, and the temperature of the room drops to the point where the molecules in your brain are barely moving. A robot disassembles you, including your brain, carrying one part at a time over to the other bed, and reassembling you precisely, one brain lobe and limb at a time. When the robot is finished, the room warms up, and you wake up. Are you still the same person? Of course.
Let’s consider another hypothetical experiment, just like the previous one, but this time, the robot carries one molecule at a time to the other bed, reassembling you precisely. You wake up. Being made of the same materials in the same arrangement, you would surely be the same person. It is still “you” peering out through those eyes.
Now imagine another experiment where the robot carries one molecule at a time between the beds, like before. But this time, while carrying each molecule, the robot replaces it with an identical molecule. You wake up. Being made of identical materials in the same arrangement, you would surely be the same person.
In a final thought experiment, instead of disassembling you, the robot scans you, recording the location of every molecule. The robot creates an exact copy of you, molecule by molecule, on the other bed. He destroys the original you. The person created, being made of identical materials in the same arrangement, is still you. This person―you―will go to your home, engage in your hobbies, and interact with your friends.
The television show Star Trek portrays a situation similar to this last experiment. While using the teleporter, a person vanishes from one location and is recreated in another. The teleporter creates a copy and destroys the original. The copy is the same person―to that person’s mind and to other people.
But what if, in the hypothetical room with two beds, the new person is not an exact molecule-by-molecule copy? Let’s say the new brain is made of a more durable material. Would the new person still be you?
An answer can be found in an analogy. A spinning hard drive is a common place to store a piece of software. If you want the software stored somewhere more durable, you would copy it and store it on flash memory, an alternative to a spinning hard drive. The software, now running on a new material, is still the same software.
Similarly, your mind, whether it is running on a brain or a computer, is still your mind.
Once this computer running your mind is implanted in an artificial body, what is to be done with the old brain and body? In Star Trek, when a character uses the teleporter, the old body conveniently vanishes. How will yours be destroyed?
Step 3: Destroy the Old You and Live Forever
The first brain scanner might work by taking the brain apart, bit by bit, scanning as it destroys.
A later brain scanner might preserve the brain, which you will appreciate if the cloning is unsuccessful. Before you lie down for the brain scanning, you would take two medications. One is a delayed-release suicide pill, which will keep the old you from occupying your favorite living room chair and draining your bank account. The other medication puts you in a coma. You fall asleep, and your brain is scanned. The new you is built and wakes up.
Imagine that glorious sensation―waking up immortal.
Friends and family interact with the new you to determine whether it is indeed you. If the brain scanning was inaccurate, they might decide it is not you. Or the new person might announce it is not you. And even if the person created really is you, it might stop working. In cases like these, the suicide pill will be removed from the old you before it has taken effect. You will be woken up and would get to continue living.
Your old brain will be the first backup you have ever had. And when duplicates are made of your electronic brain, you will have even more backups. They will remain switched off until you need them. In the event of a power loss, computer virus, or other problem, backups will ensure you can live forever.
This immortality is not the only thing to look forward to.
Travel will be easier and faster. You will transfer your mind through the Internet to a rental body on an exotic island or planet.
You will evolve more quickly too. After downloading new skills to your brain, you will create what you have always wanted to create―music, sculpture, virtual worlds.
When you tire of the real world, you will escape to a virtual one, filled with new sights and sounds. There, you will laugh and love, and you will finally be able to fly.
Tweet
No comments:
Post a Comment