2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
time.com
time.com
You could look at the internet as a single machine made from a bunch of parts. Those parts are distributed all over the place - but still. And unlike a car, the parts of the internet do get upgraded bit by bit. The internet has been running non-stop for decades, with no end in sight.
You could regard dna-based life as a kind of machine - one machine, whose parts are the organisms which carry dna. These parts are distributed all over the place, and are continuously upgraded through evolution. The dna in every organism results from an unbroken chain of upgrades that goes back billions of years.
So by this definition, there are machines that go on without end. And if you could change your perspective, drop your identity as a human organism, and instead say "I am dna-based life", then you are already immortal. Congrats! :)
"Here lies humanity... Do not resucitate"
Critics say it's all pseudo-science, and they're right. but pseudo-science is not necessarily a bad thing. There's really not much difference in some smart guy thinking through what might happen in 50 years and some other smart guy speculating on how man might have lived 120K years ago based on a couple of bones and an arrowhead. Educated creative speculation is fun. It's not physics, but it's fun.
Having said that, my money is on 300-500 years as the time frame for consciousness transfer and the beginning of the singularity. These are just really difficult problems, and it's always very tempting to project out some great breakthrough within your own lifespan. My money is on a lot of "little" breakthroughs in both biology and information technology that take us in ways we can't predict right now, but which converge in some sort of Omega Point immortality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point
Even theoretically, how would it be possible to separate the "mind" from the body?
To be clear - this is merely theoretical - which is a fancy way of stating that all this singularity stuff is still pure fiction (at least for the time being).
So there would be 2 of you now?
What if you had your whole brain replaced piecemeal like that?
What about if you had a prosthetic thalamus or visual cortex?
I would continue to be me through the copying procedure, which can presumably be less disruptive to my consciousness than falling asleep. I would then begin to alter my brain state (without which process I would not be me), and, in the course of time, become something which bears no more resemblance to Me' than any other biological brain does.
At this point, the effort of copying my brain state may begin to feel like a waste of time.
If, in the future, you get a brain injury and are treated with a prosthetic thalamus implanted with micro-robots, are you still you?
Extend that to treatment for memory loss, old age or other sorts of brain damage - are you still you? If it gets to the point where your whole brain is replaced, are you still you?
But that's a kind of pointless philosophy, because I'm definitely not the same person I was ten years ago, and in ten years I'll certainly not be who I am now. Synthetic replacement wouldn't change that-- if it did, then it would not be me. And if that process were enabled by technology to continue at its current pace indefinitely, I don't think that Me+100years would have much more claim to being Me' than my grandchildren would; both would be radically altered derivative products.
It follows that I don't see how a synthetic brain is supposed to maintain my consciousness in the long term more than having children will. Or in brief: I don't see the question "would I still be me" as particularly interesting or useful.
A synthetic brain would maintain your consciousness in exactly the same way that a synthetic heart would - by keeping you alive. Perhaps not a bit deal for you now, but if you get an acquired brain injury, or start getting old you might see things a bit differently.
I won't spoil my mind assuming immortality is even a distant possibility.
Seriously though, you guys are going to die out. You know that, right?
Humanity is notoriously self levelling.
Not that I don't love the idea of revolutionary technology, but the very idea betrays what seems to me a fundamental misunderstanding:
Man, as in mankind, already is immortal. We seem to stand a decent chance of outliving our star, anyway.
The desire for one individual, by which we really mean the one ephemeral brain-state that happens to exist at this moment, never to cease to be seems positively juvenile. For life to be, change must happen; for change to happen, that which is must end. Demanding that thought continue to happen according to my design is a selfish idea of the mind that shouldn't make intuitive sense to anyone with a materialistic conception of consciousness.
No we don't. What we really mean is hard to pin down, but it's not that (at least not in this context). I have friends, and every ten minutes they're in a different brain state; but they're still the same person, more or less, and I would be sad if they were to die but I don't get sad when a particular brain state ceases to exist.
Have you ever known someone who got in a relationship, or went to a foreign country, or took a job that seemed to really change who they were? Has that ever made you sad? What do you think it means to grow apart?
You don't want your friends to die, but you also don't want them to change so much that they aren't your friends any more. Death is a very great and permanent discontinuity, but nothing else about it makes it special.
But seriously, we should create some redundancy or protection for our technological foundation before connecting to the Matrix...