The Road to Immortality

The dream of immortality has occurred in ever society of man, and for obvious reasons. Nobody wants to die. Along those same lines, nobody wants their loved ones to die either.

In a lot of science fiction a quick remedy for death has been brain uploading and clones. When you die, another you is grown and its brain is an exact copy of yours. The rest of the world goes on unchanged, 'you' are still out there with friends and family going about your life. In reality though, you are dead. These clones and brain imprints serve as a distraction from your death, and in the end you slip away completely unnoticed by the world. That's not much in the way of immortality.

This is nothing more then ripping a cd, burning a new new one when yours gets scratched up. The original is gone and worthless.

A better route to take in achieving immortality is upgrading the brain. Take away its tendency to deteriorate with age, its dependence on oxygen. Make it easier to work with in the event of brain damage. Make adding peripherals like eye and nerve easier. And give it some life support in the event of body failure.

When discussing immortality, it is important to first define who you are, and what is death. My views from what I have learned studying neuroscience and neural networks, is that you are electrical pattern in the neural network of your brain. When this network shuts down, you are lost. New instances of this pattern can be created, but those are not you.

Now how can we transfer ourselves (our instance of consciousness) into a new brain? Lets say I isolated the region of your brain which recognizes numbers and I cut it out. You would continue on with your life as before thinking and acting just the same, but you could not recognize numbers. Now suppose we could create a copy of the network formed by the piece of brain we cut out. We then add an interface for the brain, and hook this piece to your brain. You would once again be able to recognize numbers and would be unaware of having and android brain.

If we continue this process over time, I believe we would be able to transfer a consciousness, intact, into new 'hardware'. Once we get here it is a matter of re-engineering our artificial brains to be more resilient.