Immortality
So quoted my previous post when I defined my thoughts on one of our long term objectives.
The one we have been trying for centuries to achieve. Over the centuries our best scientific minds have been working on an elixir to achieve this end. Magicians and religious minds have been investigating and praying for the answer. So far, to the best of my knowledge, we have not even come close.
How it will happen is anyone’s guess. If it is as pure energy or as biological units no one knows but I am certain it is achievable.
Now I have spent a little bit of time thinking about this subject. What exactly would be immortality? Where is the point where you would consider yourself dead?
Basically I can see in the not too distant future that we will be able to replace every part of the human body. In effect making a complete replacement possible. However I would not see that replacement being me. Even if it had my memories and looked exactly like me it would still be a facsimile and not me. I would be in another body or dead and that one would still exist.
Personally I believe that what we class as you is in your brain. Thus if my brain was removed and put in a robot it would still be me. So replace my heart, body, head whatever and I would still be me. My brain would contain my essence or if you like my soul.
In some cultures your soul resides in your heart but nobody in the West would consider you dead if your heart was replaced via a heart transplant. Same with a liver or kidney transplant. It’s just seen as a replacement. Yet if you had a new brain transplanted we would consider you have been replaced and a new person was occupying your body.
So I’ll stick with the brain being the one component that defines the real you.
Now in the future I see us being able to augment our memories and memory capacity by simply plugging in more. It could be made up with your own stem cells, mouse stem cells or even some technology like a solid state drive but to your mind it would just be some more memories you can access or some more storage space for new memories or even some new ways of managing or processing the information.
But now the sticky part. Assume 10% of your unaugmented brain dies. You replace it with an augment, reload the memories and you are back to where you were. Have you actually died? Assuming we have souls what has happened to yours? If 10% is not OK with you what about people with significant, lets say 60%, brain damage that are still alive but can do nothing for themselves? Are they dead? Law doesn’t think so. So if we augment their brains to give those people a decent life what does that mean in reality? Anyway if 60% is acceptable how about 70%, 80% …. Where do you draw the line before you are dead? It’s tricky and thinking about it is enough to make you brain dead.
In the meantime of course our brain cells are dying by the millions. Could it be God’s little trick to ensure we don’t live forever?
Immortality. What does it mean to you?
Now I have spent a little bit of time thinking about this subject. What exactly would be immortality? Where is the point where you would consider yourself dead?
Basically I can see in the not too distant future that we will be able to replace every part of the human body. In effect making a complete replacement possible. However I would not see that replacement being me. Even if it had my memories and looked exactly like me it would still be a facsimile and not me. I would be in another body or dead and that one would still exist.
Personally I believe that what we class as you is in your brain. Thus if my brain was removed and put in a robot it would still be me. So replace my heart, body, head whatever and I would still be me. My brain would contain my essence or if you like my soul.
In some cultures your soul resides in your heart but nobody in the West would consider you dead if your heart was replaced via a heart transplant. Same with a liver or kidney transplant. It’s just seen as a replacement. Yet if you had a new brain transplanted we would consider you have been replaced and a new person was occupying your body.
So I’ll stick with the brain being the one component that defines the real you.
Now in the future I see us being able to augment our memories and memory capacity by simply plugging in more. It could be made up with your own stem cells, mouse stem cells or even some technology like a solid state drive but to your mind it would just be some more memories you can access or some more storage space for new memories or even some new ways of managing or processing the information.
But now the sticky part. Assume 10% of your unaugmented brain dies. You replace it with an augment, reload the memories and you are back to where you were. Have you actually died? Assuming we have souls what has happened to yours? If 10% is not OK with you what about people with significant, lets say 60%, brain damage that are still alive but can do nothing for themselves? Are they dead? Law doesn’t think so. So if we augment their brains to give those people a decent life what does that mean in reality? Anyway if 60% is acceptable how about 70%, 80% …. Where do you draw the line before you are dead? It’s tricky and thinking about it is enough to make you brain dead.
In the meantime of course our brain cells are dying by the millions. Could it be God’s little trick to ensure we don’t live forever?