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Eternal Life...

AngelicAtheist333

Thinker
AngelicAtheist333
Joined
Sep 30, 2008
Messages
132
Okay, Most of you clicking this aren't going to get any religious crud. Sorry, no troll here. With that said...


I've been thinking a lot lately. Science has been a wonderful thing at explaining and discovering things. And since its so good at doing what it does best, why haven't people looked into creating synthetic bodies with synthetic organ yet? I mean, the most difficult part would be preserving the brain, but why can't we just looking into creating a scanner to scan everything in the brain and putting it in chips or hardrives?

I mean, has anyone even considered how cool it would be if the human species could expand their life?

Forever even?

I know there could be bad and good things that come with this, the risks in discovering it, it not ending up in the wrong hands, lots of horrid failures before success, etc,. But wouldn't it be worth it in the end? Thikn of the discoveries that could be made just because life has expanded.

Now gimme your thoughts! :D
 
Ignoring the fact that we do not have the technology to scan the brain to record even the most rudimentary thoughts, my brain, scanned into a computer hard drive, might seem like "me" to other people, but it would not be me to me. It would be a separate entity.
 
gdnp said:
Ignoring the fact that we do not have the technology to scan the brain to record even the most rudimentary thoughts, my brain, scanned into a computer hard drive, might seem like "me" to other people, but it would not be me to me. It would be a separate entity.
Click to expand...

How is that a meaningful distinction in anything other then a purely subjective sense? Also, your scanned brain will think it is you.
 
gdnp said:
Ignoring the fact that we do not have the technology to scan the brain to record even the most rudimentary thoughts, my brain, scanned into a computer hard drive, might seem like "me" to other people, but it would not be me to me. It would be a separate entity.
Click to expand...

If you were to scan your brain and get every detail of who you are, emotions, past, education, etc,. It would be you.

You would just be in a different body. :D
 
No, it would be a copy of you.
You could then give it a copy of your bank account so it had money to spend.
See the problem here? This is not extending your life. It's creating a new one. The old matter-transmitter problem.
 
No, I don't understand.

I'm talking about transfering yourself into a synthetic body. You scan and review, then insert the memory of yourself into the synthetic body.
 
A popular subject with science-fiction authors. More than a few in the technology fields have given thought to the process. I recall reading an article in the old OMNI pubication years ago addressing the possibilities and problems.

Seems that it might well be technologically possible at some point, likely not in the near future. As noted above, we don't yet have a very clear notion as to how memories are mapped and consciousness functions.
 
Wow. Dead topic already.

Allright, forget it.

I'm hoping the MODs will delete this. I feel foolish for even mentioning it. So, rather than bring it up more, I'm going to go do research at my local bookstore on the mind and learn more about science and technology.

The way I see it, until someone takes interests in these things, there'll never be a breakthrough. And since I believe there's no limit to knowledge other than what you set yourself up to believe, I'm going to continue trying to find a way to make my dream come true.

I realize now that my love for science and knowledge is going to fuel me to learn more about this.


Thanks for reading my sad excuse of a thread. Its my fault I was illequipped to argue my point and my fault I'm incompetent as far as retaining things I have learned. I know my logic is flawed, but at least I'm trying.

Thank you.
 
Bikewer said:
A popular subject with science-fiction authors. More than a few in the technology fields have given thought to the process. I recall reading an article in the old OMNI pubication years ago addressing the possibilities and problems.

Seems that it might well be technologically possible at some point, likely not in the near future. As noted above, we don't yet have a very clear notion as to how memories are mapped and consciousness functions.
Click to expand...

Thanks for responding. :D

But I won't be now. I simply thank you for reading it, though. :]
 
Well researchers are looking into the creation of synthetic organs. They have been doing so for some time, but I'm sure you're already aware of this.

As others have mentioned you are making a strange assumption on the "brain scanning". Just imagine this happening to you. Scanning your brain would not kill you after all, so you would end up with your "old self" holding a chip that contains your " new self". Which one of these would be the real you? I meet this kind of thinking a lot when discussing the effects of human cloning. Perhaps an example from that debate would help?

Let's say I clone you. There is now a little baby girl that share an identical set of genes with you. Is she you? Of course not. She would be your twin sister, though several years younger then you. Same thing with the brain scan copy. It would be an AI simulation of you. Sort of like a very realistic portrait of a real person.

But let us say that researchers instead find a way to keep our own bodies from detoriating. No one ever grows old. That would be really cool, right? Nope, not cool at all. Our entire civilization, not to mention our own basic natures, is built on the fact that we are born, we age and we die. A constant change were the new and inexperienced take the place of the old and experienced.

Babies being born is balanced against those dying of old age. If people stop dying of old age then 'baby slots' are filled up. Change slows down, since each new generation becomes smaller and smaller, and thus have smaller impact on society. Careers become very hard since few, if anyone, ever retire. Those in power today will be those in power forever. Structures in society grows rigid. There is no sense of urgency since we have all the time in the world at our disposal.

Immortality is a blessing for the individual. It is a curse for the society. And I'm sure you know plenty of stories about the hypothetical troubles immortals would have living in a society of mortals.
 
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Soapy Sam said:
No, it would be a copy of you.
You could then give it a copy of your bank account so it had money to spend.
See the problem here? This is not extending your life. It's creating a new one. The old matter-transmitter problem.
Click to expand...

If the copy is identical to you in every meaningful way, what objective criteria are you employing to distinguish between you and it?
 
AngelicAtheist333 said:
Wow. Dead topic already.

Allright, forget it.

I'm hoping the MODs will delete this. I feel foolish for even mentioning it. So, rather than bring it up more, I'm going to go do research at my local bookstore on the mind and learn more about science and technology.

The way I see it, until someone takes interests in these things, there'll never be a breakthrough. And since I believe there's no limit to knowledge other than what you set yourself up to believe, I'm going to continue trying to find a way to make my dream come true.

I realize now that my love for science and knowledge is going to fuel me to learn more about this.


Thanks for reading my sad excuse of a thread. Its my fault I was illequipped to argue my point and my fault I'm incompetent as far as retaining things I have learned. I know my logic is flawed, but at least I'm trying.

Thank you.
Click to expand...
I think you are being unnecessarily hard on yourself here. This is one area where sci-fi authors and scientists are on approximately equal ground. There are a lot more questions than there are answers, and one reason is that so many of the questions turn out to be poorly framed. In recognizing that simply coming up with well-formed questions (let alone definitive answers) is a challenge that is easily underestimated, you have already taken an important step. You might also find consolation in knowing that you are in good company.

On your very first trip to the bookstore, get yourself a copy of "The Mind's I", by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. You won't regret it. It may not help you make your dream come true, but it will help you interpret it.
 
There is some good hard scifi that deal with this subject. I recommend Diaspora by Greg Egan.
 
Well, gees, what exactly did you expect? It is not like this hasn't been explored by real living, thinking humans before. I am often amused on this forum by the way ideas are proposed, and when it is pointed out that the idea was explored in the science fiction short story in he fifties, a faction always looks upon it as if the fact that the sci-fi was written to make a buck made it as relevant as, say, a romance novel.

James P Hogan is a woo of the first order, a believer in the AIDS hoax, Zeitgeist, Veliskovsky, anti-Big Bang, you name it; he refers to himself as a capital-H Heretic. He is (perhaps was would be better) also, IMHO, a first rate "hard science" science fiction writer. His prose won't live as long as Shakespeare's, I imagine, but he did describe how it would be to have a communication channel with a computer wide enough so that the two entities could effectively become one, and then what would happen when two such humans communicate through such a link, tantamount to mind reading (The Genesis Machine). Larry Niven has talked about instant transportation and its implications for decades. I read a novel not long ago (three years, maybe) where the characters were transferred back and forth through time (specifically to the middle ages), in which the absolute certainty of their physical deaths by atom-by-atom flaying in the space of some milliseconds in the transmitter going each way was made explicit. (Unfortunately, can't remember the name of it. Later - ain't Google wonderful? It was Timeline by Michael Crichton, another real life woo who writes good stuff.)

The area has been explored, at least to a first approximation. Many of us are aware of that; it is part of our journey to here, so we are somewhat in wonder about someone who has not explored the implications you are asking about. We point them out not to one-upman you, but rather to share the wealth. As my music appreciation teacher in college used to say to the class on the opening day, "We are about to listen to Johannes Brahms - I really envy those of you who don't yet know what that means."
 
AngelicAtheist333 said:
The way I see it, until someone takes interests in these things, there'll never be a breakthrough. And since I believe there's no limit to knowledge other than what you set yourself up to believe, I'm going to continue trying to find a way to make my dream come true.
Click to expand...

There are people with a strong interest in this; it's just that the technology we have is so very far away from being able to do it, even with that strong interest.

I have friends who study cognitive development of mathematical skill; they do this with fMRI (functional MRI), and it's a super-blunt instrument. It is, nonetheless, the most effective "mind reader" we have...and it could never pull off the kind of scan you want.

We're similarly far away with other necessary technologies that we are trying very hard to make (e.g. synthetic organs). Life is beautifully complex, and as a consequence, is tremendously hard to reverse-engineer.
 
AngelicAtheist333 said:
I mean, has anyone even considered how cool it would be if the human species could expand their life?
Click to expand...


Have you ever considered how cool it would be if you were able to post in a manner that actually allowed people to read what it is you are trying to write? But then again, perhaps you don't really have anything to say that is worth reading, so instead of posting it in a readable way, you post it in a pale lavender type that is difficult to read, and which hurts one's eyes who foolishly makes any serious attempt to read it.
 
It may be within the realm of science to, eventually, do those sorts of things. But, it will take a long, long time; and a LOT more research into the basics of what constitutes life, etc. In a sense, science is already crawling its way in this direction, but progress is slow, because there are too few to take on all the tasks. Too few who want to engage in science, or even understand much about science. Far too few.


But, on the other hand: Living forever just ain't really all its cracked up to be...
 
If scanning and uploading is too scary (the whole "it's not me" idea), then just figure out a way to keep the brain living forever and cut that out, put it in a jar, and put that on a big robot. I'd do it.

I'd take the scanning too though.
 
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