Transfer of consciousness to a computer and other ways to the immortality of mankind

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

You may argue that you would like to die one day, completely forgetting about the life you lived. But we know very well: if you had the opportunity to live forever, you would use it. We will tell you about several technologies that in the near future will allow us, if not to achieve immortality, then come close to it.

The future is approaching, and there is no getting away from it: if 100 years ago the average life expectancy was 40–46 years, today, according to statistics, in developed countries it is about 80 years. Today, no one has a universal recipe for a long life, but it is likely that modern technologies will be able to suggest it to us. And it may happen even earlier than you think.

The first technology that opens the door to immortality has already become the talk of the town. Wherever she was exploited and as soon as they mocked her, especially after the appearance of Dolly the sheep. You have probably already guessed what will be discussed.

Cloning

By itself, cloning does not imply an extension of the life of a single individual.

However, an artificial clone body can be used for a brain or head transplant. In addition, you can theoretically upload your consciousness into someone else's body, as in the TV series Altered Carbon.

It's just that the cultivation of such bodies has been prohibited since 1998. And this prohibition will persist until we ourselves solve the ethical dilemma: should we consider the transplantation of our personality into another body to be murder? After all, we will have to remove the brain from the clone and replace it with our own.

The industry of creating artificial organs is now flourishing: scientists have learned to grow not only skin, but also internal organs (liver and heart), are working on creating an artificial penis and brain tissue.

The production of organs is, of course, cool, but so far they can only be used for transplantation, and not in any way to create a new organism.

Yes, you can take cells from your liver and grow a new one almost the same (although, we suspect that this is not worth doing). You can even transplant this liver to you if your family refuses.

But when it comes to combining artificial organs into a system, serious problems arise. After all, for this you need to take into account a whole bunch of factors: features of biochemical processes, biocompatibility of cells, stability of a new organism over time. This is not just a transplant of one organ instead of another, it is the creation of the entire system from scratch - every vessel and nerve, every fold of skin and hair on the head. In addition, it is very difficult to create any particular artificial body part and maintain its existence for the rest of the body's systems. For example, the heart will not be able to work if blood and electrical signals from nerve endings do not flow to its tissues.

Even nature does not always manage to create a viable organism (look at the number of congenital pathologies and statistics of deaths during childbirth), but what is a person capable of in this field?

However, there is still hope, because we have good helpers - computer programs. In the future, computers will be able to quickly simulate and synchronize processes inside the body and advise a person how to correctly design an artificial body so that it works exactly. These algorithms will probably be trained by studying living patients, and then using our input data to build models of organisms and create a kind of "assembly instructions" for us.

Today, it is possible to mathematically model only small systems - separate groups of cells, for example, the nephrons of the kidneys or areas of the heart muscle.

All this, sadly, is a matter of the distant future. So far, we can only hope to prolong life with the help of organ transplants and "repair" of the body. Using the advances in medicine of the near future, we may reach the point where our senile brain can be transplanted into a young virgin body.

The next technology, which will be discussed, exists today and is even used by several companies, although scientists doubt that it can provide immortality.

Cryopreservation

Cryopreservation technology, first described in science fiction novels, has smoothly moved into the real world thanks to transhumanists and scientists. A person's body or just his brain is frozen in order to preserve until the moment when science learns to cure all diseases in the world, transplant people into new bodies or upload consciousness into a computer.

It is believed that when the temperature drops, all processes in the body slow down. Hence the conclusion: if you cool the body or brain to the temperature of liquid nitrogen (-195, 5 ° C), then you can stop all physiological processes for an unlimited time.

Both in the US and in Russia there are already hundreds of "frozen" people, whose bodies (legally dead) are kept in cryochambers. Thus, the American Alcor contains the bodies and brains of 164 people, and another 1236 bought membership in this organization. In Russia, only 66 KrioRus patients are undergoing cryopreservation.

Most of the scientific community considers cryopreservation only as another method of burial, and not as an opportunity to preserve life in the body for its future "resurrection".

For this method of life extension to be legal from the point of view of lawyers, the body must be frozen immediately after the recorded biological death, otherwise it will be considered murder. That is, in fact, cryopreservation is something like embalming in a modern way.

Why is freezing considered an option for disposing of a corpse, and not a way to extend our life by a thousand years? One of the difficulties, oddly enough, is that human cells contain a lot of water. By cooling to the freezing point (for the contents of cells it is slightly below -40 ° C), the cytoplasm of the cells turns into ice crystals. But this ice takes up more volume than the water from which it was formed, and, expanding, damages the cell walls. If in the future these cells are thawed, they will no longer be able to function: their membrane will be irreversibly destroyed.

However, this problem already has a solution: today, cryonics companies such as KrioRus replace all fluid in the patient's body before freezing with cryoprotectants - solutions that lower the freezing point. Thanks to them, it is possible to cool the human body (or brain) to the temperature of liquid nitrogen without damaging the tissues.

The main problem with cryonics is its unpredictability. There is no guarantee that your body or brain will not be disconnected from the apparatus until the moment when a way is found to restore them.

Yes, purely theoretically, there is still a possibility to "resurrect" a cryopatient. But for this it is necessary not only to keep it in the chamber for the required time, but also to have time to freeze it in time and maintain the optimal temperature regime in the cryochamber. Besides, who knows if you will like the world of the future, in which you will find yourself after the "resurrection". It is quite possible that you will feel like the hero of Wells' novel When the Sleeper Wakes up.

From such a cold matter, we are moving on to, perhaps, the most desirable way of extending life by many.

Transferring consciousness to a computer

If you have never thought about how cool it would be to become immortal and superintelligent at the same time, then you probably did not have a childhood. Today these two ideas have merged into one - to download human consciousness into a computer, like in the movie "Supremacy".

Information travels through wires in a computer much faster than through the nervous system in a human body. But computers, as we know, have one drawback: they cannot think like humans. By learning to move human consciousness into electronic devices, we will create a symbiosis with great potential.

As fantastic as this idea sounds, it is more real than even cryopreservation. To do this, we need to learn how to model the entire human brain, make a “digital map” of it, and develop a way for the electronic brain to communicate with the computer environment.

The brain modeling and mapping phase is already in full swing. In 2005, the Blue Brain Project was launched with the goal of creating a complete map of the human brain by 2023. In 2011, its participants were able to completely map the rat's brain (this is about 100 million neurons). According to scientists, the human brain is about 1000 rat brains in volume, so it will take 12 years, not 6, to map it. Let's take into account, however, that the data of these experiments were processed by the Blue Gene supercomputer, the computation speed of which is 6 times less than the speed of the best modern machines, so the process can be significantly accelerated in the future.

The second project, the Human Brain Project, founded in 2013 in Switzerland and heavily funded by the European Union, can be considered a direct sequel to Blue Brain (they share the same creators). However, their goals are still slightly different. If Blue Brain wants only to map the human brain and get closer to understanding what memory and consciousness are, then Human Brain plans to completely simulate the work of the brain in a computer. Together, these two projects are paving the way for the digital equivalent of the human mind.

Unfortunately, not everything is so rosy and good here. If it is still potentially possible to map the brain and make it work in a virtual world, then when it comes to loading consciousness, everything becomes oh, how incomprehensible. After all, we do not even know what consciousness is and how it is determined. Although there are as many views on this matter as there are scientists on the planet, none of the theories of consciousness is supported by experimental facts, which means that these are just hypotheses.

In this regard, a large number of unresolved issues arise. And the main one is that if human consciousness can exist only in one "vessel" at a time, then, transferring it from a biological body to a computer, will we create a digital copy that will think like we do, or will we simply "pour" the mind and feelings into virtual body?

Another question arises: if the brain of a deceased person is loaded into a computer, will it remain the same as it was during life, or will it be a new personality that does not identify itself with a real person who once lived? This remains to be seen.

Connecting yourself to a computer is, of course, cool, but not everyone is ready to take such a step. Not everyone is ready to clone themselves or freeze themselves in a cryo chamber. Therefore, now we will talk about those ways to achieve eternal life that will not affect your appearance in any way, do not require difficult moral choices and will not be so vague.

Crayfish

Yes, you heard right. Cancer is not just a disease; it is cellular changes that we cannot control.

Fighting malignant tumors is similar to biting a nursing hand: cancer cells cannot die (that is, they are deprived of the possibility of apoptosis - programmed death), which means they can potentially exist indefinitely. The only problem is that we have not yet learned how to control their reproduction.

But if this becomes possible, we will kill two birds with one stone: we will get rid of terrible diseases and we will be able to extend the life of many people for years, or even decades. In addition, by learning how to program the growth of cancer cells, we will discover a new way of growing biological tissue for transplantation to patients.

How do we make cancer cells our allies? To do this, you need to understand why they can share endlessly at all. We have already found out that they avoid apoptosis - but who wants to die?

The reason for the "immortality" of these cells is various mutations that occur in the genetic structure of cells. A mutated cell is capable of extending the ends of its DNA strand. Normally, this chain becomes shorter with each cycle of cell division, but in cancers it does not change its length. The ends of such DNA strands are called telomeres, and the enzyme that allows them to grow is called telomerase. Due to mutations, this enzyme works more actively in cancer cells, so they can exist almost indefinitely.

Having learned to control the processes inside cancer cells, we will be able to control them at will and live as long as we like.

But here many problems arise. First, cancer cells stopped dying not from a good life. They are like people doomed to death who are ready to sell their souls to the devil, just to stay alive.

Cancer cells are initially damaged and in most cases cannot function as the body needs. To solve this problem, we need to create conditions so that the immune system itself destroys damaged cells, but at the same time does not touch those healthy cells that are not tuned to apoptosis.

Secondly, cancers during division can mutate in such a way that it will take a long time to clean up the consequences, so it is important to protect future generations of cells from harmful mutations. In our opinion, the ideal option is this: if one of the cells is damaged, the immune system removes it. At the same time, the neighboring cell begins to divide, replacing the deceased neighbor with its “daughter”.

There is little research on the subject, but HeLa, a cancer cell culture recovered in 1951 from a tumor in the cervix of a woman named Henrietta Lacks, is promising. Since then, trillions of these cells have been produced, and they are truly immortal.

So far, HeLa has been used as a model for cancer research, but there is a good chance that cultures like them could be modified to extend human life.

Yes, it's not so simple with cancer cells, but you must admit that the method is very tempting. From turning a disease into a medicine for eternal life, we are moving on to another crazy idea, which, nevertheless, in the future can provide us with eternal life without losing our personality and body.

Symbiosis

A lot of different types of bacteria live inside a person. Each of them is selfish and acts only in their own interests. The interests of a number of bacteria coincide with ours, so they help us - for example, they process undigested food residues in the intestines. Other bacteria, which we call harmful, also feed on substances in our body, but at the same time release toxins into it. With the first species, we establish a mutually beneficial relationship - a symbiosis: we give them food for life, and they save us from undigested food residues, which otherwise rot and cause harm.

The idea of using bacteria for treatment is relatively recent.

There is a growing body of research showing that it is much more effective to treat disease with bacteria than with pharmaceutical drugs.

Thus, the flu virus constantly mutates, adapting to the drugs that kill it. The production of each new product requires more and more resources and money, and in the end it will reach a dead end, which cannot be said about bacteria. Their genome can be easily changed and tuned to destroy a specific type of virus; moreover, bacteria can mutate themselves if necessary.

If we consider our symbiosis with bacteria as a means for immortality, then there are also some problems with implementation. The use of modified microflora may prevent some diseases from occurring and cure existing ones, but it is not capable of excluding programmed cell death. However, these bacterial helpers will allow us to extend our life for more than a dozen years, and, you see, this is already an important step on the path to true immortality.

Interest in this topic is fueled by research results published by Russian scientists in 2015: the bacterium Bacillus F discovered by them in the Mammoth Cave was able to prolong the life of experimental mice by 20-30%. Perhaps, when science studies the mechanisms that give this effect, we will be able to modify this type of bacteria and increase this percentage to 100-150.

We looked at five promising methods for increasing life expectancy to infinity, but we still have not figured out what this infinity means. In the scientific sense, this is the time that remained of our Universe before its death, if at all possible. But in practice, can we live that long?

The information that accumulates in our brain can eventually damage it: there is a risk of just going crazy - although so far there are less dire symptoms of an overabundance of information. They are part of the so-called information fatigue syndrome - a psychological illness of the 21st century, the manifestation of which in society will only increase from year to year if we do not learn how to effectively distribute information flows and make use of each material read.

In addition, according to the theory of probability, every year of our life the likelihood of an accident increases: today a person can get to work calmly, and tomorrow a truck will fly into him. If you are flying an airplane, there is a small chance that it will fall and you will die. These are very small risks, but the longer you live, the more they start to affect your life.

You argue that maybe in 50 years all cars will be equipped with an autopilot, or we will fly by air taxi, and then life will become less risky. But this is not the case.

In return for the risks we have eliminated, others come, and each one is impossible to predict. Therefore, immortality is, rather, a state of being able to choose between life and death. If you are free to choose when you want to leave life without coercion, you can assume that the goal of science has been achieved.