And They Lived Happily Ever After
Would You Transfer Your Consciousness?
Who doesn’t want to live forever?
Elusive immortality is glamorized and drooled over in fiction. Youth is lusted after in real life. Aging? Forget about it. Take resveratrol to keep those telomeres nice and long, why don’t you. Get those Korean sheet masks, because who needs wrinkles in this day and age?
What about your mind? Keep it nice and limber with sudoku, sure. But what about when you’re past that stage? When you’re just about…
Dead.
Here’s a wild suggestion for you: digitize your consciousness and upload it to the cloud.
“Rubbish,” you say. “You’ve been watching too much Altered Carbon and Black Mirror.”
Well, yeah. But the concept of consciousness transference isn’t completely removed from real life.
Take Nectome, for example.
The Y-Combinator supported startup originally came to attention with sensational headlines highlighting the “100% fatal” tag attached to their ultimate intent: the preservation of your brain and memories. Essentially, they want to back up your mind.
In the first wave of media coverage in March, Nectome’s link to MIT — and specifically, Professor Edward Boyden — was emphasized, providing a veil of legitimacy and prestige for a startup that most of the general population would’ve laughed at and never paid any mind to again.
But Nectome has received upwards of $900,000 in federal grants from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Receipts below.
Unfortunately for Nectome, less than a month after the first hullabaloo, MIT released a statement cutting ties with the ambitious brain-preserving startup.
“Neuroscience has not sufficiently advanced to the point where we know whether any brain preservation method is powerful enough to preserve all the different kinds of biomolecules related to memory and the mind. It is also not known whether it is possible to recreate a person’s consciousness.” — Statement on Nectome from MIT Media Lab
Nectome co-founder Robert McIntyre then emailed LiveScience and clarified, “I want people to understand that we’re currently in the research phase, and that rushing to apply ASC [aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation] today would be irresponsible.”
So, Nectome was over-hyped. Okay. Does it mean that they won’t eventually be able to perfectly preserve your mind?
Opinions are divided.
But Nectome isn’t the only company working on extending the life of the human mind. A company called Humai, led by Josh Bocanegra, came to attention in 2015 with the vision: “We want to transplant your brain into an elegantly designed bionic body called Humai. It will use a brain-computer interface to communicate with the sensory organs and limbs of your new bionic body.”
Though a catchy idea, experts were quick to dismiss Humai’s proposed method of conscious transference.
The 2016 BBC documentary “The Immortalist” spotlighted Dmitry Itskov, a Russian millionaire focused on avatars and immortality technologies. He founded an organization called “Initiative 2045” in 2011, with the intent to make immortality feasible by 2045.
The roadmap for Initiative 2045 includes plans for avatars that range in capabilities and design, with the first avatar model (Avatar A) estimated to be available by 2020. Avatar A is meant to be a robotic copy of a human body, with human and robot communicating via brain-computer interface.
The final avatar meant to be developed by 2045 is Avatar D, a hologram avatar which operates with an uploaded human consciousness.
Opinions are also divided on whether Initiative 2045 will actually accomplish its end-goal. But digitization of consciousness is a divisive topic in general. There are those who fervently believe immortality is in the cards for them, those who believe immortality is unfeasible, and those who think a regular lifespan is enough.
Consciousness transference also poses an additional question to individuals who believe a human body houses a mind and soul…
What’s the point of recreating or preserving your mind if your soul is already gone?
