The Weird Neuroscience of Immortality

• Commander of Awesome

  

  [h=3]The Weird Neuroscience of Immortality --Uploading the Human Mind[/h]
  
  
  Neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth, 41, recently of Harvrad and a veteran of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, believes that he can live forever, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. But first he has to die. "The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body." Hayworth wants his 100 billion neurons and more than 100 trillion synapses to be encased in a block of transparent, amber-colored resin—before he dies of natural causes. Why? Because Hayworth believes that he can live forever.
  
  "If your body stops functioning, it starts to eat itself," Hayworth says, "so you have to shut down the enzymes that destroy the tissue." If all goes according to plan, I'll be a perfect fossil." Then one day, not too long from now, his consciousness will be revived on a computer. By 2110, Hayworth predicts, mind uploading—the transfer of a biological brain to a silicon-based operating system—will be as common as laser eye surgery is today. Haysworth is pioneering the field of connectomics --a new branch of neuroscience. A connectome is a complete map of a brain's neural circuitry. Some scientists "believe that human connectomes will one day explain consciousness, memory, emotion, even diseases like autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's—the cures for which might be akin to repairing a wiring error. In 2010 the National Institutes of Health established the Human Connectome Project, a $40-million, multi-institution effort to study the field's medical potential."
  Connectomics scholar Sebastian Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a prominent proponent of the grand theory, describes the connectome as the place where "nature meets nurture."* Hayworth looks at the growth of connectomics—especially advances in brain preservation, tissue imaging, and computer simulations of neural networks—and sees a cure for death. In a new paper in the International Journal of Machine Consciousness, he argues that mind uploading is an "enormous engineering challenge" but one that can be accomplished without "radically new science and technologies."
  "There are those who say that death is just part of the human condition, so we should embrace it. 'I'm not one of those people," he adds.* Hayworth ansers critics his many doubters in academia saying that science is about overturning expectations: "If 100 years ago someone said that we'd have satellites in orbit and little boxes on our desks that can communicate across the world, they would have sounded very outlandish." One hundred years from now, he believes, our descendants will not understand how so many of us failed for so long to embrace the idea of immortality.
  "We've had a lot of breakthroughs—genomics, space flight—but those are trivial in comparison to mind uploading. This will be earth-shattering because it will open up possibilities we've never dreamed of."* In 1986, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education, "researchers did manage to map the nervous system of a millimeter-long soil worm known as C. elegans. Though the creature has only 302 neurons and 7,000 synapses, the project took a dozen years. (The lead scientist, Sydney Brenner, who won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002, is also at Janelia Farm.) C. elegans's remains the only connectome ever completed. According to one projection, if the same techniques were used to map just one cubic millimeter of human cortex, it could take a million person-years."
  "In 2010, Jeff Lichtman, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard and a leading light in connectomics, and Narayanan Kasthuri, also of Harvard, published a small paper full of big numbers. Based on their estimates, a human connectome would generate one trillion gigabytes of raw data. By comparison, the entire Human Genome Project requires only a few gigabytes. A human connectome would be the most complicated map the world has ever seen." State of the art methods of preserving brain tissue top out at around one cubic millimeter—far, far short of an entire human brain.
  "Mind uploading is part of the zeitgeist," says MIT's Sebastian Seung. "People have become believers in virtual worlds because of their experience with computers. That makes them more willing to consider far-out ideas."
  Taking a stark contrary view, J. Anthony Movshon, of NYU, says that more than 25 years after the C. elegans connectome was completed, he says, we have only a dim understanding of the worm's nervous system. "We know it has sensory neurons that drive the muscles and tell the worm to move this way or that. And we've discovered that some chemicals cause one response and other chemicals cause the opposite response. Yet the same circuit carries both signals." He scoffs, "How can the connectome explain that?"
  "Our brains are not the pattern of connections they contain, but the signals that pass along those connections," concludes Movshon.
  The Daily Galaxy via http://chronicle.com/article/The-Strange-Neuroscience-of/132819/
• O-Trap

  

  Honestly, this stuff is nothing short of fascinating. It's pretty cool to speculate how consciousness can be preserved, though I believe it will take longer than Hayworth speculates ... potentially a lot longer.
  
  I was tempted to reply with 'tl;dr' but I ended up reading it. Plus, I don't feel like I have an excuse not to.
• Raw Dawgin' it

  

  tl:dr
• Heretic

  

  Futurama was right!
  
  
• Commander of Awesome

  

  O-Trap;1236975 wrote:Honestly, this stuff is nothing short of fascinating. It's pretty cool to speculate how consciousness can be preserved, though I believe it will take longer than Hayworth speculates ... potentially a lot longer

  Completely agree with you on all accounts. Consciousness and what equates it is really an interesting topic.
• O-Trap

  

  Commander of Awesome;1236986 wrote:Completely agree with you on all accounts. Consciousness and what equates it is really an interesting topic.

  Yeah, consciousness has always been an intangible, and even with this, I think there will be some mystique to it, as we'd still just be creating an environment (artificial, in this case) in which the consciousness can flourish.
  
  I don't see this as a furthering of creation of consciousness as much as I do the preservation of the consciousness that already exists.
  
  What would be amazing would be to get to a point where we could combine consciousnesses ... or at least the mind's retention of data. At that point, we could theoretically all speak every language or know what others know at the click of a "Download" button, similarly to how an operating system can be given the ability to do new tasks with new information stored on the same hard drive.
• justincredible

  

  I believe I used this gif not too long ago but it also applies here.
  
  
• Sykotyk

  

  problem is, just because you've copied the programming and data, doesn't mean you'll still be 'you'. For instance, imagine you 'uploaded' a copy of your entire brain chemistry into a computer and into a robot to do so as it pleases WHILE you and your body are still alive and fully functional.
  
  Are you still you, or are you the robot? You obviously have to be one or the other.
  
  
  Just because in this scenario your body ceases and a new entity continues does not mean 'you' continue.
  
  Besides, all the A.I. issues come into play with this scenario if it held true. You're suddenly ensconced in a body without the ability to 'die'. Do you still have morals? Do you still have enjoyment in things? Why? A passing fancy, is just that, passing. A life without death would have nothing interesting. And that's if magically you still existed and not just a copy of your internal hard drive.
• gut

  Yeah, it sounds to me like just preserving a copy of you. In essence an imitation, not actually you, continues on. It's a form of immortality, but a pretty shitty one IMO.
  
  I think the better (and more likely) scenario is, instead of the "singularity", we'll get some super-juiced stem cells that get injected to rejuvenate the brain, if not the entire body. Basically the fountain of youth. Take your body in for a tune-up/overhaul every 60 years or so and maybe live to be 200-300.
• BoatShoes

  gut;1237251 wrote:Yeah, it sounds to me like just preserving a copy of you. In essence an imitation, not actually you, continues on. It's a form of immortality, but a pretty shitty one IMO.
  
  I think the better (and more likely) scenario is, instead of the "singularity", we'll get some super-juiced stem cells that get injected to rejuvenate the brain, if not the entire body. Basically the fountain of youth. Take your body in for a tune-up/overhaul every 60 years or so and maybe live to be 200-300.

  I agree...this and nanomachines running around through your circulatory system. Senescence doesn't really seem to be different than any other engineering problem at a fundamental level. Hard to imagine what the future holds.
• gut

  BoatShoes;1237258 wrote:I agree...this and nanomachines running around through your circulatory system. Senescence doesn't really seem to be different than any other engineering problem at a fundamental level. Hard to imagine what the future holds.

  In theory it doesn't sound hard, no? Basically as you get older your body "turns off" or loses the ability to repair/regenerate. Arguably your "peak" health is @25-32 (guessing, just going off peak athletic ability). So if you can turn that ability back on or recharge it, you could stay that age forever (maybe with a stem cell "boost" for things that just age).
  
  That'd be pretty damn cool to be like 60 and start therapy to go back to, physically, being 28. The hairline comes back, pounds melt-off magically with higher metabolism, and lines disappear.
  
  If you look at how far genetic research has come in just about 20 years, we could be seeing some amazing things within the next 20 years. I view athletes as guineapigs in that regard. It may be kind of regarded as junk science or quackery now, but I think HgH and steroids (or something similar) are going to become the norm supplement/program as we age.
• cruiser_96

  

  Are these the same guys that said we'd have flying cars and be living on the moon by now!? Is so, tl;dr.
  
  If not, ...interesting. I guess.
• password

  

  Very interesting assumption on preserving the living after their death, but how is that working out for Ted Williams?