In the future, there will be no fear of death

I am as concerned as anybody else over the effects of aging. But this post isn’t about the natural cell degradation that takes place over a lifetime. What I am really concerned about is sudden death, the kind that comes through accidents, natural disasters, killings, heart attacks, snake bites and in other ways ranging from the common to the unusual. These have always felt unfair and over centuries we have devised various explanations, justifications and convoluted arguments on why innocent people die and why does God let it happen. Well, I think in the future there will be no fear of such death. Nothing and nobody will be able to irreversibly harm anyone else.

Before getting down to conquering death or converting it to a minor nuisance, we have to understand two major trends underway which are shaping our future without our fully realizing it. The first one is continuous progress in life sciences, neuroscience, molecular biology, genetic engineering and similar fields. Recently, it was speculated that the cost of sequencing a human genome will soon come down to just hundreds of dollars. The continuous and dramatic drop in genome sequencing costs has already started a mini-revolution in biological research. Scientists are now identifying the 3-dimensional structure of a genome, researching on the expression of genes, studying the role of mutations in causing diseases and really figuring out how the human body works from the ground level up.

The second major trend is the incessant innovation in digital technology at all levels, be it processors, storage mediums, display interfaces and algorithms. I don’t need to talk much about this. The internet is flooded with websites which announce and analyze every advance in digital technology.

Back to our original concern, why is it that we are so helpless against hazards and accidents? Over the last few decades, huge progress has been made in medical technology, surgery and fighting diseases. But till now, we haven’t been able to understand the complexity of the mind. When we think about it, it is really our the memories and experiences (which I collectively call mind) we gain over the years that define us. We are akin to a machine which has the capacity to absorb new information, retain it and take decisions based on it. Other than the mind, the rest of the body just take instructions from the mind just as a car consisting of gears and engines takes “instructions” from the person sitting at the wheel. Hence protecting the mind from harm is essentially enough to survive. But this has so far eluded us. When met with a fatal incident, the mind dies along with the body.

Although our brain is not a modular component which can just be separated from the rest of the body, there are ways in which the information stored in it can be protected from permanent harm. One is the idea of mind uploading which suggests the detailed information and states in a brain be copied to a computer or a server. Although this line of thought was proposed long back and we have still a long way to go before it becomes possible, we keep moving closer to it. The Blue Brain project conducted by IBM and EPFL is already trying to simulate the behavior of thousands of neurons on supercomputers. There has been much progress on human computer interfaces which allow a brain and a computer to talk to each other. Storage capacity keeps getting bigger, more reliable and less power hungry with optimizations in solid state storage. On the other side, neuroscientists are conducting extensive research into the cell structure and workings of the brain. Within the next decade or two, it is highly likely that people will be able to seamlessly copy and sync the entire information in their minds, be it semantic, structural or experiential, with local machines and servers.

There are debates on whether a digital copy of the mind can ever acquire consciousness. It is difficult to argue without actual demonstration that consciousness itself is just a product of the mind. But consider this: the brain is just another storage medium and decision machine made of carbon-based compounds. There is no reason why equivalents based on silicon or other materials cannot be created. Hence it is highly likely that the mind copy will have the same consciousness and thought-process as the original mind, the only difference been that it resides on a machine. Hence, even if a person meets with a fatal incident, an exact clone of the mind will survive.

At this point, you may say that the mind clone won’t be much useful without the body. It won’t have any mobility or sensory perception. This is where the trend of biological progress kicks in. Once we understand the cell structure of humans and animals and acquire the ability to create body parts artificially, the mind clone has to just order a custom made body, in the brain of which it will create a copy of itself and then activate the biological body. Once the new biological body is activated and adjusts to its surroundings, the original person has completely survived the fatal incident. Some may say the person has been reborn.

But surviving accidents by copying minds between biological bodies and computers is only scratching the surface. The endless possibilities will be discussed in later posts..