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While many tech moguls dream of changing the way we live with new smart devices or social media apps, one Russian internet millionaire is trying to change nothing less than our destiny, by making it possible to upload a human brain to a computer, reports Tristan Quinn. "Within the next 30 years," promises Dmitry Itskov, "I am going to make sure that we can all live forever."
It sounds preposterous, but there is no doubting the seriousness of this softly spoken 35-year-old, who says he left the business world to devote himself to something more useful to humanity. "I'm 100% confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn't have started it," he says. It is a breathtaking ambition, but could it actually be done? Itskov doesn't have too much time to find out.
"If there is no immortality technology, I'll be dead in the next 35 years," he laments. Death is inevitable - currently at least - because as we get older the cells that make up our bodies lose their ability to repair themselves, making us vulnerable to cardiovascular disease and other age-related conditions that kill about two-thirds of us.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35786771
Horizon: The Immortalist, produced and directed by Tristan Quinn, will be shown on BBC 2 at 20:00 on Wednesday 16 March 2016 - viewers in the UK can catch up later on the BBC iPlayer
Dmitry Itskov, Founder of 2045 Initiative
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:15PM
No, it isn't. That's why this is pretty much useless if you truly want to live forever. Making a copy of your mind won't stop your original body and consciousness from dying.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:25PM
It could be useful for other things, like low resource interstellar travel with no oxygen or deep freeze necessary.
You could also copy your mind and enslave yourself into being your own digital assistant! What could possibly go wrong?
Finally, you could take the plunge, copy your mind, and kill off your body. It's not like your consciousness would jump from body to computer, but if it is acting exactly like you than it might fool other people.
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(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:40PM
How can you be so certain? We don't know what "life" exactly is. Imagine parts of you brain failing - may be first the part to control the heartbeat and breathing. If you replace these basic functions by a cybernetic implant, is that still living? If you start incorporating other cybernetic elements into your brain, at which point do you stop "living"? I think, consciousness is a continuous process, not necessarily dependant on the exact underlying hardware. We wouldn't know, because the new existence would act like the wet-ware did before, so even if it is just emulating consciousness, begging to stay powered on, we wouldn't know for sure.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:52PM
How can you be so certain?
If you cloned an exact duplicate of yourself which looked exactly like you and had the same memories, there would be no reason to think the clone could not act independently of you, given that it has a separate body. If you then destroyed the original, then following that line of reasoning, there is also no reason to think that you haven't just ended someone's consciousness. We don't fully understand consciousness, true, but there is no reason to believe it is magic.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday March 16 2016, @07:30PM
It makes you wonder what would happen if you removed, swapped and reattached the left brain hemispheres from the original and the twin. Depending on the true nature of consciousness, it might swap the conscious viewpoints, have no affect on them, destroy them, make each consciousness somehow be shared across two bodies (seems unlikely), or even give rise to four consciousnesses. In fact there's no way of knowing that there aren't multiple conscious first persons existing in each human brain, perhaps in a similar way to the way in which your past and future selves exist but are distinct from your present self, or similar to parallel experiences in the many worlds hypothesis.
Consumerism is poison.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday March 16 2016, @07:33PM
Argh s/affect/effect/
Clicking Submit just keeps refreshing a Preview of this Comment. Is this an invisible Lameness Filter or what? There's no message.
Consumerism is poison.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @09:41PM
You get the message if you scroll up to the top. There you'll find something about a 2 minute wait between posts.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday March 16 2016, @10:40PM
Ah thanks. I had a good look but for some reason I didn't notice that!
Consumerism is poison.
(Score: 2) by julian on Wednesday March 16 2016, @09:10PM
In fact there's no way of knowing that there aren't multiple conscious first persons existing in each human brain
Actually there is a way of knowing, and the answer is affirmative at least for some definitions of consciousness. There are two independent (though not entirely equal) consciousnesses in your brain--right now. This has been experimentally verified with split-brain patients. Sam Harris talks about this in a few chapters of his book Waking Up. I recommend it. For an even weirder exploration of this idea try Julian Jaynes's "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". Although I'd almost classify that as speculative medical-fiction. His ideas are pretty far out there and not widely accepted.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @09:45PM
Experiments with split-brain patients can only prove that split-brain patients have two independent consciousnesses. They cannot prove that there are also two consciousnesses without the split. It might be exactly the split that breaks the consciousness into two independent ones.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday March 16 2016, @11:05PM
Indeed and we still don't know how many consciousnesses there would be after a successful reattachment.
Consumerism is poison.
(Score: 2) by devlux on Thursday March 17 2016, @12:16AM
Consider those with full fledged mental illness such as Multiple Personality Disorder.
When it's full blown the brain is literally running the consciousness of the multiples as easily as it's running the native personality.
"Whatever you was in the goo, was not the true you." (no idea where but a quote from some scifi I read as a child).
Just like different programs and even operating systems running on the same physical computer.
Possibly brain death can be given a coredump style function?
gdb acidandy.core
bt
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday March 16 2016, @07:17PM
Exactly. A million times this. I honestly don't know why people keep overlooking this fact. The whole computer copy of your brain thing is more analogous to cloning an identical twin of yourself, teaching them your memories and then them acting as your character, then you die. OK, that's not the best analogy (if anything the twin has a lot more in common with you, biologically) but it's about as much use.
Worse it's doubtful anyone could ever prove that any given brain upload technology actually works. Even if you performed it on yourself to validate it, you'd never know whether it had worked and you had become a computer copy or whether you had only ever been the newly created computer copy and the original consciousness unfortunately died.
Consumerism is poison.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @08:01PM
You take what you can get. The Russian millionaire is trying to make the most out of a bad situation (certain death). Biological anti-aging and reversal of aging would be more ideal than mind uploading since there is no copy-original problem involved.
There has been no successful mind upload. By the time hardware has advanced enough to make such an attempt possible, what's to say a non-destructive method of scanning the brain won't be possible?
Why do we even need to destroy the original? We can have more fun with this concept. How about networking your biological brain to several copies of your "mind upload". Use anti-aging therapy to keep the meatspace body alive. The results could be far more interesting than the unimaginative "mind upload as the last chance to avoid death" scenario.
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(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday March 16 2016, @07:33PM
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @07:56PM
No successful upload has been done. This talk of a "destructive process" doesn't take into account advanced scanning technologies that don't exist yet. We could end up with some kind of neutrino scan that is entirely non-destructive.
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(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Wednesday March 16 2016, @11:01PM
Then this will never work. You cannot sign a waiver that allows someone else to kill you. You're barely allowed to kill yourself and only in a few locations, let alone have another person slice your brain into pieces while you're still alive.
(Score: 1) by U on Thursday March 17 2016, @09:05AM
Make the system entirely automated and have the subject push the button to commence the process.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday March 17 2016, @12:55PM
That didn't work for Kevorkian [wikipedia.org] so I doubt it would work here.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 17 2016, @02:53PM
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Wednesday March 16 2016, @09:10PM
I suspect this too. The consciousness is unique to the specific instance of space-time. Because the instant that a perfect copy is made, differences in entropy over space will make the brains differ. And if not, it most likely will be like a super twin not yourself.
So there may be a perfect copy but not a transfer. And if the simulation isn't good enough. You might become a total psychotic. No limbic response = psychopath.
Simulations is also hard because it supposedly requires 36.8×10^15 instructions per second for real-time performance. However another researcher estimates that every neuron would need 10^15 instructions per second. Thus a requirement of 36.8×10^30 instructions per second. Not many computers can handle that. If there's any sufficient software to do it at all and scanning procedures exist.
But the Chinese Tianhe-2 at 33.86×10^15 at least has brain simulation within theoretical reach if the simpler model is feasible!
Current brains simulation paradigm seems to be assume that with enough computational capability a human brain simulation is possible. But if it's a mix of room temperature quantum phenomena and computational capability. Then any plain computational simulation will most likely fail hard. Photosynthesis is already observed to use quantum phenomena to work. So nature has harnessed this while humans have not.