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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: 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
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