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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 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