The Do's & Don'ts of Backing-Up Your Brain
What is life? Is it existence? If so, then what is existence? Existence is a state of being real or a way of living. That’s the problem with words, without a lot of them tied together they are open to an individual’s own interpretation. For one thing, life has got to be about living; the avoidance of death.
I’ve always said that “I would be extremely pissed-off if I had to die, there’s so much I want to still do and see.” Yet I know that my body has a limited shelf-life. I’m not a big buyer of re-incarnation or an after-life, so it’s technology I’m counting on. Cloning sounds interesting, but does not necessarily meet my expectations as of yet. Having a body that matches my DNA is not as exciting as a mind that matches my memory.
I have thought about cryogenics. It does sound more promising that cloning, other than they have yet to defrost anyone. And when they do, a defrostee would have a lot to deal with. For starters they would have a lot of catching up to do between lives. Poor Walt, If he had been cryogenically frozen, as so often people have speculated, I wonder what he would think of Disneyland Resort Paris?
With what research has had to show in matching the way the brain and silicon chips work, it is likely that one day in the future we will be able to download our brains. Taking further steps could mean manipulating that data and uploading it back to our own brain or even a fresh one. Take Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s past blockbusters ‘Total Recall’ and ‘The 6th Day’ for inspiration. Unfortunately as these movie titles stem from Hollywood, they depict less of the good and more of the bad for such possibilities in technology.
Downloading could be an extremely cheap form of preserving our lives. After all, the body really doesn’t offer much other than a means to support the brain whilst we interact with our world. Sure, we can lop off and freeze only the head. The rest can go to medical research, organ transplants, etc. That does offer a space saving opportunity, but does mean that at some point we’ll be lopping off more heads in order to reattach them back to fresher bodies. All rather messy!
There’s a couple of ways we could use downloaded brains. One, we could fix damaged brains offline, a sort of defrag, uploading a better You; Or two, we could grow human blanks a-la-Repet (The 6th Day), uploading the brain to a fresh body. Although I’m not sure how quickly we would be able to match the body to our existing one, or why we would want to (unless you’re Brad Pitt or Jennifer Aniston). Better yet, we could pick a more ‘suitable’ body. Adding on to these possibilities, we could travel great distances at the speed of light: Broadband connection to the stars, or at least their planets. You could be uploaded to a blank at a base station millions of light-years away. Another possibility is to dispense with the body completely. Although to accept this one, I think that would need more jiggery-pokery with my brain than I’d care to consider.
Such possibilities would bring to the rise even more questions about ‘life’. And death. And even more profound questions if we didn’t ‘have’ to die, would we want to, and if we did, would we be allowed to?
I’ve always said that “I would be extremely pissed-off if I had to die, there’s so much I want to still do and see.” Yet I know that my body has a limited shelf-life. I’m not a big buyer of re-incarnation or an after-life, so it’s technology I’m counting on. Cloning sounds interesting, but does not necessarily meet my expectations as of yet. Having a body that matches my DNA is not as exciting as a mind that matches my memory.
I have thought about cryogenics. It does sound more promising that cloning, other than they have yet to defrost anyone. And when they do, a defrostee would have a lot to deal with. For starters they would have a lot of catching up to do between lives. Poor Walt, If he had been cryogenically frozen, as so often people have speculated, I wonder what he would think of Disneyland Resort Paris?
With what research has had to show in matching the way the brain and silicon chips work, it is likely that one day in the future we will be able to download our brains. Taking further steps could mean manipulating that data and uploading it back to our own brain or even a fresh one. Take Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s past blockbusters ‘Total Recall’ and ‘The 6th Day’ for inspiration. Unfortunately as these movie titles stem from Hollywood, they depict less of the good and more of the bad for such possibilities in technology.
Downloading could be an extremely cheap form of preserving our lives. After all, the body really doesn’t offer much other than a means to support the brain whilst we interact with our world. Sure, we can lop off and freeze only the head. The rest can go to medical research, organ transplants, etc. That does offer a space saving opportunity, but does mean that at some point we’ll be lopping off more heads in order to reattach them back to fresher bodies. All rather messy!
There’s a couple of ways we could use downloaded brains. One, we could fix damaged brains offline, a sort of defrag, uploading a better You; Or two, we could grow human blanks a-la-Repet (The 6th Day), uploading the brain to a fresh body. Although I’m not sure how quickly we would be able to match the body to our existing one, or why we would want to (unless you’re Brad Pitt or Jennifer Aniston). Better yet, we could pick a more ‘suitable’ body. Adding on to these possibilities, we could travel great distances at the speed of light: Broadband connection to the stars, or at least their planets. You could be uploaded to a blank at a base station millions of light-years away. Another possibility is to dispense with the body completely. Although to accept this one, I think that would need more jiggery-pokery with my brain than I’d care to consider.
Such possibilities would bring to the rise even more questions about ‘life’. And death. And even more profound questions if we didn’t ‘have’ to die, would we want to, and if we did, would we be allowed to?
posted by Matt Jones at 19:46
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