Digital immortality: eternal life in a computer
Will the secret of immortality ever be revealed?
Will scientists ever discover the secret of immortality?Mark Piesing, Independent, Thursday 03 May 2012
Translation: InopressaTo date, the work aimed at achieving eternal life is largely focused on finding the key to the so-called "digital immortality".
"Digital immortality is when you physically died, but you exist in silicon," a kind of "plan B" in case the science of life cannot achieve true biological immortality," writes Briton Stephen Cave in his book Immortality.
"That is, your brain is scanned, and your essence is downloaded digitally, as a set of bits and bytes," explains the futurologist. "This complete brain emulation can be stored in a computer memory bank, and from there, at any moment, it can be brought back to life in the form of an avatar in a virtual world like Second Life, or even in the body of a robot endowed with artificial intelligence, which will be an exact copy of yourself."
According to Cave, today there are three main obstacles to the implementation of this program (some believe that they will be overcome within 40 years).
Firstly, the task of reading all the information that makes up the human "I" remains unsolved. Cave believes that to do this, you will have to extract the brain from the skull, preserve it and cut it into thin slices, then scan it.
Secondly, there is a problem of storing information, the volume of which exceeds the capabilities of modern computers by "many millions of orders of magnitude".
Finally, you have to learn how to "revive" the resulting copy. Theoretically, all this is possible, but Cave doubts whether it will come to practical implementation. Digital immortality remains for him only a surrogate, which, moreover, can "turn into a curse, as it always happens in mythology."
Dr. Stuart Armstrong, a researcher at the Institute for the Future of Humanity at Oxford University, is more optimistic. "The problems on the way to digital immortality lie in a purely engineering plane, no matter how difficult and intricate they may be. If you create a program comparable in scale to the Manhattan project, they can be solved within a decade," the scientist is convinced. He equates digital immortality with immortality as such: "If this avatar or robot is you in every way, then this is you." Armstrong foresees the difficulties associated with the temptation to "pump" his own copy or multiply successful clones: "You can copy five of the best programmers in the world or the best call center employee a million times, and these copies will simply replace people who will lose economic value."
Dr. Randal Cohen, founder of the California-based Carbon Copies Project, prefers to talk about "substrate-independent intelligence." Such, in his opinion, will be a continuation of the personality of the subject to the same extent that he himself is a continuation of himself at an earlier age. In the future, the recreated person will not know that it is a copy, Cohen believes. He believes that humanity has repeatedly faced possible ethical problems in the past, and digital immortality is the next stage of evolution.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru05.05.2012