Emergence Of The Era Of Digital Immortality. [The concept of digital immortality explained]

Introduction

It is a well known fact that when someone has been declared "brain-dead", it means that there has been a cessation of all the functions and activities of the brain; which includes consciousness and self-awareness. And it has been an age-long desire of humankind to circumvent the process of dying. Before now, the major attention had been tilted towards reversing the process of senescence or achieving biological immortality, but technology has offered an alternative to this; which is the transference of one's consciousness to another body posthumously, thus achieving a level of immortality called "digital immortality".

[Image Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Glogger]

Creating a brain backup

Have you ever thought about the possibility of downloading everything that is in your brain (which includes consciousness) and transferring it into another body? Now some may think that this is just another science fiction, but may I remind you that this is actually turning to science fact.

Over the period of past decades, the brain has been compared to computers. But the fact is, the brain is different because of the presence of consciousness and cognition. And we are also aware that "consciousness" is the sum total of the information that represents a particular individual. The question is, can this consciousness be transferred from one body to another body, and how can it be transferred? You will find out soon.

Stephen Hawking; one of the most respected scientists of all times, made a comment sometime ago, and I quip:

Theoretically, it is possible to create a copy of the brain data and transfer it to a computer, which will ultimately provide a form of immortality. Stephen Hawking. Source [paraphrased by me] 

This theory is based on the fact that the human brain has been seen to have similar functions to the computer, in which it is believed that it operates like "software" in the human mind. And as the computational capabilities of computers have been seen to be increasing exponentially in this era, the actualization of this feat is getting closer. And in fact, we are close to achieving the feat of preserving human consciousness even after the person has been declared brain-dead. But does this count as immortality? We would find out soon.

Also in the same article, Hawking was seen to have made a claim that by the year 2030, it would be possible to upload the human consciousness in machines. 

But Stephen Hawking is not the only proponent of digital immortality. A very renowned futurist; Rey Kurzweil (which is also the director of Engineering at Google inc) indicated that humans are less than 30years away from achieving a full interaction with machines, and that includes uploading of consciousness into them.

[Image Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Paul Wicks]

But as it were, there are some considerations to place before embarking on this journey of creating brain backups, but I'm sure they are already aware of this.

Reading data from the source brain

Now, this is actually the first step in the process of creating the brain backup. Over time, neuroscientists have been learning how the brain stores up data and information. Like we know, unlike the computer that stores information in bits (zeros and ones), the neurons in the brain are interconnected with other neurons, and the information is stored in different locations in the brain.

But advanced in the field of neuroscience has made it possible to scan the human brain. A major research was heralded by a team of researchers from the university of California. the research was comprised of 42 human subjects selected at random, which were made to watch some varieties of videos. During the period of watching the video, their brain activities were being scanned by an FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner, after which it was analyzed by a computer system. It was discovered that, with only the brain scans, the computer was able to decipher what those people were actually watching. 

With this, the scientists were able to create a 3D imaging of the areas of the brain scanned in Voxels (Voxel is a 3D version of pixel. A pixel is a 2D representation of picture element). Though the voxels were arranged in fragments, the computer was able to collate the fragments into a single whole. 

[Image Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: John Graner]

With this kind of technology, reading of data from the source brain has been taken care of. The next step is copying the source data to the destination brain.

Writing data in the destination brain

This is starting to sound like the read/write action a computer storage device; but this is more complex than that.

A particular research on Optogenetics was carried out on mice, which, after genetically modifying the neural cells of the test mice to be sensitive to light, then striking them with laser light, they were able to represent how memories are written and read in these mice, and they were able to transfer memories to these mice. 

But talking of human brain, it has been estimated that it can store up to 2.5 Petabytes of data (that is 2,500,000,000,000,000 bytes). Okay that's pretty huge. Now, the real thing is; how do you copy a 2.5PB file?

Assuming you're transferring with the world's fastest USB transfer protocol; "the Thunderbolt 2",  which can run at 20GB/S, it would take over one week of continuous connection to complete.

[Image Source: Wikimedia Commons. Author: Mustafa Cann]

But if this obstacle is finally circumvented, then how do you effectively map the human with precision, judging by the fact that thoughts do not reside on a single neuron? Well, advances are being made, and these things are becoming attainable by the day. Just as it has been predicted, we are really close to achieving digital immortality.

Maybe, in the future, "death" would not be seen as an inevitable end. Immortality really beckons.

Thanks for reading

References for further reading: Ref1, Ref2, Ref3, Ref4, Ref5

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