Ending death for most people in the United States is feasible. What's your excuse?

Great Debates
1

Here’s an article from MIT technology review, showing in clear detail an extraordinary effort to copy a tiny piece of rat cortex.

Here’s what I conclude from this :

a. The rat brain was completely preserved for this scan. The human brain is bigger, but not so much bigger than comparable methods could not be developed.
b. Once this effort is complete, scientists will have an exact map of a small piece of the rat’s cortex. With a map and calculated neural strengths, it would be possible to resurrect the rat as a digital equivalent.
c. Nothing I see in this effort couldn’t be eventually applied to humans. Scanning an entire human brain could be done the same way. Sure, it could not be done affordably now - but human genome sequencing wasn’t affordable 15 years ago, either.

Extraordinary advances in scanning speeds and costs are entirely feasible.

How can this be used to end death? It’s obvious. Develop a method that preserves human brains for terminal patients, before their deaths, where you would slice the brain samples and scan from randomly selected samples of the patient’s brain.

If randomly selected samples are scannable - that the tissue is preserved well enough that a complete synaptic map can be created - it is possible to recover the person’s personality and memory data.

You don’t have to actually scan a whole brain, not without first making the technology to perform such scans faster and cheaper over 20+ years of R&D, just scan tiny pieces of a well preserved brain to show it’s feasible to do it all.

Then start licensing hospitals to perform this procedure. Cover it as a medical procedure under medicare. Fund through medicare long term care facilities, which are basically underground vaults protected by armed guards, where the patients will be stored for the next 30-300 years. Since each vault could store hundreds of thousands of patients, but have costs no greater than maintaining and guarding a nuclear missile silo, it would be quite cheap. Cheaper than spending $100k+ on each patient for futile end of life care.

You’d save many billions of dollars not having to provide dementia or Alzheimer’s care, which is not only futile, but in fact I would argue is actively evil.

If you have the ability to preserve a patient’s brain with memories and personality mostly intact, but you instead give them a bed in a nursing home and keep them fueled and at body temperature, it is ethically equivalent to leaving a car engine running that you know is failing badly and is going to fail explosively without maintenance.

So, what’s your excuse? There are thousands of members of this board, many of whom are senior citizens. All of you are bound for the grave in the next few decades. The Straight Dope says there is no evidence for an afterlife. Who the fuck cares about Trump or taxes or gun control, this is the issue that we should be discussing here.

2

I think you’ve leapt far beyond where the science is.

First off, the article is describing something scientists are planning to do. So they haven’t actually completed a brain scan.

Second, while this detailed mapping of the physical structure and activity of a brain will undoubtedly advance neuroscience, there’s no guarantee that any understanding of how a brain works will unlock how a mind works. Certainly not to the level that you can study the brain and tell what that brain is thinking.

Third, deconstructing a brain is not the same as constructing a brain. The process that’s described does not leave you with a working brain. It reduces the brain being studied to mush. And nobody is offering suggestions on how to build a new brain and insert the old brain’s activity into it.

3

Why?

4

First, code an emulator that’s capable of running “SamuelA.exe”.

5

Preserving what’s on the hard drive doesn’t of itself keep a computer working.

6

In addition to the issues raised so far there is of course the philosophical issue of whether duplicating a brain is the same as transferring it.

We might argue that we talk about “moving” programs all the time. But in reality, with regards to software, we interchangeably describe the same operation as “Move” or “Copy and delete original” because we don’t actually *care *about the distinction.
With consciousness, which remember we don’t have a model for yet (beyond basics like it being something which happens in brains), is a situation where the distinction matters.

Or, since I know from experience some Dopers will handwave all the above, let’s just focus on what that means in terms of uptake: many people will refuse to undergo the procedure, as they would not be sure their consciousness would really be transferred.

7

Another article on the subject.

tl;dr: Don’t hold your breath waiting for that upload.

8

I am not an expert on mammalian brain but I feel confident that any brain expert would dismiss any possibility of doing what OP envisions in the foreseeable future.

Synapses are not binary switches — though I think even recording a binary value for each synapse is much more than the MIT project is attempting. Synapses encode continuous variable(s) and are dependent on local variations. Some brain researchers think the microtubules in a neuron (not needed for mitosis) participate in learned responses. If so, the brain might be unusually hard to copy: Although there may be even less than one quadrillion synapses in human brain, each of the hundred billion neurons may have about a billion microtubules.

9

…bolding mine.

septimus nailed it.

10

So, if a patient is terminal, what do you download his brain into? The body is eventually going to fail, even if the mind has been preserved. Your mind can be as sharp as it ever was, but it won’t help if you’re dying from heart disease or cancer. Are you going to clone a physical body to host the new brain? Are you going to create a cybernetic body? These questions should be answered if you’re going to talk about duplicating a human brain.

11

A good article, and an update to it.

13

Even if the technology existed to perfectly replicate a human brain artificially, there’s still the sticky philosophical issue of the “teleportation paradox.” Is that thing actually you, or just a copy of you? If it were so easy to copy the structure and processes that make up a person, if you made multiple copies of yourself, would they all, or would any of them, be you? Obviously these are questions that cannot be answered until the physical technology actually exists to find out, but it’s quite terrifying to explore.

14

What’s my excuse for what? For not planning my life around technology that doesn’t exist today and may not for the foreseeable future?

15

Do we WANT to have old people hanging around forever?

There’s a fair argument that a lot of our social progress comes about by having the hide-bound, set-in-their-beliefs people GO AWAY.

Not to mention that all these ancient people will be clogging up the world. Right now every square inch of the planet is owned by someone (or held jointly by coalitions of existing people.) Where will those born in the future live? Older people hold the majority of the jobs, including government. How will younger people ever advance if old slots never open up?

Nope. People should die to keep the cycle going. (And I say this as a Golden Ager myself.)

16
  1. Even if everyone in the world clapped their hands at the same time and shouted “I want to live forever!!”, the science needed to make such a thing happen isn’t going to pop into existence.
  2. Even if it became possible in the far, far future to accomplish this, the expense will prohibit anyone except millionaires from benefiting from it.
  3. Even if the first two problems are overcome, where are you going to put all these extra people that aren’t getting out of the way of future generations, and what are you going to feed them?
  4. The already mentioned “teleportation paradox” problem.
17

Sounds like someone has been watching too much Dark Mirror on Netflix.

People can’t agree on the legitimacy of copies of media downloads, let alone entire people.
IMHO they would all be “you”. The stickier question is, if they are all indistinguishable from the original "you, which one has the legal right to all your stuff? Or, if you create a copy, does the copy have the same rights as you do as a person? Speaking of Dark Mirror, there was an episode where Jon Hamm sold a service where they duplicated people’s brains for them in order to run their smart homes. The copy often had to be incentivized into doing it’s job so they would stick it in a virtual white isolation box for weeks or months. Sometimes their mind snapped and became useless for anything besides cannon fodder for war games.

What if instead of creating copies of myself to run my thermostat and make my toast, I make a bunch of copies to run my corporation? Or I just hire one really talented engineer and clone his/her brain a bunch of times?

Once you can start copying minds, presumably you can edit the contents as well. Are you still “you” if you edit out a bunch of shit from your childhood?

Or, ultimately, does any of that stuff matter?

18

I remember a documentary about this.

19

I don’t understand why people think that some kind of copying of their brain and it’s memories and processes keeps you from dying. You will die. Even if it can be done someone or something else will wake up with your whatever was in your brain but it won’t be you. Maybe the brain-cloned rat won’t realize the difference but your brain-clone will know that it’s not you, and you won’t because you’re dead, and I can’t understand how if you know you are dying that it will make you feel any better about it because you know that some copy of you continues to exist.

20

No, the stickier question is your IMHO part: personal identity and the transporter problem is one of the most frequently discussed and contentious philosophical problems, and since we have no central model of consciousness, science is largely neutral on at this time.
As with many issues of consciousness, it’s a whole different class of problem from the kind we’re used to solving (that can be entirely described with objective third-person descriptions).

Meanwhile, we can work out the legal issues in a taxi on the way to the duplication clinic… Or maybe that would be unwise, but it’s certainly a more familiar class of problem to us.

21

Is the value of the Mona Lisa lessened if an exact duplicate is created?
If not, then what is the value of the duplicate?
If so, then by how much?