Overcoming Objections to Brain Preservation
Overview
Five Defenses
1. The Scientific Advancement Defense
2. The Exceptional Cases Defense
3. The Better Death Defense
4. The Religious Defense
5. The Social Benefits Defense
The Patternism Hypothesis
A Number of Non-Obvious Proposals
Challenges for the Future
A Brief Bibliography
Nine More Objections and Defenses – For the Scientists and Philosophers
This article discusses some common objections to and defenses of the value of brain preservation as a social option. In recent years advances in neuroscience, genetics, cellular and molecular biology, biotechnology, microscopy, data science, and other fields have given us a new and deeper understanding of the epigenetic, extracellular, and synaptic changes that form the molecular basis of memory. The 2014 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience was won by three neuroscientists for the discovery of specialized brain networks for memory and cognition. The 2016 Brain Prize was won by three neuroscientists for elucidating the molecular mechanisms of long-term potentiation, one of the keys to storing and sustaining lifelong memories in mammalian brains. In this “brave new world” of progress in neuroscience and related fields, considering human brain preservation at the end of our lives, as a personal choice, and making this choice available for all who might want it around the world, has become a more viable idea than ever before.
Is brain preservation a wise and ethical use of resources, in any individual case? Is it wise for society as a whole? The answer to the first question is clearly a personal choice. Each of us will have our own unique responses to it, which will also change over our life. For each individual case, I firmly believe that giving each of us more options to preserve any information we individually may want available for the future, including our own memories and identities, is a wise and ethical act, as long as a minority of neuroscientists expect that the act of preservation may have some future informational value, and as long as preservation can done sustainably with respect to the environment.
If preservation can be validated to preserve even simple memories in higher organisms, a compelling case can be made that making the preservation option available for all who might want it around the world, and championing the ability of each of us to make our own free choices on this matter, will be a great advance in building the kind of societies we want. Such a validation has already occurred in primitive ways for very simple organisms, and it may occur in the coming decade in well-studied brain circuits in higher organisms. Understanding how memory “engrams” are stored in our connectomes and synaptomes, so that they can be retrieved over a lifetime in our wet and constantly changing neural environments, will likely come long before we have a full theory of how emotion, personality, and consciousness operate in the brain. Making a credible case for memory preservation, then, may be the first proof of the potential value of this technology for a significant number of people who are skeptical about it today. Many other proofs will come, as our neuroscience and computer science advances.
To answer the question of brain preservation’s value to society, let us first ask under what circumstances information itself, both generally, and within unique human minds, is worth preserving for the future. History shows that the advance of civilization has always been directly tied to advances in our collective memory, in the preservation and sharing of our unique history and ideas. A book that makes this point well is The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory, by Michael S. Malone, 2012. Right now, 57 million unique human minds die every year, and 155,000 of us die every day. Preserving as much as possible of the wisdom, experiences, drives, and goals of humanity’s dying minds, for later return to life, either as memories in “the cloud” or as fully revived individual minds, seems to me to be an example of social progress that may prove even more important than such memory advances as language, writing, printing, and our modern digital revolution. I firmly believe that the more brain preservation we do today, and the more affordable and accessible we make it, the more we will increase the diversity and wisdom of our future civilization.
To understand this claim, I think it helps to think of ourselves in informational terms. One important step in this regard is to recognize the “patternist” nature of our personal identities. What we call our memories, our personality, and our “self” is not our matter but is instead a very complex and special informational pattern held in our biology. We know that we are a complex pattern, not matter, because our matter is constantly changing. We are being imperfectly copied, all the time, at the molecular scale. We also know we are patterns because when sufficiently complex brain patterns are replicated in technology, as our science has learned how to do when a cochlear or retinal implant is integrated into a deaf or blind person’s nervous system, this very small part of their self now operates as a technological pattern, in partnership with our biological patterns. We’ll discuss this surprising idea, commonly called the patternism hypothesis, later in this article.
If brain preservation works, a question the BPF was founded to investigate, it would only be the latest in a long series of technological advances on Earth that have increasingly captured and “uploaded” our unique and valuable biological patterns into our faster, more flexible, and more long-lived technology. We began this uploading process, from human brains into technological systems, with the invention of oral language and tools, moving useful ideas from our own heads into the environment around us. Then we recorded that language in writing. Then we learned how to record our experiences. Then we began computing information outside our brains. Now, we’re moving some of our neural network algorithms into our increasingly brainlike deep learning computers. Human memory and identity preservation and retrieval, if these are feasible, can be seen as just another, very similar step in this very long progression.
Curiously, this process of “pattern uploading” from biology to technology has actually been accelerating since the birth of our civilization, and we can expect it to happen ever faster the more advanced, miniaturized, and efficient our digital technologies get. This progression of complexity from chemistry to biology to minds to technological minds may be as natural, useful, and universe-driven as it is human-chosen. It may be a likely development, on planets like ours, everywhere in the universe. But the evolutionary path we take toward this developmental destination, and how we treat each other in the process, is certainly not inevitable. The path we walk, every step of the way, seems to be the essence of our free moral choice. Let us walk it as well as we can.
Many of us have strong views on the topic of death, and of appropriate thinking and behavior with respect to death, both for ourselves and for others. Individual death is a highly personal and emotional experience, and we all deal with it in our own ways. Some of what follows may anger some readers. We should recognize when at least some of our anger stems from issues we each must consider when facing the inevitability of our own biological death. Many of us don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about this topic, either personally or for our fellow human beings.
In dealing with the pain and loss of death, I think respect for each other’s personal choices should be our guiding principle. Yet at the same time, we can have discussions that may help ourselves and others to improve those choices. I’ve written this article to try to help with those discussions.
What follows now are five defenses for the personal and social value of brain preservation. I’ve tried to arrange them in an ascending order, from my perspective, from generally easier to harder to see and agree with, but each of us will have a different order depending on our own experiences and beliefs. I hope you find these useful in your own journey, and let me know if I’ve missed any, or anything else you find objectionable about these defenses.
1. The Scientific Advancement Defense
Most individuals will grant the value of developing better brain preservation techniques to advance such fields as medical science, neuroscience, microscopy, cognitive science, and computer science, and to gain more of the many benefits they provide. Scientific value, with appropriate legal consent, is therefore a good place to begin societal discussion of brain preservation, as even the most skeptical individuals will typically see this value. This argument recognizes the value of preserving a variety of medically unique brains (from individuals with mental disorders, or other functional differences or abilities), and as well as representative samples of individuals with “typical” brains, to understand the range of healthy mental function.
But note carefully that this is a defense of the value of brain donation for scientific research, not of memory retrieval or personality revival. The way current organ donation works, even if some individuals would be willing to have their memories or selves be brought back, if future science allowed, such retrieval or revival might not be ethically permitted, due to the lack of consent language regarding that possibility in our current brain donation contracts. Unfortunately, medical ethics and scientific practice haven’t yet even considered this potential future capability, so donor preference in that regard is simply not asked in any contracts, to our knowledge. That is an oversight we hope will be corrected by ethicists and legal professionals in coming years.
2. The Exceptional Cases Defense
Some individuals who have no interest in brain preservation for themselves will nevertheless grant the potential value of brain preservation for others who might wish it, in exceptional cases. They may grant its value for a child or young adult who has been struck down early in life by disease or accident. Even if they expect the preservation process to have very low probability of working in the future, they might grant its value today for the benefit of the child’s loved ones, as long as the cost to those loved ones and to society was not prohibitive.
They might also grant its value for individuals who feel they have unique and unpreserved culture, history or knowledge they wish to pass on to the future. Anyone who believes, at the time of their death, that they still have valuable and unfinished creative goals that they feel uniquely capable of pursuing, relative to other minds, for many years or generations to come, might consider brain preservation a valuable personal choice. Clearly some level of ego-fulfillment is involved in seeing oneself as exceptional, relative to the typical case. Yet we all consider ourselves exceptional to some degree, in some circumstances, to some individuals. So this defense is often easily granted as well, as many of us can imagine some actual or hypothetical cases that might make sense.
Exceptional cases is a small step beyond the scientific advancement defense for some people. Unlike the scientific advancement defense, the exceptional cases argument allows us to envision at least a few individual cases where either future memory retrieval, or full revival might be considered a social good. Albert Einstein’s brain, which has been chemically preserved, has been cited by some in this regard.
This is a powerful defense, as every culture has their own examples of individuals who they would love to see able to return in the future, if that were also the wishes of the dying person, and if either memory retrieval or full revival later proved feasible and affordable. Benjamin Franklin is often cited as an early scientific thinker who would have been interested in such a process. In a letter to a friend, physician Jacques Dubourg in 1773, Franklin said:
“I wish it were possible… to invent a method of embalming drowned persons, in such a manner that they might be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But… in all probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection…”
Many of us would love to see Ben Franklin alive and talking today, or a century or two in America’s future, if science allowed this possibility, and we know that while certain aspects of his personality and goals would surely have to change for him to adapt in our modern world, it is obvious that many other aspects of his personality, values, and goals would surely stay the same. We can also argue that those parts of Ben’s personality and experiences that stayed the same, in our modern world, would be the parts we’d consider wisest, and most valuable to society. Recognizing this, some of us may also recognize that we each have gained, in our own lives, our own share of timeless wisdom as well, and experiences, interests, and goals that might be usefully unique and valuable to future society.
Helping people to understand and support such “exceptional cases”, then, can be a great first step in considering the social implications of this technology. But it is only a first step. Let us turn now to the three additional social defenses, any of which might help to move more of us from mentally granting exceptional cases to championing brain preservation accessibility and affordability, in every country, for all who might want it as an end-of-life choice.
Even if we had a validated brain preservation option available to us at the end of our lives today, and it was freely available, most of us would not presently choose to preserve our mental information. We haven’t yet had the widespread discussions that would shift significant numbers of people into making this choice. The next three defenses are offered to spur that discussion.
The main reason we haven’t had this discussion, in my view, is because human beings, as a rule, don’t like to think about their own or others deaths. Even our modern societies tend to greatly avoid the topic of death. As a result, we don’t always die well. See Sherwin Nuland’s classic, How We Die (1995) and Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal (2017) for two great overviews of the many challenges of dealing with death, as individuals, as families, as health care professionals, and as societies.
We spend large sums on modern medicine at the end of life. Medical spending during the last year of life is roughly ten percent, in many wealthy countries, and is over twenty five percent during the last three years of life in some countries. It is hard to estimate what fraction of this would not be spent if we, as a society, spent a lot more time on advanced directives, and had more conversations with our loved ones and ourselves about when additional interventions and procedures are not worth pain, expense, and lower life quality that typically accompanies them. Some health care professionals call this increasing amount of low quality life that many are now experiencing at the end of their lives the “punishment of modern medicine.”
For those who have some rational expectation, even if it is an expectation of unknown probability, that they might come back, and see their loved ones again in the future, it is easy to imagine that letting go, and knowing when to resist so-called “heroic measures” will become easier at the end of life, both for the dying individual and for their families. It is also easy to imagine that when any individual makes the brain preservation decision, they and their loved ones must envision a future they would like to live in, and a world they would like to return to. That future orientation, in turn, may positively change the thoughts and actions they do today. We’ll say more about how this decision might positively change societies in the social benefits defense. Being more willing to let go when the time is right, because we are less traumatized by the act of death itself, is the first of two main ways I can imagine that brain preservation becomes a better death.
Yet there is another way in which brain preservation offers us a better death. This second way helps us to understand the nature of death itself, and how it changes as complexity grows. Death of various types is inevitable. It is fundamental to to how nature works. But so is life, growth, and renewal. If brain preservation allows us to return again in the future, our outdated ideas and behaviors will continue to die, be forgotten and outgrown in that future world, when they have outlived their social usefulness, just as bad ideas die out, in our own minds, in competition with better ones, over our entire lives. With brain preservation, for the first time, our minds and ideas will no longer have to die inappropriately, all at once at the end of our lives, due to the current limitations of biological nature, long before the usefulness of many of them has ended.
In the future, whether we are thinking of advanced biology or advanced technology, we can imagine a world where the kinds of deaths that occur are the appropriate deaths that already occur in our societies and minds all the time, the “little deaths” of less useful information, ideas, and behaviors, when less fit ideas are replaced by better ones, in our minds and in our social discourse, the deaths that occur as the old neural connections extinct themselves, making room for new ones – a life of constant growth and change, but no sudden, catastrophic loss of information, experience, and wisdom.
As natural complexity grows, all adaptive organisms move away from less appropriate to more appropriate forms of death, and more useful forms of renewal. In higher animals like us, we have culture, a new form of information preservation, death, and renewal that greatly outlives our biological lifespans. Technology allows even more powerful and durable forms of information preservation, death, and renewal. It seems reasonable to expect that particularly good ideas, patterns, and algorithms in technology will greatly outlive the average lifespan of human cultures, and even of all biological cultures, if we think in astronomical time scales.
Aging and death will always be with us, but they become different concepts, the more complex human society becomes. We’ll move from our present lifespans to much longer ones, and from today’s death to many better forms and processes of death. Nothing is ever immortal, but information that is more universally valuable (let’s call it “wisdom”, or “truth”) continues to get better collected, better preserved, and to have ever longer useful lifespans. We get ever more useful and appropriate life, death, minds, and longevity, as social progress grows.
In nature, not only death but constant change, renewal, growth, learning, and useful new forms of diversity, adaptibility, resilience and complexity appear to be among the few constants we can depend on. When our minds and science were less imaginative and less developed, the natural cycle of human biological life was more acceptable. Today, that cycle has come under scrutiny, and we can now imagine less informationally destructive ways of life. We may soon have a choice to greatly increase the diversity, abilities, ethics, empathy, and longevity of our minds on Earth.
This I think, is the most important sense in which brain preservation offers us the possibility of a better death. In a more advanced biological and technological future, we won’t be immortal, far from it, but both we and our society will be subject to much better regulated, and far more fine-grained, forms of death, and many more powerful and continual forms of growth and renewal.
Many people today feel that living a long natural biological life is sufficient for them, and they have little to no desire, at the end of life, to extend it beyond what has been given to them by God or nature. Helping us to gracefully accept our biological deaths is the fact that our bodies and minds naturally age and become increasingly frail and feeble after we reach sexual maturity. This fortunate reality has long made the sudden cessation of life in our old age much easier to bear.
But it is also true that many of the ravages of biological aging are being steadily minimized by advances in science and medicine. Sanitation, public health, and medicine have greatly extended our healthspan (the healthy period of our lives) improving average American lifespan from 47 to 77 years over the 20th century. More recently, longevity research and regenerative medicine are beginning to shorten our frailspan (the physically and mentally frail and enfeebled period of our lives), by slowing the basic processes of aging. That new health at the end of our lives, increasingly available to all of us, may increasingly change our feelings toward all-at-once biological death. We may come to see that a better kind of death is in our future, if we want it.
Consider this 2011 study, by Darren Baker and Jan van Deursen at the Mayo Clinic, which discovered that much of the physiological degeneration that occurs in adulthood, in a mouse population with a premature aging mutation, was due to a small population of senescent cells that produce inflammatory proteins. When these inflammation-creating cells were removed in middle age or earlier, these mice no longer aged “naturally”, but retained new physical and mental vigor well into their old age, and they experienced a much more abrupt decline in health much later in life. The team that achieved this did it again in 2016, this time with genetically ordinary mice, extending their lifespans by 20-30% and making it clear that senescent cells are a key target for healthy life extension. This process is sometimes called “squaring the curve” of aging, and it is happening in humans at a growing rate today.
If therapies to remove or block these senescent cells or their inflammatory proteins can be developed for humans, as is now being explored, those who use them will increasingly feel, at a personal level, like current biological death is a sudden collapse and loss of function at the end of an even longer and more vibrant mental and physical life than we typically enjoy today. In that world, the desire for longevity beyond our current biological lifespan may be even stronger than it is today.
In 2012, in informal surveys done in the US and a few European countries, David Ewing Duncan, in When I’m 164 found that only 1% of individuals, on average, were interested in living beyond their biological lifespan. But several surveys have found higher numbers in some communities in the years since. A 2014 survey of German citizens in all age groups found as many as 22% could already imagine doing brain preservation at the end of their lives.
So the percentage of individuals who can presently imagine brain preservation as a better kind of death may already be higher than most people realize today. This percentage seems to already have become a volatile number, different in different countries and communities. I would imagine that survey results would depend a lot on how the question is asked, on the kind of information provided to each individual, the degree to which this option has been previously discussed, or exercised, by both opinion leaders and loved ones, and of course on the latest science, technology, economic, social, and ethical advances, and the awareness of those advances by the person being asked.
While there has been little guidance on the subject of brain preservation from religious leaders so far in any faith, many religious practitioners might think, on first consideration, that the preservation of their brains at biological death would go against their beliefs. We must be respectful of and sensitive to such views, while at the same time recognizing that behavior and ethics here will never be uniform. Within every religion there will always be individuals and communities who do not believe that the preservation choice conflicts with their faith. There are already patients from several religious faiths in cryonic storage. These individuals expect or hope to be revived in the future, if their God or the Universe permits.
Every religion or spiritual practice has a different perspective of the afterlife, and all our most successful religions have periodically reformed their views in the light of growing scientific and social knowledge. Many Eastern spiritual practices do not believe an in an afterlife, and thus brain preservation may be particularly unconflicting with their faith. Even for Western religions, it may be reasonable for any practitioner to believe that the afterlife begins once informational death finally occurs. In that case, uploading or biological revival, should either be achieved in the future, would simply constitute more life, prior to an afterlife.
There are also different personal views of the kind of revival, in this world, that might be most beneficial for self, family, or society. In my informal surveys to date I have found individuals from a variety of faiths who would be willing to donate their memories to the future, but who would not wish to be personally revived in the future, given their particular beliefs. Some religious communities may consider brain preservation for memory donation but not for conscious revival to be acceptable, assuming such a request is feasible, scientifically plausible, and might be expected to be honored by future society.
My own mother, a Christian, would have gladly preserved her life’s memories for her family if affordable (low-cost), medically supervised, and validated brain preservation had been available at the time of her death. Sadly, it was not, and still is not today, though it may become available sooner than most of us think. She wished her children could have seen her and our history, through her eyes. But she would not have wished to be revived as an individual in the future. I am sure there are others who share her views.
If brain preservation becomes increasingly validated, accessible and affordable in coming years, we can expect a variety of such individual responses and preferences with respect to the brain preservation option, from a wide variety of faiths. I am confident that all our leading religions will be able to reform their beliefs to allow for the value of brain preservation, should it become more widely adopted in society. But this is a big perspective shift for some religions, so it may take a few generations for this shift to occur. In the meantime, we can be as respectful as possible of each individual’s choices and beliefs in the matter of death, while advocating for greater individual choice for any individual who is facing the prospect of their own or their loved one’s death.
Emergence of the brain preservation option could have significant positive effects on the larger society, as we argue in our last defense.
5. The Social Benefits Defense
If any brain preservation technology can be proven to preserve the key morphological and molecular features that neuroscientists presently believe contain our memories or identity, and if neuroscience and computer science can show that those features alone are able to preserve and create memories in both animal and computer models, then the availability of affordable and environmentally sustainable brain preservation services, the option and freedom to use them by anyone in society, and their use by a socially significant minority may begin to change those societies for the better today, regardless of how much or how soon anyone’s personal neural information is retrieved at a later date.
Specifically, social values in such societies may move measurably toward what we can call a Preservation Value Set. Imagine any country where a socially significant minority, let’s say 100,000 individuals, have personally made the brain preservation choice at death. Given the conversations that must have occurred in the larger society during the creation and access of this freedom, and the predictable lowering of cost and improvement of access that comes as any technology becomes more widely adopted, we can expect some measurable changes in those individuals social values and perceptions, and to some degree, within the wider society as well.
As a result of this level of use and access of the brain preservation choice, a politically-significant fraction of individuals in such societies may become, as measured on social surveys, noticeably more science-oriented (more willing to advocate and fund rapid and responsible scientific advances in their society, given the increased personal benefit they may receive), more progress-oriented (more willing to see and support signs of social progress, as they desire to be revived in a measurably better world), more future-oriented (more comfortable making long-term plans in more facets of their life), more sustainability-oriented (less willing to harm their environment today, as they realize they may return in the future), more preservation-oriented (more motivated to preserve the unique species in our natural environment and the unique information in human culture and minds), more truth- and justice-oriented (better behaved today, as those who have experienced injustice may donate their memories so that present crimes may be righted via future forensics, and so future laws may better match true human behavior), more diversity-oriented (more motivated to live in a “usefully unique” way themselves, to increase the value of their memories and mind to future generations) and ultimately, more community-oriented (more desirous of living in a way that makes them valuable not only to themselves, but also to loved ones and society). For many, achieving a significant shift toward preservation values in our societies today, regardless of how much neural information is eventually recovered in the future, is the most important reason to support the brain preservation effort.
We will likely need some significant minority adoption threshold, perhaps on the order of 100,000 individuals who have made contractual arrangements for brain preservation as an end-of-life service, for themselves or one of their loved ones, before these measurable positive social changes may occur in any society. Why will some kind of adoption threshold be necessary before these social changes might occur? Humanity has never known the option of escaping death, in the entire three million year history of our species. So we can be forgiven for being particularly certain and closed-minded in our current ways of thinking about this topic. We’re going to have to go through the “death” of thinking about death as an inevitable, and inevitably destructive, process. Memories at least, and perhaps much more, will live on, for all who choose to preserve them at the end of their lives.
Attitudes regarding death (either of a loved person, or of a widely-held, but now incorrect idea) often follow the DABDA stages (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and eventual Acceptance) identified by the psychologist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. As brain preservation adoption begins to grow, both increased levels of social denial that it might work, or have any value, and some degree of anger, or at least indignation and disapproval, are to be expected. In a worst case scenario, brain preservation may be banned early on in certain freedom-restrictive countries, and will then require a politically significant minority to emerge, willing to lobby for it in political and legal ways, in order for access and affordability to grow.
Something on the order of 100,000 adopters in any society is no longer just a fringe group. A group of that size becomes a politically significant minority. Consider the Netherlands, a European country with a population of 17 million. In that country, the Levensiende (“Life End”) group, and advocacy and support organization for the right to physician-assisted suicide and personal choice in confronting death, grew to 130,000 members by 2012. In that country, physician-assisted suicide, usually with less than six months of life expectancy left, and earlier in special cases, has been legal since 2002. Roughly 2% of all of those dying in the Netherlands, one out of fifty people, now annually choose this option at the end of their lives. This percentage seems similar to the number of individuals who might today be interested in brain preservation at the end of their lives, if it were validated, affordable, and sustainably done.
In May 2012, after persistent lobbying from Levensiende and other groups, it finally became legal for Netherlanders to call a service to do physician-assisted suicide in their homes, in addition to hospitals and hospices, where that option had existed for ten years. It took the efforts and stories of this politically significant minority, and their public expression of their desire to end their lives in their own homes, to change the laws and increase personal freedoms and public understanding around this choice. The same initial resistance dynamic, and extensive social and political discussion and activism, may have to occur in most societies in order to see increased social access to the brain preservation choice. Getting brain preservation available in hospitals and hospices, and getting it funded by health care, will all be both social and political efforts, requiring engaged citizens. Yet even if brain preservation never becomes a majority choice in any society for, say, the remainder of this century, I expect significant minority adoption could occur in many societies over the coming generation. I believe that we will see the measurable spread of these “preservation values” in all societies where such minority adoption occurs.
As another way to speculate on what our social values changes may be, some research suggests that changing our perception of the finality and unfairness of death may make us measurably less dogmatic in our beliefs, more tolerant of social change, and more willing to champion cognitive diversity. As Sam Harris notes in The Moral Landscape, psychologists have discovered that merely reminding judges and juries of the fact of death increases their inclination to automatically punish those who have violated the law, and to reward those who uphold cultural norms. Others have replicated this association between death awareness and cognitive dogmatism and intolerance.
It must be said that awareness of our eventual death can be a great motivator, as Steve Jobs eloquently reminded us in his Stanford Commencement Speech in 2005, before his own death from the cancer he had recently acquired. But there are many other great motivators to live purpose-filled lives as well: awareness of our limits, curiosity, passion, honor, duty, ethics, hope, vision, and intelligence, for example. Those who currently choose to preserve their brains at death for the possibility of future revival are no less motivated to live full and valuable lives.
Since the dawn of civilization, most of us have lamented the loss of personal history and unexpressed insights that occurs with their own death. We have had to make peace with a set of circumstances we have been unable to change, due to our ignorance of how life works, and survives. Our lifespan is surprisingly short by contrast to the appropriate lifespan of the unique experiences and ideas we gain and create during our lives, much of which we are not able to express in our behaviors or works prior to death. It seems to some that just as we are reaching an age where experience leads to wisdom, we must end our lives. Much of this unique internal information is presently lost at death, and only some of it is eventually reinvented by others.
Consider that even if our children were to wear a digital device that creates a searchable audio and video record of their entire lives, as may occur in coming generations, much of their unique subjective personality, thinking style, experience and insights may never be reinvented by anyone in the future. As all intelligence is physical, with physical limits, no current or future intelligence will ever be “godlike”, or able to even fully appreciate its own past. Each human mind has an astronomical number of connections that are unique only to that individual, and the present and future value of that diversity is far beyond our current ability to estimate. If future society continues to have finite computing capacity and limited ability to recreate its diverse history, as it does today, valuable information will always be lost with involuntary death. Soon brain preservation will offer our species a powerful new way to reduce this loss.
Growing diversity seems to be one of life’s fundamental goals. Our evolutionary diversity has constantly increased over the entire history of biology, human culture, and technology. Even the great extinctions, curiously, have catalyzed rapid growth in genetic and species diversity. When one considers how much unique information presently dies with an individual without being sufficiently shared through that individual’s behavior or works, the increase in useful diversity that is promised by brain preservation may be a social advance on par with language, writing, printing, mechanical recording, digital computing, and other major historical advances in our cultural memory.
Finally, consider that life is not just about growing diversity, it is about growing useful diversity, also called adaptiveness, and perhaps its greatest product, adaptive intelligence. Some of the most important things in life are not the things that change, but the things that stay the same in the midst of constant change. We might call those things truths, wisdom, or universals. If you and your loved ones are able to come back in the future, either as memories or as living, conscious individuals, consider that there would be many parts of you that would not change in that future world. Those would be the parts of you that are already true, wise, moral, or universal. Those parts would continue to be deeply useful. The better we understand and protect those parts of all living systems that usefully remain the same, as well as understand and protect those parts of us that are usefully different, the better we know ourselves and our societies, and the better the world gets.
Anthropologists have long observed that the more complex society gets, the greater the social and economic value of each individual human life, and the more elaborate our responses of grief and injustice to the loss of life. Society, via our cultural memory, and technology, via writings and recordings and science, have become far better at preserving information than our biological bodies, which die on a cyclic basis. An uploaded human being is simply another form of this information preservation trend. Information technology in particular is very good at preserving everything that has gone before it, and enabling more social creativity, diversity, resiliency, and progress than ever before.
For all of the reasons above, it seems reasonable to expect that brain preservation, if undertaken by a socially significant minority in any society, may become a major social good.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to seeing the value of brain preservation today is the need to adopt a “patternist” understanding of the nature of self. The last 150 years of biological science have carefully uncovered the working hypothesis that our individual selves are entirely the result of special complex physical structures and processes, or patterns in our brains, bodies, and their interaction with the environment. The patternism hypothesis proposes that it is a special physical pattern, not the matter, or even the type of matter (computer or biological), that stores the highest level information in living systems. If the special pattern that stores this information can be successfully maintained, and copied as necessary, the information survives.
Remember first that our identities (our selves) are not contained in any particular biological matter. All our matter is replaced, or turned over, in our bodies and brains on a moment-by-moment basis. Life is constantly copying all its important patterns, both across generations and within each individual living being, every second. Some ninety-eight percent of the atoms in our body are replaced every few years (the number varies by study), by the food we eat, the air we breathe, the liquids we drink. This is a natural process of pattern copying. We are continually being “uploaded” into new matter with a very similar pattern all the time. Many of our cells (with the exception of the brain) are constantly dividing, replacing old with new.
This copying process is never perfect, and certain useful molecular tags (methylation, phosphorylation, ubiquitination) are always lost in this constant and statistical process of molecular renewal and turnover. This copying happens so incrementally, and our patterns are altered so subtly, that we don’t notice it, until we study how the process works on the molecular level. Every living thing is constantly having parts of itself “uploaded” into subtly different to very different physical substrates, as a natural process.
Our identities, then, are our unique and personal collection of intelligent patterns, expressed by our matter as a series of predictable conditional and causal relationships within neurons and their interaction with the physical world. These patterns must be continually and imperfectly copied to keep us alive, and to keep our memories and mind relatively stable to time and change. Amazingly, these special patterns can even become independent of our biology, as we are now learning to recreate them in our technology, and intimately connecting this technology to our biological bodies and brains.
For example, artificial cochleas and retinas replicate and restore sensory aspects of the biological self. Even brain patterns are now being replicated in our technology – see for example Ted Berger’s work with the artificial hippocampus, and other projects in neuromorphic engineering, where chips are designed to replace brain circuitry. This work is simple today, as neuroscientists still do not fully understand all the ways neurons process and store information, but we have every reason to expect continued progress in these efforts. Accepting and understanding the patternist nature of self allows us to realize that one of highest purposes of humanity appears to be a responsibility to continually preserve and improve our best biological, social and technological patterns.
As we have said, what is natural changes as our species changes. As our physical patterns have grown in complexity, humanity’s natural abilities and responsibilities have grown in the same measure. Before humanity invented gestural and verbal languages, which were among our earliest “technologies,” we had no responsibility to pass on to others, or give extended lifespan to, our individual experiences. But after language arrived, we gained a new responsibility to teach our descendants, and thereby improve our families and culture. Once written language arrived, we gained further responsibilities to physically record and pass on, or give extended lifespan to, our discoveries and experience, and to further improve individual and social wisdom. Today’s digital computer and communications technologies are direct extensions of these earlier technologies. I believe we have a new responsibility to improve these increasingly natural technological systems as well, to broadly distribute their benefits, to try to minimize their downsides, and to endeavor to use them to increase our ethics, wisdom, awareness, foresight, and resilience.
If inexpensive and validated brain preservation arrives, we will be endowed with new capabilities to pass on, or give extended lifespan to, our memories, learning, and identities to our descendants. In time, we will recognize new social responsibilities to do just this. Whenever we successfully improve the complexity and resilience of our individual and social patterns, and allow them to live for as long as they might be valuable, available to any who might be interested in them, we seem likely to achieve greater individual and social conscience and consciousness, new respect for the value, rarity, and uniqueness of each human life, and new levels of individual and social progress. This is perhaps the greatest potential benefit of the patternist perspective: we can be more effective and aware today, and make better choices in the present moment, choices ideally in greater harmony with the self-improving nature of life and the universe.
In summary, the past century and a half of research in cognitive science and neuroscience have increasingly established that the entirety of what we call our mind is a complex information processing stream computed by the circuits in our brain, and in the society and technologies in which that brain is embedded. Once we recognize that our critical physical patterns are not only biological, but also social and technological, we can resist the resignation, isolation, and apathy that can accompany biological old age. We can recognize that even as our biological minds begin to fail us, our social and technological ones are growing faster, smarter, and more intimately connected to our biology every year. Furthermore, growing knowledge of brain health and neural plasticity offers us new ways to reduce or reverse “natural” cognitive decline as we age, to restore our mental abilities to more youthful levels and to remain lifelong learners. We learn to see our selves as not just our biology, but also as our social minds and technology, we can become champions of the kinds of scientific and technological developments that will increase innovation, wisdom, resiliency, and social and individual empowerment.
A Number of Non-Obvious Proposals
If we wish to argue the potential value of brain preservation as a broadly available social option in coming years, it helps to make a number of not-immediately-obvious proposals:
- Brain preservation techniques may soon (perhaps within this decade) be validated to preserve useful neural information, including memories, in model organisms.
- Should brain preservation be validated to preserve neural information at death, this will be a natural process, once we acknowledge that not only our biology, but also our social minds and our technology are natural.
- The preservation of any amount of neural information upon our death could prove valuable to our loved ones and society both today and in the future, if it can be inexpensively preserved today, and if it is reasonable to expect that it could be inexpensively recovered by future technology.
- Low-cost preservation technologies may soon exist, which is relevant to the financial wisdom (expected benefit to cost ratio) of the brain preservation choice, as preservation always involves taking resources from loved ones or society today for an uncertain future return.
- Rapid advances in computing and scanning technologies argues that neural information might be inexpensively and automatically read from preserved brains even a few decades from now, while one’s loved ones are still alive.
- Not just memory retrieval, but full revival of the individual, and their indefinite lifespan in the future may also be an outcome of brain preservation, for those who might desire either option.
- Memory retrieval or identity revival will very likely be done in computers in the future, and computer technology is dramatically more miniaturized and resource efficient per computation with each successive generation. If present accelerating, miniaturizing, and efficiency trends continue, technology will support far more living, loving minds in the future than biology ever could, and this ever-increasing diversity of mind, creativity, and intelligence appears to be the long-term trend of nature on Earth.
At present, roughly 57 million unique and precious human beings die every year, or 155,000 people every day. It is hard for us to comprehend the scale of this catastrophic loss of human experience. Thus today we largely avert our minds from this unparallelled daily loss of diversity, wisdom, social history, and individual life, except on those occasions when it touches us personally. Meanwhile, medical science makes slow progress in preventing biological death and extending our health and lifespan. Fortunately, technology is accelerating in its ability to record and augment our lives, and now the preservation and later revival of human memory and identity appear on the verge of scientific reality.
By advancing the appropriate sciences and technologies we can accelerate the arrival of the brain preservation choice for all of us, and end the tyranny of an unchosen death. Given historical rates of accelerating scientific and technological change, it is even reasonable to expect reanimation technologies to be available not centuries from now, but possibly even within this century, while our loved ones are still alive. Furthermore, all of our friends and loved ones who have also chosen preservation will also return to interact with us. For many, this is one of the most important personal motivations for preservation, the likelihood that one’s individual pattern may remain useful to those we know today, and remain connected to and supportive of the social community from which it emerged. Once we understand and have internalized the implications of accelerating change on our science, technology, and economy, we can recognize how extraordinary the human future will be, and by direct extension, how extraordinary and opportunity-filled our own lives are here today.
As we consider our extraordinary present and future, each of us has the ability, regardless of our honorable religious, philosophical, or cultural backgrounds, to internalize the implications of accelerating technological change, to consider some version of the patternist hypothesis of self, to champion scientific and technological progress and evidence-based inquiry, and to gently reform our esteemed religious, philosophical, and cultural communities of heritage until they are in better alignment with apparent evidence and scientific truths.
For inspiring evidence of how our biological brains and minds can be continually improved throughout our lifespan, even in advanced age, read Norman Doidge’s excellent book, The Brain That Changes Itself, 2007. For a general understanding of brains as connectomes, read Olaf Sporns’ Discovering the Human Connectome, 2012, and Sebastian Seung’s Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, 2012. For more on how our mind and brain are embedded in their social and technological environment, read Andy Clark’s excellent general-interest book, Supersizing the Mind, 2011. For two good books that discuss our increasingly intimate brain-machine interfaces, and our progress in simulating modular subsystems of the biological brain within our technology, and implanting those systems in living human brains, read Michael Chorost’s very accessible World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet, 2011, and Miguel Nicolelis’s Beyond Boundaries: The New Neuroscience of Connecting Brains With Machines, 2011.
For a technical exploration of connectomes, read Sporns’ Networks of the Brain, 2010, and for a technical understanding of the physical basis of subjective experience and consciousness as emergent and nonmystical processes of neural synchronization, read Gyorgi Buzsaki’s excellent Rhythms of the Brain, 2006. For an understanding of how organisms are most essentially a type of computer at the genetic, cellular, and physiological levels, you may enjoy Uri Alon’s technical book An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits, 2006, and Eric Davidson’s technical work The Regulatory Genome: Gene Regulatory Networks (Circuits) in Development and Evolution, 2008.
Nine More Objections and Defenses – For the Scientists and Philosophers
We will conclude this page by considering some common scientific and philosophical objections to brain preservation, and suggest some answers that seem reasonable to us. If you have a scientific or philosophical bent and do not presently see the potential value of brain preservation, either for yourself or for others who might choose it, please let us know if you still have questions or critiques after reading this article.
First, hypotheses in science are always conditional, including the patternist hypothesis of self. We may agree to tentatively hold the patternist hypothesis, but to do so also requires us to begin considering its implications with respect to the future of mind and technology. Some of these implications are abstract, unsettling, and not among our normal cultural concepts. Nevertheless, a large body of scientific evidence can be marshalled in favor of the patternist hypothesis, so it makes sense to hold the hypothesis conditionally, and to explore its implications, at least until contrary evidence against it materializes.
Second, many scientifically-literate individuals do not recognize how close our species has come to having the technology to make memory and mind preservation a reality. They are not familiar with the state-of-the-art techniques available for chemically or cryonically preserving neural structure at the synaptic level, and for verifying this preservation and circuit tracing with automated sectioning and volume electron microscopy techniques. Please see the Essays / Papers / Links section of this website for references on the current state of the art in these areas. Fortunately, objections based on the lack of our capacity to preserve are easy to define. Overcoming them in a definitive way is one goal of our Brain Preservation Prize.
Third, some doubt that we will ever able to decipher the code for long-term memory storage in brains. Fortunately, this doubt seems unreasonable. Neuroscience is rapidly gaining a molecular-level understanding of processes central to long-term memory creation. Our brains store memory in at least three different ways. Working memory is stored in conserved electrical patterns, with a persistence of seconds. Short-term memory is stored in preexisting hippocampal and cortical synapses and preexisting signaling proteins, with a persistence of a few days. Long-term memory is written from our hippocampus to our cortex, primarily during slow-wave sleep every evening. It involves the synthesis of newsynapses and brain proteins, and modifications to synapse and nuclear proteins, and it has a persistence of a lifetime if it is periodically reinforced. It is long-term memory, encoded in durable synaptic and nuclear changes in neurons, that we particularly care about preserving. If we are revived with the loss of our working memory, as happens after a concussion or anesthesia, this is not of great concern. We are even able to bounce back well if our short-term memory is entirely wiped out, as sometimes occurs in anoxic brain trauma followed by short-term amnesia. There is some tentative evidence, for example, that the hippocampus might be uniquely vulnerable to damage during cryopreservation, unlike the rest of the brain. But as long as our cortical synapses can be well preserved, uploaded, and connected to an artificial hippocampus in the future, we’d likely lose very little useful information and personality, just the last few days of experience prior to preservation. Neuroengineer Ted Berger has been making early versions of implantable artificial hippocampus chips since 2005, for mice. Recall Henry Molaison (HM), the famous memory disorder patient who could not learn new memories after his hippocampi were surgically removed, but who kept all his older long-term memories prior to the surgery. What we care most about in brain preservation is that our long-term memory will survive the preservation process, and can be reinstated from appropriately detailed scans of the preserved brain. One critical proof of this ability will come when neuroscience sufficiently understands part of a model animal nervous system, such as C. elegans (the nematode) or Aplysia (the sea slug), well enough to train the animal associatively in one of several unique ways while alive, chemically or cryopreserve its brain, scan the relevant bit of brain tissue, and then correctly predict how it was trained by reading the scan of the appropriate neural circuits. This will require the ability to model, in a very well-studied behavioral subsystem (neural circuit set), the way both synaptic connections and neuromodulator proteins at these connections bias the pattern generators in that circuit into a particular set of output patterns, a field of research called behavioral plasticity. That demonstration may be ten or more years away, but if and when occurs it will be a major step forward in clarifying how robustly the brain preserves higher information, including memory and experience, in particular synaptic connections and their unique sets of molecular weights.
Fourth, even if we understand the code, some doubt we can inexpensively and reliably retrieve memories from a preserved human brain. One doubt arises because of cost. But we are already using automated robotic systems to slice, scan, and upload very small animal brains (including the zebrafish brain, the size of the tip of a pencil) into computers today (these uploads don’t reproduce memories because they don’t yet have all the critical molecular features, and we still don’t understand the code). As technology advances, it is reasonable to expect that the cost of this scanning process will continue to drop exponentially, while capacity continues to grow exponentially. Also, new methods of brain scanning will surely emerge. One promising technology is molecular-scale MRI. Recently, MRI machines have been built that canimage individual cell proteins, and there appears to be no theoretical reason these machines could not eventually image whole human brains. Molecular-scale MRI may one day give us the ability to scan plastinated brains inexpensively and nondestructively, and to upload the critical molecular features that encode our memory and identity. Another doubt arises because modern neuroscience suggests that our molecular memories, when remembered, are not simply recalled but are actively recreated, in a holistic and electrical process, from molecular networks of stored synaptic potentials distributed throughout the brain. But this is not a problem, it is an advantage. We know from artificial neural network models that this holistic way of storing information is robust to damage. Memories are retrieved in a distributed, associational manner from molecular stores. Thus future scans should be able to retrieve memories even from partially damaged brains. Furthermore neuroscientists suspect that humans share a common, or “baseline” brain, in which the vast majority of cellular and molecular structures and processes are highly similar from brain to brain. Simulating this baseline brain is a top goal of current and future neuroscience, in the same way we try to predictively simulate bacteria today, down to the molecular interactions of their metabolome. Such simulations are quite limited today, but they get exponentially better over over time. On top of our shared baseline brain, we have neural correlates of individuality, or NCI’s, molecular stores that comprise our unique memories and individuality, and which are persistent, even in the face of chaotic electrical and molecular activity in the brain. Brain preservation is thus about saving the NCI’s, which appear to reside almost entirely in our unique synaptic connections, a few associated proteins, and a few nuclear modifications, and later placing these NCI’s in a baseline brain emulation in a computer. Fortunately, in addition to being predictable and persistent, molecular NCI’s are highly redundant and fault-tolerant. They survive even when the brain temporarily loses all electrical activity in coma, surgery, or cold-water drowning, and through all kinds of trauma and environmental fluctuations. For example, if you forget something because a particular synaptic connection weakens or breaks, you can very often recall and reestablish what you have forgotten simply by thinking of other aspects of the memory in question, routing around the damage and reestablishing the memory. All this suggests that memory and identity retrieval from preserved human brains will be a very worthy and exciting scientific and humanitarian endeavor with great chance of future success.
Fifth, while it may be possible to retrieve memories, some doubt that we will be able to retrieve them in a piecemeal, incremental fashion. In the worst case, for example, one might fear it will be necessary to resimulate an entire conscious individual in order to recall even a single memory from that individual’s life. Thus, those willing to donate their memories to the future, but who do not wish to be consciously revived in the future, might see brain preservation as undesirable. Fortunately, this fear looks to be unfounded. We can already reconstruct realtime experiences from very small populations of neurons today (e.g., 177 neurons holding visual working memory in a the cat’s brain, Stanley et.al. in 1999). Today’s early models of consciousness (e.g., Buzsaki’s neural synchronization and Tononi and Koch’s integrated information theory), though incomplete, are already powerful enough to suggest that this is a number of neurons far too small to be conscious. If long-term neural information is stored in a similar connectionist way to working memory, using small populations of distributed and redundant networks to encode information, we should in the future be able to extract memories and experiences from preserved brains in an incremental, divisible fashion, without restoring higher individual consciousness, if that is what the preserving individual desires. Neural synchrony and feature binding will be required to retrieve memories, but just as you can retrieve memories from local areas of the brain during dreaming, and not be in higher (globally self-aware) consciousness, it seems likely that memories can be retrieved in a similar fashion from a scanned brain, once we understand the long term memory code. Just as an anesthesiologist can prevent consciousness today by administering anesthetics which prevent neural synchronization and allow a neurophysiologist or neurosurgeon to operate without the patient’s awareness, future memory donation without individual identity or higher self-consciousness restoration may be a common option in the future, for those who desire this particular choice. Neural synchronization, the current leading candidate for a mechanistic understanding of consciousness, has made great conceptual advances in the last few years. See Wang’s Physiological Reviews article for a recent review of this exciting field. The neural synchronization model of consciousness is consistent with the way disruptions of synchronization with anesthetics remove consciousness, and with the way several patients who have been in a persistent vegetative state for years have been partially reawakened to consciousness and mental life by administering Zolpidem, a drug that modulates theta and gamma oscillations in the brain. We are beginning to understand consciousness as an entirely physical process, one we may one day replicate in sufficiently complex technology.
Sixth, some doubt that the full identity and self-consciousness of any particular person could ever be “uploaded,” or emulated in a computer or other nonbiological life form. This objection often rests on the material identity hypothesis, the belief that the human mind must be indivisibly attached to the particular type of matter, in this case biological matter, that presently generates it. But what comparative psychology and computer science have taught us so far is exactly the opposite. Information processing is independent, to a surprising degree, of the particular physical substrate it is run upon – any substrate of sufficient complexity will do. As biologist Simon Conway Morris states in Life’s Solution, 2003, both simpler and higher features of the human mind and senses are shared in animals, including insects, with much-simpler and differently-built brains than ours, and a few mental features have already been successfully simulated (replicated) in computer technology. Furthermore these computer technologies, when integrated with biological brains, as in neural, retinal, and cochlear implants in humans, produce replicable components of mind. If we can recreate the relevant patterns of sensation, memory, emotion, experience, consciousness, and identity in a computer or robotic body instead of living tissue, we have recreated the mind. If future society scanned your preserved brain at the molecular scale, and could replicate a living brain in a computer that generates sufficiently similar types of patterns, this copy would truly “be” you. Certainly, as several biologists have noted, the ability to replicate all the critical patterns of one material system (wet biology) in another (electronic computers) is not guaranteed. But to date, every new computational substrate that has emerged at the leading edge of universal complexity has not only contained all the capabilities of the previous substrate, it has exceeded them. As universal complexity has journeyed from physics to chemistry to biology to (today’s still-primitive and non-autonomous) technology, each new substrate has grown to contain all the physical abilities of the previous, and has introduced powerful new freedoms and abilities as well. Certainly if future science discovered any pattern insufficiencies (structural or functional) in our computer simulation of human brains, we could always seek to use advanced nanotechnology to recreate a biological version of the person preserved. Advanced nanotechnology could even repair and reintegrate the same physical matter of the preserved brain into a future repaired biological form. In the very long term future, nanobots created by a society with advanced artificial intelligence might carefully remove the fixative or plastic resin embedding each neuron, repair aging and other damage, and revive the same physical brain that was preserved. Such a course of revival would likely convince even the most skeptical that “they” had been revived as the “same” individual. For examples of such revival scenarios, read Eric Drexlers’ excellent Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, 1987, or this “realistic” scenario for nanotechnological repair of the frozen human brain, written by an anonymous biologist in 1991. While these scenarios are both plausible and fascinating, material repair and restoration of the preserved brain may turn out to be a very uncommon pathway for the recovery and reanimation of mind. While many of us might desire to be revived as a biological body, patternism suggests that placing such a restriction on our revival would serve only our own vanity, and might be a hindrance to our rapid revival for ourselves, loved ones, and society. Those not willing to let future society create simulations of themselves first may delay their revival and return to future society by many decades, as nondestructive pattern reading and emulation technology for preserved brains may arrive long before advanced nanotechnology. We may think we presently understand the future optimal course of our revival, but the reality is, there are many ways future science might revive us, and many useful and “true” copies of ourselves that could come back. If we don’t let future science and future minds advise us on the best pathways for memory donation or reanimation, we are very unlikely to pick them today.
Seventh, while some will grant that all valuable biological structure and function may eventually be duplicated by technology, they believe that there is some metaphysical element of self which must exist independently of physical processes, and which could not be transferred in any material duplication. Such individuals would agree with statements like: “If you made an exact molecule-for-molecule copy of me, that copy might act just like me, have my memories and my personality, and would even think it was me, but it would still not be me.” The independent soul hypothesis is the belief that the mind is not only an emergent property of the brain, but is also independent from (has an existence separate from) the physical patterns and matter that houses it. This is a tradition of many, but not all, religious, philosophical and cultural heritages. At the same time, there are also subgroups of every one of our major religions, philosophies, and cultures which either do not believe, or have never even considered, the idea of metaphysical independence of mind from matter. Most religious scriptures are silent on this question. As philosophers from Descartes to Whitehead have argued, it is certainly useful and appropriate to see our minds as in a different category from physical things. We can observe an apparently fundamental body/mind, material/virtual dualism in all complex matter on Earth. Certainly complex minds are not only emergent, they do seem particularly special in the universe. As human minds grow, over both individual and historical time, they gain astonishingly greater influence over their local material environments, as is reflected in the popular phrase, “mind over matter”. We can even see an emergent dualism in the “virtual reality” that complements today’s physical computing technology. Several scholars have argued that our computer games and simulations are components of an emerging and still-primitive “technological mind.” Yet in all these examples, the material/mental and the physical/virtual are also fundamentally integrated (nondual) phenomena. Human minds have emerged on a smooth and divisible continuum from our physically simpler predecessors. While we can observe simple matter without higher mind, science has never observed, and we cannot reasonably imagine, mind without some physical basis to support its complex patterns.
Eighth, some who grant the scientific plausibility of reanimation of their pattern still have little faith that our future ecological or political environment will be either able to sustain, or will be socially hospitable to, such reanimation. Our existing population of seven billion humans is presently seriously degrading our planet’s environmental systems, while demographers are hopefully projecting an end to human population growth in the mid-21st century. Won’t adding more humans, even “virtual” humans, just make our precious planet a worse place? To answer this question, we must carefully consider the history and likely future of computing technology, which has seen exponential improvements in its speed, capability, efficiency, and miniaturization for at least 120 years, across at least five different design platforms, since our first complex mechanical computers, such as the 1890 Hollerith Tabulating Machine. This trend is commonly known as Moore’s law. What is less commonly appreciated is that our computers have also become astoundingly more energy efficient over the same time period. As Gene Frantz observed in 2000, and named Frantz’s law, digital signal processing power used per computation halves every 18 months in our leading computer chips. Since 2010, this accelerating efficiency of computing is now better known as Koomey’s law. In that year, Jonathan Koomey published a paper documenting that digital computing has become half as energy intensive, every 1.6 years, since the 1950s. Because of the amazing efficiencies that emerge when we move physical processes to the nano scale, computation in human civilization gets exponentially cheaper and more resource efficient over time. As computers continue to miniaturize, they also become exponentially more space-efficient and matter-efficient as well. This accelerating sustainability of computation is just as important a global trend as Moore’s law, but most folks still don’t know about it. This phenomenon has been aptly called “dematerialization” by a growing number of future-thinking authors since the 1980s. It is similar to what the futurist Buckminster Fuller called ephemeralization, as far back as 1938. Seeing dematerialization requires both recognizing the increasing efficiency of digital systems, and the increasing substitution of information and computation (software) for physical systems of all types. Accelerating dematerialization, and the demonetization and democratization that eventually come with it, are global trends we are now finally recognizing are central to digital technology. So bringing back lots of individual memories (or people) in virtual space won’t require huge resources, because this accelerating efficiency seems to be a natural trend, on Earth at least. While there are many short-term engineering blocks, physicists presently see no fundamental physical reason that will prevent us from continuing to make accelerating advances in nanotechnology. If we are able to “upload” billions of human minds into future highly miniaturized computers, planetary resource issues will have little relevance. Resource sustainability is an issue for biological humans, which use roughly the same or more level of resources with each doubling. Physical resource accessibility is an increasingly less important issue for computers, which become ever more miniaturized, resilient to damage (as they are able to easily “back up” their complexity), and as their intelligence grows, increasingly independentof energy and material resources, per any standardized measure of complexity we choose (per computation, per mind, per society, per species). A world with widespead artificial intelligence will be both radically miniaturized and have abundances, such as fusion energy, that we can scarcely imagine today. Furthermore, the more minds exist, the more diversity, variety, and specialization society contains, and evolution always seems to maximize diversity, however it can. What about dystopian political futures? They certainly are possible, but as Matt Ridley notes in The Rational Optimist, 2010, it has been rational so far to expect, on average, social progress in surviving societies over the long term, even as exceptions always exist, and sometimes blind us to the long-term trend. Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2011, makes an even more evidence-based claim with respect to the long-term decline in violence frequency and severity in human society, and the increasing subtlety and sophistication of human ethics. One injunction that seems necessary for all ethical societies will be the voluntary and reversible nature of all copying or reanimation when dealing with conscious organisms. If such procedures are voluntary, and if the person undergoing either of them claimed to be essentially the same or improved in some way at the other end, many of us might one day do them as well, to reap their benefits. We would not consider people uploaded from preserved brains to be “zombies” (fake copies, not “real”) and we would not view these technologies as violent or immoral, as long as all of those using them claimed to be real, used the technologies by choice, and some degree of reversibility (even if it was not a perfect or an inexpensive reversibility) was available to those who decide they do not prefer their new state. In practice however, even a less-than-perfect uploading of a preserved human into a virtual world might be desirable, particularly if the original pattern (the preserved biological tissue) was still available for future use. Any previously biological human not appreciating the benefits of their new digital form, and not willing to live with any drawbacks (such as, for example, some memory loss or other deficits), would ideally have the ability to shut down and suspend their life further, and await the arrival of better revival technology. Such reversible, voluntary, and suspendable uploading scenarios may be reasonably expected in future society if humanity’s moral development must also improve as a function of our collective intelligence, as several scholars (Norbert Elias, Ron Inglehart, Robert Wright, Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, etc.) have proposed.
Ninth, the patternist perspective leads us to anticipate some of the unusual mental capabilities that our future selves and societies may one day possess, and these can seem so strange or unsettling that we may reject them intuitively, or decide they belong to a world that has no relation to our own. Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine that you have the ability to reanimate a true copy of yourself using advanced brain scanning and simulation technology. Notice now that this allows you the ability to create many true copies. Recall for example the “duplicate” humans that were occasionally created in the transporter in the Star Trek science fiction series. If two copies of yourself were uploaded, and you found yourself in a room with your exact copy, there would, at that moment, simply be two self-aware versions of you in that room, no matter how counterintuitive to some that this may seem. Just as biology can today make genetically identical twins, technology will one day be able to make mentally identical twins (triplets, quintuplets, etc.) of individual minds, as strange as this seems. Of course, these twinned selves would begin to diverge from each other the moment they were created, as they would begin to have different subjective experiences. But at the start they would simply be two identical, true copies of “you.” If this duplication process wasn’t too costly or difficult, we can also imagine that our future selves might engage in such mental “forking” on a regular basis, to generate two or more slightly different personal perspectives on complex and subtle problems. We might also reintegrate (merge) these separate selves later, after the problem was solved or no longer relevant. Science fiction authors like Phillip Jennings, The Bug Life Chronicles, 1989 and Charles Stross, Accelerando, 2006, are among those who have described this strange idea. We can imagine this future ability as a natural extension of the way we presently argue with ourselves, using slightly different yet largely similar neural structures within our own brain, whenever we are “mentally split” over the course of action on a difficult problem. In fact, we must admit that any human being today is already a Society of Mind, a collection of somewhat independent and arguing “mindsets,” as Marvin Minsky observed in 1987. We might reintegrate these twinned minds/selves eventually, after some period of exploration and experimentation, and such a process, while it might involve the elimination of less adapted mental structures in the process of reintegration, would very likely be seen as growth, not death. We can understand this in the same way that, after long arguments within our own mind today, one set of synaptic structures may end up prevailing, and one or more of the less-fit synaptic structures end up dying. In this process, the less-fit connections end up being reweighted, in a way that involves effective information destruction in the network within our own brains, as the less adaptive behaviors, once ignored long enough, attenuate to extinction. To a healthy and mentally integrated self, this kind of information loss feels simply like creativity and growth, not death. So too we can forsee how a future technological self, which has the ability to make multiple copies, backups, and “instances” of itself, would be a system in which “little deaths” were constantly occurring, but in which deep resiliency, continual learning and growth, indefinite lifespan, and substantially less fearfulness and stress over the consequences of conflict would also be achieved. The inevitable competitions and deaths in such a future should feel far less subjectively violent, and involve far less informational destructiveness, than the world we live in today.
Thank you for reading this piece, and I look forward to hearing any of your thoughts, feelings and beliefs on these topics.
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