Author: BPF Co-Founder, John Smart

BPF advisor Dr. Susan Blackmore recently wrote a thoughtful and insightful opinion piece, Brain preservation is a step closer, but how could it ever be ‘you’? in the Death and Dying section of The Guardian (14 Mar 2018), exploring the ethics, sustainability, and lack of desirability, from her perspective, of brain preservation at the end of life. While I grant many of her points, I do not share her conclusions as to the personal and social value of this choice, and so would like to share my view.

As VP of the Brain Preservation Foundation, I also wrestle with the implications of this accelerating technology and its value for individuals and society. Both brain preservation and neural emulation technologies have been demonstrating exponential improvements in their capacity and affordability for many years now, so their futures deserve careful consideration. My views continue to change the more I discuss these topics with others. Death is a very emotional and personal experience, and we each have our own responses to it. Let me address what I think are her top three criticisms, in the hopes of a productive dialog.

1. Regarding resource uses, for some strange reason computation in human civilization gets exponentially cheaper over time. It’s something that seems built into how our universe works, at small scales. Koomey’s law (the energy cost of computing) is the observation that computation, in the history of digital computing, has become half as energy intensive, every eighteen months, since 1950. The accelerating sustainability of computation is just as important a global trend as Moore’s law, but most folks 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. We just need to see it and acknowledge it.

2. Regarding the value of information preservation, human civilization has advanced greatly every time we come up with a new way to use technology to preserve information. Michael Malone describes this well in The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory (2012). At first, our tools were our senses and our brains. Then we invented oral language. Then we recorded that language. Then we recorded experiences. Now, we’re replicating our brains algorithms in AI, and this is just another kind of preservation tool, as Manuela Veloso, an AI professor at Carnegie Mellon University, reminds us. Soon, AI and preservation of brains (animal and human) will allow us to record memories. In each case, the collective diversity and value of all of humanity’s information makes a great forward leap. That too seems to be a natural trend, that we need to better see and acknowledge.

3. Regarding the value of individual minds in the future, our answer seems to depend on how advanced you think future society will be, and on your own view of the value of the wishes and beliefs of individual human beings. This is the point that I think requires the most careful consideration. We each may have very different opinions on this, depending on our assumptions and personal beliefs. 

The first point that I think is worth stating is that any of us who might choose brain preservation today are making our own individual guesses, as free human beings, as to what our future may be like, and whether it may be valuable for us and our loved ones to come back. We are also making our own guesses about whether a “copy” of us will actually be us. Many today would guess that they are not, and that of course is their right. But others, including those who believe the arguments and evidence for the computational nature of mind, would guess that “we” are computation, in our truest essence, and “we” would simply wake up, in any future computation of sufficient fidelity and complexity. (We could also expect that every future consciousness, copy or not, would have the same human rights, in a just society). These guesses have real consequences, and each of us deserves the freedom to guess, based on our present beliefs.

The second point I that I’d like to bring up is that no materialist today, at least none that I know, would believe that any future intelligence may one day become omniscient or omnipotent. This is a more useful insight than many presently realize. All real systems, including the AIs to come, and our own future versions of ourselves, are confined to being finite physical systems. Thus all future beings will have an incomplete ability to simulate their past, present, and future, and multitudes of questions that their science and experience cannot answer. Our individual histories, our useful diversity, and our collective wisdom will never be fully accessible to any future intelligence, no matter how smart it becomes. Future “digital” minds will still have raging philosophical and scientific debates and yes, their own metaphysical beliefs and religious communities too. Science, debate, and belief never end.

Because of the computational incompleteness of reality to mind, it follows that having better knowledge of the past will continue to improve any future beings understanding of, and adaptiveness in, their own present and future. There is always a gap between the capabilities of our new tools, and our collective wisdom. Yet one of the key ways we have gained more wisdom to date is by better preserving and studying (both reviving and reinterpreting) our past. People returning from the past will be a new form of collective memory. If such people are also able to continue to be growing and learning organisms, if their problems of aging and rejuvenation have then been solved, as is reasonable to expect, they will also bring humanity new ways to be creative in the future. That new diversity of thought, experience and creativity will help us better understand who we are, and better navigate our future.

Blackmore points out that we will have to grow, and perhaps grow to a great degree, in that future society, but she seems to assume that everything, or at least most aspects of our future selves would have to change, and by extension, most of our most valued aspects of our current selves might no longer have value in future society.

But consider for a moment all the parts of us that would very likely not change in future society. Life has deep common patterns, values, and processes, across its entire 5 billion year history. These “truths”, this wisdom, such as it is, will only continue to accumulate, and that accumulation is how progress happens. Future life have to follow all kinds of Golden Rules too, and they’ll love and empathize, just as we do. We all have timeless ethics, views, and values in our minds and experience, in addition to our individual differences.

Life is not just about growing diversity, and improving our individual and cultural memory, it is also about growing useful diversity, also called adaptiveness, or perhaps, 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.  Those parts will continue to be deeply useful, to ourselves and society.

Recognizing those parts today, as best we can, in ourselves and others, can greatly improve our lives here today. But sometimes only our long experience, a long and well-preserved history, will help us to see the unchanging parts that are so universally valuable. In other words, 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.

I also think that the more affordable, validated, and medically accessible the brain preservation option becomes today, and the more societies learn to respect the wishes of those who make the brain preservation choice, even if the majority, at least at first, make different choices, the more our social values will also change today, toward what I call Preservation Values, regardless of how much of “us” and our loved ones ever comes back in the future. I discuss those values changes as the Social Benefits Defense of the idea of brain preservation, in my article Overcoming Objections to Brain Preservation, which I recommend for any who would like a longer version of this argument.

To conclude, the more we appreciate the great value of the diversity of mind and identity, of respecting each of our own unique choices regarding death, and of seeing, protecting, and improving those things in ourselves and society that seem to have special value, the greater our happiness, wisdom, justice, and adaptiveness may grow as well. Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments, thanks.