DIGITAL IMMORTALITY

Everything that lives perishes with time. No organism can evade the common fate. What if I told you, that you could change that and unlock immortality? Think for a minute, about the endless possibilities you could achieve. A place where laws of physics would not apply. You could skip through time to see the future, or enter life-like simulations of the past. If you are even one bit smart, before running off into the illusionary dreamland rendered by the amazing human brain, you would question, how would this happen?

The most accurate method is the brain slicing method as our MRI machines are not developed enough for full, comprehensive scanning of our brain. In 2019, scientists took a cubic millimetre of a rat’s brain and sliced it into 25000 slices, which were all examined by five, powerful, electron microscopes for five months. This included 1,00,000 neurons, 100,00,00,000 synapses and 4 kilometres of nerve fibres. The completed data set was made up of 20,00,000 gigabytes of information. Repeat this process for a human brain, and you have up to 20,00,000 petabytes (about 3963074785441 DVDs) of data, not taking into consideration the complex molecular structures that would further increase the data requirements. All the data storage in the world is not enough for this.

Before we make a copy of your consciousness, let’s discuss three assumptions:

Physicalism: In the future, we must gain a greater understanding of our brain’s processes and biochemistry. We still don’t know exactly which part(s) of our brain control(s) our consciousness.

Scan ability: In the future, we would possess software that will make an accurate copy of your brain.

Computability: It should be possible to simulate every thought process in the form of code, including emotions and hormonal influence in the future. The machine should be able to write its own script, as such a huge library of possible thought processes would be difficult to sort by even a huge team of developers. So, Artificial Intelligence should be common in the era of digital immortality.

So, the above-described method will bring a dead person, back to life. But the train of thought does not stop here. We can also think about creating a co-existing digital copy of our brains. Having an immortal clone of yourself can have both pros and cons. Think about some and comment below!