Digital immortality is the key to eternal human life
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
All iLive content is medically reviewed or fact checked to ensure as much factual accuracy as possible.
We have strict sourcing guidelines and only link to reputable media sites, academic research institutions and, whenever possible, medically peer reviewed studies. Note that the numbers in parentheses ([1], [2], etc.) are clickable links to these studies.
If you feel that any of our content is inaccurate, out-of-date, or otherwise questionable, please select it and press Ctrl + Enter.
To date, work aimed at achieving eternal life, is largely focused on finding the key to the so-called "digital immortality."
"Digital immortality is when you physically died and you exist in silicon," a kind of "plan" B "in case the science of life can not achieve real biological immortality," writes Briton Stephen Cave in his book "Immortality" ("Immortality"). "That is, your brain is scanned, and your essence is uploaded digitally, as a set of bits and bytes," explains the futurist. "This whole brain emulation can be stored in a computer memory bank, and from there, at any time, brought back to life as an avatar in a virtual a world like Second Life, or even in the body of an artificial robot that will be an exact replica of you. "
According to Cave, to date, there are three major obstacles to the implementation of this program (some believe that within 40 years they will be overcome). First, the unresolved task remains to read all the information that makes up the human "I" without any rest. Cave believes that for this you have to remove the brain from the skull, preserve it and cut into thin slices, then scan. Secondly, the problem arises of storing information, the volume of which "by many millions of orders" exceeds the capabilities of modern computers. Finally, we have to learn how to "revive" the resulting copy. Theoretically, all this is possible, but whether it comes to practical implementation, Cave doubts. Digital immortality remains for him only a surrogate, which, moreover, can "turn into a curse, as it always happens in mythology."
Dr. Stuart Armstrong, a researcher at the Institute of the Future of Humanity at Oxford University, is more optimistic. "Problems on the way to digital immortality lie in a purely engineering plane, no matter how difficult and intricate they are.If you create a program comparable in scale to the Manhattan project, they can be solved within a decade," the scientist is convinced. Digital immortality equates it to immortality as such: "If this avatar or robot is in all respects you, then this is you." Armstrong foresees the difficulties associated with the temptation to "pump out" his own copy or propagate successful clones: "You can copy the world's five best programmers of the world or the best call center employee a million times, and these copies will simply replace people who lose their economic value."
Dr. Randal Cohen, the founder of the California-based Carbon Copies Project, prefers to talk about "substrate-independent intelligence." Such, in his opinion, will be a continuation of the personality of the subject to the same extent as he himself is a continuation of himself at an earlier age. In the future, a re-created person will not know about what is a copy, Cohen believes. He believes that with the possible problems of the ethical plan, mankind has repeatedly faced in the past, and digital immortality is the next stage of evolution.