Immortality Close? 2045 Initiative

It's funny you say that because its the opposite for me. The fact that I'm going to die turns me off from work. Why work hard to achieve anything, if your going to be dust in a few hundred years and not enjoy it? So your making it for your children, still in a few thousand years they will be all dust, and even your achievements will be dust, and less than even memories. However if I was immortal, if my family was immortal, I wouldn't be concerned about that fact, and would work harder. It really depends on peoples perspectives.

Edit: Because we are mortal, we place high value in it. Especially artists, poets, and philosophers. "We are mortal, their must be a divine reason, or natural one for as to why?" Therefore naturally we view immortality as an abomination. However, if you were immortal, and lived in a world of immortals, you would have completely different views on the subject. Philosophers and artists would be making up stuff about how immortals are superior in a cultural way, and how mortals would be an abomination, poor beings that die, that have meaningless lives.

That's not my personal view one way or the other, however I believe the main reason people are turned off from immortality, or the prospect of it, is just because we are mortal. The fact that we are mortal, must be important for something right? I believe that reasoning is beautiful, but not very practical.

If the soul exists, it is either an energy field that one day scientists will be able to tap into and transfer, or it is a divine metaphysical force that can never be understood. If its the second option, we don't need to worry, because divine metaphysical forces as far as we are aware, would not follow any of the physical laws we would. So chances are the soul has no connection to our physical body whatso ever, and probably is loosely connected to your consciou8sness but even that is a stretch in my mind. The soul is the soul, it can't be manipulated by man. Again this is all philosophy, theres still the high chance that souls are just primitive man's way of coming up with a spiritual solution to immortality.

Also on the transfer aspect, this is how I look at it. We loose (I can't remember the specific number) a lot of brain cells every day, and those cells get replaced. Our brain is constantly rebuilding itself, and within a few years you pretty much have a new brain than before. So how are you the same person? The trick is nature keeps the consciousness streaming at every given moment, even when we sleep, our consciousness doesn't fully go asleep, it just becomes less active while the sub consciousness becomes more active. So the trick with transferring a consciousness would probably involve a very extensive procedure that would keep it streaming the whole time. It just means that unlike a computer program, having a backup copy of ourselves would be pointless because the original died, it doesn't mean however that we can't have our consciousness switched over to another brain.

 

I heard this from somewhere, but I don't know if its true so please, someone correct it for me if I'm wrong (I would google it but I have to head to work in a few mins, I'll google it later if no one does.)
Apparently we loose like 100 thousand brain cells a day, and those cells get replaced. Eventually the brain we have will no longer have been purely the original anyways. So what is the trick with nature? Consciousness is constantly streaming. Also we wouldn't replace the cells with pre-programmed ones, we would probably replace them with complete copies of the originals, just with a bit more durability. They are talking about backwords engineering the brain, not making a copy of it. Therefore, it would be still you, as long as the consciousness never stops streaming. Like if you are awake throughout the whole process of the transfer, and not once do you black out, would be proof that it was still you. But yeah, even if its only a copy of you, I have bad news for you. If your in your fifties or older, maybe even less, the original you is dead, and the brain you currently have is just another organic copy that has slowly replaced itself through the years. Honestly I think the physical matter that is our brain is not what makes us alive, its the electrodes and energy that make up our consciousness thats important, and of course the physical brain must be maintained or replaced, but that doesn't change who you are as long as the consciousness is constantly streaming, and never gets fully shut off. Otherwise yeah, it would simply be a copy of you (even in that case, at least a copy of me, thinking it was me, would obtain immortality. Friends and family that didn't know any better, would still have me here with them. So really even if thats the case, is that really a bad thing?)

 

Actually, according to some people in the project (I've been reading a lot of documents about it, both on their site, on news sites, and other technology sites) they believe they will have a working understanding of the brain and its mechanics within 3 years (not the consciousness, just the brain as a device). They have multiple reasons to believe this, and their article can explain it much better than I can. Basically though, they have a team that's being funded big dollars to figure this stuff out as quickly as possible, just to get a jump start on the neural brain computer interfaces.

For those skeptics that do like to read articles, I suggest reading this one 2045 Initiative

Again, their not saying complete understanding of consciousness, but they want to have the mechanics of the brain worked out by then, and they believe it can be done with today's technology. Its interesting, however we still have to wait and see if they can walk the talk as some would put it.

I love this reasoning, because when people use it it just shows how little they know about the project. They want to be able to completely be able to backwards engineer the brain by that point, that means backwards engineering the subconscious, the parts that allow us to dream, and all the rest, including the neuroplasticity of our brain which is what allows us to learn. If they can do that, chances are these robotic bodies would be almost the same as our own (including squishiness and fleshiness, since we can synthesize many substances that can act like flesh and stuff.)

 

Why would you want to hurt the poor robots, what have they ever done to you? Other than steal American jobs that American's didn't want anyways. XD