The Shaky Logic of Immortality

Because there has been a revival of the subject of human immortality recently, I thought I'd write a little about that today. I've discussed this in earlier posts. To recap, I said that it is possible that there have been aliens who became immortal, but got tired of being immortal and then decided to die. That was written in the context of never receiving any extraterrestrial communications. More recently, I said that if you made an electronic version of yourself and abandoned your body, you would effectively be dead. When your body died, all that would remain would be an electronic copy of you. I think that, in a physical sense, if you were able to remove your brain and integrate it with an artificial copy of your body, and then maintain your brain in much the same way that your body currently maintains it, you would not technically be dead, as long as your brain were operating in the same way that it was in your body. In this case, you would be immortal only as long as your brain was maintained in a manner similar to the way that it was maintained in your body. So, if everything went well, you would be immortal, but if your brain were irreparably damaged, then you would be dead. It would also be possible to become effectively immortal if advances in medical technology allowed your body to live indefinitely, but that would probably be more difficult than simply keeping your brain alive.

From reading about our place in the biosphere, I think there are other questions that come up. Whatever anyone thinks, we are all part of the Earth's biosphere. This raises the question of what it would mean to send part of the biosphere to a different solar system. In all likelihood, a biosphere on a planet in a different solar system would have different characteristics from ours, and by going there you might just die. How much fun would that be?

I would like to reiterate that even if a sustainable immortality for a human were achieved technologically, there is still the psychological problem of the potential of suicide. As organisms on Earth, all we are doing really is attempting to survive and have offspring who survive. This is built into our genes, and you can't make it go away through technology without altering your identity. We have this specific Earth-based motivation, which means that an immortal human may essentially be an engineered automaton with no inherent purpose. In effect, the more you remove biological characteristics from humans, the more they come to resemble stones or other inert objects. Compared to us, stones are immortal, and the tech bros may not have figured that out yet.

I think that a key distinction must be made between organisms and inert objects. At the moment, quite a few people are worried that H. sapiens may soon be superseded by a new species. In my view, because of my statements above, I think that there may actually not be a new species, and we may just end up with humans who have robotic bodies. Actual robots don't concern me that much, because they won't have the equivalent of survival instincts and would not have any reason to harm humans unless programmed to.