Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Isaac Asimov was my favorite science fiction writer and his favorite science fiction story
talked about an era far in the future when our bodies would be in pods and we would mentally
control beings, beings of pure energy that would go flying around the universe. And,
of course, it was science fiction but here's the idea. Mind without body. Pure consciousness
roaming across the universe faster than any rocket ship. It turns out that that's actually
a physical possibility. First of all the Obama administration and the European Union are
pushing the Brain Project to delineate all the pathways of the human brain. This means
that one day we might have a CD ROM called Brain 2.0. That is every single neuron encoded
on a memory disc, your personality, your memories, who you are, the essence of your soul would
be incorporated in this disc as pure information. Even if you die your consciousness, in some
sense, may live on.
Now you as an organic being will have died. That means that your neurons will turn to
dust. But the configuration of neurons that made your thinking process possible can be
put on a disc in which case, in some sense you become immortal. Not only immortal but
this could be the most efficient way to explore the galaxy just like Isaac Asimov predicted
in his short story. Let's say I take your -- not your genome but your connectome, put
it on a laser beam -- in fact in the book I actually calculate how big a laser beam
will be required to put your consciousness as pure photons -- shine it into the heavens.
You're now shooting consciousness into outer space at the speed of light. Forget booster
rockets. Forget asteroid collisions. Forget radiation dangers and weightlessness and lack
of oxygen. Forget all that. You are riding on a laser beam at the speed of light and
then at the end there's a relay station.
A relay station which takes the laser beam and then puts into a surrogate. That is all
the neural networks encoded into laser beam can be manifested as a robot on the other
side of the galaxy. So in other words, it's like staying at a hotel. If you're a businessman
you go from hotel to hotel and relax. The same way you'd be on a laser beam going from
relay station to relay station and when you go to the relay station you take the robot
body of a super human. You become superman on the other end of the rainbow. So is this
a physical possibility? Yes. When might we have it? Well let's be honest. It would take
perhaps a hundred years or so before we have a complete understanding of the connectome
that is all the neuropathways of the brain. Perhaps another century beyond that before
we have relay stations on which we could then shoot our consciousness into outer space.
Is it mathematically and physically possible and the answer is yes.