See if you can guess the film genre from these opening scenes:
A rocky landscape as viewed through a pair of binoculars; a coach-and-horses rushing through a hastily opened pair of gates; someone looks up – there are two suns in the sky; someone picks up an old-fashioned phone – the line is dead.
Easy stuff. The respective genres are: spy thriller; period drama; space opera; murder mystery.
Okay, here’s one more: A team of scientists are hard at work in a laboratory. One of them remarks on just how close they are to discovering the secret of immortality…
Well, it’s got to be a horror story. In scene two, things will start going very wrong. Or perhaps we’ll fast forward a few years to a zombie-infested future wasteland. Either way, one can be sure the results of the research will prove disappointing.
Still, it’s all fiction, isn’t it? It’s not like anyone seriously expects to conquer death.
Actually, they do. From cryogenic ‘suspension’ to cloning to gene therapy, there are well-funded programmes devoted to this age-old quest. Another avenue is to achieve eternal life by digital means. Writing for Quartz, Simone Stolzoff explores the weird world of “augmented eternity”…
“…in which academics and technologists explore ways the human mind might be downloaded, recreated, and transferred into other forms. ‘Eventually the mind will become migratable information, just like files can migrate from one device to another and live in the cloud,’ says Michael Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. ‘When the information processor’—the brain—‘goes, you’ll be able to copy [the mind] and implement it in other hardware.’”
Stolzoff concedes that “eventually” might be a long time coming:
“Though there are still technical limitations to the future Graziano imagines—namely the ability to adequately image and map the brain in its intricate detail…”
That may be prove to be the understatement of the year – indeed of the decade, century or millennium (how long have you got?). Even if we accept the materialist assumption that ‘you’ consist of nothing more than meat-encoded information (as opposed to anything more meaningful like a soul), our knowledge of those patterns and how they might generate personality, memories and consciousness is either rudimentary or completely non-existent.
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