Who Wants To Live Forever?

you came up with a great suggestion, digital immortality. Digital immortality. You know, I have a feeling the title of this episode will be who Wants to Live Forever? Right, because I'm a big fan of Queen. Yeah, who wants to Live Forever? That came from the soundtrack to the hit film Highlander. Oh cult classic. Did Queen do the whole check?

They did Highlander and Flash Gordon? They did. I did not know Highlander and I saw Highlander the other day and I was like, not, hold up, No, the movie is one of those that I wish we could just wipe from history and redo because the concept is amazing. Yeah, but that's not what we're gonna talk about. Although there are immortals in Highlander, yeah, yeah, there are. Yeah, I mean that's the that's the connection, right, I guess so or Queen your love of Queen in Queen doing the

Highlander sound check. The mortality. Yeah, it's ultimately it all goes back to uh tesla. No, we're gonna be talking about digital immortality, this concept of using technology to extend our lifespans indefinitely. Yeah, immortality. Yeah, to the point where essentially until the sun burns out right and the great

heat death of the universe. Yeah, I mean yeah, because you could in theory, if you were had digital immortality, there's nothing stopping you from hopping on a spaceship and high tailing it somewhere else, or being transmitted it near the speed of light. Yep. Yeah, you could be beamed from one point to another and sure if you I wonder what that experience would be like. Well, maybe that

it's that's the future of space travel. Physical space travel is as digital beings, rather than maybe that's the while we keep banging up against is the physical limitations, and then that will finally unbridle us and allow us to really do like interstellar travel, intergalactic travel, though presumably you would have to have something you're beaming into well you just purely digital, then you have to have something to

house that information. I mean, I guess you could just be literally just information beaming around, but I don't know how. I wonder what that experience would be, like I wanted to be like going to sleep. Think about a laser. The laser doesn't have any sort of infrastructure, and you're trans meeting light information from one place to another at

the speed of light. Right, Well, what if we figured out a way to digitize ourselves, as we'll talk about um, and we were able to beat ourselves in much the same way that a laser beams light. Right, But the question is then, because if we are digitizing ourselves, we're usually talking about that with the understanding that that digital information rests on top of some physical architecture. Right, just as software needs hardware to run off of, Right, you

need like fiber optics. Now, yeah, I'm saying, what if you remove that, you figure out a way to remove it, then there's no leye. If you can get to a point where we become pure information and there is no need for physical infrastructure beneath that, then we're golden. There's

no limit. Then I guess we would need some sort of receptacle to beam into even on the end, even if we don't have something connecting the two points that if you're just gonna send someone ahead like all right, dull, it's your job to set up all these these CPU talents, Bill, do not let us down. Make sure they're all plugged in, and please use one of those uninterrupted power supplies because if if there's a blackout, we don't want you know,

we lost Lucy, and then make it over. Please don't smoke while you're setting them up, Bill, because we could smell it last time. It's dunk up the whole place, right right. So to get down to what we're actually talking about, you probably picked up on this. The idea of digital immortality largely revolves around this concept of somehow transferring human consciousness and experience into a digital format. Usually the way we describe it as uploading your brain into

a computer. That's kind of the easiest way to explain it. And there are a lot of really smart people who have been talking about this possibility beyond saying it's hypothetical, saying it will be possible or it will happen. A lot of people strut around like they're just cock of the walks. They and it's gonna happen. And some sometimes they even put like dat on things like this, Oh ye know the guy we got to talk about to

be at least ray Kurt's watch. Kurtzwile Uh famous for his futurism predictions, including the idea that we will reach what is called the singularity. There's the point at which technology is evolving so quickly that there is no meaningful way to describe the present because it's changing that fast and in the way I always think about singularities. Usually it's also the moment where UM one of two things

has just happened. Either UM in AI has awakened and become conscious right and therefore we it is now the master of the universe as far as we're concerned, or we it's the moment we merge biology merges with technology at a point where we're able to UM remove ourselves the limitations of evolution and chart our own courts from

that point on. Yeah, that's that's pretty accurate. I would argue that there's also there's the possibility of developing UM technology that allows us to genetically alter ourselves without having to directly incorporate like computers or electronics into our systems. That also can be It's transhumanism, is what we're talking about here. We're like right there. Yeah, we're already kind of happening, like very crudely, but it's we're like right there.

As far as that last definition, yeah, yeah, we're there. Well, even with the incorporation of technology, we're getting there. You look at things like cochlear implants, and while this is this technology is specifically meant to give people who have either lost or never developed a particular uh sense or maybe some other form of neurological process. Uh you know, right now, it's meant to address that. In the future, it could be meant to augment, not just to to

repair damage or to address a loss of something. Right, Like, the defining characteristic of trans humanism is that, um, you don't want a blade prosthetic leg because the one you were born with was removed. You want to blade prosthetic leg because you want to be able to run faster. It's not to it's not to make up for a loss. It's to further, right, it's to go to the next

step exactly. So, Uh, this this singularity idea is very closely related to digital immortality, and largely because of Ray Kurtzwild, because, as it turns out, I think it's fair to say Ray Kurtzwild has an issue with the concept of mortality. Yeah, I was wondering, like, I don't know that much about Kurtzwild. I mean, I'm slightly familiar, but you clearly know a lot more about him than I do. And I was wondering if he is a like a fretful Annie, Like

does he constantly worry about misstepping and dying? You know, people dying really weird, random mundane ways every day. And I wonder if he just lives in literal mortal fear of that. Well, he he is certainly taking great precautions to extend his life because he does believe firmly that we will reach this point in which technology will allow us to extend our lifespans indefinitely within his lifetime if he takes care of himself, so he he is determined,

he doesn't. I mean, you would kind of feel like a like a dufus if you, you know, if you were capable of feeling if you died the day before they invented digital immortality. Right, it's the like the last guy to die in a war right after like right before there? Right, Yeah, there's a there's a great um. Have you ever seen there's a British sketch comedy show called that Mitchell and Webb. Look, have you ever seen?

You've told me about it though, Yeah, it's it's a two comedians, uh, David Mitchell and Robert Webb who do this series. And one of the ones they they have is it's just supposed to be off the cuff conversation between the two so it's not in the context of a sketch, so basically like what we're doing kind of what we're doing now, except it's obviously scripted and ours

is not. But in that case, they have a conversation where David Mitchell is very upset with the thought that his generation is going to be the last generation to die, and he is spiteful of the of the next generation. He's mad at them for being able to live forever while he has to die. Robert Webb is like, you could just be happy for them, and there's no same sort of thing I think with Kurt Swile is that he's um taking great pains to take care of himself.

He's advocate for a healthy diet and exercise, which is fantastic. He takes something like a hundred and fifty dietary supplements. I'm going to have to correct you, and this is from the article that you two's constantly taking pill you know. Yeah, so that's uh. And and there there are plenty of studies that have suggested that unless you are suffering a deficiency of some sort, these supplements are not actually helpful. Well, um, it's kind of like um, vitamin A. I believe vitamin

A H is known to help you see better. Pretty sure, it's vitamin A UM. And it's been shown that if you're especially like night vision is a little deficient, that if you eat some carrots your night vision will improve. So carrots do help you, But if it's already up to whatever your baseline night vision level is, you can't all the carrots in the world and it's not going to help it. As a matter of fact, you will turn. My wife turned a little orange because she like carrots

so much when she was a kid. So, but she couldn't see any better beyond her baseline night vision level. So I think it's the same thing as what you're same thing with vitamin C. Right, once you hit a certain level of vitamin C. Anything beyond that you're such is just going to pee away. And in fact, vitamins can become toxic. Much of anything is is toxic to

the human body because it speaks homeostasis. Right, So I'm wondering if kurts, well, surely he's smart enough to know, like, maybe I should cut this one out, or maybe I'm taking too much of this. Well, it's also possible that the reported number of supplements that he takes has been you know, exaggerated, as it's been reported over and over again.

I am personally a little skeptical that he takes that many, But at any rate, the whole point is that he wants to make certain to live long enough to see the day when his prediction comes true, that that we will have the technological ability to port a person's mind

into some kind of electronic construct. May I point the thing out I have, just while you were speaking, pulled out my calculator and Ray Chritswell takes a pill every five point seven six minutes a day, assuming he stays up all twenty four hours in a day, assuming again that that number is in fact accurate, that the number of supplements, not that I completely trust your math. Let's talk a little bit about some of the concepts here

about how this could in theory happen. Now, obviously, we are not at the point where we can create any kind of hardware and or software that would allow us to to migrate and intelligence from our meaty brains, right, And that's a huge problem what you've just said, we're we are dealing in something called software hardware, when what the substrate that our our brains and consciousness exists on is what you would term wetware biological material, and where

it's not necessarily analogous to a computer. Even though people and to think of the brain is such, that doesn't mean that it is the same thing. That's absolutely correct. I mean, let's let's take memory for an example. Memory is a great way to illustrate the difference between a

computer system and the brain. All right, So in a computer system, you end up designating a certain space on some medium, like on magnetic tape or in certain you know, it all depends on whatever the form is that you're saving it too, But at any rate, it all ends

up being zeros and ones, and it is unaltered. If you call up a file and you know you haven't done anything to it since the last time you looked at it's going to be exactly the same there, unless there's some sort of corruption in the file or you have made changes to it and then saved it again. You're not you know, it's gonna be the same experience every time. Human memory totally different a memory is, and we only sort of understand memory. Uh, we don't have

a full grasp on how memory works. But based upon what we do know, when you experience something, your brain creates a certain neural pathway in response to the stimuli you are experiencing. So, for example, right here in this room, my brain is thin hair. Your hair, the heat in this room, the light in this room, little things, and I'm not noticing everything. My hair look pretty good, isn't it. You can start contrast with all the rest of the

experiences is amazing hair. So the these these pathways are forming in my brain. Later on, assuming that I have converted this particular experience to long term memory, which is a pretty big assumption. Honestly, I can't remember what a podcasted about two weeks ago. Yeah, I think my hair is going to make it into your long term memory. The more you say it, the more likely it's going to happen. When when I think back on it, my

brain will reconstruct that same pathway. So the memory is essentially representative and the physical relationship between the various synapses that light up when I have this experience. Right, So there is a physical pathway that is retraced when you recall. Right, but it's not like your memory of how great my hair looks is sitting in one little spot of your brain like it would be on a computer's magnetic tape.

It's distributed, and it's faulty because when I remember the process of remembering, sometimes that that pathway doesn't form exactly the way it did, and sometimes it adds new stuff exactly I might fill in some gaps. Like imagine if you opened a power point presentation that you've made and uh, there are a few slides missing, but then there's some new stuff and maybe it was a little bit better than before. But you haven't done anything. Don't remember this transition,

but all right, we'll go with it. Just the very act of retrieving it from your computer's memory and opening it again changes it. Right. That doesn't happen computer, but it doesn't human memories, right, thing, right exactly. That is

exactly what I'm saying. And the reason why I say it is that that's a problem because if we are ever to move from wetware in center brains to hardware and software in the digital realm, unless we factor that in somehow, like we create an algorithm that mimics the experience of remembering something, the experience is going to be fundamentally different. The experience of remembering will be totally different.

I mean, one of the reasons why I very much argue against eyewitness testimony for things, especially for crimes that might have happened a long time in the past, is that our memories are faulty. Now, if we were in this other experience where we had moved to hardware and software and our memories were more analogous to computer memory, that would not be an issue. Perfect. So, but that's a that's't just one illustration of how this is a

tricky thing. It is tricky. And you say that, you know, comparatively speaking, it sounded like your take on it was

that human memory is faulty compared to computer memory. I I would positive that there's also another way to look at it, that um, human memory is much more robust and rich than computer memory because think about it, when you say, smell something for the first time, and then you smell it again and again, that that memory of what something smells like is going to become more detailed.

There's going to be more to it, it will become more refined, and it will be totally different from that first sent memory that you created of whatever it was you smelled. And so I would pose it again. Sorry to use that word twice, but it makes me sound pretty smart when I do um that that additional adding new material, adding new stuff to it when you recall

things or when you experience something. The ability to make your memory more robust and more rich and and to be able to refine it just through recall, to me, is superior to just straight here's the information that a computer will give you, and it should be exactly what you have before. And also with memories, we can associate stuff that previously was not connected in our brains, whereas with computers, the way you do that as through meta data.

You tag stuff. Right, you're like, Okay, well, let's tag this piece of information with all the metadata we can think of that that that describes what this information is really about. And then if I want to associate things, I have to look for similar tags like but but in my brain, it doesn't automatically, and it does it in ways that you cannot necessarily anticipate, which can lead

to things like innovation, creativity. Yes, precisely, and you also kind of hinted at something that's the big problem facing the idea of uploading ourselves onto the internet strick. It is that with with men, we can figure out memory. Will will eventually figure out how human memory works exactly. And that's what There's a philosopher called David Chalmers. That's what he's pointed out as the easy problem of consciousness. We understand, we're going to understand how the mind functions.

Sometime down the road. We will figure that out. There's a hard problem is what what Chalmers has also pointed out in figuring out how phenomenal experience, our experience of reality is produced from those processes. That that is the big issue that is facing us trying to upload ourselves onto the internet. It's like when you talked about meta. The computer is not writing meta itself. It might be able to simulate memory retrieval in its own way, but

it's not writing its own tags. It's not making these connections. It takes a human consciousness to do that. And not only do we not know how to make a computer simulate that, we don't even know how we do that, right, we may never know. There's a lot of philosophers out there there like, we may never figure out the hard

problem of consciousness. Uh. Neuroscientists would say that clearly the mind, which is what we could probably you know, use as an umbrella term for things like consciousness and experience and intelligence and the kind of stuff that that emerges from the physical construct of the brain, because you can you can observe changes to the mind when someone suffers an illness or injury that damages the brain. And therefore it stands to reason that the mind in fact is a

product of the brain. So if you could figure out how to simulate a brain to a significant level of sophistication, hypothetically you could have intelligence emerge naturally from that simulation, hypothetically, hypothe Because we can't do it yet, the best we can do right now is to simulate a few thousand neurons, but there are know, we're talking about billions of neurons

and synapsis in the human brain. Yeah, from what I saw, the low but average estimate is something like EIGHTI six billion, and the normal human brain I'm sorry, not synatha's neuron,

it's trillions of synantha. Right, So it's it's incredibly complicated, and in fact, there's some people who suggest that it may be to truly simulate a human brain, you may have to go down to the molecular level, at which point the computational requirements for simulating that brain are going to be so vast as to be impractical or impossible

to achieve. Well, you mentioned the Blue Brain project in this article that you wrote, um, and I was just kind of skimming their website and they mentioned that in their simulations it requires about a laptops worth of computing power. They didn't say what kind of RAM or hard drive for storage or anything it has. They just used a laptops worths You can kind of let your imagination from on with it, but that that was required just for

one individual neuron to power. Yes, we're talking about billion laptops, which is that's you know, should be great news for

the exactly any hardware manufacturers out there. Um, there are actually quite a few different uh projects out there that are attempting to simulate brains for one reason or another, not necessarily so that we can pourt consciousness to them, but also to just study things like, uh, you know, how our brains work, how we might be able to treat brain damage or illnesses that that damage the brain. That how how certain medications might react to our brains.

Building these very complex simulations, so some of them. M I. T has a course on the emergent science of connect tomics. I've seen that lately too. It sounds so full of bs, but apparently it's it's a real deal and and once you look into it, that makes total the terrible name. Connectomics is all about the connections that happen within the brain. And yeah it does. Connectomics sounds like it's some sort of weird economics course or like maybe an l. Around

Hubbard book. Yeah, like Dinetics part two. Connectomics. Yeah, So that's an example. There's the US Brain Project, there's an EU Brain project, there's the Google project. Yes, and there's the Google Brain project. They hired Ray Kurtzwile. Yeah, he's their chief engineer, director of engineering. Yeah, for for specifically for the Google Brain project. They I mean, clearly Google has just put their cars in the table. They're like, we're putting some serious resources behind figuring out how to

get people on to digital consciousness. Right. It's it's one thing to think about this kind of you know, armchair computer scientists neuroscientists sort of approach, but they're really putting actual money towards research and development and on this stuff, including hiring another guy named Jeff Hinton who is a British computer scientist who who specializes in neural networks. So they're looking at using neural networks for lots of stuff,

not just to simulate a human brain. I mean that might be part of it too, but neural networks can be really useful for processing different types of information for all sorts of applications, right true. And also, I mean, if you think about it, just figuring out some of the efficiencies that the human brain is evolved to include as far as networking goes, if you could just even get some insider inspiration from that, that could help tremendously. Yeah, absolutely.

There's some other great things I can mention. There's um Ted Burger, who is a professor at the University of Southern California's Center for neuro Engineering, who built a prosthetic of the hippocampus. Now, the hippocampus is uh, hippocampuses is large. Yeah, is lar argually associated with the formation of memories, also with incorporation of emotion. But memory is a big part

of what hippocampus is involved in. So I think it also um takes in century information, determines what region it should be transmitted to, if it should go into long term memory or that kind of stuff. It's kind of like a big deal, big engineer in this case. And so in two thousand eleven came up with a proof of concept hippocampal prosthesis and tested it in live rats. In two thousand twelve tested it in non human primates, and supposedly sometime this year they're going to test it

in people. Man, that is amazing. So like, if you have some sort of damage to your hippocampus and you're no longer able to form memories, then this would be the thing for you. Kind of yeah, I mean, this could end up being depending upon the nature of of the the problem. I mean, it could potentially be a treatment for things like Alzheimer's. Um Whether or not that turns out to be the case, we'll still have to wait and see, but it is very promising. Have you

ever heard of Henry Mollison. He is like one of the one of the more facing, one of the more famous patients, or to save time, you could just say one of the more faiths um in as far as memory studies go, because he had some he had I believe epilepsy, and some old timey doctor gave him some brain surgery and messed up his his hippocampus and the guy was unable to form new memories from that point on. He could remember everything up to that point under the surgery.

Then after that it was almost like his brain refreshed every I think something like thirty seconds. And he was just lived in an institution and was fortunately taken care of by a few doctors that like really studied him but also like really kept him from the public limelight. His name wasn't published in the life he died, but he yielded a lot of information about how memories are formed thanks to the hippocampus. But it sounds like he

would have been a great candidate for that. Yeah, I'm reminded of and I have to trust other people's uh details of this, because I have no memory of it. I had There was a time where I had a kidney stone. It was so bad that I had to go to the hospital and they treat me with a very powerful pain killer that just knocked your hipocampus out of a convention, I couldn't remember things. I had no

short term memory. Well, it makes sense. Like also, when you're drinking, um, your hippocampal function is is messed with your You are not forming new memories, and you require the hippocampus do this. So if you're doing something, if you're on drugs, if you have some sort of structural damage, if you have been drinking, like that's why you're you're not forming new memories. That accounts for a blackout, that

accounts for amnesia. Your hippocampus is just not functioning properly exactly. Uh. There's another expert I want to mention, Enders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford Universe. I am a huge fan of that institute. Yeah, yeah, one of my favorite people in the world works. There's names Nis. Yeah, I know of Nick Bostrom. So Sandberg had said this is a quote. The point of brain emulation is to

recreate the function of the original brain. So this is talking about actually creating a copy of a of a person's brain, not just the concept in general, but in the specific case of this person's brain. We're going to recreate it digitally. If run, it will be able to think and act as the original brain. We are now able to take small brain tissue samples and map them in three D. These are at exquisite resolution, but the

blocks are just a few microns across. We can run simulations of the size of a mouse brain on supercomputers, but we do not have the total connectivity yet. As methods improve, I expect to see automatic conversion of scanned tissue into models that can be run. The different parts exist, but so far there is no pipeline from brains to emulations. Now he thinks that it may be very difficult to ever simulate memory in a computer the way that humans do,

for the very reasons we mentioned earlier. Um He also points out that there is a problem with this particular approach as the scanning essentially damages or destroys the brain tissue because there's not a non invasive way. It's like Heiberg all over again. Huh. You gotta pretty much crack the nogg and open and mush around in the gray stuff to find out, you know, to really scan it

and get that resolution. This this scanning would either kill you or you need a freshly dead person, in which case there's no longer consciousness right right, exactly A big so you could make You can make a copy of a dead brain, which, as you point out, not really that useful. Or you could make a copy of a living brain, but in the process you kill the living brain.

You are left with the copy. Now, theoretically, this copy would think and react in a way that would be exactly the way the original person thought and reacted, but the original person still dead. So, Josh, if you had this done, there would be a Josh computer Josh Bought two thousand and Josh Bought would think like you, would have quips like you, better hair, with even better hair than you, and feel somewhat smug about it. Meanwhile, Josh Clark,

the human being would be no more. And this comes to another big problem in the concept of digital immortality, which is continuity. Sure, so continuity being the continuous experience of you as Josh Clark, whether you are in your meat body or poured it over to some digital format. I don't think that's that big of a problem. Really, think a man every day there we we have gaps in continuity. We go to sleep and then we wake up.

But you're talking about functional continuity. There's also a physical continuity, and there's the real problem. So functional continuity is exactly what you're talking about. It's our our experience that we are having, and it does have interruptions, whether it's when we go to sleep or we are put under for exactly all of that. It could end up being a

break in our functional continuity. We can recover from that because the physical continuity, the stuff that's in our brains, is still there, so that even though we have that reset, we can come back and everything will be fine. If the physical continuity is destroyed, as in the actual brain dies, then you have a problem. Now. An interesting thing is that I've looked at some neuroscientists uh and their work and what they have to say about this, and it

was really interesting to me. There's a guy named Stephen Novella. He's a neuroscientist, works at Yale. He has a great podcast called Skeptics Guide to the Universe UM, and he is a critical thinker and a skeptic. Uh. He has talked a lot about this as well. He's blogged about it and his idea or his perspective. The way he communicates it is that as humans, we have brains that

are divided into two hemispheres. Now, through drugs or through surgery, you can have one of those hemispheres separated from the other. It essentially is rendered inactive. But the two hemispheres are largely copies of each other. So even if this does happen, you can have a relatively normal experience. You might have find that some things are now very hard to do,

like math if your colossum isn't there exactly. Yeah, so he says, but these two halves, which individually can act as a single brain, work together, and we have you know, even if you have the one shut down, the other one can continue to work. You're still you, largely you. So he says, what if we then extend this and we make the assumption that yes, we have created the hardware and software that will allow for the simulation of a brain in in some way we connect that to

a person's brain so that it becomes an extension. It's another part of the brain, kind of like a third hemisphere. I guess. And and so this one is starting to form pathways that mimic what your brain does naturally, so over time it helps you think the way you think already. It also starts to build in redundant memories, so it's essentially backing up your memories. And gradually it's going to act like it another hemisphere of your brain. And it

could even be more powerful. Potentially, you could do things like include algorithms that like make it way easier for you to do math. You'd be a math genius. I would hope that if I were uploaded on the internet, my math skills would just automatically improve. I would expect that. Yeah, there's certain little like base assumptions you want to make, right, that's one of them. It would be it would be funny to be digitally immortal, but crap at math. So I guess you get made fun of by all the

other digital immortals. Very likely, you know, the Kurgan is just taunting you before cutting off your digital head. Uh So, the his point being that over time you would be relying more heavily on the AI version of your brain, that even while your meat brain goes to sleep, your AI brain could stay awake so that you know, you you as you could remain active all day long because it's you know, it's it's your organic brain that's sleeping.

But your AI brain takes over, and it could get to a point where you don't even really notice that part of you as asleep, and you could theorectly reach a point where your AI brain is doing the vast majority of the work, so that the time when your organic brain dies is a non event to you. Okay, so, first of all, I could see the AI brain becoming very resentful of the organic brain right having to do

all the work while it just lays around and sleeps. Right, I don't know that the left brain gets mad at the right brain. Mind us, they're always arguing they're at odds they're doing it right now. Hey, guys, Josh and I had so much to say about this topic that it turned out it was long enough to be two episodes, not just one episode. So we're going to stop things right here. You can find Josh's work at Stuff you Should Know, including the website podcast. They do live events,

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