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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

anti aging is probably going to have a lot of unknowns and surprises along the long road. In the mean time, brain-machine interfaces and the transfer of conscious processes outside the brain seem like a more feasible road to immortality

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I think you have it exactly backwards. We have been increasing life span for quite a while. Uploading brains not so much

Maximum lifespan extension has been very stagnant. Hieronymus of Cardia, a companion of Alexander the Great who outlived his famous friend by about 80 years, dying at the age of 104 in the year 250 BC.

That’s someone famous enough to be memorable, presumably he wasn’t the record holder 2270 years ago. Most medical progress has been around avoiding people dying young rather than actually extending lifespans after 90. So moving the needle when life expectancy hits 85+ becomes far more difficult.

increasing the average, but nowhere near immortality (actually the average has dropped a bit the past decade). OTOH if we figure out how to extract the whole brain information outside the body, we know how to simulate it forever.

The "transfer of conscious processes" does not seem more feasible to me at all. We have absolutely no way to do that right now, we don't even know what consciousness is. I don't know of any research avenues on the subject either, if you know of some some I'd be interested to read about it.

In some distant future maybe making a copy of your brain in a simulator would be possible, but the copy would live on, you'd still die.

> I don't know of any research avenues on the subject either

There are many different brain-machine interfaces and probes , it s an active field of research for decades. Wikipedia must have an overview.

> maybe making a copy of your brain in a simulator would be possible, but the copy would live on

We know from conjoined twins that they can share brain structures, so maybe it is possible that only half of the person dies

Whatever we "transfer" our "conscious processes" into isn't going to last forever, either.

Eh, okay, so technically not immortal because the sun will still die.

I'm happy to settle for a "only" a couple millennia of life. More than I get now.

I think you're being incredibly optimistic if you believe it's possible to build a machine both complex enough to house a fully simulated human consciousness and robust enough to last billions or even thousands of years.

Bits rot, things break down, and it tends to happen to technology more quickly in most cases than to the human body. The more complex technology is, the faster it fails. We measure the life cycle of our most modern tech in months, not centuries.

The idea that you're going to surf the universe in an immortal, inviolate android body untouchable by aeons of time is closer to a religious hope than likely reality.

And people stop dying on this sphere, for which we still have no escape or distribution plan (into space).

They still die. "Uploading" is a copy operation, but the flesh and blood human and their flesh and blood brain still dies. Whether the copy counts as equivalent to the original is a philosophical matter. But as far as biology isn't concerned, you haven't eliminated death, you've just moved the goalposts on life.

The videogame SOMA is a pretty good exploration of this take :)

My point was - what will these growing numbers of living things do to a non-increasing volume of 4/3 pi r^3?

if the living things are electric they can be shot to interstellar space and beyond. even on earth, they'd be zero emissions

In the end, the geometry does imply that for a given reproduction rate, you eventually reach a crunch where there's not enough surface area of new space to expand to for your colonists, who are proportional to your volume. Being uploads speeds up your rate of expansion, because you could send out seedships much nearer to c and then beam over the digital colonists to be picked up by the infrastructure built at the new system- but digitised people could also reproduce much, much faster than biologicals.

It doesn't have to be.

Neurons are created and die all the time. Replacing them one at a time, with their virtual equivalent, would not be entirely different to what is already happening.

Not really, neurons are one of the few types of cells that don't undergo a cycle of death/creation of new cells. The neurons you had when you were born are the same you have now. They probably encode a lot of information that would be lost if they died and were replaced by fresh cells.

there is some neurogenesis, and the assumption is the new cells integrate with existing circuits over time.

However , in the scenario that single neurons are replaced with artificial copies with exact same synaptic weights, then yes they are functionally equivalent. It's already happening, with deep brain implants etc.

This is a myth. Neurogenesis changes with age and is mostly prevalent only in specific brain areas, but is a well investigated phenomenon.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3106107/ https://www.nature.com/articles/nm1198_1313 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4812798/

It's more that we're able to build computers from scratch, and we can transfer data between them. You can ship-of-theseus-backup yourself ad infinitum (well, until the usable energy runs out.)

are you even still "you" at that point?

from the pov of your current consciousness, does it really matter to be copied?

By the same logic - are you really you from one moment to the next?

from the perspective of my experience, yes. I think that is not true if you make a copy.

At least, you would leave an old you behind. Which from my intuition would be "me".

I understand "me" would also live on, but at that point I think I would just prefer to die.

so "you" is connected with the physical matter that makes you up? You are aware that that physical matter is completely replaced many times over during the course of your life time?

By the time we get to this thought experiment we only really need to consider people that were fine with the initial upload process. Being transferred to a new computer is peanuts in comparison.

So what?

I'd settle for 50x. Damn, even 5x would be a great improvement over current affairs.

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