Billionaires, for all their money, face one ordinary limit: death. No matter how much you spend, no matter how many doctors you employ, you cannot escape the moment at which you cease to be. That is, perhaps, until now.
As we report here, a start-up called Nectome has developed a technique for preserving the physical architecture of the brain in the minutes after death. Tested so far in pigs but soon to be offered to people, the idea is that this could be used to reconstruct the brain’s “connectome”, a 3D map of its structure – and in doing so, provide a path to resurrection.
To be clear, we have no idea how to create a working consciousness from a connectome, nor whether it will ever be possible to do so. As we explore here, consciousness remains a deep mystery – complete with a famous “hard problem” – that we are still only starting to grasp.
Besides the scientific problem of consciousness, there are questions – can a brain be recreated digitally on a computer, or must it be biological? And even if we solve those, legal hurdles remain, as Nectome’s technique requires that the subject undergoes medically assisted death, which is illegal in most parts of the world. And yet, because Nectome is promising to preserve the structure of the brain indefinitely, anyone taking up their offer must merely hope that these problems are one day solved, even if not until the far future. Assuming it is actually feasible, Nectome customers may find themselves waking up centuries after their death.
Or will they? Philosophically, we have no way of knowing whether an entity jumpstarted from a copy of a dying brain would be a continuation of its original owner, even if the entity believed itself to be so. Practically, our descendants may simply leave the brains unrevived. With all that in mind, however, the fact remains that anyone who does undergo Nectome’s procedure may very well be setting themselves on the path to immortality. How we even begin to reckon with that is perhaps the hardest problem of all.
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