Immortality within grasp?

Originally posted by sardion2000


Why would you die? We don't have the technology yet so how can you make the assumption that the copying process will kill you? An advanced hypothetical MRI-like device could theoretically record everything in your head(they can already do this to a certain extent, it's just interpreting it is the hard part) and make a replica inside an advanced enough computer. You'd still be you, and the copy in side the computer would be you as well, theoretically speaking of course.

well you don't need to die during the process, but we were talking about immortality. I was just trying to say that this will not make you immortal it will make your copy immortal. And when your time comes you will still die and only your copy will be alive. So what's the reason to do it? For you it will be the always the same result - your death. Who cares, that your copy continues to live in electronic form, when you are death?

[edit on 24-5-2005 by longbow]

Ah now I got you, sorry I misinterpreted you. And there are alot of things going on in the Longevity front as well, so you may not die when you expect(noone know when they're going to die, and it looks like that we may (those of us under 30) not die for a very loooong time)

Your clone would be alive, so it would be the ultimate "graveyard." But it wouldn't be us, what we need is a way to transfer our consciousness into machines. Besides, it was predicted at the end of the 20th that computers would be able to pose as humans 70% of the time successfully on Alan Turing's test, yet we cannot. Granted though, those are two totally different fields, but I'm saying we shouldn't be too expectant, there might be some tragedy that'll disrupt the evolution process of technology.

All of this assumes our mind is in a "binary world" . Personally, I don't think our mind thinks in a binary system. So how do you down load it???

There is another form of immortality that hasn't been touched on quantum immortality.


Taken from wikipedia

"Quantum immortality is the name for the speculation that the Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that a conscious being cannot cease to be. The idea is highly controversial. Theoretically given any potentially fatal event that could happen to, say, a quantum physicist, there will be possible universes in which the physicist indeed dies and other possible universes where the physicist somehow survives. As time goes on the physicist is dead in more and more of all possible universes due to random accidents and aging, however because there are infinite possibilities, there will always be at least one universe in which the physicist miraculously lives another day. The idea behind quantum immortality is that the physicist would only be able to experience the universes in which he survives, even though they may be an increasingly small subset of the possible universes. In this way, the physicist would appear from his own standpoint to be living forever. Some of the potential ultimate fates of the Universe could present an eventual death with no means of avoidance no matter how unlikely, but even then in an infinite universe there could be some means of working around such a limit"