July 15, 2022 • 36 mins
Could technology let us live forever? Stuff You Should Know's Josh Clark joins the show to talk about the possibility of digital immortality.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and how the Tech Area. It's time for a tech
Stuff Classic episode. This episode originally published back on July
(00:26):
two thousand fifteen. It is titled Who Wants to Live Forever?
It's really about digital immortality, and the great Josh Clark
of Stuff you Should Know joins the show on this episode.
Hope you enjoy. I have a feeling the title of
this episode will be who Wants to Live Forever? Because
I'm a big fan of Queen. Yeah, who wants to
(00:49):
Live Forever? That came from the soundtrack to the hit
film Highlander. Oh cult classic? Did Queen do the whole
sound 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, does not hold up? No,
the movie is one of those that I wish we
could just wipe from history and redo because the concept
(01:12):
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
Highlanders sound chracktality. Yeah, it's ultimately it all goes back
to uh tesla. No, we're gonna be talking about digital immortality,
(01:36):
this concept of using technology to extend our lifespans indefinitely. Yeah,
to 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
(01:59):
from hopping on a spaceship and high tailing it somewhere else,
you know, 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
(02:21):
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're 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
(02:45):
know how. I wonder what that experience would be, like
I wondered to be like going to sleep. Think about
a laser. The laser doesn't have any sort of infrastructure,
just beaming and you're transmitting light information in one place
to another at the speed of light. Right. Well, what
if we figured out a way to digitize ourselves, as
(03:05):
we'll talk about um, and we were able to beam
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 the understanding that
that digital information rests on top of some physical architecture. Right,
just as software needs hardware to run off of, Right,
(03:28):
you need like fiber optics. Now, yeah, I'm saying, what
if you remove that, we figure out a way to
remove it, then there's no Leyeah. 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.
(03:49):
That's what I was kind of if you're just gonna
send someone ahead, like, all right, Bill, it's your job
to set up all these these EPU talent. 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,
(04:10):
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
(04:36):
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 walk, saying it's going to happen, and some sometimes
(04:59):
they even put like DAYTI on things like this, Oh
yeh know the guy we got to talk about to
be at least Ray Kurts 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
(05:21):
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
(05:42):
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
from the limitations of evolution and chart our own course
from that point on. Yeah, that's that's pretty accurate. I
(06:03):
would argue that there's also, uh, 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
on a kind of happening, like very crudely, but it's
(06:26):
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,
(06:51):
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 down image 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
(07:13):
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. Right, It's not to it's
not to make up for a loss, it's to further.
It's to go to the next step exactly. So, uh, this,
this singularity idea is very closely related to digital immortality,
(07:37):
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 fannie, Like, does he constantly
(08:00):
worry about misstepping and dying, you know, people dying really weird,
random mundane ways every day. Yeah, 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
(08:21):
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,
(08:43):
it's the like the last guy to die in a war,
right after like right before the ceasefires. 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 you've told me about it though, Yeah, it's it's
a two comedians, uh, David Mitchell and Robert Webb who
(09:03):
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
(09:24):
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. Webb is like,
you could just be happy for them. 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.
(09:44):
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 wrote. Yeah two, or if
the advice she is constantly taking pill you know. Yeah,
(10:04):
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 UH is known to help you see better. Pretty sure,
(10:26):
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
(10:46):
turn rage. 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. And so I think it's the same thing
as what you're saying. The same thing with vitamin C. Right,
once you hit a certain level of vitamin C, anything
beyond that you're such as just going to pee away.
And in fact, vitamins can become toxic. Much of anything
(11:07):
is is toxic to the human body because it seeks 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
(11:27):
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.
(11:50):
We'll be back with more of this classic episode of
tech stuff after this quick break. I have, just while
you were speaking, pulled out my calculator and Ray Kurtzwell
takes a pill every five point seven six minutes a day,
(12:13):
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
(12:33):
any kind of hardware and or software that would allow
us to uh to migrate and intelligence from our meaty brains, right,
And that's a huge problem what you just said, We're
we are dealing in something called software hardware when what
(12:54):
the substrate that our our brains and consciousness exists on
is what you would term wetware. Yeah, by all logical material. Yeah,
and where it's not necessarily analogous to a computer. Even
though people tend 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.
(13:15):
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
(13:36):
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
(13:57):
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
(14:18):
you are experiencing. So, for example, right here in this
room my brain is your hair. The heat in this room,
the light in this room, little things, and I'm not
noticing everything that's hair look pretty good, isn't it again?
Start contrast with all the rest of the experiences is
amazing hair. So the these these pathways are forming in
(14:41):
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 podcast that
about two weeks ago. Yeah, I think my hair is
going to make it into your long term memory. But
the more you say it, the more likely it's gonna
happen when when I think back on it, my brain
(15:03):
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 yeah, right, Yeah,
But it's not like your memory of how great my
(15:25):
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
(15:48):
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. I don't remember
this transition it all right, we'll go with it. Just
the very active retrieving it from your computer's memory and
opening it again changes it. Right. That doesn't happen in
a computer, but it doesn't in human memories, right, right, exactly.
(16:10):
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
(16:34):
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
(16:56):
and software and our memories were more analogous to computer memory,
that would not be an issue. I witness that would
be so. But that's a that'sn'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
(17:18):
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,
(17:40):
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 does um that
that additional adding new material, adding new stuff to it
(18:01):
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,
(18:26):
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
(18:48):
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 they seeing the idea of uploading ourselves onto the
internet strick It is that with with memory, we can
(19:09):
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
(19:29):
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
(19:50):
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. We may never know. There's a
(20:12):
lot of philosophers out there like we may never figure
out the hard problem of consciousness. We've got more to
say in this classic episode of tech stuff after these
quick messages. Neuroscientists would say that clearly the mind which
(20:34):
is what we could probably you know, use as an
umbrella term for things like consciousness and experience, like 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
(20:54):
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.
(21:17):
But there are you 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
eight six billion normal human brain. I'm sorry, not synapthis neurons, 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
(21:40):
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
(22:00):
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 had. They just used a
laptops words, you can kind of let your imagination from
on with it, but that that was required just for
one individual neuron to power. Yea, so we're talking about
(22:21):
U 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
(22:41):
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 common plex simulation so some
of them. M I. T has a course on the
(23:04):
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
it makes total sense. Just the terrible name. Connectomics is
all about the connections that happen within the brain and yeah,
(23:25):
it does. Connectomics sounds like it's some sort of weird
economics course or like maybe an l Around Hubbard book. Yeah,
like dineticsnets 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.
(23:47):
They hired Ray Kurtzwile. Yeah, he's their chief engineer, director
of engineering. Yeah, for for specifically for the Google Brain project.
They 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
(24:10):
you know, armchair computer scientists neuroscientists sort of approach, but
they're really putting actual money towards research and development 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,
(24:31):
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
(24:53):
get some insight or 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,
(25:19):
it's largely 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 engineer in this case. And so in two
(25:42):
thousand eleven came up with a proof of concept hippocampll
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 hipocampus and you're no longer able
(26:03):
to form memories, than 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. I
(26:25):
have not. 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 faithents 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
(26:46):
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 freshed every
I think something like thirty seconds and he was just
lived in an institution and was fortunately taken care of
(27:09):
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
(27:32):
of this, because I have no memory of it. I
uh 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 convintion. I couldn't remember things. I had no short
term memory. Well, it makes sense. Like also, when you're
(27:53):
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.
(28:18):
There's another expert I want to mention, Ender's Sandberg of
the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. I'm a
huge fan of that institute. Yeah, yeah, one of my
favorite people in the world works. There's names Nick Bostroma. Yeah,
that guy I know of, Nick Bostrom. So Sandberg had said,
this is a quote. The point of brain emulation is
(28:41):
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. If run, it will be able to
think and act as the original brain. We are now
(29:03):
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
(29:23):
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
(29:45):
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 all over again.
You gotta pretty much crack the nogg and open and
mush around in the gray stuff to find out, you know,
(30:05):
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. Problem, So you can 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
(30:27):
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 is still dead. So Josh,
if you had this done, there would be a Josh
(30:48):
computer Josh Bought two thousand and Josh Bought would think
like you, would have quips like you with even 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
(31:11):
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 about it. Man. Every
day there we we have gaps in continuity. We go
(31:33):
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
(31:54):
of that. It could end up being a break in
our functional continuity. We can recover from that because is
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
(32:16):
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
(32:38):
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.
(32:59):
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 corps colossom isn't exactly. Yeah, so
(33:23):
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
(33:43):
we make the assumption that yes, we have created the
hardware and software that will allow for the simulation of
a brain 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
(34:07):
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
(34:28):
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,
(34:49):
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 intially immortal, but crap at math. So
I guess you get me 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
(35:12):
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
(35:33):
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. Well,
I hope that you really got a lot out of
that classic episode of tech stuff. If you didn't, don't worry,
(35:54):
Josh Clark will be back next week because this ended
up being a two parter, so we will continue are
just gusion about digital immortality on that episode next week.
If you have suggestions for topics we should cover on
episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The
best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle
for the show is text stuff h s W. I'll
(36:15):
talk to you again really soon Y. Tech Stuff is
an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I
Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and how the Tech Area. It's time for a tech
Stuff Classic episode. This episode originally published back on July
(00:26):
two thousand fifteen. It is titled Who Wants to Live Forever?
It's really about digital immortality, and the great Josh Clark
of Stuff you Should Know joins the show on this episode.
Hope you enjoy. I have a feeling the title of
this episode will be who Wants to Live Forever? Because
I'm a big fan of Queen. Yeah, who wants to
(00:49):
Live Forever? That came from the soundtrack to the hit
film Highlander. Oh cult classic? Did Queen do the whole
sound 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, does not hold up? No,
the movie is one of those that I wish we
could just wipe from history and redo because the concept
(01:12):
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
Highlanders sound chracktality. Yeah, it's ultimately it all goes back
to uh tesla. No, we're gonna be talking about digital immortality,
(01:36):
this concept of using technology to extend our lifespans indefinitely. Yeah,
to 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
(01:59):
from hopping on a spaceship and high tailing it somewhere else,
you know, 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
(02:21):
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're 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
(02:45):
know how. I wonder what that experience would be, like
I wondered to be like going to sleep. Think about
a laser. The laser doesn't have any sort of infrastructure,
just beaming and you're transmitting light information in one place
to another at the speed of light. Right. Well, what
if we figured out a way to digitize ourselves, as
(03:05):
we'll talk about um, and we were able to beam
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 the understanding that
that digital information rests on top of some physical architecture. Right,
just as software needs hardware to run off of, Right,
(03:28):
you need like fiber optics. Now, yeah, I'm saying, what
if you remove that, we figure out a way to
remove it, then there's no Leyeah. 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.
(03:49):
That's what I was kind of if you're just gonna
send someone ahead, like, all right, Bill, it's your job
to set up all these these EPU talent. 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,
(04:10):
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
(04:36):
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 walk, saying it's going to happen, and some sometimes
(04:59):
they even put like DAYTI on things like this, Oh
yeh know the guy we got to talk about to
be at least Ray Kurts 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
(05:21):
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
(05:42):
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
from the limitations of evolution and chart our own course
from that point on. Yeah, that's that's pretty accurate. I
(06:03):
would argue that there's also, uh, 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
on a kind of happening, like very crudely, but it's
(06:26):
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,
(06:51):
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 down image 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
(07:13):
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. Right, It's not to it's
not to make up for a loss, it's to further.
It's to go to the next step exactly. So, uh, this,
this singularity idea is very closely related to digital immortality,
(07:37):
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 fannie, Like, does he constantly
(08:00):
worry about misstepping and dying, you know, people dying really weird,
random mundane ways every day. Yeah, 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
(08:21):
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,
(08:43):
it's the like the last guy to die in a war,
right after like right before the ceasefires. 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 you've told me about it though, Yeah, it's it's
a two comedians, uh, David Mitchell and Robert Webb who
(09:03):
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
(09:24):
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. Webb is like,
you could just be happy for them. 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.
(09:44):
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 wrote. Yeah two, or if
the advice she is constantly taking pill you know. Yeah,
(10:04):
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 UH is known to help you see better. Pretty sure,
(10:26):
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
(10:46):
turn rage. 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. And so I think it's the same thing
as what you're saying. The same thing with vitamin C. Right,
once you hit a certain level of vitamin C, anything
beyond that you're such as just going to pee away.
And in fact, vitamins can become toxic. Much of anything
(11:07):
is is toxic to the human body because it seeks 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
(11:27):
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.
(11:50):
We'll be back with more of this classic episode of
tech stuff after this quick break. I have, just while
you were speaking, pulled out my calculator and Ray Kurtzwell
takes a pill every five point seven six minutes a day,
(12:13):
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
(12:33):
any kind of hardware and or software that would allow
us to uh to migrate and intelligence from our meaty brains, right,
And that's a huge problem what you just said, We're
we are dealing in something called software hardware when what
(12:54):
the substrate that our our brains and consciousness exists on
is what you would term wetware. Yeah, by all logical material. Yeah,
and where it's not necessarily analogous to a computer. Even
though people tend 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.
(13:15):
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
(13:36):
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
(13:57):
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
(14:18):
you are experiencing. So, for example, right here in this
room my brain is your hair. The heat in this room,
the light in this room, little things, and I'm not
noticing everything that's hair look pretty good, isn't it again?
Start contrast with all the rest of the experiences is
amazing hair. So the these these pathways are forming in
(14:41):
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 podcast that
about two weeks ago. Yeah, I think my hair is
going to make it into your long term memory. But
the more you say it, the more likely it's gonna
happen when when I think back on it, my brain
(15:03):
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 yeah, right, Yeah,
But it's not like your memory of how great my
(15:25):
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
(15:48):
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. I don't remember
this transition it all right, we'll go with it. Just
the very active retrieving it from your computer's memory and
opening it again changes it. Right. That doesn't happen in
a computer, but it doesn't in human memories, right, right, exactly.
(16:10):
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
(16:34):
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
(16:56):
and software and our memories were more analogous to computer memory,
that would not be an issue. I witness that would
be so. But that's a that'sn'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
(17:18):
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,
(17:40):
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 does um that
that additional adding new material, adding new stuff to it
(18:01):
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,
(18:26):
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
(18:48):
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 they seeing the idea of uploading ourselves onto the
internet strick It is that with with memory, we can
(19:09):
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
(19:29):
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
(19:50):
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. We may never know. There's a
(20:12):
lot of philosophers out there like we may never figure
out the hard problem of consciousness. We've got more to
say in this classic episode of tech stuff after these
quick messages. Neuroscientists would say that clearly the mind which
(20:34):
is what we could probably you know, use as an
umbrella term for things like consciousness and experience, like 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
(20:54):
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.
(21:17):
But there are you 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
eight six billion normal human brain. I'm sorry, not synapthis neurons, 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
(21:40):
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
(22:00):
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 had. They just used a
laptops words, you can kind of let your imagination from
on with it, but that that was required just for
one individual neuron to power. Yea, so we're talking about
(22:21):
U 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
(22:41):
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 common plex simulation so some
of them. M I. T has a course on the
(23:04):
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
it makes total sense. Just the terrible name. Connectomics is
all about the connections that happen within the brain and yeah,
(23:25):
it does. Connectomics sounds like it's some sort of weird
economics course or like maybe an l Around Hubbard book. Yeah,
like dineticsnets 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.
(23:47):
They hired Ray Kurtzwile. Yeah, he's their chief engineer, director
of engineering. Yeah, for for specifically for the Google Brain project.
They 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
(24:10):
you know, armchair computer scientists neuroscientists sort of approach, but
they're really putting actual money towards research and development 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,
(24:31):
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
(24:53):
get some insight or 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,
(25:19):
it's largely 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 engineer in this case. And so in two
(25:42):
thousand eleven came up with a proof of concept hippocampll
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 hipocampus and you're no longer able
(26:03):
to form memories, than 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. I
(26:25):
have not. 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 faithents 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
(26:46):
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 freshed every
I think something like thirty seconds and he was just
lived in an institution and was fortunately taken care of
(27:09):
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
(27:32):
of this, because I have no memory of it. I
uh 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 convintion. I couldn't remember things. I had no short
term memory. Well, it makes sense. Like also, when you're
(27:53):
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.
(28:18):
There's another expert I want to mention, Ender's Sandberg of
the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. I'm a
huge fan of that institute. Yeah, yeah, one of my
favorite people in the world works. There's names Nick Bostroma. Yeah,
that guy I know of, Nick Bostrom. So Sandberg had said,
this is a quote. The point of brain emulation is
(28:41):
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. If run, it will be able to
think and act as the original brain. We are now
(29:03):
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
(29:23):
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
(29:45):
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 all over again.
You gotta pretty much crack the nogg and open and
mush around in the gray stuff to find out, you know,
(30:05):
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. Problem, So you can 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
(30:27):
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 is still dead. So Josh,
if you had this done, there would be a Josh
(30:48):
computer Josh Bought two thousand and Josh Bought would think
like you, would have quips like you with even 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
(31:11):
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 about it. Man. Every
day there we we have gaps in continuity. We go
(31:33):
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
(31:54):
of that. It could end up being a break in
our functional continuity. We can recover from that because is
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
(32:16):
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
(32:38):
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.
(32:59):
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 corps colossom isn't exactly. Yeah, so
(33:23):
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
(33:43):
we make the assumption that yes, we have created the
hardware and software that will allow for the simulation of
a brain 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
(34:07):
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
(34:28):
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,
(34:49):
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 intially immortal, but crap at math. So
I guess you get me 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
(35:12):
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
(35:33):
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. Well,
I hope that you really got a lot out of
that classic episode of tech stuff. If you didn't, don't worry,
(35:54):
Josh Clark will be back next week because this ended
up being a two parter, so we will continue are
just gusion about digital immortality on that episode next week.
If you have suggestions for topics we should cover on
episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The
best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle
for the show is text stuff h s W. I'll
(36:15):
talk to you again really soon Y. Tech Stuff is
an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I
Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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