Memento Mori
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
- Swinburne, The Garden of Proserpine
Because of a piece I wrote in the MIT Technology Review a couple of years ago, I am often asked to comment when “mind uploading” comes up. It is not something I am really that interested in. I am a neurobiologist, though, and maybe the fact that I don’t think it’s interesting is good: I have nothing to gain or lose from my opinions on the subject. Uploading is a catch-all term for any kind of virtual existence or immortality based on preserving or scanning your brain. Though I try to respond comprehensively when asked about it, usually the snarkiest thing I say is what makes it into an article, so I thought I’d just lay it all out here.
There are several ideas and technologies that are often conflated in these discussions. They span normal scientific research, transhumanist fantasy, techno-utopianism, and vapid tech culture boosterism, and my experience of interacting with “cryonics” people has been that they tactically shift among these positions to avoid being pinned to any of the flimsy premises at the heart of it. (“Cryonics” is actually a pretty good crank flag. Cryogenics is the science of cold things and biological samples might undergo cryopreservation. “Cyronics” is a dippy, new age paperback word, but sometimes they get muddled, and I often use them interchangeably without thinking.) If you push on the nonsensical uploading stuff, they retreat to reviving people from cryogenically stored bodies. If you point out the difference between something that is dead and cold and something that is alive and cold, they backpedal to tissue preservation for neuroanatomical research. Then they go out taking money from people while talking about uploading.
Their other rhetorical move is to conflate theoretical possibility and our ignorance of the future with some kind of likelihood or even inevitability about the power of future technology. This is not a serious position. It’s what Dan Dennett calls “intellectual tennis with the net down,” and it’s as tedious as it is absurd. There is no difference between invoking nanobots or quantum consciousness or any omnipotent, made up technology and invoking omnipotent, made up deities, and it preys on the same human cognitive and emotional biases. And just like using religion to sell indulgences, at its worst this trick is used to sell the promise of the non-existent. It is theoretically possible that humans will colonize other solar systems. Selling mortgages for houses on Alpha Centauri 3 to people now — no matter how thorough and winking your disclaimers are — is just a scam.
Techno-utopianism and transhumanism are a mish-mash of real science, made-up science, lazy and tortured metaphysics, and a willfully blinkered devotion to wishful thinking. For these reasons, I find it is hard to have honest exchanges with anyone who is deeply into it.
Cryogenic and chemical fixation based preservation of tissues is totally legitimate scientific research.
For example, the grant Nectome had that MIT was a subcontractor on is for completely normal basic methods research. Concerns rightfully arose because they were combining the air of legitimacy derived from this research (and their association with MIT) with their upload nonsense into a really ghoulish and exploitative form of medical hucksterism.
Reanimation
Tissue that has been fixed long-term with chemical fixatives (like Nectome’s method) is dead and is going to stay dead. Cells and small organisms can be indefinitely cryogenically stored and revived without chemical fixation. I have a big freezer full of worms. Most are dead or will die upon thawing, but some percentage survives. Will it ever be possible to do this safely with humans? There is no law of nature against it, so it will either be practically possible or it won’t. No one knows. I don’t have a dog in this fight, other than my certainty that what anyone is doing now is not something anyone will ever be “woken up” from. There are facilities containing very cold dead people (or parts of them) who will always be dead. Doing research is fine, taking money from frightened people making end of life decisions in the guise of a “service” is appalling.
Uploading
I don’t think a synapse-scale anatomical connectome is anywhere near enough information to make a simulation of a working human brain, let alone an individual, even in theory. This is the opinion of every neurobiologist I know. That said, chemical fixation does preserve many things at the molecular level. In theory, there might be enough information in a chemically fixed, cryogenically stored brain. The first problem is getting the information out. You would have to have some way of reading the relative abundance, distribution, and contacts between perhaps trillions and trillions of molecules — proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, etc. This scale of information is unimaginable and we have absolutely no clue about what technology could do this even in principle. We can’t say it is theoretically impossible — the information is physically there. But I think it is likely to be orders of magnitude practically harder — and probably much less scientifically interesting — than, say, establishing an interstellar human civilization, or the reanimation stuff discussed above.
“Enough information.” How much of that information do we need? We have no way of knowing, because we have no idea what we would do with the information if we had it. But, OK, fine, let’s assume we’ve read out everything we could possibly need. Then, we have to have the means to simulate a brain to a sufficient degree that it is a conscious entity. No one knows what this means, even conceptually. There is no biological or cybernetic or information-processing definition of consciousness. We are in a realm where no person has the slightest notion of what this would involve. None. It is pure fantasy, built on layer after layer of equally fantasy-based, interdependent technologies. But, sure, I don’t see why it is theoretically impossible.
Companies that offer any kind of life-extension based on reanimation or uploading have to assume (or pretend to assume) that whatever far-future technology is invented just happens to be back-compatible with brain preservation technology from 2018. I mean, I have lab reagents/equipment less than 10 years old that are obsolete and unusable.
I hope by now you see why I think “theoretically possible” is such a weak position to justify raising money or marketing a service. The usual transhumanist dodge is, again, “we can’t imagine the power of future technology and therefore we can assume it is unlimited.” It uses an obviously true premise (our ignorance) to disguise a transparently desperate conclusion (this one thing I care about will be not just possible, but practical). Acknowledging our ignorance of what the future will bring says nothing about whether future technology will be able to do this specific fantastical thing. Our assumptions about what is and isn’t possible in the future will seem as naïve in the future as those of the past do today.
Say what you will about Juicero, and laugh at the suckers who bought one, but at least they probably all drank some juice.
Why?
This is the hardest part for me: I don’t get why people care if simulations of themselves exist in the far future, even assuming we can somehow figure out the ethics of testing simulations of entities that are capable of suffering. Maybe all the transhumanist fantasies come true, and early adopters like Sam Altman will be among the first guinea pigs of a future nascently upload-capable civilization. And maybe — perhaps likely — those first sentient simulations will experience unimaginable horror and suffering until this future society (which we assume will feel utterly benevolent and giving toward us) decides to turn them off and try the next beta test. Or, maybe they‘ll just let’em run to see what happens to a horrifically suffering, insane simulation of a 21st century technopreneur.
Tutankhamun would be baffled and terrified by how we’ve screwed up his whole afterlife situation, which was prepared much more rigorously and expensively than any services offered today. Just like for Walt Disney and Ted Williams, cutting edge, state-of-the-art methods were used to ensure the highest possible likelihood of comfortable immortality. I don’t see why future cultures would be any more likely to respect our wishes and values, or why our hopes and sureties will look less naive to them than those of the pharaohs seem to us.
No one wants to die. But if it’s fear of death, well, [stage whisper] you’re still dead. The thing that is one particular subjectively-aware causal physical system in time and space has succumbed to entropy and does not exist. The new thing? It isn’t you. I could show you a black box and say “Inside this box is a perfect simulation of you enjoying a $250 glass of juice listening to 90s EDM on Peter Thiel’s space-yacht [I’m just guessing what these people like]. Scratch that, it’s Peter Thiel on your space yacht. You’re immortal!”
Maybe you’d be skeptical at first, but after I let you talk to what’s-in-the-box for a few hours, maybe you’d be convinced. Let’s say it’s true. Would that make you indifferent to death, because you’re in the box in some way that matters? Would you die to protect the box? Of course not, because your intuition is correct: whatever is in the box, it isn’t you. You’re not on P̶e̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶T̶h̶i̶e̶l̶’̶s̶ ̶v̶i̶r̶t̶u̶a̶l̶ ̶s̶p̶a̶c̶e̶ ̶y̶a̶c̶h̶t your virtual space yacht, someone else is. And if it’s just some kind of expression of ego, like a digital sentient monument to yourself…well, I’m sorry that’s just pathetic.
[I am well aware of the convoluted metaphysical arguments to get around this. Occam’s Razor, people.]
Cryogenic storage is useful for many kinds of medical research. But it would not be in the tech news if that’s what these companies were about. The reanimation/uploading immortality stuff is a sad sideshow used to take money from people who are afraid and/or making end-of-life decisions (again: indulgences). And obviously it’s just my opinion, but burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems? Why should they care? I hope they don’t. I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their descendants. The one good thing we reliably do for our descendants is get the hell out of the way. There are many other good things we could do for the future. Devoting our hopes and resources to egocentric and superficial falsity when there are so many other places to direct it in the world is not one of them.
