Debate topic of the weekend:
Will humanity conquer death, either organically or digitally?
I think either have a possibility. We might be able to regrow our bodies/organs and if necessary transfer our memories or our brain.
Or we could build some kind of matrix where our memories could be stored digitally. Of the two, I certainly prefer the organic option!
What do you think? Is it possible?
4,900 subscribers. 10,000 daily views.
Entropist: These idiots are wrong on so many different levels, its hard to... Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” Rally – Interviews With Participants
Just a Guy: Me an my wife have negotiated infidelity. Meaning she can be with other guys as long as she doesn’t hide... Negotiated Infidelity
Gwenny: Absolutely not! The world has plenty of people having kids. A child consumes HUGE amounts of resources, which from both a... QotD: Kids?
Siberia: Or maybe they know they have neither patience nor inclination to deal with the fruit of their loins and thus, rather than be... QotD: Kids? Siberia: Well, it wasn’t exactly my (or anyone’s) choice, was it? I didn’t exactly ask to be born. It was my... QotD: Kids?
DDM: Repubs and Dems. He’s saying they only take first impressions and... Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” Rally – Interviews With Participants
CM: Good point, most religions encourage having a lot of children. From an evolutionary standpoint you sort of owe it to your... QotD: Kids?
Jasowah: “They don’t go beyond those emotions, and that’s the... Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” Rally – Interviews With Participants
|
|
|
By 
108 Comments
Pretty sure that even if you did copy your memories to something else, it wouldn’t be you. Sure that would continue on, but a copy isn’t you you. It’s just a copy of you.
Totally agree.
For all intents and purposes though that copy IS you. Not only will no one else be capable of telling you apart but both you and the copy will be convinced that you are the original, and you’ll both remember everything up to the time of copy.
It’s probably worth pointing out that the human body is constantly rebuilding itself and trading matter with the environment. If you find it more palatable, imagine that instead of a direct instantaneous ‘copy’, small fractions of your mind are slowly copied and replaced with technological analogues.
Personally, I think that if you copy someone’s thoughts and memories into another brain (synthetic or otherwise), you are creating a second person, not moving the first. Granted, the second person is exactly the same as the first for all practical purposes, but from the perspectives of the original and the copy, there is a clear difference. (If it is not obvious, imagine that after the copying process, someone walks in with a gun, says, “Well, no need for *two* of you, is there?” and then takes aim. While you would probably not want either of you to be shot, you will probably react differently if the gun points at you rather than at your copy.)
I think that replacing the brain in bits and pieces is much more promising, from the perspective of the person who is looking for immortality. Presumably, if you replace just a small piece of your brain with everlasting synthetic brain, that would not be fatal. So if you just keep going piece by piece, waiting in between for the brain to adapt and integrate those new pieces, until nothing from the original brain is left, then the everlasting synthetic brain you are left with has become your brain.
It’s a matter of perspective though, and until recently I thought the same way. Both the copy and the original *are* the same person, with the gun pointing scenario you’ve chosen (or, perhaps, restricted) your perspective to either the original or the copy. It’s worth remembering that we’re assuming perfect copies – there’s nothing to distinguish them and hence no basis for deciding which is the original and which the copy. Both think that they got up that morning and hopped into the cloning machine.
I’m not certain that replacing bits is any better than replacing it all at once. It’s easier to accept but the end result is the same, other than bits instead of a complete brain being thrown out at once.
It’s the same question in reverse, is an amnesiac still the same person they were? Is a second body with the same brain as you the same person as yourself? No. Sorry to trivialize this subject in such a way, but it reminds me when they recast someone on a tv show, like Darren from Bewitched. From this point forward, the second you is taking in things and processing them like a separate person. If you are faced with a decision, the alter-you is capable of choosing differently than original-you. They might even decide to do things you wouldn’t risk your only body on, things you decide against for one good reason or another. Your thoughts aren’t in their head, it’s not like they are joined in communications. Autonomy of body and thought means they are not like you. That’s not you in there.
there are two people once you copy. but both those people ARE YOU.
you and other you will start to diverge from then on, but lets not make the mistake of thinking there is a ghost in the machine here. your mind (YOU) is the product of the brain. what the heart does is pump blood, what the brain does is YOU. copy the brain perfectly and to every last detail, and it’s you in there. like it or not. it is you.
someone comes in and points a gun right after the cloning with memory transfer? you both think you are you! it’s what it means to have a perfect copy.
and moments after being awakened you WOULD have the same thoughts. they would probably start at about the same time and they would consist of basically the same information. but even the SLIGHTEST variation of inputs and environment will cause you to drift away from each other quickly. but even then you STILL will both have significantly ’synched’ responses for the rest of your existences.
you and you. both of you. two people. one you.
the you that you know as you is simply a pattern that changes in a predictable way over time, if we recreate that then we have recreated you.
get over it.
“get over it”? What-ev! Jeez, some people.
Anyway, I think we just disagree on what it means to be a person. I am me, what does it mean to be me? If my brain were to be preserved and reloaded at a later date, that would still be me, continued. If you copied me to another, that is not me. I’m still in my head until I die. My processes will end regardless of whether they were copied and can continue. I will die, there is no preservation of my life in the copy. I will still face death and not know what’s going on in the future. This reproduction may enhance the lives of the people I know, that think that I will still be around, they think that’s me and that’s fine. But that’s not me. I’m not in that head, knowing things it knows and will know. The only way around it is to transfer, not to copy. The other me will think they are me, but original me will die, it’s dead, it’s gone. Life, it is over.
Actually, you are not disagreeing here. If your mind is the product of the brain, and there are two brains, then logically, there are two minds. It does not matter if they have the same starting point: they are two separate beings, with two separate identities. One of them, looking at the other, may recognize every attribute that they recognize about themselves, but they would not believe that they are in fact the same person. And the proof is in the gun-pointing illustration: if someone points a gun at one of them, that one knows the gun is pointing at them, and the other knows it is not.
Neither would have reason to doubt that they were the original, but the truth of the matter is that only one of them actually could be the original. Not that it really matters from any practical standpoint which one is which, if they truly are identical, but if they are different in a way that does not affect their identities — if, say, one is about to die and the other is going to live forever — then it definitely makes a difference to them.
Both the copy and the original *are* the same person, with the gun pointing scenario you’ve chosen (or, perhaps, restricted) your perspective to either the original or the copy. It’s worth remembering that we’re assuming perfect copies – there’s nothing to distinguish them and hence no basis for deciding which is the original and which the copy. Both think that they got up that morning and hopped into the cloning machine.
I understand what you are saying, but I do not agree. I believe that whether or not someone walks in with a gun, or walks in at all, your perspective must be from either one body or the other — either the original or the copy. Granted, if you both wake up in the same state (i.e., one of you is not laying on a bed covered in electrodes while the other is floating in a vat of mysterious bubbling fluids), you may not know whether you are the original or the copy, but you *would* know that you are not the other person in the room who looks exactly likes you and knows everything you know. The only alternative would be that your perspective would be from *both* bodies, which seems hard to imagine.
imagine that after the copying process, someone walks in with a gun, says, “Well, no need for *two* of you, is there?”
And what if You agree to die while in a drug-induced coma, and the You2 then wakes to life bearing the memory of You falling asleep. Would that be death, or just a deeper nap? I feel it, but I don’t get it. Am I dumb? Help.
It is really hard to think clearly about it, because as is mentioned further in this thread (where I’m going to write a longer response), we don’t really have a clear understanding of what we are talking about.
Have you been reading Iain M Banks, by any chance, Daniel?
Without being able to colonise other planets or build Culture style “Orbitals”, I sincerely hope we never manage to achieve immortality in that or any other way. Death is part of life. Work on a care-of-the-elderly ward for a while – you begin to understand what “tired of life” really means to somebody in their nineties.
I doubt the elderly would all get tired of life if there bodies could stay in 20-year-old condition.
Charles Stross wrote an interesting novel about the digital way. He’s made it freely available here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/accelerando/
I wonder what it would mean for the major religions if heaven no longer had a monoploy on eternal life. For many believers that is the biggest selling point. Heaven would loose a lot of its appeal.
Biologically, I am inclined to think it is impossible. Just knowing how cellular processes work, specifically DNA replication and repair, it is extremely unlikely we could beat death. Regrowing organs could be simple enough in future, but preserving our DNA as is would be incredibly difficult due to telomere shortening and other cell senescence processes. Unless we found a way to harness certain parts of cancer cell machinery and keep division rates under control (cancer cells are essentially immortal and can continue to divide forever, but are prone to lots of DNA reshuffling and duplication, which is lethal), I would say biological immortality is practically impossible.
As far as digitally goes, it would be a long way off at best. We still have very little idea of how the brain works, it is just so complicated compared to our other bodily systems. Even if we understood how it works in minute detail (this is probably decades away, if not centuries), there would still be the challenge of finding a way to convert all of that biological info to digital info. Then there is the additional challenge of putting those memories into another body (it could not be a clone, due to the issues discussed above) or a robotic body. In that case, robotics would have to progress quite a lot.
As the old saying goes: “The only things in life which are certain are death and taxes”
“incredibly difficult” isn’t the same as impossible, as you seem to acknowledge when you later change it to “practically impossible.”
I rather think Daniel’s asking if we think this is theoretically possible–and so far, no one has offered an objection to this as a theoretical possibility.
Tommy
Tom is right. Of course it’s not possible now — I’m talking in 100-10,000 years.
Well, I’ll admit that in theory it may be possible. However, surmounting the practical issues would be a Herculean task.
I hold the rather pessimistic view that our species will have gone extinct before science progresses enough to accomplish this. (Why yes, I am a jaded evolutionary biology student!)
I think that so long as there’s only one copy at a time, there’s no real difference between the you before copying and the you afterwards – continuity of personality is entirely down to memories. (I’m actually planning to write a book about the development of this technology, and the social consequences… but right now I’m just too lazy)
I’ll do the whole Matrix thing, as long as Keanu Reeves isn’t there.
In all seriousness, though, I doubt that the biological route is possible. Even if you could grow a brain identical to yours and transplant it into your body (or grow yourself a clone, or whatever), it would – as stated above – be a different person who just happened to be identical to you. The mechanical route could be possible, if laymen can get past the naïve idea that emotions are some extension of the “soul” rather than complex chemical processes that could be replicated.
At any rate, I think that trying to do this by any method would be a bad idea. Extended lifespans would lead straight into overpopulation, unless all new births were stopped. And locking humanity into a static set of inhabitants would be very bad. The human brain tends to be pretty limited, and I don’t think that a world of the same people for centuries would have the same capacity for development as a world into which new, fresh minds are constantly being introduced. Bottom line, I think the human race would stagnate. And then probably go extinct.
Yeah but just a little over a hundred years ago most people believed powered flight was impossible. I think it would be a combination of both if it is going to happen. How it would be done I have no idea and would you be the same person? No you would have the memories of who you were before but anything you do now would make you a different person. I know if my memories were moved to a younger body there are things I would do differently then I did this time.
We probably have the same identity issue right now. Are we the same person we were twenty years ago? I have been told (don’t know if it’s true) that all the cells in our body change over at least every 7 years. What is continuous is our perception of continuance, maybe?
There is no law of nature that prohibits cheating death. We could theoretically determine the quantum states of every single atom in our bodies, store that information (which to my knowledge would require a bunch of hard disks the size of the Earth), and create copies of that body.
Also, there is no theoretical limitation to the idea of somehow transferring our minds into machines. For all that we know, we could already be “dead” and trapped in a “Matrix”, as there is no way to tell the difference if the computer system was programmed in such a way.
So in essence, the answer is, yeah, we could probably do the trick. It will take ages to develop the necessary technology, but if we put a lot of effort in it, I don’t see why we could not do the trick.
The problem, however, is that given the current way humanity deals with its only habitat, we will presumably run out of time. And there are follow-up questions that are even more problematic: Why would you do such a thing? What adaptations are required for a persona to exist for a period that is significantly longer than that given by nature? Given the complexity of said process, who would have access to it? In case of digital storage, who would be responsible if anything went wrong? What would be your legal status? Would you still qualify as a human being, with rights and duties and everything? What if it is done against your will?
The ramifications on societies are endless: economics (the longer you live, the more money you can make through accrued interests), pastimes (parachuting without a parachute), politics (people tend to become more conservative through the years), to name just a few.
I personally hope that noone ever opens this Pandora’s Box.
Yes- but what about the big rip which will end the universe for good some billion of years in the future? Even if we could manage to live that long, the universe will be destroyed and we’d be dead– unless there were multiverses and we could somehow escape…
I pondered about putting in the death of the universe, but since the question was if we could conquer death, it seemed a bit off topic (not that I am against OTing). But since you addressed it, it’s the ultimate death. Either a Big Rip or the scenario I prefer, the Big Freeze, or something else.
As I like to say: Let’s face it, we won’t get out of here alive. Seems you have to believe in the skydaddy to get an eternity…
Death is not such a bad thing. The real question is Can we conquer dying?
That’s a great comment.
Thanks. No one else seemed to get it.
Will death ever be conquered? The answer is…YES, but “we” wont do it, He will…for the last enemy that shall be conquered is death.” 1 Corinthians 15:26.
Good thing you have supporting evidence for that.
Regardless of what you believe, it is entirely possible that eventually we will have the technology to upload someone into a “matrix.” If that’s possible, it’s also possible to create an undying robotic body. “Ghost In The Shell” I feel has a pretty interesting take on all of this.
Yes, I do as a matter of fact for…faith is the substance of things hoped for, the EVIDENCE of things not seen. Heb 11:1.
Leaving the false realm of appearances, not merely believing what our physical eyes tell us as He instructed we transition into the true, eternal realm of spirit that is from the beginning.
Sorry, JC but that isn’t what evidence means:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evidence/
Ah don’t try that with him you know he redefines words as he needs to. How else could he create his own reality based on some weird ideas. If he had to use the proper definitions he wouldn’t be able to fool himself into believing what he says.
Well it was worth a try! Also, JC you *can’t* leave the realm of appearances– your thoughts are necessarily dependent on your sense experience. If you had no sense experience, you’d have no thoughts.
put more clearly, this Platonic spirit realm that you refer to is just an artifact of language– language that arises as a direct result of sense experience.
“Sense” experience is part of the Adamic dream (nightmare) the illusion and so not of the true, eternal realm of the spirit and man(kind) has not yet awoken out of the nightmare. So we hear these true words (if we want to) “Awake to righteousness and Christ (our true identities) will shine on us”.
As always…there is more….lol.
Reminds me of a recent episode of Dollhouse on FOX. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the show but the premise is a group of people called “Actives” who for a price can be provided to clients with certain memories to suit the client’s purpose. In a recent episode the life after death angle was presented. A woman who was murdered got her memories put into the body of a female Active and gave her an opportunity to solve her murder and give her life closure.
I find FOX network amusing. On one hand they have compelling TV like Dollhouse created by atheist Joss Whedon, Animation in An atheist main character in House played by Hugh Laurie who himself is an atheist… then we have Faux News which serves a conservative agenda.
Oh and there’s the Seth MacFarlane animated shows on FOX, too.
Follow the money.
Heh, paraphrasing David Hilbert (who happens to be a relative, haha) on this subject:
“We must not believe those, who today, with philosophical bearing and deliberative tone, prophesy the fall of culture and accept the ignorabimus*. For us there is no ignorabimus, and in my opinion none whatever in natural science. In opposition to the foolish ignorabimus our slogan shall be: We must know – We will know!”
*Ignorabimus et Ignoramus – “we don’t know and we will not know”, a stance that struck scientists, philosophers and others in the late 19th and early 20th centuries about the development of the scientific understanding which apparently had hit a massive wall and was “unable” to progress. Apparently, for them, everything was discovered already. Besides Hilbert, Einstein, Heinsenberg and Planck would proceed to throw them off-balance shortly afterwards. ;D
An interesting question concerning this topic is whether or not evolution is going to jump tracks from the biologic to the electronic. A hundred years from now the entire human race could be compared to the Amish.
Memories are inextricably tied to emotions…and emotions are tied to biology. If you store the memories you must store a copy of the biology from which the memories are generated – otherwise the effects that the memories biologically produce will have changed.
In essence, a completely cybernetic body won’t experience the memories the same way the original biological being did. It’s just data.
I’m fairly sure that we’ll find a way to do it eventually, it’s only a matter of time.
However, I don’t know if we -should-. It’d be ridiculously expensive, but imagine a truly awful figure in history who you CANNOT KILL. An Immortal Hitler, for example. Keeping the same hate flowing, the same evil agenda, and the same charisma and leadership.
But the same forces exist today and are countered more or less by opposing forces. Why would you think that evil forces will win out in that particular setting more so than in a more prosaic future? I’m guessing that a risk/benefit analysis is nearly impossible since that particular future would be so very different than what we are accustomed to.
Immortality is not all that it’s cracked up to be. I think we value our lives precisely because they are limited. We value good health because we know it can be lost. It’s like having money. Suppose we have a magic wallet that contains $1,000,000.00 and when we spend any part of the money, it magically reappears in the wallet. Money, for us, would lose its value completely. We would pay $100,000.00 for a loaf of bread without a second thought. The same pertains to life and health. If we became immortal and indestructible, anything we did would be without consequence and, ergo, without value. It is only death that makes life so precious.
Imagine yourself as a personality/information nexus on an internet of the future. You could still ‘die’.
Interesting reading on personal identity:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-time/#5
And death:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/death-definition/
I think that given the prospect of the “big rip” of the universe, talk on living forever is moot. [too bad! :( dying scares me. ]
If you could “die” in a permanent sense, then I’d go for it because, again, only death makes life worth living.
Mmm, I’m not getting how to use this “reply” feature.
Why the cat picture haha..?
Because Daniel asks “Will We Conquer Death?” and kitty says, “I don’t think so, meow!”
It’s ZOMBIE CAT!
OMFSM!!! It IS zombie cat!!! LOL!
In principle, I think this is possible. People seem to think that the new body would be a new person, but I disagree. I think that if your brain is copied and then put into a new body, it would be you, but with the experience of having suddenly been moved some distance away into a new body. If you were still alive and conscious, you would be you without that experience. I think this breaks the “two yous” paradox. As soon as the experience of the brain copy diverges from the original, you have two individuals — each of which is a possible step from the “you” of the present.
But imagine if you went to sleep, and then your brain was copied into another body. Your original body is euthanized. The new body (asleep) can optionally be moved into the same spot. Either way, it will be you with the experience of waking up in a new body. The “paradox” is resolved by removing the original body entirely (hopefully it was already on its way out). The experience of waking up in a new body is a necessary part of having your brain copied into a new body, but it separates you from the “you” who woke up in the same old body. It’s a little hard to explain, but we’re considering possible future “you”s, and there isn’t just one of them in this context.
Ultimately, I think if we had the technology to copy brains, we would also have the technology to make organic bodies through industrial means, since I think the latter would probably be even a little easier.
Assuming such technology is possible, my guess would be that it will take us a few centuries to get there.
Actually, I think the most promising research on this is the aging research. We are genetically programmed to die. If we re-program our cells, then they would be able to divide into new cells forever (the way stem cells and cancer cells do). Then we wouldn’t need a new body– because our body would continually renew itself.
I agree that this is the correct route for extending life, but there are several reasons I don’t think it can give you eternity:
A) Sugars and proteins form stiff, yellowish compounds that build up and tissues and lead to the stiffening that causes joint stiffness and cardiovascular disease. There are ways of breaking these compounds down, but there’s bound to be some buildup over time, and it will always increase the chance of a heart attack or other problems.
B) DNA degrades over the course of multiple cell divisions — this is true for cancer as well. In fact, it increases the chance of cancer. Certainly, future technology has good odds on delaying or reversing these effects, but my guess is that is a ways off as well.
C) Most importantly, you still only have one body, so if you get hit by a bus, you’re done. With the technology to record brain states, you can guarantee having a backup “you”, even if you have to lose a few days or weeks of memories.
That, and I’m more interested in the philosophical problem posed by the brain copying scenario. I think I have a good interpretation, though admittedly, in my scenario, at least one of you has to die.
The paradox isn’t actually removed because you still died.
The fact that one body dies has nothing to do with the paradox. I think you are overthinking what being a “you” entails.
Imagine your brain is copied into a new body. You are still you. But You2 also thinks he is you, except with the experience of having been moved some distance away into a new body. If you closed your eyes and then opened them and were somewhere else and in a new body, would you feel you were an entirely different person? Since you’d have all the same memories, including those of the last few minutes, you absolutely wouldn’t. You2 doesn’t either. He is you, but with a different set of experiences starting from the moment that the brain was copied into his body.
Let’s assume we never let You and You2 talk, meet, or correspond with each other. Then, presumably, You die of natural causes. But You2 has been living some time since the copying with the strong impression that he is you, but having one day found himself transported into a new body in a different place.
I think You2 is the same you, every bit as much as you’re the same you every time you wake up, or even every time you blink. In other words, I think you’re overstating the persistence of identity in general.
I just don’t think this is a very clever way to cheat death. If I want to live forever, I want it to be me, but the copy will go on, and I will die. I will still die. It doesn’t matter if the whole composition of the other’s brain is identical to mine, I’m not in there, I can’t get in there, and I will still die. I have two toasters and one’s broken, and I’m going to throw it out. Maybe I will save it for parts when the other toaster breaks. That doesn’t mean they’re the same toaster.
Again, I think you’re overestimating the persistence of “you” in the first place.
Imagine falling asleep and having your brain transplanted into another body. Is it still you?
Imagine falling asleep and having your brain copied into a new body. You would feel exactly the same way as if you had had your brain transplanted.
The problem here is that there is still a “you” in the original body. The only way to avoid this outcome is to destroy that body. But if you die in your sleep, you cease to be you anyway, right? And you’re not even aware of it when it happens.
So what’s the phenomenal difference between having your brain transplanted while you sleep, and having your brain copied into a new body and then dying in your sleep? How could you tell the difference?
That is to say, if you woke up in a new body, how could you determine whether:
A) your brain had been transplanted
or
B) your brain had been copied, and the original body died in its sleep?
If my brain were transferred to another host body of some sort, that would still be me. The problem is “cheating death” by copying the brain. You are supposing a non-tragic implantation of a copy brain into my body or a clone of my body, such that I must have died in my sleep or was murdered. I wouldn’t know the difference when I woke up because I wouldn’t be waking up. The same way someone doesn’t know anything after they die anyway. The copy would likely go through my routine as if it were me, and go to work and recognize faces and know how to do my job.
The copy wouldn’t know the difference, it’s the copy who doesn’t know they’re not me. I know they aren’t, if we are allowed to figure I know things after I die, and know that I have ceased to be. Or if we just say, I haven’t died, but am being stored or perhaps retained my body while a copy of me was made. If the copy is immortal, that’s great. I still die, awareness doesn’t cut into the fact. Can’t cheat death this way.
Put my brain in another body, I would still be me, just like someone who becomes a quadriplegic or an amputee is still themselves, but I would feel at least a little clumsy. I don’t know how muscle memory works, but I think there’d be some adjustments with the things I know how to do and the particular way I do them. Take away my brain (mostly) and leave my body, that’s really a question I had asked about amnesiacs, and possibly for other mentally damaged people. Which part of your brain is you? If you are my parent and I can’t recognize you, would you consider me still me and maybe I’ll remember you someday, or would you just start over like I was your baby and re-know me and re-teach me, or could you just agree I’m dead now in a living body, that’s not her, and go on with your life, because I won’t know the difference?
That’s sort of philosophical, but the way it works, the awareness of the brain or lack of brain doesn’t enter into it. If everyone had copies of their brain on back-up, you could just implant the copy of my brain into my body and take the amnesiac one out – the copy doesn’t know the difference, the amnesiac brain can’t tell the difference, a dead person doesn’t know they are dead. They’re done knowing things and don’t live on. Period. That’s how it is, with or without a copy. The copy doesn’t function to let you continue living, except for people who will accept the copy as yourself. The switcheroo where you wake up in your body in your bed and don’t even consider that some kind of major surgery occurred on you while you were sleeping, that doesn’t erase the fact that you yourself don’t continue to live on. The problem posed was “cheating death.” “Living forever or a very long time.” That didn’t happen.
So you visit the You2 store at the local mall where the salesperson tells you that they can make your body 50% more efficient. You say great. He says that the way it will work is that they will put you to sleep, upload your brain onto a disk, kill your body, make the super duper improvements, reanimate your body (but we can’t reanimate your brain) and download your brain copy into the new you. Are you buying?
Another good way to put this is if you had your copy with you now, would your significant other have to love both of you? I mean physically.
Nanites are a good possible way to go for the whole no aging/no disease definition of immortality. All aging is, is slow damage at the cellular and sub-cellular level; a few billion nanobots programmed correctly (after we figure out exactly the mechanisms and progression of damage due to aging, of course) could keep you in tip-top shape indefinitely. You could also design a breed of nanites that is a hyperefficient immune system, either to augment or replace the one you’ve already got.
The tougher problem is the “new body”/invulnerable to injury sort of immortality. That one I tend to think is not possible for the general difficulty of the notion that consciousness is non-portable; all one would achieve doing is creating copies of one’s personality, instead of moving it. It may be irrelevant to the new creature thus created (who would believe that they are the old creature having been successfully moved into the new body) but it would matter to the old creature still stuck in the old body (and who would still, presumably, die).
Nanotechnology is awesome!
ie, molecular motors:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/441670.stm
As I’m probably clumsily arguing above, I disagree. I think it comes down to what you think “you” actually are.
Consider the notion that our brains construct an illusion of identity in order to put our bodies in relationships to other patterns we recognize. When I say, “I am mowing the lawn,” I am positing the existence of several entities: the lawn, presumably a lawn mower, the action of mowing, and of course myself.
What is a “lawn”? It would be fairly simple to construct a definition for lawn in terms of other entities, but at some point this process has to break down. A lawn is a synthesis of perceptions, each processed in a different part of the brain and then put together mysteriously into a coherent whole. Imagine now that you wake up one morning unable to synthesize your perceptions into coherent wholes. Imagine the greenness, the flatness, the grassiness, and all the other atomic constituents of the impression of a lawn now exist apart from one another. You would be unable to function, unable to react meaningfully to your surroundings.
Would you still be you? I think you would to the extent that you have memories of being you. Perhaps you can no longer form memories meaningfully, but perhaps your now incoherent sensory impressions can trigger memories of your past. If we consider the situation where your memories cannot be put together into coherent wholes, then I would have to concede that you are probably no longer you; that you are hopelessly brain damaged.
But likewise, what composes my identity? What is it that is lost when I die such that a copy doesn’t count as me? I suppose this goes to Kodie as well, since I still don’t understand what either of you are positing as the entity that we’re trying to preserve, here.
Yeah, Dan L. Imagine a copy of you was built right now and is sitting next to you, or on your lap. That person tries to post to the forums instead of you. They know your passwords and such, right? They know what you were thinking. But the simultaneity is gone. You take a bite of a salad and start choking. Do you know the Heimlich Maneuver? Maybe your copy will help you out. Maybe they don’t think they need to. You would be the one choking, and the copy would be attempting to unblock your windpipe. If they succeed, you will have had the experience of choking and they will not. If they fail, you will know you are dying when you can no longer breathe. Living on in the copy isn’t possible.
When you place this occurrence at a time when you are sleeping, without knowledge of the copy or the realization that you have died when someone replaced you with your copy, it doesn’t take away from the fact that you cease to live, and the copy is someone else. Your individual consciousness doesn’t move from your brain to the copy of your brain. It has its own consciousness who believes itself to be you, and blends into your life as if you hadn’t died, but it’s another person.
The question is, what is consciousness and why can’t it move? What is it that you think consciousness is? Elemenope said above that it is “non-portable”, but how do you know? I certainly can’t logically demonstrate that. I haven’t even seen a meaningful definition of consciousness yet.
If you and your copy are side by side, as in my scenario, and your copy attempts to respond to my post instead of you, do you not feel a little possessive about the words and phrases you want to choose to communicate your point to me and others? If your copy takes that away from you, do you say, good enough, now I can get out of my chair and take care of some things around the house that have been slipping. This is really convenient having two mes! Won’t you still have to come back later and read what your copy wrote, as much as you’ll be curious as to what I or someone else had to say about it? Are you comfortable delegating the full responsibility to your copy to read and post to Unreasonable Faith so that you can accomplish other things?
This is what I mean, and also, when you die, you don’t know the difference afterwards. If it was a painful death, you’ll go into shock, and you’ll die. You will not know the difference if your copy has taken over your life, but “what is consciousness” is the possession of your autonomous thoughts. Even if your copy has identical patterns in the brain so they can essentially take over as you, if they were here now, you would clearly see the difference between you and he. The copy would not know the difference that he is not similar to you up to the save point, but they would agree with me, that you’re not pulling the strings up there anymore and they have their own autonomous thoughts. Just because all their thoughts and perceptions and abilities cause them to believe they are you, they can also see they are a separate person from you. If you switch the Folgers in the night and take my brain out and replace it with copy, the copy doesn’t have any way of knowing, just like your dead brain (with or without copies technology) doesn’t have any way of realizing it’s dead. It is sort of a victimless crime that way, but it still happened. If you observe it in the light of day while two of you exist, you wouldn’t say you know what your copy is thinking and have any influence now over the direction of their thoughts.
“The copy would not know the difference that he is not similar to you up to the save point, but they would agree with me, that you’re not pulling the strings up there anymore and they have their own autonomous thoughts.”
I messed up some of the words through this part, but I think if you disregard the whole thing, the rest of the text still adheres to my point. I don’t feel like rephrasing it, and just taking the word “not” out doesn’t really cut it for me.
OK, but that doesn’t answer my question. What is it that you think consciousness is? Why do you think it is that is destroyed when the original body dies, such that the copy who “thinks” is is you is not good enough?
It’s not an extension of the first life, but instead a substitute. Others may be satisfied with this as a solution to keeping you around, but it’s essentially like getting a new dog when your old dog dies, or if you like a better example, a goldfish. Everyone including your copy is happy with the arrangement, but you’re still external to all that. You’re dead, you’re not with them. Whether this technology ever is developed and implemented or not, the story doesn’t change. When you die, your lights go out, and you’re oblivious to the facts thereafter, you don’t continue to live inside a copy of your brain.
You’re still dodging the question. What is “you”? What is it that dies that you find so important that copying the brain and destroying the original isn’t good enough?
See, I think you’re conflating “consciousness,” and “identity,” and I think those two things are separate. So I’m trying to figure out what it is you think “consciousness” is, and what you think “you” or “identity” is. Can you try to be more specific about what you mean by, for example “you don’t continue to live inside a copy of your brain”?
And by the way, it’s not like getting a new dog or a new goldfish at all. That’s a rather absurd argument. We’re talking about the status of something which at the very least thinks it’s a human being, and has the ability to reason. Plus, a new dog wouldn’t think it was the old dog and wouldn’t act quite like the old dog. If the old dog’s brain had been copied into a younger dog’s body, it would.
I’ve used example after example and scenario after scenario to try to get this nugget through to you. So go read those, I haven’t dodged your question at all. And yes, it is like getting a new goldfish. Everyone’s happy with this as an acceptable replacement except the old goldfish. Goldfish being essentially identical unless you are an ichthyologist. I consider “Copy” of you to be your placeholder, because you would be dead. It’s identical to you for my purposes but not yours. Just because it thinks it’s you doesn’t mean you don’t have your own thoughts on the subject while you’re choking on salad.
I think the problem is that the whole thought experiment only yields the results that Kodie, Elemenope and I are aiming for if you imagine yourself in the role of the person being copied. Imagine that you, Dan L., step into a booth, see a bright flash of light (which you know means a copy is being made), and then you step out again. You have no way of knowing at that moment whether you are the original or you are the copy, but if you see another booth opposite to yours, with a person who looks exactly like you stepping out, would you point and say, “That person there is me?” It would be a ridiculous statement: you cannot perceive that other body’s thoughts, so you have no way of knowing they truly are your own. All you can say at that moment is, “That person there looks like me.” If you were to go on and interview them, you may find that they have the same thoughts and memories as you, but by the time you have done that, you would have had additional memories that are different from theirs — namely, the memories of giving an interview, as opposed to being interviewed — so again, it would be ridiculous to say that you are them. No matter how you slice it, when you make a copy of a person, you have two separate, distinct people.
Kodie:
First of all, it is nothing like replacing a goldfish. The reason goldfish are so easy to replace is because their behavior is simple. Humans are difficult to replace because they are complex, and if I can produce a person in a new body that behaves very much like the original person, I think I have something more interesting than merely swapping out a goldfish. After all, if the copy is not quite right, the family would know in the case of a human being, moreso than in the case of a goldfish, right?
Also, I read every single one of your posts before posting that last one. You have never given me an explanation of what is lost when you die such that the copy isn’t good enough. Consider the following:
When one is getting old and fearing death, employ an individual under the following terms:
“I will fall asleep tonight, and wake tomorrow in a new body. You may anesthetize me and then either transplant my brain or copy my brain into a younger body but the means you choose must be kept a total secret. Of course, either means entails destroying the anesthetized original body.”
And so you wake up the next morning in a new and younger body. The means by which you got there are an utter secret. Your memories extend from your birth to the moment you fell asleep last night, and now a few moments after waking up this morning.
Are you still you?
If that’s not convincing, then how do you know (aside from the fact that it is not possible technologically) that you weren’t replaced in your sleep with a copy of yourself with the original subsequently destroyed?
You really haven’t told me what you mean by “you”, and reading your posts over again isn’t going to change that fact.
RobG:
I think that it is possible to have two different people that identify as the same person (nominally) because they both share memories of being that person. Does that explain it better? So even though experience after the copying causes a divergence, each person still remembers being the original person. In fact, the divergence is an important part of my point, not a challenge to it.
The notion that the “original” owner of that identity somehow has some special privilege to it does not ring true to me, in this case. And although Kodie nor yourself has provided me any notion of what would confer this privilege, it smells like some kind of atheistic dualism.
The “original” owner of the identity has an individual privilege to their identity. Replacing a the first brain with the copy of it means the first brain ceases to live, is divided from further identifying with the copy. If I place you on one side of a wall, in a cell perhaps, and copy your brain and put it into a body on the other side of that wall, and not tell you, is that you? If I set that copy-you free to go home to your family, is that you? It can think it’s you all it wants and not know the difference, and nobody else will no the difference, while you are in the cell. Speaking of cells. Em. It’s exactly like replacing a goldfish with another goldfish. You’re still at the pet store while some other fish is hanging out in your place, touching your stuff and thinking it’s his, and your family treats him like you. As I had said much further above, with two of you there who both think you are you, would your significant other have to love both of you?
I’m a little tired of you not getting this. Your singular idea is this would only work if you were anesthetized during the operation. “You” (either version) wouldn’t know you had been replaced, because you died. When you die, you don’t know stuff. It’s exactly the same as dying now, which is something we’re trying to examine the possibility of cheating in this manner.
I understand what you’re saying, Kodie, but you’re still not addressing my question. Yes, the original you still thinks it’s you, but so does the new you.
What if, on your deathbed, a copy of your brain is made and put into a new body. Then, the original dies. The new one wakes up and its last memory is being you and losing consciousness on your deathbed. Why is this new body not you? What is the entity that was lost? Is it a little man in your head that makes you you? Some kind of spiritual energy? Your pituitary gland? What?
If you’re getting a little tired of me not getting this, I’m getting a little tired of you A) presenting this goldfish thing like it’s actually relevant to the question of human identities, B) refusing to actually explain what you think is the nature of identity, and C) arguing totally by assertion.
Saying it doesn’t make it true. If you can actually explain why the original owner has a special privilege to the original identity, I will believe you, but simply stating it is not arguing for it. Basically, I think your position is based on some unstated and unjustified assumptions about the nature of identity and consciousness, and frankly I’m getting a little tired of you failing to think a little more openly about how the mind, consciousness, etc. might work.
I think you are focusing too much on the “special” privilege. It’s not “special” as in “I was here first, so I get to be me.” It simply is. You have not tried to compare yourself with a copy of yourself yet. You are not he and he is not you. Unless you can say you are he and he is you, you are not and he is not. If the copy of you goes on and lives the rest of your life for you, right now, not after an operation to euthanize you and dispose of your body and your brain, is that satisfactory example of you living on, from your perspective?
Would you still try to live your life in competition with the copy, or let your copy live your life so you can go to the tropics, or would you think you were irrelevant and suicide yourself? Your version of whatever consciousness is doesn’t bother the sleeping and it wouldn’t bother the dead. What if I told you I was going to put you under anesthesia and replace your brain with a copy of your brain, but the operation failed and you died, and also your copy brain? How would you know the difference? That seems to be your primary question throughout. What if I told you I was going to put you under anesthesia and replace your brain with a copy of your brain, but the lab messed up the labels and someone else’s brain was implanted?
You don’t seem to care about any of this, which is essentially the same thing as being dead. How would you know? You would be dead and the world would go on.
Dan L.,
I considered some form atheistic dualism at one time, but I am trying very hard to avoid it here, because it introduces one of those unprovable entities that we all dislike so much. Instead, I am trying to focus solely on the processes of the physical brain.
First of all, we are making an assumption that the brain is the only essential part of your identity. If you receive a heart transplant, or if you lose a limb and have it replaced with a prosthetic, your identity is not changed. But if you receive a brain transplant — your brain is removed and discarded, and someone else’s brain is put in your body — then your identity has changed: you are gone, and someone else is now using your body. If that assumption is granted, then the assertion Kodie and I are making is that there is a fundamental difference between copying your brain’s contents into another brain, and transplanting your brain into another body.
Using your example of telling someone to wait for you to go to sleep, and then either copy your brain into another brain and discard your old brain, or transplant your brain into another body, suppose that they decided to make the copy of your brain, but rather than putting the copy into another brain, they instead stored it on their supercomputer’s hard drive, and then not destroy the original. When you woke up, you would have no way of knowing what happened to you that night, and there is no reason for you to care: you are alive, and you will continue your life as you had planned. Now suppose that you make the same arrangement the following night, and this time, the person doing the procedure for you decides to transplant your brain instead, but the surgery goes wrong, and your brain dies in the process.
If I stopped here, I am sure you would agree that at that point, you are dead. Yes, there is that copy of your brain sitting on the supercomputer’s hard drive, but that is not you — unless you want to argue that being a set of inert data in a computer somehow counts as being alive. And since you are dead, nothing that happens afterwards matters to you. It is impossible for anything to matter to you, because you no longer exist.
I think that your position is that if the person who did the procedure took that copy from his supercomputer’s hard drive and imprinted it into a new brain, that you would be alive again. My argument is that you would not, because again, when you are dead, it is impossible for anything that happens afterward to matter to you, because you no longer exist. From every available perspective, yes, you have come back to life — but the original you’s perspective is not available, because you ceased to exist.
Just to clarify: when I say “you no longer exist”, I am again talking about the physical processes of the brain. When the brain stops, you are dead, period. From that brain’s perspective, nothing that happens afterwards matters — it is just squishy, cooling tissue with nothing interesting going on in it any more.
Rob G:
Thank you for taking a serious attempt to try to clarify what you are saying. However, I still disagree.
But neither of you have been able to explain what that difference is.
Let me try to give a little perspective. Five years ago, I would be agreeing with you and Kodie. However, since taking a philosophy of the mind course, I’ve been thinking very hard about this stuff and come to some other conclusions.
My impression is that you and Kodie think that identity, who you are, is inextricably intertwined with consciousness. I don’t think it is. I personally think that consciousness is a system element — specifically a feedback loop — in the signal process whereby perceptions are transformed into actions. In the brain copy example, the identity of the individual is wholly recorded as part of the brain state. While the physical brain is different, consciousness itself is merely a part of the system arising from the brain’s activities, and so it interprets the identity as if it were possessed by the original person.
But you don’t have to take my claim seriously, I have no evidence for it (as you have none for yours). However, my interpretation is logically possible. In the absence of any evidence or strong arguments to the contrary, I think you and Kodie have to, at the very least, admit that my interpretation of the thought experiment is possible.
If you disagree, I will be happy to continue the conversation in email. Find a mailto by mousing over my name. However, be forewarned: I expect the terms being used to be rather rigorously defined, because philosophers and dilettantes get a lot of mileage out of the fuzzy definitions of consciousness, identity, the mind, and even death.
Hi Dan L. I’ve never asserted the copy would know the difference or be able to judge him or herself as not being the original person. You are unable to accept this experiment as though there were two of you and one of you might mind being replaced by the other. If you are the copy, you don’t know what I’m saying, if I tell you you are the original, you’ll believe it. If I tell you you’re a copy, you will not believe that you are. I think that’s what you’re saying.
But you’re not responding to scenarios in which you are the original and see the copy taking your life from you, getting the love of your family and living in your home and drinking all your beer. The only way you willingly perform the experiment to us is if your original has died, not alongside the copy, but while sleeping or anesthetized, during an operation/euthanization, and the copy can carry on with no idea. Dying is dying whether there’s a copy on the other side of night to live out your life for you, thinking it’s you, or not.
I think I do understand what you’re saying, and agree the form of identity is included in the mind and, in this exercise, isn’t excised from the brain copy, if it were possible to selectively eliminate or rebuild portions of what’s necessary to continue.
Please try to acknowledge the experiment as though you are alive simultaneously. The copy isn’t receiving signal from the original after that. Your thoughts are independent. If you are imprisoned, and a copy was made of your brain, implanted into another body, and sent home to live your life for you, I think you would say that you are still in prison and someone else is living your life. The copy can’t tell the difference, and can function and relate to others and be recognized as you. I think you are talking about one thing and ignoring another, is that fair? Once the original has gone to sleep and is euthanized, nothing else matters after that. That mind ceases awareness and knowledge and living this extended portion of life. It only matters to you if legacy is important to you, or your family would miss you, or you think you have more work to do and that it won’t get done without a replacement of yourself ready to take over, things along those lines. I think that might be more important to you than actually being there to see it happen. Because you won’t. After the copy, there’s no transmission of thoughts back to the original, you’ll still be dead. If you want to lay on the beach for the rest of your life and the next rest of your life, you will only be there until the end of this one, although your copy wouldn’t mind taking over when you die.
@Kodie:
I have certainly thought this through from the perspective of being the original after the time of copying. I think it is rather interesting, actually. You have a copy of yourself — it possesses all your memories of your own life, shares your love for your family, the years of study, etc. The only thing that makes your copy different from you if a few days or weeks of divergent experiences. Presumably, your copy still shares all your goals, dreams, and desires. So certainly, the situation where I am locked up while the copy lives my life is horrific from my perspective, but even going on and living my life as normal is rather horrific from the copy’s perspective. He can’t make money, as he can’t legally obtain identification. It would be difficult to go to his family for help, since his family is my family. I can’t help but feel tremendous sympathy for such a creature. In fact, are far as I can tell, he’s simply a possible version of myself, had something slightly different happened in the course of history.
I would like to point out that the conscious experience of one’s identity is not continuous in the first place. Every night you fall asleep, and I bet you can never quite remember doing so. And then every morning you wake up. What connects you to your past? Only the memories encoded mysteriously into the state of your brain.
And thus the examples with sleep and anesthesia. You willingly give up consciousness and thereby your identity on a daily basis. By virtue of this fact, a great many scenarios where the identity of the original and the copy are made ambiguous. Add to this the fact that the molecules in my brain are being recycled, and that my brain is constantly changing in structure.
I am offering a recipe for cheating death whereby one falls asleep and then wakes up in a younger body. The old body dies in its sleep, and is not aware of this. The new body wakes up with all the memories of the old body up until the old body fell asleep. I am saying that there is no essential difference between calling this cheating death and calling the brain transplant cheating death. Either way, you are put under anesthetic, operated upon, and then wake up in a new body.
If there is some other source of continuity for identity besides memory, I can’t see what it is. Thus, since we are agreeing that all the memories are copied, I believe that the younger body approach is actually cheating death — putting yourself in a younger body so as to live longer. If you think there is some other source for the continuity of identity, please explain.
Consciousness is that inner reality in which the real “you” resides. Being rooted either in the tree of Self (knowledge) or the tree of (Life, Christ) within. Only one has a living root system being soiled, grounded in the Eternal, ancient garden of Life. Hence we are transplanted, re-grafted again from a withered vine into that One, True Vine which is Christ within (John 15:1-8) as it was in the original, pristine, undefiled paradaisical, Edenic state.
Paradise regained.
What if consciousness is an illusion created by the physical brain, and there is no such thing? No “spirit”.
Did you know that ancient Greeks (and subsequently Romans) believed in an element to go with earth, air, fire, and water, called aether? It’s what the sky is made of, of course.
Yes, Rodney…I am familiar with the elements from that perspective. The thing we miss (encased in this fleshly tomb) is that…there is more than meets the eye, that we can see with our natural eyes. Quantum Physics is a good example but no one here seems candid and unbiased enough to admit it, its a spooky, strange phenomenon and its…invisible.
I think maybe it’s more that skeptics are reluctant to speak with authority on something they don’t understand very well.
“There are quantum particles, therefore God exists” is a pretty big leap.
The primary problem I see for this approach is resource competition with electronic beings that can develop rapid (in comparison) improvements to their species. Ray Kurzweil suggests that, based on models of the computer processing speed increases over time, there will be by around 2070, individual computers with brute processing power sufficient to make each one of them more intelligent than the entire human race combined. Now, his timing may be off but the underlying assumption is probably not, given enough time. If this model carries forward then niche and/or resource protection may be a problem for us humans. Put another way, if the current growth in electronic intelligence is an extension of evo, then no matter how well we refine human biology we may be obsolete.
It’s a race for which portion of the singularity happens first, nanotechnology or AI. If we get to nanotech first, there is nothing that stops humans from becoming every bit as capable of evolving at a geometric rate as an AI might given enough computer resources. After all with the ability to manipulate things on the level of cell organelles (or smaller) you could literally rebuild a body from the ground up and modify it any which way you liked. Making humans smarter would become a trivial enterprise at that point, given requisite knowledge about how the brain works.
Biological immortality dosen’t mean you still can’t be killed, However the possibilities with technology are limitless, for one you can have 2 brains working together for double the neural processing, these brains could be connect by neural feedback, these 2 brains will act as one, but in case 1 dies, you have a backup brain so you could still have your self awareness.
I have no doubt that my 5 year old boy will live to be 1,000 years old. This video sums up why I think this…he talks about how humans will eventually control their own evolution, which I don’t doubt will happen. I only wish I was 5 years old!
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/juan_enriquez_shares_mindboggling_new_science.html
Where would everybody live? I’m trying to imagine about 6 billion “immortals” and adding more everyday.
From where would all the required resources come? Long life is indeed desirable yet I think its untenable in the above sense. I recall Tolkien describing mortality as a gift from Iluvatar. I agree in that it is ultimately a “gift”, to the future generations.
This sounds a lot like the movie The Sixth Day. I think that was the name anyway.
Overpopulation might be an issue.
I don’t think overpopulation would be a problem. I figure by the time they can come up with how to transfer our minds to another body or whatever, we would probably be able to terraform the moon or even other planets in this solar system.
The only major problem I can see is maintaining personal continuity, which is rather difficult to explain.
Put simply, if you were to copy yourself to an identical body with an identical neural network, the person would have your memories, your feelings, your ideals… but they would simply be a copy. The holy grail would be tricking the brain into transferring the stream of consciousness: i.e. your original self would perceive going to sleep and waking up afterwards.
People do have gaps in their memories, usually some sort of blackout period where they don’t remember anything. It’s probably not normal but it’s explainable. If you waited until someone went to sleep or got their consent to put them under anesthesia before you made the copy and performed the operation, the copy would also remember going to sleep and not know they had been operated on. If you had to make the copy during an office visit several weeks before the operation, there’d be a gap, but the new brain would also remember electing the procedure and visiting the office. I don’t know what else it might pick up in the interim that’s separate from the patient’s brain, but if we’re talking about brains like they are potentially no more difficult to exchange than computer memory storage, explaining the blank couple weeks would appear normal (not continuous, just easily attributed to the normal course of things) to the copy, so long as nothing really interesting happened before the implant that could possibly surprise him or fail to be recognized. Of course waking up after brain surgery – difficult to imagine that wouldn’t take some recovery time and possibly be very surprising to wake up to, realizing you were well just the day before, but this is science fiction, and skull grafting will also be as sophisticated as we need it to be to eliminate recovery periods as we know them now.
Mm, I keep thinking of Arthur C. Clarke’s scenario in the City and the Stars, where people were reloaded and reshuffled over and over and over…
Conquering death? Who would want to live forever (meaning as long as our universe exists) anyways? What would you do with “forever”? I mean, it sounds great and all, but wouldn’t you get tired of it after a few thousand years? I don’t think it would be healthy for humanity for people to live that long anyways. The earth is already cramped enough. Are people just going to stop having children or something? Honestly, as terrible as it sounds, it’s a good thing that people die. It’s absolutely necessary. Unless there’s some scientific solution to that I’m missing.
And on another note, for those of you who are atheists, wouldn’t knowing you were going to live forever deplete how fully you live? You say that thinking there is an eternity depletes the meaning of this life, but wouldn’t “conquering death” physically do the same?
Fascinating fact: Turtles don’t die of old age. They undergo negligable senescence, where their bodies do not age after they reach maturity. If you want immortality, I suspect the secret lies with them.
http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/featturtle
Lobsters neither. Put a lobster in a tank and care for it, and, as far as we can tell, it will never die. (nor stop growing larger, I think I remember.)
To the Kodie – Dan L. discussion:
And what if through having identical consciousnesses would grant you access to both bodies. I know this sounds science fictional, but after thinking about it, I wouldn’t be able to see why 2 identical personalities wouldn’t function under the same consciousness.
I guess the only way to test this would be to copy a lab rat, then hurt/feed/stimulate the original to see if the copy responded as well?
I have a headache.