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‘What Life Might Be’

Martin O'Dea

This article was submitted for publication to the Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness by Martin O’Dea, a business lecturer in Dublin, Ireland. Mr. O’Dea holds an MBA and his interests include Human technological and biological development.

Mr. O’Dea discusses the concepts and feasibility of brain imaging as it relates to the long-term storing and uploading of human representations to a virtual domain toward future revitalization.

An introduction to the concept of a Delayed Delivery approach to the process of imaging the entire human entity or ‘infomorph’ and enabling tomorrow’s technology to revitalise for immersion in a virtual environment; an electronic substrate.

Introduction

The aims of this article are:

To introduce the concept of ‘Delayed Delivery’ in the context of mind-uploading;
To present the case that current technology could be employed to accurately image and store representations of the human being to an electronic platform. The purpose of uploading being fulfilled using this stored information with future technological capabilities;
To look at one example of current scanning that may be further developed for the purpose of information storage as laid out as part of the concept of ‘Delayed Delivery’;
To address in brief some potential obstacles to the work suggested here and look at some solutions to these obstacles and perceived obstacles; and
To suggest a course of action, now, so that process may begin towards the goals of mind uploading to a virtual, habitable electronic substrate may be attained at a future point.

Delayed Delivery

It is suggested here, that a major scientific drive be developed in the concept of 'Delayed Delivery' of a second realm. This concept acknowledges that current computational capabilities would not suffice for mind-uploading of a vast amount of human brains and beings in their entirety as well as a virtual environment which would be completely safe and also designed to meet the many sociological, developmental, philosophical, individual, ethical etc. considerations that would arise. In other words the design of the ‘world’ in which we would awaken should not be an issue that is dealt with lightly or quickly.

Essentially, It is envisaged that with a greater understanding of the underlying workings of the human entity and superior computational capabilities future technologists will be able to ‘re-vitalise’ the human entity in its entirety from ‘records’ we store safely of ourselves, particularly our DNA [1] and high resolution images of our brains.

The concept hinges on future technology and understanding being able to recreate from the ‘image’ or ‘record’ of the current biological being (its entirety), in an electronic form. Therefore the totality of the record left, as well as its malleability to the electronic substrate, would be of key interest to current-day scientists.

Perhaps it should be noted that by ‘future’ we would mean any length of time, limited only by our survival as a physical species and our continuing efforts in this project.

It might also be noted here that this time lapse, be it two hundred years or two million years, would be of no consequence to the ‘infomorphs’ (you or I) themselves. This can be thought of in a manner like a human being reawakening from a state of unconsciousness such as an anaesthetic or coma. For the individual in this instance they are not fully aware of time passing; examples of those reawakening from comas after many years believing it to be the year in which they first entered their coma are well known to most. In the situation we talk of here, there is not limited brain activity but, rather, no brain activity during the ‘rest’ state and so we may infer no minor sense of time elapse would be felt. Therefore, what is offered is the possibility of ‘instant’ reawakening in an environment without many of our current limitations after the physical body’s death.

To be clear this would manifest itself in one’s consciousness as one closing one’s eyes at the point of biological death and reawakening immediately in an environment that we have yet to design.

The representation of the entity or ‘infomorph’ should concentrate on best futurist models to attempt to envisage how future technology of greater computational powers and perhaps other predictable advances might develop and so might be best aided by the format of the ‘storage’ of relevant information we choose. Certainly included would be DNA records and electronic representations of imaging of the human brain, central nervous system, and entire anatomy with: fMRI[2] MEG [3], PET[4], SPECT[5] etc.

[1.] DNA – n. Deoxyribonucleic acid; a nucleic acid that consists of two long chains of nucleotides twisted together into a double helix and joined by hydrogen bonds between complimentary bases adenine and thymine or cytosine and guanine; it carries the cell’s genetic information and hereditary characteristics via its nucleotides and their sequence and is capable of self-replication and RHA synthesis.
The American Heritage Stedman’s Medical dic·tion·ar·y, Second Edition . Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004: 236.

[2.] fMRI – abbr. functional magnetic resonance imaging.
The American Heritage Stedman’s Medical dic·tion·ar·y, Second Edition . Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004: 307.

[3.] MEG – n. magnetoencephalography – an imaging technique that is used to detect electromagnetic and metabolic shifts occurring in the brain during trauma.
The American Heritage Stedman’s Medical dic·tion·ar·y, Second Edition . Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004: 480.

[4.] PET – PET scanner – n. A device that produces cross-sectional x-rays of metabolic processes by means of positron emission tomography.
The American Heritage Stedman’s Medical dic·tion·ar·y, Second Edition . Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004: 621.

[5.] SPECT – abbr. single photon emission computed tomography.
The American Heritage Stedman’s Medical dic·tion·ar·y, Second Edition . Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004: 764.

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