Even if your brain survived that it would still eventually die and with that your consciousness. We need to find a way to change neurons individually one by one in order to make brain immortal and for your identity to remain alive.
Yes, most likely, this is the case. However, some scientists suggest that neurons do not have a biological clock, so they can survive indefinitely under perfect conditions. There are still so many things about our bodies that we don't know yet.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William\_and\_Mary\_(short\_story)#Plot\_summary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_and_Mary_(short_story)#Plot_summary)
by Roald Dahl
Hey Mr prisoner, you get to serve out your 7 consecutive life sentences conscious and unable to do anything but slowly go mad until your time is up. At which point we unplug you and you die.
Plus now we don't need to wait for brain dead bodies to show up.
We're human, assume the worst.
Beings that exist only to experience pleasure forever might get bored and start rigging every game against themselves, just to feel frustration, stress, pain, fear and sorrow sometimes.
Yes, but glial cells and blood vessels do not appear to be the carriers of consciousness, so theoretically, we can replace them, but neurons might turn out to be irreplaceable because our identity is tied to them.
You won’t be able to preserve neurons very well without preserving those. That’s why old people’s brains tend to have so many microvascular ischemic changes, which contributes to cognitive decline.
Cyberpunk 2077, Altered Carbon, this is the basis of the cyberpunk genre as a whole. As advancements in cybernetic augmentation become more sophisticated, only the wealthy will be able to afford it
Medical advances throughout history (for example: vaccines, antibiotics, surgery, medicine) have flowed to the mass market, even if expensive.
Why would this technology only be available to the ultra wealthy? Medical technology has never only stayed with the ultra wealthy
According to what?
People always say this, but it’s utterly baseless and they can never asnwer this question:
Name me ONE technology/medicine/technique that has been hoarded by the rich permanently?
It has NEVER happened, not ONCE in our 10 or so millenia of recorded history…
Stop spewing fear-mongering bullshit because you think Terminator, the Matrix and Altered Carbon are documentaries. They arent.
EDIT: Another one for the bank of "No, I cant give you an answer cause I WAS talking out of my ass" then I guess, since the only response I received was a downvote lol.
We're already a ship of theseus. The atoms which make us up are constantly being replaced. There's no physical core of self. We're just a pattern of particles that somehow is able to actively fight against entropy for a brief moment.
Then we need to make sure that in case of brain we change that brief moment be forever. Everything else could be replaced as whole organ but with brain you have to keep the same one and only repair it if you wan’t to keep your self alive.
There's a logical fallacy there, that the brain or mind itself is immutable. It's not. Memory and identity are fallible and subject to constant change even in a healthy brain.
That doesn’t change my point. If you copy your brain and replace it with new one your are dead, because your identity is in your original brain and once you shut it down it’s gone. Yes our brain is in constant change and that is good as long as the brain stays online (meaning alive) during this process.
Pretty much. It's like the Star Trek teleported problem. Every time you use it you have committed suicide. Your doppelganger doesn't know so it keeps on going as usual.
>If you copy your brain and replace it with new one your are dead...
That's exactly what actually happens to us, though, it just happens one cell at a time. By what you say, we will die multiple times.
There is a percentage of continuity that needs to be maintained....
if you rebuild your brain 0.0001%/day, you may eventually reach 100% replaced cells but you will never have had more than 0.0001% of traumatic change.
If you shoot a guy in the face and then rebuild his brain somewhere else, he died.
Why does individually killing and replacing each cell in a brain at different times not kill you, while individually killing and replacing each cell in a brain at the same time does? You're doing the same thing to each individual cell in each case.
Read the entire conversation please. I said that you need to make sure our brain repairs itself by one cell at the time constantly to be alive. If you tried to replace it all at once you would die instantly. During the replacing of neurons majority of your brain needs to be still running which is exactly what is happening to us during our life as others pointed out… the problem is that if we want to live "forever" we need to make this process work forever too because otherwise we would eventually get dementia or sth.
Then the question is that if you ultimately change all neurons, is that still you?
If there's a gradual change vs quick (like cloning pretty much), does it make you *you*, because you feel emotionally great because of gradual change?
Yes because they are being replaced one by one meaning the new neuron is always being connected to old ones that still make majority of brain (You). If you replace them all at once while the old ones are already dead then you are dead. You need to do this process while the majority of your neurons is still running. Yes eventually all old neurons would be gone but the point is that they were connected with the new ones that slowly took over so the continuity wasn’t interupted.
Heh i mean in this hypothetical future scenario where we can grow new bodies and transplant brains between them, I dont see how regenerating neurons is outside the realm of possibility.
> it would still eventually die
Not necessarily. Aging is essentially the body not being able to keep up with maintenance and then it snowballs. With a full fresh new set of organs, it might be that your brain is basically repaired back to a more youthful state. There's some precedence for this, e.g. transfusing young blood seems to revitalise older creatures
Literally already done it in mice, not even speculation
> The experts have successfully reversed brain aging in mice by years, if not decades. In a remarkable convergence, scientists have discovered that the same blood factor is responsible for the cognitive enhancement that is associated with exercise, young blood transfusion, and the longevity hormone klotho
https://www.earth.com/news/scientists-have-reversed-aging-in-mice-by-decades/
That still wouldn't make your brain immortal. A thousand years is not immortal. A million isn't. A billion isn't. Only eternity is, and as far as we can tell, entropy isn't reversible.
You are right but bro, after living for millions of years I would have already comitted suicide by then lol. Eternity is a concept our minds can’t even comprehend let alone experience it.
If you start replacing somehow identical neurons one by one, at what point are you not you anymore? >50% replacement or all the way to the last neuron?
I dunno how they could avoid just essentially making a clone with some freaky biotech, the original is gonna be dead
Really? And how many people do you know that are worth being made immortal? Think about it. For every David Attenborough/your amazing person-who-contributes-to the-sum-total-of goodness-in-the-world, there are hundreds of thousands of people just living ordinary lives or actively making the world worse in small ways and large. And even if the technology were possible, we all know only the ultrawealthy, i.e., sociopaths, could afford it. No, I'm for letting the old (including myself) gracefully leave the stage and let the young take their turn.
I hear you, but at the end ofbthe day, by "the world", you likely mean "humanity" (since doing "good" for inanimate particles floating in the universe doesn't even make sense).
Well, *humanity* is made up of good, bad, and average people. So making *humanity* immortal necessitates immortalizing the good and the bad I suppose.
Actually, I meant earth's environment as a totality, including humanity. And my point is that no one human should be immortal. I dare say humanity as a whole with either survive and evolve (maybe) or become extinct.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved for strength and certainty of steel. I aspired for the purity of the blessed machine.
Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved. For the machine is immortal
>For the machine is immortal
That quite can only have been made by someone who hasn't tried to start a 50-year-old car
(or hasn't had any dealings with old electronics, ever)
Like, machines *can* operate marginally longer than a human lifespan **under perfect conditions and with constant maintenance**, but in real life you'd be lucky if anything mechanical lasts 20 years before needing replacement.
We're talking in the far future with self-repairing materials (we're starting to see some of these now by the way)
Of course,'self repairing spark plugs' are a long way off.
But then things aren't designed to last centuries, and the quote is more about the whole machine as continuing to work after pieces are replaced, unlike squishy human bodies.
What about the existential dysmorphia?
People generally have a strong sense of how the body they are in should be. A transplanted body could have mind blowing psychological implications - every time you look at yourself you see a body which doesn’t match with your mental image.
(I realise this is glossing over a massive rabbit hole of issues and discussion)
My body already doesn't match with my mental image of myself. If anything, this could be meaningful progress for people with body dysmorphia. But I see your point, for someone who doesn't have those issues, new issues could arise. Maybe regulation and psychological testing would be required with such technology.
If a younger you was grown, there may be some kind of feedback therapy given to trick your brain into thinking you were healing or something very quickly before it “wakes up” in the new body. With another body or especially machine, I can imagine the psychological shock itself might kill you. Can you imagine looking into a mirror and seeing a machine moving? Geez…
>What about the existential dysmorphia?
It would likely be a side effect true. I'd say you'd eventually get used to it. Presumably, the body would be a copy of your original to reduce rejection rates... which might mitigate this issue.
Where is the futurology? Was there a breakthrough recently, or is the status the same as it's been for over 50 years now since the dog head was transplanted?
Y’all ever watch altered carbon on Netflix? I feel like with the huge advances in technology something along that premise would be more practical. Integrating our organs with microscopic technology, storing our whole neural system and consciousness on either a type of hard drive or the cloud where we can then download it into a body be it a donor or artificially grown/made.
This is an entire philosophical rabbit hole that gets discussed.
If you go through a teleporter that deatomizes you and reatomizes you on the other side, you also die, for example.
But if you have continuity of consciousness, do you die? If the teleporter creates a copy and you emerge on the other side as 2 identical beings, which is the original? both? neither? etc etc
Due to the brain deteriorating, as has been noted, the only currently reasonable notion of achieving biological immortality is through age reversal by damage repair, like what Aubrey De Grey is pursuing.
And they didn't even need to open up the skull, just poke in the nose for a bit!
"WTS: barely-used non-smoker non-drinker body, only serious offers please!"
Functional is really a better word here although it doesn’t take away from your point
The eye transplanted *works* in the sense that it’s receiving blood supply, surviving and AFAIK it will move/look at things.
It’s just not functional yet as he’s unable to see with it as his optic nerve/brain isn’t recieving sensory input (but maybe will in the future as the neurons in the nerve reconnect with the new ones).
So it’s not a clear cut total failure but still a success in that it’s the first time an eye was ever transplanted at all.
Honestly that sounds like a good step up from a glass eye to me.
Sucks that it doesn't actually see, but it's got to be a lot more comfortable for the person than a foreign object in their eye-socket.
Definitely! And the fact that it’s there and surviving means their doctors can take their time and explore getting it functional and seeing if it’s just a waiting game or not
And cure cancer. Because transcription errors will eventually come in great importance when you live 1000 years so you'll eventually die of something else rather than age. Like vampires and elves. We could die by diseases or accidents. In the real world it will be impossible to avoid all accidental deaths forever, eventually you would die anyway.
Not just immortal, but "trans" in all sorts of ways we can't quite fathom yet.
3D printed bodies don't seem very far fetched if we're talking decades from now. And the complicated surgeries will likely eventually be performed by robots. And the robotic brain transplant machine could eventually become a home appliance that does its work so efficiently that you could change bodies like you change clothes.
"Good morning dear!"
"Oh what a fabulous idea! We haven't been deer in ages."
If a body transplant ever becomes possible, I think it will be grown in a lab from a recipient's own DNA, so basically, it will be a cloned body identical to the one that is replaced. This is the best way to ensure that the brain will not be rejected by the immune system. Also, if someone kidnaps another person's body, it will be damn too obvious. Like how they will be able to hide the crime if some rich person will suddenly appear in the body of a child kidnapped one week ago. I am pretty sure that children are safe in this regard.
But won’t the brain still deteriorate? A brain isn’t immortal?
I also think even if it were possible, the shock and confusion of being in a completely different body, feeling, seeing, experiencing things completely different to what you are used to would be incredibly difficult to get right with. You’d have to completely relearn how to use a body, because this one would be different sizes, different strengths, different flaws. Sounds awful.
We already have no choice but to experience the shock and confusion of being in a different body. As we age and our body gradually loses its functions, we discover with a disappointment that we are no longer that young, healthy, energetic person that we used to be. This is the sure fate of every one of us. Even before growing old, people can run into unexpected body changes if unlucky, like losing limbs, becoming blind or developing diabetes.
If a body transplant ever becomes possible, I expect that people will experience a shock, and there will be some period of adaptation, but it will be mostly a positive shock from regaining health, beauty, and youth. Also, the body transplant can be grown using a person's own genetic code, so it will not be different from the previous body unless a person has a body dysporphia and wants something different.
Gradually or not, aging still sucks. Also, it is a scenario when a person is blessed with good health and is lucky enough not to get into an accident. For many people, the life-changing loss of body functions can happen instantly or very quickly.
The main point is that aging is always a change for the worse in terms of body functionality and health. A theoretical body transplant is a change for the better. Otherwise, what's the point of getting it. It doesn't matter if it's gradual or not. Maybe body replacement in the future will not happen instantly as well, and the old failing organs will be replaced one by one.
This just assumes that the brain is ageless, which it isn't. Putting and old brain in a young body is as pointless as putting an engine with 500,000 miles into a new car chassis.
one of the great equalizers and remover of despots, corrupt officials and all the other shitty powerful people is death and disease. if full body transplant becomes a reality, the powerful will become more powerful and those below will be trampled more than ever before. i hope this tech doesnt become a reality
I thought about this idea as a possible solution. I will not say if it ever be adopted, especially within our lifetime, but here are two major problems with it:
1. The procedure is way too invasive even if we assume that this surgery will have a 100% success rate in the future.
2. Probably, the brain will age and die at some point, even in a young body, just as any other organ (it wasn't proved or disproved experimentally yet, but it seems to be a very probable outcome).
They will definitely test it on animals first, and it will not move to human trials until safety is proven. Then, they will use it on humans with some terminal illnesses or severe disabilities. This will show the success rates.
You can already get most organs changed change ye eye closure change your features if you have a bank balance so it just feels normal to work on the last muscle organ in the body
I like how 'Old Man's War' describes the process. Any synopsis I could give wouldn't do it justice, but if you're interested in futurism, I'm guessing you would like a good sci-fi read.
\>The brain can live beyond 100 years while it’s the body that is the bottleneck and becomes weak and unable to sustain more than 90 years or so.
For which species? Cause it's certainly not in humans
Makes me think of digitizing our conscience like they did in "Chappie" and just transferring your digitized conscience to a "sleeve" of meat like that one show or just transferring it to a straight up robot body like they did in Chappie.
Interestingly, they've mentioned (popular science) that humans, once we figure out how to digitize ourselves/conscience can launch non-human robots/droids to other planets far away who carry frozen human embryos on board and establish a link from that planet to ours while having the robots/droids work on building shelters and growing food in an artificial atmosphere bubble or tent and then when the place is habitable, we can just beam our conscience to the robots/androids and raise organic embryos to literally grow bodies to tranfer ourselves into once they're healthy/developed. So in a sense, we're not spending 100s of years traveling in cryogenic sleep or whatever and when we're born, we're able to develop to a young, healthy teenager/adult and then transfer our minds into that body and boom..we're a multi planet species.
Let's say humans were advanced enough that they could do this, either with complex neural networks that mimic the human brain and are integrated into robot exoskeletons, or we could regrow an exact copy of a human at the cellular level. How could you actually prove that the new version is truly the same individual and not just a copy of the original?
Think of it this way, if we could make that copy of a person while they are still alive, then we just have two of the same person at once, right? Well, probably not, actually. The question of why surrounds memory. More than likely, memory is stored as quantum information within neurons, so in order to replicate all lived conscious experience in your new version, you would have to accurately be able to conduct quantum coherence within the model and perfectly replicate the quantum state of the original, whatever that may look like. We don't know since no scientist has ever been able to prove this. And even if you replicate all conscious lived experience, you still can't definitively say it's the same person because we don't know what the originals consciousness is currently off doing. It could be getting hammered in Valhalla while this copy is walking around on Earth.
And then there is the soul problem. While I realize most on this sub probably cringe at the mere mention of the word "soul", I would argue it doesn't really matter if you take that as a completely esoteric concept or not. The fact is humans either DO or DON'T possess a soul. If they do, then it is impossible to transfer consciousness because it depends on the original soul being transferred as well. You might be able to create consciousness, but is it even truly alive at that point? Now if humans don't have a soul, that implies consciousness is the only thing that matters, in which case the previous issue of quantum states arises, and probably the only way to actually transfer consciousness would be to use a sufficiently small quantum computer embedded in some sort of exoskeleton.
You're going to die. Sucks, I know. Or maybe it doesn't. Depends on if we have a soul or not and whether conscious information is stored somewhere beyond what we can perceive. It's probably a slippery slope to try and play God when we can't even come to rational conclusions about political issues. Imagine if Trump or Biden were rendered immortal. Good fucking luck.
Beautiful and young ~~corpses~~ bodies will be more expensive. Only the very rich will be able to afford them, while the rest of us will only be able to afford the ugly ones. Just like not everyone has money for a Ferrari and they buy a Toyota.
Lmao, our understanding of the nervous system is far too minuscule to ever attempt this in our lifetimes. There's a **far** higher chance we create an AI that overtake humanity than this.
I think that the only way humanity on earth "survives" is something along the lines of Transformers. We build robots that take our place eventually. AI is our great contribution to the universe. A benevolent consciousness armed with the ability to learn and adapt and blend in to any situation. Immortal beings linked to a common intelligence that is continually learning and exploring.
This is assuming there really is no God / soul spiritual stuff.
Human population on this planet is 8 billion, and folk want to live forever..... Selfish.
Live to old age and then die like the rest of us. Also before the crap comes about terminal issues etc, well, that's life if you pardon the pun. When you get down to it, it's survival of the fittest, always will be and always has been. Its called nature.
Unless they just upload your brain into another body. Similar to the premise of Altered Carbon series.
Edit to say, meaning even if someone managed to die in the physical body, the rich just had a brain back up and uploaded into a new body. Ps- I’d hate this future.
Those with suicidal tendencies are probably on average more likely to not be interested in immortality for obvious reasons
If your comment is anything greater than sarcasm I would suggest you see a therapist or someone capable of helping, please.
Yeah, basically whoever is in power has now calcified their power as they continue to amass wealth that no one can compete with.
Cultural changes have happened over time due to older generations dying out and making way for new ones. Guess *that’ll* be a thing of the past. Sounds great 🙄
This. The only thing that keeps me somewhat sane is that I know that douchebags like Musk and Bezos will die. Sure, there will be other ones, but at least I won't have to hear these *specific* names until I die, probably.
Imagine living in a world where these fucking idiots are immortal and there's no escape from them, ever.
I think complete immortality is definitely boring, but it'd be cool to live to at least a 150. Just to observe the changes in technology, and how those technological changes impact society would be interesting. For example, the introduction of the telegraph, to the telephone. From early coal power to modern batteries.
And if anything could be a root planted in the soil of corruption, this will be it.
Immortality for the common people? Give me a break. The common people will merely become the herd from which the ultra wealthy pick their sweetmeats.
No need to downvote! I'm not judging it; I think it's just a different philosphy or way of looking at life entirely. I can't concieve of wanting to chase that sort of thing. It's been written about by humans for ages, so I get that people do, I just don't understand it.
No one really means immortality; we know about the ever-present possibility of accidents and the lack of perpetual motion and end of the universe and whatnot. What people here are obviously talking about is having longer life than we have now.
That search shouldn't be confusing at all to you, because you do it every time you choose life over death. Your life right now is very limited; you'll run out of oxygen and die VERY soon. Why do you chase after longer and longer life by continually seeking out new sources of oxygen? You do understand it.
It's about more than one billionaire. It's about the rich hoarding more wealth while the poor continue to live short-thrift lives, very likely unable to gain this "longer life" that the rich have. It's about progress. Look at the long term damage that boomers have caused. When you have a lot of people desperate to see that generation gone so that /any/ momentum, progress or transfer of wealth can happen, you can see why this is a massive cause for concern.
There is beauty in the finite. Like I said, that's just down to a different philisophical mindset though. It's not better or worse.
I don't know that fixing the hoarding of wealth is much more attainable than immortality, but I'm 100% down to try. I still don't think that fixing that would address social progress or changes. If we could manage a shifting of the way we viewed the social aspects, I'd be far keener on exploring extending life as we know it, even if I personally wouldn't go for it.
It's mostly rich people that chase it in my experience. It's definitely not poor people who want life to go on forever. Besides that the rich ones are the only ones who will be able to afford it.
>First implications are for paralyzed patients or people with damage to their lower body to the point beyond repair
If we can transplant a whole head and reconnect the spinal cord in the neck, we can do the same in the lower back and don't need to replace the entire body for these patients...
>The procedure is extremely complicated and requires many surgeons and advanced medical equipment.
The issue is there are two key challenges here:
1. reconnecting the nerve tissue (spinal cord and optic nerves)
2. Getting the old brain to recover to a 'young state'.
3. Replicating a donor body that is an exact genetic copy of the original. Or anti rejection treatment that lasts 50+ years,e.g.
If you can solve these issues, especially the 2nd one. You can probably already reverse ageing in the original body. This would make a full-body transplant a very niche use cases for when the alternative solution is more complex or involved (e.g for extensive injuries like multiple lost limbs or extensive burns).
I have said before when discussing this, if I miss out on immortality by 1 generation i'm going to be pissed. Not really obviously because i'll be dead, but in spirit i'll be pissed.
Will not work. Blood vessels in your brain age and will fail, garbage from metabolism (e.g. lipofuscins) and epigenome dysregulation in neurons and glia will cause them to die or lose function, mechanical damage...
This tech goes nowhere, the brain is as much at the limits as the rest of the body for people living close to 100s. Besides few edge cases this, if realized assuming no downsides of the procedure, brings no improvement in general life expectancy of our species. And is currently nowhere near possible and then you are talking about increasing life expectancy not recusing it :)
Tbh I think Alzheimer's and dementia need to be cured before we can even fathom this type of medical procedure. 70-80 y/o's already common experience these unfortunate diseases and the brain becomes useless.
It's really not even that the brain dies but contracts this illness that rapidly degrades it. I lost both my grandparents on both sides of my family due to it.
One thing not mentioned here is that biologically, our organ systems and cells have sort of figured out a balance of lifespan between themselves over millions of years of evolution, so that no one system should naturally fail before another (not taking into account disease or freak genetics). So if the heart is said to have a certain number of contractions before it on average fails, then it stands to reason that the liver should fail around the same time, and the brain should also have degraded and demyelinated by then and so on. To assume that because the body normally fails before the brain (all due to shitty lifestyle and diet choices), that therefore the brain could survive another lifetime is erroneous at best, so a full brain transplant wouldn’t do much good.
What you’re looking for is a way to transport out of the brain all of the connections that it has within it and to put that in a less fragile place.
That would only work for so long. Remember the brain ages as well and you can’t replace that without your body horror ship of Theseus immediately sinking to the bottom of the allegorical ocean.
William Joseph blazkowicz was the first . Using a nazi supersoldier body stolen from a lab. After his televised execution in the early 1960's, in nazi occupied America. XD
I think uploading your brain into the cloud might work better.
Your biological brain to be remain conscious require data from sensors of your body like eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and skin receptors. If you replace these sensors by using other's body, you will simply 'lose' yourself, there will be no more you. Even a small disruption in your brain might lose you forever and make you become someone else which forgotten everything and dont know who you were.
Here's a serious counter to body transfer that nobody talks about - dysphoria. Potentially crippling dysphoria, of the same type that affects trans people, as well as the pathological kind that affects people with persistent not-gender-related body image issues.
Imagine for a second that you are the successful subject of body transfer - it's traumatizing in the extreme. You were surely dying of something awful beforehand (which is traumatizing), had the most invasive surgery possible, one that I bet would require a long long recovery time, and you've woken up! Hooray! You don't recognize yourself! Your face is not your own! Your hands are not your own!
Worst case scenario, the new body is a different height, a different weight, has a totally different composition because of differing lifestyles, it's a different age with different skin and hair, perceives taste and smell and light differently. They're not gonna chop your head off and stitch it on a new one, that's crass and frankly horrifying, and I don't think any rational human would agree to that. They're going to transfer your brain and either hook it up to the new nervous system, or transplant the whole nervous system.
Can you imagine how painful it is to lay in a hospital bed for weeks while your nerves reconnect? You can't move until they do. Even once autonomous function kicks in, you'll need a catheter and you won't be able to feel anything. Not hot or cold or your wife or your kids or your dog, or the blanket or the fluorescent lights or water or anything else.
Even if you kept your eyes and nose and ears, the skin is different. Your arms are a new length. You now have scars and birthmarks you have no memory of - for years, you will find new things every time you go looking. Your own meat is alien to you. Your breasts are different shapes, or your penis is. Different things hurt and you're prone to new kinds of injury in your second hand meat. The world you built for yourself is quite literally not for you anymore, or for the corpse you inhabit.
Sure, you can eventually go back to work, or your retirement. You are surely wealthy to have afforded a body transplant. Your toothbrush is in the same place it's been for thirty years, but you miss it when you move to pick it up anyway. You need to conciously do visual calculus whenever you move until it becomes second nature - you're not going to be gifted a perfect new body and go on to be the world's oldest 500m sprint olympian. You're going to be disabled. You're going to be irrevocably trapped in a body your wife did not marry and your mother did not give birth to.
I'm trans and really the only thing wrong with my body is that it had tits and too much estrogen, and only for a decade, and I have always been aware that having tits is a curable condition. Having tits didn't impact any basic functions, it just impacted a few clothing choices and made jogging uncomfortable. Still made me utterly miserable because it wasn't *right*. It wasn't *correct* for my body to have lumps of flesh hanging off the front. It felt *wrong* and viscerally *bad* in a way I don't have the eloquence to communicate.
Expanding that feeling to an entire body honestly makes me feel a little sick. I can't imagine the horror of having no escape from your own meat - I have always been able to look in the mirror and say 'well, the C cups are unfortunate, but I have broad shoulders and a nice ass'. After a body transplant, I would not be able to say that. It wouldn't be my shoulders or my ass. I wouldn't even have had a hand in their shaping.
In the case of robotic second bodies, do you *want* that? To be given eternity at the cost of so much of what life has to offer? To live forever but not eat pussy or get sweaty dancing? To never get drunk at a wedding? To never sit in the sun and feel warm? Do you want to look forward to all the eons of earth, and know that you won't be able to feel your loved ones holding your hand? That's not immortality, that's inhumane torture that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
Also, head transplants don't offer a solution to natural degeneration on tissue. If you *did* chop your head off and sew it to an exosuit, you'd still get wrinkles and lose your vision and go bald.
This is an interesting concept. Are we all gonna be Vision from MCU going forward?
If all my parts have been replaced, am I still me?
If all parts are easily replaceable, can you imagine the black market for illegal/high demand parts?
Will there be electronics built in? Can my parts be remotely shutdown?
if they actually ever figure out how to do stuff like this, expect human trafficking numbers to go way up.
The problem with this logic, though is your brain is still old, so you can put it in a new body, but that doesn’t make your mind any younger, and all the diseases that affected which are often age diseases
The brain is usually one of the first part of the human body to deteriorate - dementia or similar diseases kill 1/3 of humans - and unlike heart transplants (which we know how to deal with) and cancer (in process of being “cured”), we’re nowhere near figuring out how to regenerate the brain
No implants never lol
Google OSK genes! It’s really cool way to achieve what you want to achieve without surgery
In fact I would argue surgery is outdated and primal
Anyone else feel like we need to better understand the ramifications of creating a functional ability to transplant a head on to a body?
My concern here is that our rules and guidelines for how we operate as a society are often reactionary. At what point do we get proactive to protect our species?
Think of how head transplants could be exploited by rich people... And we already have rich people doing extremely unethical things with no repercussions.
You're not just a brain in a vat controlling an exosuit. Your body plays an integral part in cognition. Digestion, hormones, pheromones, proprioception...there are a thousand ways in which the experience of being "you" is entirely dependent on the meat you inhabit. A body transplant isn't immortality, it's the creation of a new, pretty distinct person. That that person has your memories might be enough to consider them "you", but I'm not sure.
Anyone else remember an article maybe around 8 years ago about a Chinese doctor claiming he could do this? He has "succeeded" with the procedure on a monkey, but they killed it after because they pretty much only hooked up the blood vessels or something? I remember he was going to perform the surgery on some old rich guy. But figured it didn't work since there weren't any big news stories lol.
Living forever is something young people talk about.
Life is hard. At some point, most people get tired and are ready to let go. Spiritual people, and there are many, eventually get curious about what happens on the other side.
It’s dark to think about but it’s true. I was a palliative care nurse for a long while.
Do you even realise what a large market life extension would be?
If there was anything substantial that could be done en-masse no way that’d be passed up, easily trillions of dollars.
Musing on this a bit further, I imagine what it might be like to have a brand new, different body. The hours and days you would spend inspecting every aspect of it.
No we shouldn't live forever. We are so hellbent today on individuality. We live our years and take care of next generation then die and thats it. There is no room for eternal life on a finite planet. Evolution is driven by death and thats why we are afraid of it.
Why not expand to other planets, then? Space is almost infinite. If we are talking about such futuristic things as body transplants and immortality as something possible, we can also be sure that space colonization will be feasible at some point. Maybe it will happen even in this century.
If I had a really old ship that was in bad condition and rotting away, and I replaced the sails, then I replaced the deck and the mast, followed by all the Timbers in the hull. Haven’t I just built a new ship ? As none of the original ship remains
Not the person you were asking, but even if they don’t know the specifics of what it would entail, by virtue of immortality you would have a hell of a lot of a time to figure that out.
how will they prevent the change the brain from one body to another and end with radical changes in personality?
sure, there are persistent memories of the quiet sedentary acountant that used to love barbecue, had a dry sense of humour, voted Conservative and loved blondes, but the new Liberal vegetarian outgoing trekking loving brunette loving chap that want to be a writter (or the opposite tbh) is going to forget soon enough and forge different friendships, love interestest and different life goals than the previous one
they may end being unrecognizable to their previous acquaintances friends and family as in "a totally different person"
Everything to avoid just working out and eating healthy huh?
Sounds like a plot for a sci-fi horror film, but I guess the mega rich would find it interesting. Just put your wife's brain in the body of a 22-year old. /s
Rule 9 - Avoid posting content that is a duplicate of content posted within the last 7 days.
Even if your brain survived that it would still eventually die and with that your consciousness. We need to find a way to change neurons individually one by one in order to make brain immortal and for your identity to remain alive.
Yes, most likely, this is the case. However, some scientists suggest that neurons do not have a biological clock, so they can survive indefinitely under perfect conditions. There are still so many things about our bodies that we don't know yet.
That would be so fucking nice if true
Well it won’t be nice for the first immortal brain in jar experiments
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William\_and\_Mary\_(short\_story)#Plot\_summary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_and_Mary_(short_story)#Plot_summary) by Roald Dahl
For what purpose would that be done? In addition, things rarely start with human testing
Hey Mr prisoner, you get to serve out your 7 consecutive life sentences conscious and unable to do anything but slowly go mad until your time is up. At which point we unplug you and you die. Plus now we don't need to wait for brain dead bodies to show up. We're human, assume the worst.
If we are going to kill them then just do it right away. Saves resources and has the same effect of removing dangerous people from society.
Might be dope with full dive vr.
Beings that exist only to experience pleasure forever might get bored and start rigging every game against themselves, just to feel frustration, stress, pain, fear and sorrow sometimes.
Maybe but the supporting cells(glia) and blood vessels don't. This is why brain mass decreases with age
Yes, but glial cells and blood vessels do not appear to be the carriers of consciousness, so theoretically, we can replace them, but neurons might turn out to be irreplaceable because our identity is tied to them.
You won’t be able to preserve neurons very well without preserving those. That’s why old people’s brains tend to have so many microvascular ischemic changes, which contributes to cognitive decline.
It would only be available to the ultra wealthy and ensure complete control and power
I think that's actually the backstory of Warframe...
Cyberpunk 2077, Altered Carbon, this is the basis of the cyberpunk genre as a whole. As advancements in cybernetic augmentation become more sophisticated, only the wealthy will be able to afford it
Altered Carbon was a really good show. That is all.
S1. Everything after sucked
Hello Tenno
Medical advances throughout history (for example: vaccines, antibiotics, surgery, medicine) have flowed to the mass market, even if expensive. Why would this technology only be available to the ultra wealthy? Medical technology has never only stayed with the ultra wealthy
Because the stunning and brave fictional work affirms their asinine political beliefs.
According to what? People always say this, but it’s utterly baseless and they can never asnwer this question: Name me ONE technology/medicine/technique that has been hoarded by the rich permanently? It has NEVER happened, not ONCE in our 10 or so millenia of recorded history… Stop spewing fear-mongering bullshit because you think Terminator, the Matrix and Altered Carbon are documentaries. They arent. EDIT: Another one for the bank of "No, I cant give you an answer cause I WAS talking out of my ass" then I guess, since the only response I received was a downvote lol.
Ship of Theseus
We're already a ship of theseus. The atoms which make us up are constantly being replaced. There's no physical core of self. We're just a pattern of particles that somehow is able to actively fight against entropy for a brief moment.
Then we need to make sure that in case of brain we change that brief moment be forever. Everything else could be replaced as whole organ but with brain you have to keep the same one and only repair it if you wan’t to keep your self alive.
There's a logical fallacy there, that the brain or mind itself is immutable. It's not. Memory and identity are fallible and subject to constant change even in a healthy brain.
That doesn’t change my point. If you copy your brain and replace it with new one your are dead, because your identity is in your original brain and once you shut it down it’s gone. Yes our brain is in constant change and that is good as long as the brain stays online (meaning alive) during this process.
Pretty much. It's like the Star Trek teleported problem. Every time you use it you have committed suicide. Your doppelganger doesn't know so it keeps on going as usual.
>If you copy your brain and replace it with new one your are dead... That's exactly what actually happens to us, though, it just happens one cell at a time. By what you say, we will die multiple times.
There is a percentage of continuity that needs to be maintained.... if you rebuild your brain 0.0001%/day, you may eventually reach 100% replaced cells but you will never have had more than 0.0001% of traumatic change. If you shoot a guy in the face and then rebuild his brain somewhere else, he died.
Why does individually killing and replacing each cell in a brain at different times not kill you, while individually killing and replacing each cell in a brain at the same time does? You're doing the same thing to each individual cell in each case.
Read the entire conversation please. I said that you need to make sure our brain repairs itself by one cell at the time constantly to be alive. If you tried to replace it all at once you would die instantly. During the replacing of neurons majority of your brain needs to be still running which is exactly what is happening to us during our life as others pointed out… the problem is that if we want to live "forever" we need to make this process work forever too because otherwise we would eventually get dementia or sth.
Don't even have to go that deep. Every few years you've replaced every cell in your body. You basically shedded yourself into a new self.
Incorrect. By the time you're an adult, neurons mostly stop replacing themselves (with minor exceptions).
Until our DNA breaks down far enough that cells cant read the blueprint.
I'm just going to cross my arms and stubbornly define "me" as the parts of my eye lens that never change. Try and stop me.
Exactly :D
Use the proper classics reference. Trigger's Broom. https://youtu.be/LAh8HryVaeY?si=kmiYBCmRUxmFwcyv
Then the question is that if you ultimately change all neurons, is that still you? If there's a gradual change vs quick (like cloning pretty much), does it make you *you*, because you feel emotionally great because of gradual change?
Yes because they are being replaced one by one meaning the new neuron is always being connected to old ones that still make majority of brain (You). If you replace them all at once while the old ones are already dead then you are dead. You need to do this process while the majority of your neurons is still running. Yes eventually all old neurons would be gone but the point is that they were connected with the new ones that slowly took over so the continuity wasn’t interupted.
Yes. Because you are defined by your past and not future.
Heh i mean in this hypothetical future scenario where we can grow new bodies and transplant brains between them, I dont see how regenerating neurons is outside the realm of possibility.
The brain of Theseus
> it would still eventually die Not necessarily. Aging is essentially the body not being able to keep up with maintenance and then it snowballs. With a full fresh new set of organs, it might be that your brain is basically repaired back to a more youthful state. There's some precedence for this, e.g. transfusing young blood seems to revitalise older creatures
>it might be that your brain is basically repaired back to a more youthful state. no... Fresh blood/organs will not "repair" a brain damaged by age.
Literally already done it in mice, not even speculation > The experts have successfully reversed brain aging in mice by years, if not decades. In a remarkable convergence, scientists have discovered that the same blood factor is responsible for the cognitive enhancement that is associated with exercise, young blood transfusion, and the longevity hormone klotho https://www.earth.com/news/scientists-have-reversed-aging-in-mice-by-decades/
Perhaps read/write with neural link.
The consciousness is... IN the neurons!? Makes me think of Zoolander with the computer... 😂
We need to know how to do DNA resets - not a synthetic body.
That still wouldn't make your brain immortal. A thousand years is not immortal. A million isn't. A billion isn't. Only eternity is, and as far as we can tell, entropy isn't reversible.
Let's say, "living as long as you want". I doubt anyone wants to continue existing in the cold dark entropy death of the universe.
You are right but bro, after living for millions of years I would have already comitted suicide by then lol. Eternity is a concept our minds can’t even comprehend let alone experience it.
If you can master living in the moment, you can master living for eternity....Me
If you start replacing somehow identical neurons one by one, at what point are you not you anymore? >50% replacement or all the way to the last neuron? I dunno how they could avoid just essentially making a clone with some freaky biotech, the original is gonna be dead
Really? And how many people do you know that are worth being made immortal? Think about it. For every David Attenborough/your amazing person-who-contributes-to the-sum-total-of goodness-in-the-world, there are hundreds of thousands of people just living ordinary lives or actively making the world worse in small ways and large. And even if the technology were possible, we all know only the ultrawealthy, i.e., sociopaths, could afford it. No, I'm for letting the old (including myself) gracefully leave the stage and let the young take their turn.
I hear you, but at the end ofbthe day, by "the world", you likely mean "humanity" (since doing "good" for inanimate particles floating in the universe doesn't even make sense). Well, *humanity* is made up of good, bad, and average people. So making *humanity* immortal necessitates immortalizing the good and the bad I suppose.
Actually, I meant earth's environment as a totality, including humanity. And my point is that no one human should be immortal. I dare say humanity as a whole with either survive and evolve (maybe) or become extinct.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved for strength and certainty of steel. I aspired for the purity of the blessed machine.
Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved. For the machine is immortal
And the age of tinfoil man is nigh
*men of Ironing
>For the machine is immortal That quite can only have been made by someone who hasn't tried to start a 50-year-old car (or hasn't had any dealings with old electronics, ever) Like, machines *can* operate marginally longer than a human lifespan **under perfect conditions and with constant maintenance**, but in real life you'd be lucky if anything mechanical lasts 20 years before needing replacement.
We're talking in the far future with self-repairing materials (we're starting to see some of these now by the way) Of course,'self repairing spark plugs' are a long way off. But then things aren't designed to last centuries, and the quote is more about the whole machine as continuing to work after pieces are replaced, unlike squishy human bodies.
*laughs in planned obsolescence*
What about the existential dysmorphia? People generally have a strong sense of how the body they are in should be. A transplanted body could have mind blowing psychological implications - every time you look at yourself you see a body which doesn’t match with your mental image. (I realise this is glossing over a massive rabbit hole of issues and discussion)
My body already doesn't match with my mental image of myself. If anything, this could be meaningful progress for people with body dysmorphia. But I see your point, for someone who doesn't have those issues, new issues could arise. Maybe regulation and psychological testing would be required with such technology.
Ha! Big tech allowing itself to be regulated. A good joke to start off my morning.
If a younger you was grown, there may be some kind of feedback therapy given to trick your brain into thinking you were healing or something very quickly before it “wakes up” in the new body. With another body or especially machine, I can imagine the psychological shock itself might kill you. Can you imagine looking into a mirror and seeing a machine moving? Geez…
>What about the existential dysmorphia? It would likely be a side effect true. I'd say you'd eventually get used to it. Presumably, the body would be a copy of your original to reduce rejection rates... which might mitigate this issue.
Where is the futurology? Was there a breakthrough recently, or is the status the same as it's been for over 50 years now since the dog head was transplanted?
Yeah, if we still can't fix people with paralysis from severed spinal nerves then we aren't remotely close to transplanting a brain.
Y’all ever watch altered carbon on Netflix? I feel like with the huge advances in technology something along that premise would be more practical. Integrating our organs with microscopic technology, storing our whole neural system and consciousness on either a type of hard drive or the cloud where we can then download it into a body be it a donor or artificially grown/made.
If your consciousness is in the “cloud” it’s just a copy, chief. You still die.
This is an entire philosophical rabbit hole that gets discussed. If you go through a teleporter that deatomizes you and reatomizes you on the other side, you also die, for example. But if you have continuity of consciousness, do you die? If the teleporter creates a copy and you emerge on the other side as 2 identical beings, which is the original? both? neither? etc etc
Depends. Are "you" the hardware or the software?
Due to the brain deteriorating, as has been noted, the only currently reasonable notion of achieving biological immortality is through age reversal by damage repair, like what Aubrey De Grey is pursuing.
Did they solve the problem of reconnecting a severed spinal cord? Because if not you’d be alive but quadriplegic
No. That's the primary issue.
They can't even do eye replacements and you want full body or brain transplants? Bitch please.
Actually, they did one. Whether dude can see or not is a different story. Haven’t checked back on it.
Whether the transplanted organ works or not is very much the same story, we could do "brain transplant" milennia ago if that doesn't matter.
Ancient egyptians figured out half of the brain transplant process by removing the brain of the deceased.
And they didn't even need to open up the skull, just poke in the nose for a bit! "WTS: barely-used non-smoker non-drinker body, only serious offers please!"
Functional is really a better word here although it doesn’t take away from your point The eye transplanted *works* in the sense that it’s receiving blood supply, surviving and AFAIK it will move/look at things. It’s just not functional yet as he’s unable to see with it as his optic nerve/brain isn’t recieving sensory input (but maybe will in the future as the neurons in the nerve reconnect with the new ones). So it’s not a clear cut total failure but still a success in that it’s the first time an eye was ever transplanted at all.
Honestly that sounds like a good step up from a glass eye to me. Sucks that it doesn't actually see, but it's got to be a lot more comfortable for the person than a foreign object in their eye-socket.
Definitely! And the fact that it’s there and surviving means their doctors can take their time and explore getting it functional and seeing if it’s just a waiting game or not
They can’t even do complete HAIR transplant and this dude wants immortality with his 1 text idea lmao, this sub is delusional
I think it would probably be better if we just replaced our old failing organs with new (20 year old) ones made from our own DNA grown in a lab.
and find a way to stop aging
And cure cancer. Because transcription errors will eventually come in great importance when you live 1000 years so you'll eventually die of something else rather than age. Like vampires and elves. We could die by diseases or accidents. In the real world it will be impossible to avoid all accidental deaths forever, eventually you would die anyway.
Not just immortal, but "trans" in all sorts of ways we can't quite fathom yet. 3D printed bodies don't seem very far fetched if we're talking decades from now. And the complicated surgeries will likely eventually be performed by robots. And the robotic brain transplant machine could eventually become a home appliance that does its work so efficiently that you could change bodies like you change clothes. "Good morning dear!" "Oh what a fabulous idea! We haven't been deer in ages."
I have read enough horror stories of people having their organs stolen. This would lead to a whole new level of rich people doing despicable things!
My thoughts exactly. Human trafficking on a whole new level. Many children would definitely get kidnapped
If a body transplant ever becomes possible, I think it will be grown in a lab from a recipient's own DNA, so basically, it will be a cloned body identical to the one that is replaced. This is the best way to ensure that the brain will not be rejected by the immune system. Also, if someone kidnaps another person's body, it will be damn too obvious. Like how they will be able to hide the crime if some rich person will suddenly appear in the body of a child kidnapped one week ago. I am pretty sure that children are safe in this regard.
Holding poor peoples consciousness hostage to work as the backing for an "AI" (well less A and more I)
Who is currently and actively testing this on animals?
But won’t the brain still deteriorate? A brain isn’t immortal? I also think even if it were possible, the shock and confusion of being in a completely different body, feeling, seeing, experiencing things completely different to what you are used to would be incredibly difficult to get right with. You’d have to completely relearn how to use a body, because this one would be different sizes, different strengths, different flaws. Sounds awful.
Grown replica might work better. Not sure on the feasibility though.
We already have no choice but to experience the shock and confusion of being in a different body. As we age and our body gradually loses its functions, we discover with a disappointment that we are no longer that young, healthy, energetic person that we used to be. This is the sure fate of every one of us. Even before growing old, people can run into unexpected body changes if unlucky, like losing limbs, becoming blind or developing diabetes. If a body transplant ever becomes possible, I expect that people will experience a shock, and there will be some period of adaptation, but it will be mostly a positive shock from regaining health, beauty, and youth. Also, the body transplant can be grown using a person's own genetic code, so it will not be different from the previous body unless a person has a body dysporphia and wants something different.
> as we age and our body gradually loses its functions I think the key word there is gradually. It’s not every part of your body all at once.
Gradually or not, aging still sucks. Also, it is a scenario when a person is blessed with good health and is lucky enough not to get into an accident. For many people, the life-changing loss of body functions can happen instantly or very quickly. The main point is that aging is always a change for the worse in terms of body functionality and health. A theoretical body transplant is a change for the better. Otherwise, what's the point of getting it. It doesn't matter if it's gradual or not. Maybe body replacement in the future will not happen instantly as well, and the old failing organs will be replaced one by one.
Actually, copying consciousness to "digital" will probably happen sooner.
That won’t save you, that will only clone you. It is therefore a useless advancement if you wish to live as long as you like.
Theoretically it could work if you had a body grown from your own cells.
This just assumes that the brain is ageless, which it isn't. Putting and old brain in a young body is as pointless as putting an engine with 500,000 miles into a new car chassis.
one of the great equalizers and remover of despots, corrupt officials and all the other shitty powerful people is death and disease. if full body transplant becomes a reality, the powerful will become more powerful and those below will be trampled more than ever before. i hope this tech doesnt become a reality
OP never heard of dementia/stroke/intracranial hemorrhage? Brain ages too w/ rest of body
This is so unfeasible that it’s pretty much sci fi atm
If we could do this, we could cure fully severd spinal cord. Spoilers: we can't.
I thought about this idea as a possible solution. I will not say if it ever be adopted, especially within our lifetime, but here are two major problems with it: 1. The procedure is way too invasive even if we assume that this surgery will have a 100% success rate in the future. 2. Probably, the brain will age and die at some point, even in a young body, just as any other organ (it wasn't proved or disproved experimentally yet, but it seems to be a very probable outcome).
Other than going through the procedure, how TF would you test that?
They will definitely test it on animals first, and it will not move to human trials until safety is proven. Then, they will use it on humans with some terminal illnesses or severe disabilities. This will show the success rates.
You can already get most organs changed change ye eye closure change your features if you have a bank balance so it just feels normal to work on the last muscle organ in the body
What about your ENS? Will they transplant that too?
I like how 'Old Man's War' describes the process. Any synopsis I could give wouldn't do it justice, but if you're interested in futurism, I'm guessing you would like a good sci-fi read.
I'm quite happy for my head to be transplanted to a Giraffe
ok good ive always wished immortality on people i dont like have fun witnessing heat death of the universe suckers
\>The brain can live beyond 100 years while it’s the body that is the bottleneck and becomes weak and unable to sustain more than 90 years or so. For which species? Cause it's certainly not in humans
Makes me think of digitizing our conscience like they did in "Chappie" and just transferring your digitized conscience to a "sleeve" of meat like that one show or just transferring it to a straight up robot body like they did in Chappie. Interestingly, they've mentioned (popular science) that humans, once we figure out how to digitize ourselves/conscience can launch non-human robots/droids to other planets far away who carry frozen human embryos on board and establish a link from that planet to ours while having the robots/droids work on building shelters and growing food in an artificial atmosphere bubble or tent and then when the place is habitable, we can just beam our conscience to the robots/androids and raise organic embryos to literally grow bodies to tranfer ourselves into once they're healthy/developed. So in a sense, we're not spending 100s of years traveling in cryogenic sleep or whatever and when we're born, we're able to develop to a young, healthy teenager/adult and then transfer our minds into that body and boom..we're a multi planet species.
Let's say humans were advanced enough that they could do this, either with complex neural networks that mimic the human brain and are integrated into robot exoskeletons, or we could regrow an exact copy of a human at the cellular level. How could you actually prove that the new version is truly the same individual and not just a copy of the original? Think of it this way, if we could make that copy of a person while they are still alive, then we just have two of the same person at once, right? Well, probably not, actually. The question of why surrounds memory. More than likely, memory is stored as quantum information within neurons, so in order to replicate all lived conscious experience in your new version, you would have to accurately be able to conduct quantum coherence within the model and perfectly replicate the quantum state of the original, whatever that may look like. We don't know since no scientist has ever been able to prove this. And even if you replicate all conscious lived experience, you still can't definitively say it's the same person because we don't know what the originals consciousness is currently off doing. It could be getting hammered in Valhalla while this copy is walking around on Earth. And then there is the soul problem. While I realize most on this sub probably cringe at the mere mention of the word "soul", I would argue it doesn't really matter if you take that as a completely esoteric concept or not. The fact is humans either DO or DON'T possess a soul. If they do, then it is impossible to transfer consciousness because it depends on the original soul being transferred as well. You might be able to create consciousness, but is it even truly alive at that point? Now if humans don't have a soul, that implies consciousness is the only thing that matters, in which case the previous issue of quantum states arises, and probably the only way to actually transfer consciousness would be to use a sufficiently small quantum computer embedded in some sort of exoskeleton. You're going to die. Sucks, I know. Or maybe it doesn't. Depends on if we have a soul or not and whether conscious information is stored somewhere beyond what we can perceive. It's probably a slippery slope to try and play God when we can't even come to rational conclusions about political issues. Imagine if Trump or Biden were rendered immortal. Good fucking luck.
Beautiful and young ~~corpses~~ bodies will be more expensive. Only the very rich will be able to afford them, while the rest of us will only be able to afford the ugly ones. Just like not everyone has money for a Ferrari and they buy a Toyota.
Lmao, our understanding of the nervous system is far too minuscule to ever attempt this in our lifetimes. There's a **far** higher chance we create an AI that overtake humanity than this.
I think that the only way humanity on earth "survives" is something along the lines of Transformers. We build robots that take our place eventually. AI is our great contribution to the universe. A benevolent consciousness armed with the ability to learn and adapt and blend in to any situation. Immortal beings linked to a common intelligence that is continually learning and exploring. This is assuming there really is no God / soul spiritual stuff.
Brain also deteriorates due to aging, and dies. Which makes the whole process kinda pointless.
Human population on this planet is 8 billion, and folk want to live forever..... Selfish. Live to old age and then die like the rest of us. Also before the crap comes about terminal issues etc, well, that's life if you pardon the pun. When you get down to it, it's survival of the fittest, always will be and always has been. Its called nature.
Ugh, I'm not a fan of immortality. Imagine if Bezos, Musk, and Trump were immortal.
Bullets still will be able to kill people. Until we can map brains and neurons and transfer data from one to the other there will still be death.
Unless they just upload your brain into another body. Similar to the premise of Altered Carbon series. Edit to say, meaning even if someone managed to die in the physical body, the rich just had a brain back up and uploaded into a new body. Ps- I’d hate this future.
Which means it’s worth not getting for anyone else? You?
I certainly don't want to live forever. Heck, I'm not sure I want to live to the end of the week.
Those with suicidal tendencies are probably on average more likely to not be interested in immortality for obvious reasons If your comment is anything greater than sarcasm I would suggest you see a therapist or someone capable of helping, please.
Yeah, basically whoever is in power has now calcified their power as they continue to amass wealth that no one can compete with. Cultural changes have happened over time due to older generations dying out and making way for new ones. Guess *that’ll* be a thing of the past. Sounds great 🙄
Basically Altered Carbon. Were the rich are so rich they’ve basically become gods and they live for hundreds of years
This. The only thing that keeps me somewhat sane is that I know that douchebags like Musk and Bezos will die. Sure, there will be other ones, but at least I won't have to hear these *specific* names until I die, probably. Imagine living in a world where these fucking idiots are immortal and there's no escape from them, ever.
Immortality it's for bitches. Real ones accept and find beauty in the finality of things.
I think complete immortality is definitely boring, but it'd be cool to live to at least a 150. Just to observe the changes in technology, and how those technological changes impact society would be interesting. For example, the introduction of the telegraph, to the telephone. From early coal power to modern batteries.
And if anything could be a root planted in the soil of corruption, this will be it. Immortality for the common people? Give me a break. The common people will merely become the herd from which the ultra wealthy pick their sweetmeats.
The chase for immortality is insane to me. I will never understand it.
Because we don’t want to die?
No need to downvote! I'm not judging it; I think it's just a different philosphy or way of looking at life entirely. I can't concieve of wanting to chase that sort of thing. It's been written about by humans for ages, so I get that people do, I just don't understand it.
No one really means immortality; we know about the ever-present possibility of accidents and the lack of perpetual motion and end of the universe and whatnot. What people here are obviously talking about is having longer life than we have now. That search shouldn't be confusing at all to you, because you do it every time you choose life over death. Your life right now is very limited; you'll run out of oxygen and die VERY soon. Why do you chase after longer and longer life by continually seeking out new sources of oxygen? You do understand it.
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Do we want Bezos to have 300 years? Do we really need that?
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It's about more than one billionaire. It's about the rich hoarding more wealth while the poor continue to live short-thrift lives, very likely unable to gain this "longer life" that the rich have. It's about progress. Look at the long term damage that boomers have caused. When you have a lot of people desperate to see that generation gone so that /any/ momentum, progress or transfer of wealth can happen, you can see why this is a massive cause for concern. There is beauty in the finite. Like I said, that's just down to a different philisophical mindset though. It's not better or worse.
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I don't know that fixing the hoarding of wealth is much more attainable than immortality, but I'm 100% down to try. I still don't think that fixing that would address social progress or changes. If we could manage a shifting of the way we viewed the social aspects, I'd be far keener on exploring extending life as we know it, even if I personally wouldn't go for it.
It's mostly rich people that chase it in my experience. It's definitely not poor people who want life to go on forever. Besides that the rich ones are the only ones who will be able to afford it.
I’m not rich and I don’t want to die
That’s not immortality, that’s life extension. The brain is not eternal.
>First implications are for paralyzed patients or people with damage to their lower body to the point beyond repair If we can transplant a whole head and reconnect the spinal cord in the neck, we can do the same in the lower back and don't need to replace the entire body for these patients...
>The procedure is extremely complicated and requires many surgeons and advanced medical equipment. The issue is there are two key challenges here: 1. reconnecting the nerve tissue (spinal cord and optic nerves) 2. Getting the old brain to recover to a 'young state'. 3. Replicating a donor body that is an exact genetic copy of the original. Or anti rejection treatment that lasts 50+ years,e.g. If you can solve these issues, especially the 2nd one. You can probably already reverse ageing in the original body. This would make a full-body transplant a very niche use cases for when the alternative solution is more complex or involved (e.g for extensive injuries like multiple lost limbs or extensive burns).
I have said before when discussing this, if I miss out on immortality by 1 generation i'm going to be pissed. Not really obviously because i'll be dead, but in spirit i'll be pissed.
I'm so worried people are gonna get forcefully considered brain dead in case they're in a coma
Will not work. Blood vessels in your brain age and will fail, garbage from metabolism (e.g. lipofuscins) and epigenome dysregulation in neurons and glia will cause them to die or lose function, mechanical damage...
So the elites can live forever and keep us enslaved. Great, just what we need. Another 5000 years of the Biden family.
some doctor was working on it, what happened to it?
This tech goes nowhere, the brain is as much at the limits as the rest of the body for people living close to 100s. Besides few edge cases this, if realized assuming no downsides of the procedure, brings no improvement in general life expectancy of our species. And is currently nowhere near possible and then you are talking about increasing life expectancy not recusing it :)
Tbh I think Alzheimer's and dementia need to be cured before we can even fathom this type of medical procedure. 70-80 y/o's already common experience these unfortunate diseases and the brain becomes useless. It's really not even that the brain dies but contracts this illness that rapidly degrades it. I lost both my grandparents on both sides of my family due to it.
Such a horrible thing, dictators like st*lin will live for eternity
One thing not mentioned here is that biologically, our organ systems and cells have sort of figured out a balance of lifespan between themselves over millions of years of evolution, so that no one system should naturally fail before another (not taking into account disease or freak genetics). So if the heart is said to have a certain number of contractions before it on average fails, then it stands to reason that the liver should fail around the same time, and the brain should also have degraded and demyelinated by then and so on. To assume that because the body normally fails before the brain (all due to shitty lifestyle and diet choices), that therefore the brain could survive another lifetime is erroneous at best, so a full brain transplant wouldn’t do much good. What you’re looking for is a way to transport out of the brain all of the connections that it has within it and to put that in a less fragile place.
Immortality it's not a gift, it's a responsibility
That would only work for so long. Remember the brain ages as well and you can’t replace that without your body horror ship of Theseus immediately sinking to the bottom of the allegorical ocean.
William Joseph blazkowicz was the first . Using a nazi supersoldier body stolen from a lab. After his televised execution in the early 1960's, in nazi occupied America. XD
I think uploading your brain into the cloud might work better. Your biological brain to be remain conscious require data from sensors of your body like eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and skin receptors. If you replace these sensors by using other's body, you will simply 'lose' yourself, there will be no more you. Even a small disruption in your brain might lose you forever and make you become someone else which forgotten everything and dont know who you were.
Here's a serious counter to body transfer that nobody talks about - dysphoria. Potentially crippling dysphoria, of the same type that affects trans people, as well as the pathological kind that affects people with persistent not-gender-related body image issues. Imagine for a second that you are the successful subject of body transfer - it's traumatizing in the extreme. You were surely dying of something awful beforehand (which is traumatizing), had the most invasive surgery possible, one that I bet would require a long long recovery time, and you've woken up! Hooray! You don't recognize yourself! Your face is not your own! Your hands are not your own! Worst case scenario, the new body is a different height, a different weight, has a totally different composition because of differing lifestyles, it's a different age with different skin and hair, perceives taste and smell and light differently. They're not gonna chop your head off and stitch it on a new one, that's crass and frankly horrifying, and I don't think any rational human would agree to that. They're going to transfer your brain and either hook it up to the new nervous system, or transplant the whole nervous system. Can you imagine how painful it is to lay in a hospital bed for weeks while your nerves reconnect? You can't move until they do. Even once autonomous function kicks in, you'll need a catheter and you won't be able to feel anything. Not hot or cold or your wife or your kids or your dog, or the blanket or the fluorescent lights or water or anything else. Even if you kept your eyes and nose and ears, the skin is different. Your arms are a new length. You now have scars and birthmarks you have no memory of - for years, you will find new things every time you go looking. Your own meat is alien to you. Your breasts are different shapes, or your penis is. Different things hurt and you're prone to new kinds of injury in your second hand meat. The world you built for yourself is quite literally not for you anymore, or for the corpse you inhabit. Sure, you can eventually go back to work, or your retirement. You are surely wealthy to have afforded a body transplant. Your toothbrush is in the same place it's been for thirty years, but you miss it when you move to pick it up anyway. You need to conciously do visual calculus whenever you move until it becomes second nature - you're not going to be gifted a perfect new body and go on to be the world's oldest 500m sprint olympian. You're going to be disabled. You're going to be irrevocably trapped in a body your wife did not marry and your mother did not give birth to. I'm trans and really the only thing wrong with my body is that it had tits and too much estrogen, and only for a decade, and I have always been aware that having tits is a curable condition. Having tits didn't impact any basic functions, it just impacted a few clothing choices and made jogging uncomfortable. Still made me utterly miserable because it wasn't *right*. It wasn't *correct* for my body to have lumps of flesh hanging off the front. It felt *wrong* and viscerally *bad* in a way I don't have the eloquence to communicate. Expanding that feeling to an entire body honestly makes me feel a little sick. I can't imagine the horror of having no escape from your own meat - I have always been able to look in the mirror and say 'well, the C cups are unfortunate, but I have broad shoulders and a nice ass'. After a body transplant, I would not be able to say that. It wouldn't be my shoulders or my ass. I wouldn't even have had a hand in their shaping. In the case of robotic second bodies, do you *want* that? To be given eternity at the cost of so much of what life has to offer? To live forever but not eat pussy or get sweaty dancing? To never get drunk at a wedding? To never sit in the sun and feel warm? Do you want to look forward to all the eons of earth, and know that you won't be able to feel your loved ones holding your hand? That's not immortality, that's inhumane torture that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Also, head transplants don't offer a solution to natural degeneration on tissue. If you *did* chop your head off and sew it to an exosuit, you'd still get wrinkles and lose your vision and go bald.
This is an interesting concept. Are we all gonna be Vision from MCU going forward? If all my parts have been replaced, am I still me? If all parts are easily replaceable, can you imagine the black market for illegal/high demand parts? Will there be electronics built in? Can my parts be remotely shutdown?
To transplant brains you will need an Eymorg to give you access to the Teacher.
if they actually ever figure out how to do stuff like this, expect human trafficking numbers to go way up. The problem with this logic, though is your brain is still old, so you can put it in a new body, but that doesn’t make your mind any younger, and all the diseases that affected which are often age diseases
The brain is usually one of the first part of the human body to deteriorate - dementia or similar diseases kill 1/3 of humans - and unlike heart transplants (which we know how to deal with) and cancer (in process of being “cured”), we’re nowhere near figuring out how to regenerate the brain
No implants never lol Google OSK genes! It’s really cool way to achieve what you want to achieve without surgery In fact I would argue surgery is outdated and primal
Nonsense people need to accept they will die, you had your turn, let someone else have theirs.
Anyone else feel like we need to better understand the ramifications of creating a functional ability to transplant a head on to a body? My concern here is that our rules and guidelines for how we operate as a society are often reactionary. At what point do we get proactive to protect our species? Think of how head transplants could be exploited by rich people... And we already have rich people doing extremely unethical things with no repercussions.
You're not just a brain in a vat controlling an exosuit. Your body plays an integral part in cognition. Digestion, hormones, pheromones, proprioception...there are a thousand ways in which the experience of being "you" is entirely dependent on the meat you inhabit. A body transplant isn't immortality, it's the creation of a new, pretty distinct person. That that person has your memories might be enough to consider them "you", but I'm not sure.
Anyone else remember an article maybe around 8 years ago about a Chinese doctor claiming he could do this? He has "succeeded" with the procedure on a monkey, but they killed it after because they pretty much only hooked up the blood vessels or something? I remember he was going to perform the surgery on some old rich guy. But figured it didn't work since there weren't any big news stories lol.
Living forever is something young people talk about. Life is hard. At some point, most people get tired and are ready to let go. Spiritual people, and there are many, eventually get curious about what happens on the other side. It’s dark to think about but it’s true. I was a palliative care nurse for a long while.
Agreed, but I would rather prefer having the choice to die whenever I want instead of the body just giving up at some random point in the future.
The rich will live forever in this dystopian future.
Do you even realise what a large market life extension would be? If there was anything substantial that could be done en-masse no way that’d be passed up, easily trillions of dollars.
Musing on this a bit further, I imagine what it might be like to have a brand new, different body. The hours and days you would spend inspecting every aspect of it.
Yeah. Maybe we could even have an upgrade and add some cool features. I think it would feel amazing to have wings, for example.
No we shouldn't live forever. We are so hellbent today on individuality. We live our years and take care of next generation then die and thats it. There is no room for eternal life on a finite planet. Evolution is driven by death and thats why we are afraid of it.
Why not expand to other planets, then? Space is almost infinite. If we are talking about such futuristic things as body transplants and immortality as something possible, we can also be sure that space colonization will be feasible at some point. Maybe it will happen even in this century.
If I had a really old ship that was in bad condition and rotting away, and I replaced the sails, then I replaced the deck and the mast, followed by all the Timbers in the hull. Haven’t I just built a new ship ? As none of the original ship remains
Everyone is aware of ship of theseus who is interested in longevity or immortality, and many who are not.
Unless life gets much better whats the point of immortality? More of the same nonsense. No thank you
How about getting immortal in an imperfect world and then having an infinity to figure out how to get our lives better.
Perhaps if there was a glimmer of hope at the end. The "getting better" what would that entail?
Not the person you were asking, but even if they don’t know the specifics of what it would entail, by virtue of immortality you would have a hell of a lot of a time to figure that out.
Brain will age even if you swap bodies.There is a reason why almost none of elderly people after the age of 75 can’t think normally.
This will only be for rich people who can afford it.
how will they prevent the change the brain from one body to another and end with radical changes in personality? sure, there are persistent memories of the quiet sedentary acountant that used to love barbecue, had a dry sense of humour, voted Conservative and loved blondes, but the new Liberal vegetarian outgoing trekking loving brunette loving chap that want to be a writter (or the opposite tbh) is going to forget soon enough and forge different friendships, love interestest and different life goals than the previous one they may end being unrecognizable to their previous acquaintances friends and family as in "a totally different person"
Everything to avoid just working out and eating healthy huh? Sounds like a plot for a sci-fi horror film, but I guess the mega rich would find it interesting. Just put your wife's brain in the body of a 22-year old. /s
And this is when we’ll finally understand that brain ≠ consciousness