Problems With Life Extension: The Brain

June 30th, 2008 | by blank89 |

Introduction

We have a very poor understanding of how information is stored in the brain.

With the development of modern science came an ambition to live forever. The desire to live forever goes back almost as far as history. Religions often promise eternal life in a different form, but what about a real life extension application developed by science? In the past few decades money has slowly started to trickle to research groups looking for ways to preserve the body and it’s organs. Unfortunately, the one organ that is important is the organ we are furthest behind in saving: the brain.

We have a very poor understanding of how information is stored in the brain on a scale that we can recognize. Without being able to preserve information in the brain, there is no way to extend your life indefinitely. Even if a brain could be transfered to a new body, it will eventually die of old age and the information in the brain will be lost. This happens because while the brain does grow new cells it grows them too slowly to retain enough information.

However, all hope is not lost. There are a few potential ways to preserve the information in the brain. Science is far from a real application, but at least there is a foot in the door. Like with many answers, we have only found more questions. One such question that arises in an attempt to preserve information in the brain is: how far are we prepared to blur the line separating a human being from the information that they are made up of?

Accelerating Brain Growth

Wouldn’t it be nice if the brain just grew cells fast enough to retain information? This is the same as if dead heart cells were replaced after a heart attack. The brain would function normally, but cells would be replaced at a very fast rate.

Brain growth is a careful balancing act. If you replace cells too quickly you may lose information by not giving it a chance to transfer to new cells and cell structures. If you don’t replace them fast enough, the information may be lost when cells die out.

Prevent The Cells From Dying

If we could slow down (or stop) the rate at which brain cells died, perhaps in combination with accelerating brain growth somewhat, the information would last longer in the brain without the need to move it on to a different medium as fast. This technique may simply be a supplement to speeding up brain growth, improving the chances of information persistence.

This technique may also allow information to be preserved long enough to develop other techniques. This could drastically increase the number of people alive today who can benefit from such technologies. It may also be the easiest to develop an application for, as well as the cheapest to implement.

Replacing The Brain

What if we didn’t need to keep the brain alive at all? It may be possible to preserve the information in the brain by emulating brain cells with nano-machines. These machines would take the place of brain cells as they died out, perhaps accelerating the process by killing off brain cells and replacing them as quickly as information could be transfered. There are some serious advantages to moving the brain information on to a machine-based medium. However, there are also some enormous social and intellectual consequences.

Firstly, the line dividing man and machine would be almost completely gone. How many people are willing to admit that we are little more than chemical computers? On the flip side, a computer doesn’t need a biological body to keep it alive. This technique may bring life extension to the masses because it could be made much less expensive than keeping the human body alive.

Mapping The Brain

This is perhaps slightly less invasive than replacing all of your brain cells. If there were some way we could collect all of the information in the brain without destroying a single brain cell it would be much less controversial. If the nano-machines could instead collect information in the brain and supplement the brain as a storage medium, then when the brain died no information would be lost.

The only problem with this technique is that it may not be as smooth as the others. At some point brain death will happen. It may not be possible to determine if the remaining information is the person we were attempting to save, or merely a perfect copy.

Conclusion

Nobody ever said that life extension would come without sacrifices. One of the sacrifices that will have to be made is that we will have to admit that we could be emulated on a computer and are little more than self aware information. Religion is likely to misinterpret this as fighting against God. From the Christian perspective this is very similar to the Tower of Babel scenario. If we are immortal like God supposedly is, then what is to stop us from acting like him/her/it?

People alive today may not have a chance to find out if we do not focus more on preserving information in the brain and less on preserving the body that maintains it. Even if it means we become a brain in a jar or a computer with wheels, isn’t that better than dying?