People say they don’t want to live forever. Often their objection is that they don’t want to live hundreds of years the way the quintessential 99-year-old is perceived to be living—frail or ill and on life support. First of all, that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about remaining healthy and young, actually reversing aging and being an ideal form of yourself for a long time. They also don’t see how many incredible things they would witness over time—the changes, the innovations. Me, I’d like to stick around.
—Ray Kurzweil, Transcendent Man, 20091
In the second half of the twentieth century there arose a number of groups and movements dedicated to extending the human life span into centuries, millennia, or beyond—possibly even forever. It is a colorful cast of characters, many of whom I have met and come to know well enough to assure readers that this is no cult movement or financial scam exploiting the fearful. They are the cryonicists, extropians, transhumanists, Omega Point theorists, singularitarians, and mind uploaders, and they are serious about defeating death.
FREEZE—WAIT—REANIMATE: THE CRYONICISTS
My interest in cryonics is personal, with a threefold connection. It begins with the first human ever frozen in cryonic suspension—James Bedford, a Glendale College psychology professor who, on January 12, 1967, was frozen in liquid nitrogen at -321° F after succumbing to cancer. Having taught at Glendale College for eleven years, I heard anecdotes about “Ol’ Doc Bedford” and his eccentric manners (he once taught a course in vocational preparation in which he advised his students, among other things, to wash their underwear at least once a week). It was, evidently, eminently logical that he be first.
Second, for many years my sister Shawn Shermer worked in a research laboratory near Davis, California, for scientists doing cryonics experiments on animals. Sponsored by the American Cryonics Society, the laboratory successfully “chilled” both dogs and monkeys for several hours, then brought them back to active life. The appearance of the beagles Miles and Misty on the popular Phil Donahue talk show brought national attention to cryonics. What was not made clear, however, was that these animals had their temperatures lowered; they were not actually frozen in liquid nitrogen as Bedford and dozens more have been.
Third, when we founded Skeptic magazine and the Skeptics Society with our monthly science lecture series at Caltech, it seemed natural to take a skeptical look at cryonics. Mike Darwin from Alcor Life Extension Foundation gave a thoughtful presentation to our members, and we published a skeptical analysis in the second issue of the magazine.
Just as most religions have gods and holy books, cryonics offers something of its own trinity of godhead figures and founding documents in Robert Ettinger and his book The Prospect of Immortality, Eric Drexler and his book Engines of Creation, and Ralph Merkle and his document The Molecular Repair of the Brain. Merkle outlines the vision of cryonics and how it will change our lives:
Disease, disability, and the infirmities of old age will become rarities; joining polio, the plague, and smallpox as ancient pestilences finally laid to rest by the inexorable advance of technology. While some of us might have the good fortune to stay alive and healthy until these medical marvels are available, cryonics offers a bridge to the future in case we wouldn’t otherwise make it. Should our health fail we can be cryopreserved and cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen. At that temperature, tissue remains essentially unchanged for centuries. We can preserve ourselves for the few remaining decades until the day when nanomedicine can heal our injuries and restore our health: as good [as] or better than the health we enjoyed in our 20’s or 30’s.
Since I wrote about cryonics in my September 2001 column in Scientific American, Merkle and I have maintained a correspondence as he has tried to convince me to be more open-minded on the possibilities of cryopreservation. “You’re still being cited as a cryonics denier,” he wrote me in 2014, citing a newspaper article quoting me. “Turn away from the dark side, there’s still time!”2 He points out, for example, that the new techniques used today involving the cryopreservation and vitrification of the brain—which involves turning the cryopreserved brain into a glasslike substance—are superior to the older techniques used on the early adopters decades ago. Merkle has plied me with articles and links, all toward the end of arguing that one’s “self” is stored in memory, and it is memory that is being cryopreserved:
We have evidence that modern cryopreservation methods do, in fact, provide a quality of cryopreservation that is more than enough to preserve human long term memory in the information theoretic sense. The presence or absence of a synapse, as well as the proteins associated with the pre- and post-synaptic structures, and the proteins present in the synaptic cleft, should all be inferable following cryopreservation by today’s methods.3
The “information theoretic” definition of death means that you aren’t dead until your memories are erased, but it remains to be seen whether memories can be recovered after cryopreservation. It is one thing to see intact synaptic structures in a cryopreserved slice of brain in a microscope; it is quite another to see those synapses working to produce memories in a living brain, which has yet to be done. Still, Merkle’s point is that cryonics is possible in principle:
The human brain is physical, and human long term memory is associated with physical changes whose presence would still be identifiable following cryopreservation. Computational power will increase enormously in the future, as will our ability to image and analyze the changes that have occurred in the cryopreserved human brain. Given your cryopreserved brain, and sufficient computational power, and a sufficient imaging technology, we will be able to recover the information that defines who you are. We will also be able to restore the cryopreserved human brain to a fully functional state.4
Given the fact that no one currently frozen has been brought back to life, this is an assertion, not an observation. The renowned neuroscientist Christof Koch, whom I queried on this matter, agreed that an experimental test would be revealing, but he voiced his skepticism about the vitrification of brains:
As of today, we have no evidence that a vitrified brain can be turned on again later with all memories coming back. This could be tested in mice, for instance, by inducing a specific memory, e.g., using place-specific aversive condition, and then test for that memory after the vitrification process. And it’s silly to claim that vitrification doesn’t affect the molecular distribution of the roughly 106 proteins (from 103 different kinds of proteins) present at a pre-/post-synaptic junction. Indeed, it would be utterly amazing if such a highly invasive process didn’t profoundly disturb their distribution.5
The fact is that the best evidence we have from cryobiology is that it is extremely unlikely that anyone frozen to date will ever be brought back to life. It is one thing to freeze sperm, eggs, or even embryos and bring them back to life; it is quite another to do the same with large organs like the brain. According to Dr. Mehmet Toner, a Harvard Medical School professor of biomedical engineering and a cryobiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, even the more advanced method of vitrification in which tissues are infused with cryoprotectants is not as effective as cryonicists make it out to be. As he explained in a film for the HBO series Vice (which I also participated in), aptly titled Frozen Faith, “you can only slowly freeze and slowly warm large things. Ice is going to form inevitably during warming.” In a brain, this would mean neurons and their synaptic connections would be shattered, along with any memories they might retain. Although as we shall see, if the concentration of a cryoprotectant agent is sufficiently high, then rewarming may not cause ice to form, but the evidence for this conclusion is based on tissues much simpler than brains, and on animal brains much smaller than humans’.
Furthermore, current cryoprotectants work on only one type of cell at a time, requiring different agents for different cells. But the human body and brain consists of many different cell types, so protecting one for freezing would mean the sacrifice of others. For example, you might be able to protect many of the cells of a kidney, but you could not also do so of a different organ at the same time, such as a brain. The Vice film demonstrated the problem by showing one cell line relatively intact while another cell line treated simultaneously by the same cryoprotective agent was entirely compromised. “This is a very complex problem,” Toner continued. “They make it sound like if you vitrify everything will survive. That’s not true. So the chances of getting that head back with intact memories is a ridiculous concept.” As he reflected, “I’ve spent thirty-three years day in and day out thinking about how to freeze things, and I know it’s not going to work.”6
This means that the burden of proof is on cryonicists to show that it works, not on scientists to disprove it (or to prove it is unlikely). Here is what would do it for me: cryopreserve and freeze a large mammal such as a dog at -130o Celsius for a week and bring her back to life with her memories relatively intact—she recognizes her name, owner, and home, remembers learned tricks like how to sit up or fetch a stick or ball, and generally acts like the same dog as she was before as judged by her family. That would be a proof of concept about which even the most ardent skeptic would have to take notice.
AGAINST THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS: THE EXTROPIANS
As the name suggests, extropians are against entropy. Given the formidable power of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which holds that the universe is in a state of entropy, these are bold thinkers indeed. For starters, extropians engage in lifestyles meant to delay the inescapable decay of the flesh long enough for the anticipated technological miracles that will transform their bodies into eternal carriers of their patterns of information that constitute a scientific soul. According to the Wikipedia entry for “extropy,” the term was coined in 1988 and signifies “the extent of a living or organizational system’s intelligence, functional order, vitality, energy, life, experience, and capacity and drive for improvement and growth.[citation needed]” No citation is needed to feel the techno-optimism that exudes from this movement, starting with the noms de plume of the founders Tom Morrow (Tom Bell), Max More (Max T. O’Connor), and Natasha Vita-More (Nancie Clark), the latter said to be the first female transhumanist philosopher (she hopes not to be the last). In his founding document, The Principles of Extropy, Max More (who is now the CEO of the cryonics organization Alcor) outlines the principles of extropy that resonate with reasonableness. First, extropians believe in perpetual progress, which “means seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an open-ended lifespan” on the positive side of the ledger, and “the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to continuing development” on the negative side. Second, extropians affirm “continual ethical, intellectual, and physical self-improvement, through critical and creative thinking, perpetual learning, personal responsibility, proactivity, and experimentation.” Third, extropians take action “with positive expectations” with both individuals and organizations being “tirelessly proactive.” Fourth, extropians design and manage “technologies not as ends in themselves but as effective means for improving life.” And fifth, extropians support “social orders that foster freedom of communication, freedom of action, experimentation, innovation, questioning, and learning.”7
Well, who am I to object to such lofty and liberating goals? But it is one thing to work toward progress in incremental steps in hopes of achieving modest and realizable goals; it is quite another to accomplish the far loftier aims of the extropians as More envisions them: “We have achieved two of the three alchemists’ dreams: We have transmuted the elements and learned to fly. Immortality is next.” Citation needed.
Transmuting elements and learning to fly are spectacular achievements, but they’re modest protopian steps compared to the Grand Canyonesque leap of unimaginable distance required to conquer death. Our mortality appears to be programmed into every cell, organ, and system in our bodies such that immortality will require the solving of numerous problems at many levels of complexity, all at the same time. Even if we manage to break through the upper ceiling of approximately 125 years by solving these many problems, who knows what additional medical issues may arise that we cannot as yet conceive if we lived, say, two hundred, five hundred, or a thousand years. Instead of reaching for the utopian goal of immortality, or a thousand years, a more modest goal of living to age 150 at a relatively high quality of living (and not in a nursing home bed hooked up to a feeding tube and breathing machine) would be something well worth aiming at.
FROM HUMAN TO POSTHUMAN: THE TRANSHUMANISTS
Closely related to the extropians are the transhumanists (or H+, as they’re known), who intend to transform the human condition first through lifestyle choices involving diet and exercise, then through body enhancements (e.g., breast or cochlear implants) and body parts replacements (e.g., artificial knees, hips, hearts, or livers). H+ers propose that such steps will lead to a newfound “morphological freedom” that will be further advanced through genetic engineering, all with the goal of taking control of evolution and transforming the species into something stronger, faster, sexier, healthier, and with vastly superior cognitive abilities the likes of which we mere mortals cannot conceive.
The transhumanist movement goes far beyond the secular humanist movement that arose in the twentieth century as a replacement for religion, because “humanism tends to rely exclusively on educational and cultural refinement to improve human nature,” More writes in his introduction to The Transhumanist Reader (the definitive reference for all things H+), “whereas transhumanists want to apply technology to overcome limits imposed by our biological and genetic heritage.” More’s reach certainly exceeds his grasp:
Transhumanists regard human nature not as an end in itself, not as perfect, and not as having any claim on our allegiance. Rather, it is just one point along an evolutionary pathway and we can learn to reshape our own nature in ways we deem desirable and valuable. By thoughtfully, carefully, and yet boldly applying technology to ourselves, we can become something no longer accurately described as human—we can become posthuman.8
Just as we are already enhancing our senses with glasses, hearing aids, cochlear implants, and wearable computerized clothing, there is no reason why we could not also enhance our brains. We are already doing this with paralyzed patients who undergo surgery to have a computer chip implanted in the motor cortex of their brains and then learn to control an artificial arm or a computer cursor to read and write, all just by thinking. The computational neuroscientist (and transhumanist) Anders Sandberg has computed the possibility that such enhanced computer brains could be scaled up to “Jupiter-sized brains” whose intelligence would so far surpass us that we would be like lab rats to them.9 The philosopher Mark Walker concludes that it would not be hyperbole to suggest “those who upload may well be on their way to godhood.”10
One of the more intriguing transhumanists I met was a man named Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, FM-2030 for short (the date of his hundredth birthday and that of the hoped-for singularity), who reminds me of the Most Interesting Man in the World character of the Dos Equis beer commercials (“His passport requires no photograph”; “He can speak Russian … in French”). When I could not place his accent (he is the son of an Iranian diplomat and had lived in seventeen different countries by age eleven), he told me that the world is his country and that he rejects traditional collectivist notions such as nationality. A handsome man who looked ageless, he proclaimed when I queried him about that, “I have no age. Am born and reborn every day. I intend to live forever. Barring an accident I probably will.” If you can make it to 2010, he told Larry King in a 1990 interview, you will probably make it to 2030, and “if you are around in 2030 there’s an excellent chance you can coast to immortality.”11 Unfortunately, FM-2030 didn’t make it to 2010, much less 2030. He was struck down by pancreatic cancer in 2000 and now resides in a vat of liquid nitrogen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. This line from the Most Interesting Man in the World commercials is fitting: “Time waits on no one … but him.” We shall see. For now, FM-2030 is a posthuman, not a transhuman.
THE ALPHA AND OMEGA OF IMMORTALITY: OMEGA POINT THEORISTS
Omega Point Theory (OPT) contends that one day we will all be resurrected in a super-powerful virtual reality that is so authentic in detail that it is indistinguishable from physical reality today. This is different from the theory that contends that our entire universe is a Matrix-like virtual reality in some extraterrestrial’s computer, an idea supported by the estimable philosopher Nick Bostrom.12 What OPT suggests, however, is not so different in the sense that Bostrom thinks the computer simulation is running now, whereas OPT places it in the far future.
In OPT there is no need to fear death, or have yourself cryonically frozen, or have your memories uploaded into a computer, because in the far future of the universe, computers will be so powerful that they will be able to re-create every human who ever lived. OPT’s most prominent champion is Frank J. Tipler, a physicist and Christian who believes his theory of physics perfectly matches the biblical narrative of the cosmos and humanity, which he defends in two books, The Physics of Immortality and The Physics of Christianity.13 I have written about Tipler and his ideas in detail elsewhere,14 and I have gotten to know him well enough to say with confidence that he absolutely believes what he says about the inevitability of immortality, and that this outcome was foretold in the Bible, albeit in language appropriate for the time.
Like cryonicists, extropians, and transhumanists, Tipler is a techno-optimist who believes in humanity’s cosmic destiny, much like his childhood hero, the German rocket builder (V-2, Saturn V) Wernher von Braun. “The attitude of unlimited technological progress is what drove Wernher von Braun and it is what has motivated me all my life,” Tipler told me in an interview.15 Unlike most cryonicists, extropians, and transhumanists, who tend to be atheists or agnostics, however, Tipler is a thoroughgoing Christian who accepts all the major tenets of that religion as if they were derivatives of physics equations. Take the soul, for instance. “A soul is either a pattern in matter or a mysterious soul substance,” Tipler explained, noting that “Plato took the position that the soul consists of this soul substance, whereas Thomas Aquinas took the attitude that resurrection was going to be reproducing the pattern, which is what I argue in my book.” How is a soul pattern reproduced?
Tipler builds on the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the Omega Point, a conviction that the universe is inexorably evolving toward a higher plane of consciousness, at the end of which evolution there is a unity of creation between humans and God. Teilhard had a vague notion of technological progress helping to bring this about, which Tipler—and, as we shall see below, singularitarians—have filled in with scientific proposals of how, precisely, this could happen. “The instant the Omega Point is reached, life will have gained control of all matter,” Tipler explained in his book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. By that time, “life will have spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know. And this is the end.”16 In physics and cosmology, a point of infinite energy, density, and information is called a singularity, said to be the Big Bang starting point of the universe and the Big Crunch ending point—the Alpha and the Omega. The singularity in physics corresponds to eternity in religion, says Tipler. When I asked him to summarize his theory in a single sentence, he composed: “Rationality increases without limit; progress goes on forever; life never dies out.”
At the end of time, Tipler predicts, the universe will collapse, providing enough energy from the collapsing process for supercomputers to re-create every human who ever lived in a virtual reality indistinguishable from our reality. Since this far future supercomputer is, for all intents and purposes, omniscient and omnipotent, it is God. This deity, Tipler presumes, will want to re-create us all in its virtual reality. That is the resurrection—immortality in a souped-up version of the Star Trek Holodeck, a virtual reality so authentic that you couldn’t tell the difference from our current reality, nor could you turn it off by commanding, in Star Trek lore, “Computer, end program.”
I have already outlined six reasons why I am skeptical of Omega Point Theory in my book Why People Believe Weird Things17 so I won’t belabor my skepticism unnecessarily here except to say, in brief, that OPT is purely theoretical without an empirical basis, it depends on science and technology continuing unabated from the past into the future at accelerating rates (which may not happen), and it has far too many “if-then” propositions, all of which have to be true (such that if any one fails then the theory unravels). Moreover, OPT too conveniently matches our verdant hope to live forever and reconnect with our lost loved ones, and too perfectly matches the religion of its chief advocate. I am always skeptical of scientists who concoct theories to explain all the events and miracles of the Bible. I would be more impressed if a scientist discovered that, say, 46 percent of the stories in the Bible were true and the other 54 percent were myth, because this would indicate more objective integrity and less motivated reasoning.
In The Physics of Christianity, for example, Tipler suggests that the Star of Bethlehem was a supernova erupting in the Andromeda galaxy, timed to signal the birth of Jesus. The virgin birth is explained by parthenogenesis, or reproduction without sex, which Tipler thinks can be proven by testing the blood on the Shroud of Turin, which he accepts as genuine even though it is carbon-dated to the fourteenth century. Tipler thinks Jesus walked on water by “directing a neutrino beam” downward from his feet into the water, and that he ascended into the clouds to heaven using the same technology of beamed neutrinos. Finally, the physics of Jesus’ resurrection involved the atoms in his body spontaneously decaying into neutrinos and antineutrinos “in a fraction of a second, after which the energy transferred to this world would have been transferred back to the other worlds from whence it came.” Here Tipler refers to the “many worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics in which there exists an infinity of universes, some of which are similar to our own and include exact duplicates of all of us.
Maybe none of this needs explaining because Bible stories present myths with moral homilies instead of historical facts. But that’s a problem that takes us too far afield. Since this is a theory of physics, I turn to an analysis of Tipler’s theory by the physicist Lawrence Krauss, who points out that Tipler’s claim that the standard model of particle physics is complete and exact is not true. Further, says Krauss, Tipler’s claim that we have a clear and consistent theory of quantum gravity is also untrue. Tipler says that the universe must recollapse for his theory to be true. Krauss notes that “all evidence thus far suggests that it won’t.” Finally, Krauss concludes about Tipler, “He argues that we understand the nature of dark energy. We don’t. He argues that we know why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. We don’t. I could go on, but you get the point.”18 The point is that the Omega Point’s promise of immortality fails to deliver on its scientific promise.
TRANSCENDENT MAN: THE SINGULARITARIANS
As the name suggests, singularitarians are scientists considering singularity-level technologies to engineer immortality by, among other things, transferring your soul—the pattern of information that represents your thoughts and memories as stored in the connectome of your brain—into a computer. In the 2014 film Transcendence, Johnny Depp’s scientist character, Dr. Will Caster, has been working on a computer capable of achieving sentience when he is attacked by terrorists and shot with a polonium-laced bullet that leaves him with a month to live. Just before he dies, Caster uploads his mind into his quantum computer such that the continuity of his personal perspective is not broken. His self has moved from a biological medium to a silicon platform. Since there was no distinct break between conscious states, Dr. Caster’s continuity of self continues. He has transcended his body. He is his pattern, not his matter. He then wants to go online because, as he explains to an audience of neuroscientists, mathematicians, and hackers, “once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology. And in a short time its analytic power will become greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. So imagine such an entity with a full range of human emotion. Even self-awareness. Some scientists refer to this as ‘the singularity.’ I call it ‘transcendence.’”
Art imitates life. Johnny Depp’s real-life singularity scientist is Ray Kurzweil, aka the “transcendent man” in Barry Ptolemy’s documentary film of that title.19 “Transcendent” is the right adjective for this scientist, futurist, author, and inventor of such life-changing technologies as the first optical character recognition program and CCD flatbed scanner, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, Kurzweil electronic keyboards, and more. At age fifteen he was designing computer programs to aid in homework, and at age seventeen he won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search contest, which landed him an invitation to the White House. Recipient of the 1999 National Medal of Technology and inductee into the National Inventor Hall of Fame, Kurzweil wrote The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines, which influenced the field of artificial intelligence, and his book The Singularity Is Near popularized the term and the hope that one day soon we will live forever.
Kurzweil’s motivation stems in part from the premature death of his father at age fifty-eight. Fredric Kurzweil was a professional musician who, Ray’s mother explains, was never around while his boy was growing up. Like father, like son—Kurzweil’s own workaholic tendencies in his creation of over a dozen companies starting at age seventeen meant he never really knew his father. As the film Transcendence portrays the tormented inventor, Kurzweil’s mission in life seems more focused on resurrecting his patriarch than in resuscitating humanity. An especially lachrymose moment is when Kurzweil is riffling through his father’s journals and documents in a storage room dedicated to preserving his memory until the day that all this “data” (including Ray’s own fading memories) can be reconfigured into an AI simulacrum so real that the son will feel reunited with the father he never knew. Through heavy sighs and wistful looks, Kurzweil appears less a proselytizer on a mission than a man tormented. In one scene Kurzweil is shown wiping away a tear at his father’s grave site; in another he pauses over photographs and looks longingly at mementos. Although Kurzweil says he is optimistic and cheery about life, he can’t seem to stop talking about death: “It’s such a profoundly sad, lonely feeling that I really can’t bear it,” he admits. “So I go back to thinking about how I’m not going to die.”
How does Kurzweil plan not to die? It begins with what he calls “the law of accelerating returns,” which holds not just that change is accelerating, but that the rate of change is accelerating. Moore’s Law has accurately projected the doubling rate of computer power since the 1960s. The singularity is Moore’s Law on steroids and applied to all science and technology. Before the singularity, the world will have changed more in a century than it had in the previous thousand centuries, which is staggering enough. As we approach the singularity, says Kurzweil, the world will change more in a decade than in a thousand centuries, and as the acceleration continues and we reach the singularity, the world will change more in a year than in all presingularity history. When that happens, humans will achieve immortality.
Postsingularitarians will be to us what we are to our pets: so vastly smarter that we won’t even know how intelligent they are. Within a quarter century, Kurzweil projects, “nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence,” then “soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge.”20 Compare the room-sized computers of the 1950s to the pocket-sized computers we carry around in our pockets and then follow that trajectory downward in size over the same amount of time, or less, and you arrive at cell-sized computers that can be digested in tablet form. Once such nanotechnologies exist in the form of nanorobots that will repair cells, tissues, and organs (including brains), when they are coupled with other biotechnologies like designer drugs and engineered genes, the aging process will be halted, and possibly even reversed, enabling us “to live long enough to live forever,” as he proclaimed in his book Transcend.21
To secure your health until this secular second coming (around 2040), Kurzweil’s book, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (coauthored with Terry Grossman), recommends that we adopt “Ray and Terry’s Longevity Program,” which includes 250 supplements a day and weekly rounds of biochemistry reprogramming through intravenous nutritionals and blood cleansing. To boost antioxidant levels, for example, Kurzweil suggests a concoction of “alpha lipoic acid, coenzyme Q10, grapeseed extract, resveratrol, bilberry extract, lycopene, silymarin, conjugated linoleic acid, lecithin, evening primrose oil (omega-6 essential fatty acids), n-acetyl-cysteine, ginger, garlic, 1-carnitine, pyridoxal-5-phosphate, and Echinacea.”22 Bon appétit.
The singularity as envisioned by Ray Kurzweil is admittedly inspiring. He is not a big man, but onstage in full Singularity Is Near mode, he is larger than life. Here he is in 2016, with the full backing of the tech giant Google behind him as their director of engineering, explaining in a Playboy interview what we have to look forward to:
By the 2030s we will have nanobots that can go into a brain non-invasively through the capillaries, connect to our neocortex and basically connect it to a synthetic neocortex that works the same way in the cloud. So we’ll have an additional neocortex, just like we developed an additional neocortex 2 million years ago, and we’ll use it just as we used the frontal cortex: to add additional levels of abstraction.
Not just smarter, but healthier:
As they gain traction in the 2030s, nanobots in the bloodstream will destroy pathogens, remove debris, rid our bodies of clots, clogs and tumors, correct DNA errors and actually reverse the aging process. I believe we will reach a point around 2029 when medical technologies will add one additional year every year to your life expectancy.23
As the rate of progress of medical technology accelerates, the years will pile up for decades, centuries, and beyond, possibly to forever.
Kurzweil is no armchair philosopher. He works for Google, and his bosses, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, started the biotech company Calico to develop the science and technology to expand the human life span to over two hundred years. Hedge fund manager and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel created Breakout Labs in order to fund scientists and startups that are working on achieving immortality, and he invested $3.5 million into the antiaging Methuselah Foundation, founded by Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist who treats aging as an engineering problem to be solved at the cellular level by reprogramming the anatomy, physiology, and genetics of cells so that they stop aging. Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison has contributed more than $430 million toward antiaging research because he finds the quiet acquiescence of mortality “incomprehensible.” As he told his biographer, “Death has never made any sense to me. How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?”24 It’s a good question, and one that others are working on through mind uploading.
UPLOADING THE MIND AND PRESERVING THE CONNECTOME
Your connectome is the pattern of information—your thoughts and memories—that represents your MEMself and, as long as you’re alive, your POVself.25 Research on copying your connectome is something of an extension of cryonics, which also depends on upholding the structural integrity of the brain because without an intact connectome, individuals brought back to life without their thoughts and memories would not be themselves. They would either be unique MEMselves with new memories that formed once they started functioning again, or else they would be zombies. There are now scientists working on preserving the connectome in such a way that it can be stored for centuries, or even millennia, unchanged, until the day comes when it can be uploaded into a computer and “turned on” like Johnny Depp’s character in Transcendence.
The preservation of the connectome is one of the goals of 21st Century Medicine in Fontana, California.26 The company specializes in the cryopreservation of human organs and tissues using cryoprotectants (antifreeze) so that they may be excised, transported, and transplanted into new patients with minimum damage. In 2009, for example, the lab’s chief research scientist, Gregory M. Fahy, published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Organogenesis, documenting how his team successfully transplanted a rewarmed rabbit kidney after it had been cryoprotected and frozen to -135o C through the process of vitrification, “in which the liquids in a living system are converted into the glassy state at low temperatures.”27 If kidneys can be so preserved, why not brains?
Fahy and his colleague Robert L. McIntyre have developed a technique that they employed to win a portion of the Brain Preservation Prize (BPP), established by the neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth, a senior scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and president of the Brain Preservation Foundation. I am on the advisory board of the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) as something of an advocatus diabolic, so I follow the research closely. When it became apparent that they were in the running for the prize, I was invited to tour the facilities of 21st Century Medicine in September 2015 to meet their principal investigators and observe the research firsthand. The prize is currently valued at $106,000 (private donations continue to increase it), the first 25 percent of which was awarded to the 21st Century Medicine team in February 2016 for the Small Mammal Phase of the prize for the complete preservation of the synaptic structure of a whole rabbit brain. No one has yet won the other 75 percent for the first team “to successfully preserve a whole large animal brain in a manner that could also be adopted for humans,” but two teams have already submitted specimens for analysis, and the prospects are good that someone will win the second phase of the prize fairly soon.
After meeting Fahy, McIntyre, and their support staff and fellow scientists, Hayworth and I were escorted to the main laboratory room, where we were shown the Controlled Isothermic Vapor Storage units. These huge cylindrical tanks are filled with liquid nitrogen that released clouds of vaporous gas when we opened the lids to examine the plastic containers containing frozen whole brain samples prepared for the BPP, a total of three rabbit brains and two pig brains. Neither of the rabbit brains showed any visible signs of ice formation or damage, but one of the pig brains had a dime-sized ice smudge in the occipital lobes near the cerebellum. Not a good sign, but this is not as yet a perfect science.
From there we moved to the surgical bay, where there was already a rabbit lying on the table unconscious under anesthesia.28 The surgery on the rabbit began by shaving the fur off its neck in order to access the carotid arteries, which were carefully opened so that a tiny plastic tube could be inserted into each, through which the brain was infused with a fixative chemical called glutaraldehyde that acts as a preservative. When injected into a brain, within minutes it stabilizes neural structure by binding the proteins within the neurons together into a solid gel. Brains fixed in this manner can retain structural stability at room temperature for several days with no degradation. At this point in the process, when I wondered aloud about what all this was doing to the rabbit, I was told that the animal was dead and could not be brought back to life. Oh.
After about forty-five minutes of preservative perfusion, a cryoprotectant agent was pumped into the rabbit’s brain that then allowed it to be lowered to the storage temperature of -135o C, a temperature so low that the brain vitrifies without ice crystal formation. The next day Hayworth processed the brain, utilizing a machine that cuts it into razor-thin slices of 150 µm each (a µm is a micrometer, or micron, that equals one millionth of a meter, and 150 µm is about the thickness of a single human hair). The slices were then put on microscopic slides and viewed and analyzed through an electron microscope to determine if there was any damage from the fixation, vitrification, or freezing processes. The result was an intact glutaraldehyde fixed brain with no visible macroscopic defects; that is, there was no ice damage and the structure of the neurons and their synapses was intact.29 This entire process is called aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), and it was in fact the slices from the rabbit brain that I witnessed being prepared that won the Brain Preservation Prize. Figure 8-1 shows the liquid nitrogen containers that hold the frozen brains and the temperature gauge showing that they are stored at -125° C, the surgical bay at 21st Century Medicine where the surgery on the rabbit was conducted, and the microscope through which I observed the brain slices to assess the structural integrity of the neurons and their synapses after preservation.
The experiment, McIntyre told me, was a proof of concept.30 How is a dead animal proof of anything? I wondered aloud. Think of a book in epoxy resin hardened into a solid block of plastic, McIntyre parried. “You’re never going to open the book again, but if you can prove that the epoxy doesn’t dissolve the ink the book is written with, you can demonstrate that all the words in the book must still be there … and you might be able to carefully slice it apart, scan in all the pages, and print/bind a new book with the same words.” In this analogy, McIntyre continued, “brain viability is like the ability for you to open a book, leaf through the pages, and read the book’s story. The brain’s connectome is like the words on the pages of the book. You can preserve the words while making the book impossible to open, and you can prove that the words are preserved by doing your preservation procedure on test books, cutting them open, and seeing that the words haven’t been altered.” This, McIntyre explained, “is what I’m trying to do with brains—the glutaraldehyde glues all the proteins together while maintaining the structural connections between all the brain’s cells. Storage at -135° C completely locks everything in place and guarantees long-term storage.”
Figure 8-1
The 21st Century Medicine surgical bay where I observed the surgery on the rabbit brain, and the microscope through which I observed the rabbit brain slices to assess its structural integrity after preservation. From the author’s collection.
Further examination by Hayworth and the other Brain Preservation Prize judge, the MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung, determined that the connectome conservation was such that the prize criteria had been met. Through the 3-D scanning electron microscope, Hayworth told me, the rabbit brain circuitry he examined “looks well preserved [and] undamaged, and it is easy to trace the synaptic connections between the neurons.” Thus they have moved on to the large mammal phase of the contest where, Hayworth elaborated, the 21st Century Medicine team “has already submitted to the BPF such a preserved pig brain for official evaluation.” Hayworth added that 21st Century Medicine “has already presented credible electron microscopic evidence in their Cryobiology publication that their Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation technique can preserve a whole pig brain, but of course this will have to be verified independently by the BPF to win the final phase of our prize.”31 As of this writing, the BPP for large mammals has yet to be granted.32 Figure 8-2 shows what the rabbit and pig brains look like before analysis and after.
During my tour of the lab, Ken Hayworth offered a full disclosure to me that he has more than a detached scientific interest in this subject. He would like humanity to transcend mortality and is motivated to be a part of that effort, even if it doesn’t happen in his lifetime.33 Assuming the connectome remains intact after cryopreservation, I pressed him, how do you know memories are preserved if, say, such a brain were reawakened? “The most direct evidence that all human long-term memory is stored statically might be the Profound Hypothermia and Circulatory Arrest (PHCA) surgical procedure used since the 1960s. Patients’ brains (and cores) are cooled to as low as 10° C during surgeries lasting around thirty minutes.34 It is known that at temperatures below 20° C, excitatory synapses are no longer able to function. Thus all patterned electrical activity is routinely stopped during a PHCA surgery, but the patients recover with memories and personality intact. This is strong evidence that long-term memories (past a few hours) are stored in a static manner.”35
Figure 8-2. Cryopreserved Brains
(A) ASC-preserved rabbit brain vitrified at -135o C. (B) ASC-preserved pig brain rewarmed after being stored at -135o C. The goo covering it is melted CPA. (C) Electron micrograph of cortex sample taken from the rabbit brain shown in (A). Synaptic details are clearly visible and well preserved. Scale bar is 1 micron. (D) 10 × 10 × 8 micron FIB-SEM volume acquired at 8nm resolution taken from the rabbit brain shown in (A). Neural processes and connections are easily traced in this volume (similar FIB-SEM videos are available online as part of the ASC publication). Courtesy of Kenneth Hayworth.
A review paper by the Nobel laureate and memory pioneer Eric Kandel and his colleagues summarizing the research on memory through 2015, for example, argues that memories longer than a few hours old are stored as static structural changes that can be seen in electron microscope images.36 Another 2015 review paper titled “Memory Engram Storage and Retrieval” by the neuroscientist Susumu Tonegawa and his colleagues summarized over a century’s worth of experimental research demonstrating, in their technical jargon, that
memory may be stored in a specific pattern of connectivity between engram cell ensembles distributed in multiple brain regions and this connectivity pattern is established during encoding and retained during consolidation. Based on these integrative findings, we propose that enhanced engram cell-specific synaptic strength is crucial for the retrievability of particular memory engrams, while the memory information content itself is encoded in a pattern of engram cell ensemble connectivity.37
A more concise and poetic way to say all this is neurons wire together if they fire together.38 The wires are where the memories are, and they can be changed with changing environments, also known as neural plasticity. Thus, underlying the overall connectome for a brain is an engram circuit for a given memory, or a memory engrome, as it is called. Each of these engromes constitutes a memory or memory pattern, the totality of which constitutes the connectome. In the words of Eric Kandel in his foundational textbook Principles of Neural Science: “One of the chief ideas we shall develop in this book is that the specificity of the synaptic connections established during development underlie perception, action, emotion, and learning.”39 As Hayworth summed it up for me: “In the neuroscience literature there is a truly vast array of evidence that long-term memories are stored as static connections. The ‘static system of connections = memories’ is as fundamental to current neuroscience theories as ‘static sequences of DNA base pairs = genes’ is to theories of biology.”
THE SCIENCE OF THE SOUL
The analogy between memories and genes is apt because the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, Francis Crick, famously took a career detour from genetics into neuroscience to uncover the nature of consciousness, and opened his bestselling book The Astonishing Hypothesis with these now oft-quoted lines:
The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “you,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing.40
Crick subtitled his book The Scientific Search for the Soul, which I note here because this is the undercurrent driving much of this research; and not just the search for the soul, but the preservation and resurrection of it. Why? I put the question to Hayworth, whose mannerisms and affectations remind me of Sheldon Cooper on Big Bang Theory (without the nerdy laugh). “Well, it would be great to see the future firsthand,” he began. “As an atheist I know there is nothing to fear in death, the party will just go on without me. But I would very much like to stay at the party a while longer, especially to see us colonize space and unlock the mysteries of the universe.” That’s hardly unique, as most of us would like to stay at the party for as long as we can, but there is more for Hayworth. Degenerative brain disorders such as dementia and Alzheimer’s means that even if the extropians and the transhumanists succeed in extending life by decades or more, unless we can deal with these brain diseases it won’t be worth living longer. “When the human race finally achieves the technological and scientific prowess necessary to upload our minds into custom designed mechanical bodies and computerized brains,” Hayworth suggested, “those created bodies will have none of the limitations of our biological bodies designed by uncaring natural selection.”
That sounds utopian, and Hayworth is realistic enough to realize that if “even a hard-core skeptic like you instinctively rejects the idea that mind uploading is possible,” how much harder it is going to be to convince masses of religious people who “look forward to Jesus coming back to destroy the earth and take our souls up to heaven.” And that’s here in the West. Imagine what radical Islamic terrorists would do if they came upon a facility for brain uploading or a cryonics company, given their propensity to destroy even religious icons of faiths different from their own. Even most of his neuroscience colleagues think Hayworth has gone around the bend on this project, but as he reflected, “Whether I personally get to see the future is inconsequential. What is important to me is that this technology (brain preservation) has the possibility of making the world a much better place. That is worth working toward.”
Indeed it is, but will it do what he thinks it will do? That is, can it solve the continuity of personal perspective problem such that when the connectome with all your memories is brought back to life it will really be “you” waking up inside the computer, in a manner similar to you waking up from a long sleep? That is, is the MEMself the same as the POVself? I don’t think it is, but Hayworth does, and in support he references Derek Parfit’s book Reasons and Persons, in which the late philosopher proposes this thought experiment to counter the continuity problem: One person with a split brain whose two hemispheres are identical in every way (including identical memories) sacrifices himself for his two identical brothers who are dying of irreversible brain damage by donating each of his two brain hemispheres to them. Now you have two identical people with the same set of memories walking about in two separate bodies, each feeling psychologically continuous from before when there was just one.41 What happened to “you”? Nothing. Your old body is gone, but there are now two of you in two separate but identical bodies. Parfit believes that the psychological continuity in splitting and transplanting the two identical brain halves solves the personal perspective problem, as there are now two continuous personal perspectives, each of whom feels like and perceives himself to be “you” in every way. In this sense, then, uniqueness is not the key to identity. It doesn’t matter how many there are of you—one, two, lots; as long as there is psychological continuity when the copies are made (or transferred to another platform), then, as in the Star Trek episode with the duplicate Riker, you would each begin to lead separate lives, develop new and different memories, and become, once again, unique.
In this view, the self is not “our moment-to-moment ongoing sense of self” or our POVself, Hayworth insists, but “our unique set of memories,” or MEMself. He admits that a whole person consists of both POVself and MEMself, but he believes that once the MEMself transfer is made and the computer turned on, the POVself will also be activated. After all, POV is just how you are looking out at the world at any given moment as the information from it streams into your brain through your senses, which all organisms experience no matter how simple or complex. Your dog has a POV, as does the ant crawling across your floor. Every living thing has a POV. The key to selfhood, says Hayworth, lies in the thoughts and memories, which are encoded in MEMself.
I disagree with Hayworth and have told him so. In response, he argues that the sense of POVself as the primary one is an illusion, not unlike the illusion that we see a unified field when we look out into the world even though there is a blind spot in the retina where the optic nerve exits the eye, or the larger illusion that we are one unified self even though the brain consists of numerous neural networks working independently to solve different problems and run different systems. We are simply unaware of all that our brains are doing, and that’s a good thing, otherwise the world would be a buzzing blurry chaos of activity. If the self is an illusion, then so, too, is the POVself, because what it’s like to be you at any given moment (your point of view looking out through your eyes) is not real. What’s real is the totality of engromes—all the engrams making up your memory that together with your thoughts composes the connectome—the MEMself.42
I still don’t see how the MEMself alone can be your self (or your soul). If duplicating the MEMself were done without the death of the person, then there would be two MEMselfs, each with its own POVself looking out at the world through their unique eyes. At that moment each would take a different path in life thereby recording different memories based on different experiences. “You” would not suddenly have two POVs. If duplicating the MEMself were done upon the death of the person, there is no known mechanism by which your POVself would be transported from your brain into a computer (or a resurrected body). As I demonstrated in the Gedankenexperiment with the two Michael Shermers in the previous chapter, the MEMself is not the same as the POVself; if you copied my connectome and uploaded it into a computer and turned it on, I do not think that it would be like waking up from a long sleep with a continuity of self intact. A POV depends entirely on the continuity of self from one moment to the next, even if that continuity is broken by sleep or anesthesia. Death is a permanent break in continuity, and your personal POV cannot be moved from your brain into some other medium, here or in the hereafter. Of course, I could be wrong, and I would not protest were I to awaken in some paradisiacal state after death with both MEMself and POVself fully functioning.
THE PTOLEMY VS. COPERNICAN PRINCIPLES: THINKING SKEPTICALLY ABOUT IMMORTALITY
If there is one thing I have learned in a quarter century of professional skepticism, it is this: Beware the prophet who proclaims the end of the world, the apocalypse, doomsday, or judgment day is upon us, or that the second coming, the resurrection, paradise, or the Greatest Thing to Happen to Humanity Ever is coming in the prophet’s own lifetime. The belief that we can transcend what no one before us has arises from our natural inclination to assume that we are special and that our generation will witness the new dawn. Call it the Ptolemaic Principle—the belief, like its namesake’s, that we are not only at the center of the universe but are specially created, chosen people living at a unique time in history. People have always embraced the Ptolemaic Principle, but it is gainsaid by the Copernican Principle, which, pace its namesake, holds that Earth is not the center of the solar system, the solar system is not the center of our galaxy, our galaxy is not the center of the universe, humans are not specially created apart from all other animals, and we are not living in the most important time in history.
Recall, too, the Mediocrity Principle, which states that an item selected at random from a population is most likely to have come from the most numerous type of those items. Reach into a bag containing a thousand Ping-Pong balls, nine hundred of which are white and one hundred black, the chances are pretty good (90 percent, in fact) that you will select a white ball. Pluck someone at random and chances are that that person will represent the population at large. Select any generation of humans from the past and they are likely to resemble those who came just before or after them. Everyone feels special, and every generation believes they are living in special times, but statistically speaking this cannot be true. Thus, the chances that even a science-based prophecy such as those proffered by cryonicists, extropians, transhumanists, singularitarians, and mind uploaders will come true is highly unlikely. Prophets of both religious and secular doom foretell the demise of civilization within their allotted time (and that they will be part of the small surviving enclave while everyone else is left behind). Prognosticators of both religious and secular utopias always include themselves as members of the chosen few, with the paradisiacal state just within reach. Rarely do we hear a scientific futurist or a religious diviner predict that the “big thing” is going to happen in, say, the year 7510. But where’s the hope in that? Yes, proponents of cryonics do make such long-range projections, admitting that the technologies needed to resurrect the frozen dead are likely many centuries in the future, but perhaps that’s why they have so few takers.
Evaluating these science-based theories of immortality, cryonics seems like a better bet than mind uploading, only because without the continuity of self through one’s point of view (the POVself), having my body, brain, and connectome preserved, frozen, stored, defrosted, warmed, and reawakened feels more like waking up from a long sleep than does having a copy of my connectome uploaded into a computer (the MEMself), assuming any of this ever actually worked. And here we face a type of Pascal’s wager: if you do nothing and have yourself buried or cremated upon death, there is a zero chance of returning; if you sign up with one of the cryonics organizations, there is at least a greater-than-zero chance of being resurrected. So … should you make arrangements to be frozen, just in case? At Alcor, the oldest and most established cryonics organization in the world, the standard financial plan is to take out a life insurance policy with Alcor as the beneficiary to cover the costs ($200,000 for your full body, $80,000 for just your head). So, depending on your age and health, the premium could be between a few hundred and several thousand dollars a year. The cryonicist Ralph Merkle outlines the choice matrix as follows: if you sign up and it works, you get to live again; if it doesn’t work, you’re still dead and you don’t care that you lost the premiums on the life insurance policy. If you don’t sign up, whether or not cryonics works, in the future, you’re still dead. In a century or so we’ll know the outcome of the experiment, so why not put yourself in the experimental group instead of the control group?43
It’s a good argument, but cryonics is not a matter of nothing to lose and everything to gain. A life insurance policy purchased in your sixties could set you back between $3,000 and $5,000 per year. If you live another twenty years, that means you’ve spent between $60,000 and $100,000 on premiums that might have been invested elsewhere, such as in real estate, the stock market, or your family. And might not your money be better spent in extending your life now rather than the promised future (unless, of course, you have unlimited disposable income)? If Alcor or one of the other cryonics organizations offered me a free freeze I’d take it, but in the meantime if I had to bank on one of these technologies I would opt for the extropians and transhumanists because at least they suggest a more protopian approach of change in incremental steps that I can employ starting tomorrow (diet, exercise, lifestyle), and in fact I do that already, as do most people who care about their health and longevity. So let’s continue along that path and see how far we can get. Maybe medical breakthroughs in the coming decades will enable my generation to make it into our nineties or low one hundreds in relative physical health and cognitive coherence, and perhaps genetic engineering will allow more and more of us to lead healthy and happy lives into our 120s. But for the immortality meliorists fantasizing about living for centuries or millennia (or forever), remember that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is paramount in the universe, so entropy will get us in the long run, if not the short. As the renowned physicist and astronomer Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington explained in his classic work The Nature of the Physical World:
The law that entropy always increases—the second law of thermodynamics—holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.44
I am also skeptical of extrapolating trend lines very far into the future. Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable. All those nifty graphs of accelerating technological change may not continue at those rates, nor apply to all biotechnologies. The downsizing of computers from room size to pocket size is one thing; it is quite another to go from pocket size to cell size. The miniaturization of computer chips must one day run up against the limitations imposed by the laws of physics and impede many of the laws of accelerating returns that Kurzweil envisions getting us to forever. Plus, in my opinion, the problems of aging and artificial intelligence are orders of magnitude harder than anyone anticipated decades ago when these fields began. Machine intelligence of a human nature is probably decades away, maybe a century, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether. Even techno-optimists such as Jay Cornell and R. U. Sirius (Ken Goffman), authors of the encyclopedic work Transcendence: Transhumanism and the Singularity, admit that “the human mind is so complex and subtle, and so rooted in our meat bodies, that successful mind uploading will be far more difficult than many think, and perhaps impossible.”45
Finally, cryonics, transhumanism, the singularity, and mind uploading all sound utopian, the other thread we will explore in the next section of the book on the quest for perfectibility and why, like the quest for immortality, it fails to deliver on its promises.