Generations of Argentines grew up reading stories of extraordinary characters in magazines published by Columba: El Tony, Intervalo, Fantasía, D’artagnan, Nippur Magnum.* In May 1969, D’artagnan released “Gilgamesh el inmortal” (“Gilgamesh, the Immortal”), a comic by illustrator and scriptwriter Lucho Olivera, which initially was due to have just one episode but, due to popular demand, turned into a series with more than 140 installments.
The story is based on a beautiful Sumerian legend in which Gilgamesh, king of Uruk more than two thousand years before Christ, sets out on a journey across deserts, seas, and mountains to find the secret to eternal life. After a long voyage, he finds Utnapishtim, the Distant One, the only man who was granted immortality by the gods, and he reveals to the wandering king that the secret to eternal life is in a Lycium plant found at the bottom of the sea. Gilgamesh ties rocks to his feet to reach the bottom of the waters, and once he finds the plant, he unties the rocks and gets back to his ship with the precious elixir. However, during his return trip, a serpent steals the Lycium plant, stripping him of the gift of immortality (although, according to the legend, Gilgamesh ruled Uruk for 126 years).
Our lives go by too fast. We live a few decades, and sooner or later we face the dreadful phantom of death. Yet science’s extraordinary advances brazenly defy the inevitability of our extinction and, like Gilgamesh in ancient Uruk, we search for the Lycium flower to perpetuate ourselves till the end of time. It is the strongest impulse of every living being, our conatus, the survival instinct rooted within each of us that makes us fear death and cling to life.
The notion of Cartesian dualism, advocated by Western religions, offers great comfort: With death it is the body that perishes, but the mind, the soul, that which defines our being, survives material extinction and makes us immortal. Yet, as we discussed in chapter one, Cartesian dualism is hard to sustain from a philosophical point of view. Although it is worth noting that science, reason, cannot demonstrate the existence or nonexistence of a god or life beyond death; that’s a question of faith. But let’s set aside religious arguments and analyze concrete possibilities that science offers us to transcend death.
Currently, most scientists embrace the idea of materialism: The mind does not exist independent from the body; rather, they are one and the same. Therefore, there’s a material substrate—neural activity—that determines memory and identity. And this is precisely the fact that opens up the possibility of achieving the apparently impossible, to defeat death in the great chess match, as famously depicted by Ingmar Bergman in The Seventh Seal.
Carried along by the most formidable scientific crusade of all times, let’s then imagine that we can maintain or, more specifically, cryopreserve our body when it perishes; in other words, preserve it at a very low temperature to avoid the decomposition of organs, so as to eventually resuscitate it when scientific advances allow, in dozens or maybe hundreds of years. After all, who can assure us this won’t be possible in the future? Until a few years ago, it also seemed impossible to create cyborgs or computers that could defeat chess champions and, going further back, the idea of humans flying to the moon was a pipe dream.
The cryonics idea has been used in countless sci-fi movies,* among them Open Your Eyes, by Alejandro Amenábar, where a person is preserved in a continuous virtual sleep waiting to be resuscitated.* Up to this point, there’s nothing new—Amenábar’s movie is one of many using the same story line, but with a major difference: Open Your Eyes outlines what it would be like to remain asleep for decades, giving way to an exquisitely complex plot.
Scene from Ingmar Bergman’s Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal), in which a medieval knight challenges Death to a chess game in order to prolong his life. (© AB Svensk Filmindustri (1957), Photo: Louis Huch, Stills Archive: The Swedish Film Institute.)
Earlier we wondered if perhaps some nefarious mastermind, Descartes’s famous evil genius, could create the illusion of a nonexistent reality by stimulating our senses. We recall a similar idea explored in The Matrix, where two parallel realities are combined: the one of the Matrix, with humans in incubators experiencing a nonexistent reality, and the one faced by those who have freed themselves from that false reality and fight the machines that generate it.
This chapter’s opening illustration is inspired by the opening sequence in Open Your Eyes, where the main character, César, finds himself walking down Madrid’s Gran Vía, completely alone. The character’s solitude, in a city that is usually crammed with people, decidedly stands out and evokes Dan Dennett’s argument that the idea of The Matrix, or Descartes’s demon, is actually impossible because we cannot replicate the infinitely complex feedback we have while interacting with other people and the outside world. The Gran Vía scene is, in the end, nothing more than a dream, and once César wakes up, the scenario repeats itself in the daily chaos. The crosscutting is perhaps the most captivating aspect of the movie, visually narrating the story’s masterful fusion of reality and imagination, wakefulness and sleep; and how memories and even people’s identities are jumbled for someone experiencing eternal sleep. The complexity of the outside world and our interactions with it shows us then that external reality exists, while the coherence of the facts that happen to us reinforce that we are not dreaming; regardless of how elaborate the dream we are immersed in may be, the illusion cannot be indefinitely sustained. At some point the dream narrative would start to fail, as it does in Open Your Eyes.
The plot refers to a cryonics company in Arizona called Life Extension. Oddly enough, such a company exists. Its name is Alcor Life Extension Foundation and, as in the movie, it offers the service of preserving the body in liquid nitrogen after death, allowing for the possibility of regaining the person’s consciousness when technology grants it in the future.*
The process is much more complex than merely decreasing the temperature to freeze the body. This is how it works: Once the person has been declared dead,* the corpse is placed in an ice bath to quickly reduce the body’s temperature, and respiratory assistance is applied to avoid damage caused by the lack of blood flow, particularly in the brain; then a blood thinner is injected into the body’s bloodstream; and finally the blood in the circulatory system is replaced with a chemical compound that, when decreased to lower temperatures, becomes a viscous liquid until it reaches a glassy state. This process, called vitrification, is done to avoid the crystallization of frozen water, which can tear the body’s tissues. Finally, the body is preserved at −196°C (the temperature of the liquid nitrogen used in this process, the equivalent of −320.8°F), avoiding any type of chemical reactions and guaranteeing its preservation for centuries.1
A cryonics tank for up to four bodies from the Alcor company in Arizona.**
It should be noted that the cryopreserved brain can’t actually dream, like in Open Your Eyes, because the neurons remain frozen and inactive. We saw that sleep is much more than a resting period, and that it has a very active and essential role in learning and, especially, in memory consolidation. During sleep, neurons don’t just rest. On the contrary, they are very active, producing all the fantastic stories we barely remember when we wake up. Therefore, instead of cryopreserving the brain, we should keep it alive (and active) to allow the person to live a perpetual dream.* With cryonics, we wouldn’t be able to dream because we would be clinically dead, with absolutely no brain activity.
So, let’s set aside the possibility of pleasant sleep until being resuscitated and discuss an even more fundamental question: Does it makes sense to revive a frozen person? At first, cryonics seems far-fetched and is considered by many as pseudoscience. However, it is based on some scientific evidence and on widely used transplant techniques. In fact, different organs are routinely frozen and preserved at low temperatures, so it is worth asking ourselves if we couldn’t do the same with a person’s brain and identity.
In the 1950s, it was demonstrated that it was possible to revive rats that had been taken down to 0°C and did not breathe or have a heart rate for more than an hour.2 However, the freezing process at liquid nitrogen’s temperature could harm the brain’s structure. The problem is that the cryogenic compounds are highly toxic and, additionally, when using them on complex organisms, the possibility of controlling their diffusion into different tissues diminishes. Furthermore, experience in organ preservation for transplantation indicates that the process varies according to each organ to be preserved, requiring different freezing speeds and different concentrations of cryogenic liquids; therefore, the vitrification process of a body is far from trivial.
However, through the development of a new cryonics technique, researchers in California recently preserved a rabbit’s brain at −135°C and when defrosting it, analyzing brain slices under a microscope, they showed that neurons and the connections among them had remained unharmed.3 In spite of being an encouraging result for cryonics advocates, there are still plenty of problems to resolve. Specifically, analyzing a rabbit’s brain slices is very different from bringing the animal back to life and proving that it behaves as it did before being cryopreserved. Moreover, we have absolutely no idea how we could resuscitate an animal or a person after death (which is very different from freezing an animal for an hour). If we knew how to do it, we would already be implementing this at hospitals. We wouldn’t have to freeze people and wait for scientific advances in the future to revive them; we would resuscitate them as soon as they die. (And if in the future we can revive a person who is brain dead, we would have to reconsider how we define death; in the capitalist society we live in, it wouldn’t be too outlandish to think that we might end up considering someone to be dead when they no longer have enough money to pay for complex resuscitation treatments.)
Cryonics supporters, however, argue that although we don’t know how to resuscitate a person, that doesn’t mean we won’t be able to do it in the future. After all, in the past, a person who had a heart attack was considered dead, and nowadays we can revive them through widely established procedures. But we must clarify that cryonics is still science fiction, just like the possibility of taking intergalactic trips using space-time warps. What contemporary science does have a handle on is the cryonics process itself, in other words, how to bring body tissue to extremely low temperatures without harming it. But this is far from something that’s been proven and established. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising if future scientists aren’t able to even consider how to revive our bodies due to irreparable damage to our tissues, especially the brain, that occurred during the freezing process.
Despite the onslaught of criticism, many people believe it is better to have a chance, regardless of how tiny it may be, than absolutely nothing, and nowadays there are already hundreds of people whose bodies (or only their heads) are preserved in tanks at low temperatures, and thousands more who have registered to receive the treatment as soon as they pass away.* It is a big bet. But who would dare to predict scientific advances? Beyond the remote possibility of resuscitating a cryopreserved body, there are other basic factors that could interrupt the process. Nothing guarantees that the bodies will be preserved for centuries because they could be destroyed by an earthquake, nuclear war, or simply because the company offering these services goes bankrupt.
Let’s now raise an even more essential question, picking up the RoboCop identity discussion: Would these people be the same once they were resuscitated? Or is cryonics an extremely expensive and complex procedure to create a brand new person in the future, rather than bringing back the original one?
We saw that the notion of identity is linked to the dilemma of change: Things change, but they continue to be the same. We ourselves change and still remain the same person. But what is it that remains the same while we are alive and is lost with death?
At Christmastime in Sweden, a seven-year-old girl unexpectedly left home to search for Santa Claus. With an outside temperature of −12°C (10.4°F), she fell down a cliff and lost consciousness, submerged in freezing waters. She was rescued more than an hour later, but her situation was severe: she was in a coma, her body temperature was 13°C (55.4°F), and she had no vital signs (she wasn’t breathing, had no heart activity, and her pupils were dilated and unresponsive to light). Astonishingly, after hours trying different treatments to revive her, she began to breathe intermittently, her heart began to beat again, and the following day she was out of her coma.* This is one of many resuscitation cases of people with hypothermia due to being submerged in freezing waters, snow confinement (for example, after an avalanche), or people who live on the streets and are unable to withstand an intensely cold night.
The Swedish girl, as well as others who recovered their vital signs several hours later, are the same people as always. The loss of consciousness due to the freezing of their bodies didn’t make them come back to life with another identity. However, it should be noted that in such cases the body temperature doesn’t fall below 10°C, far from the −196°C used on people in Alcor’s cryonics. But beyond technical difficulties related to vitrification, let’s for now accept that preserving a body at 10°C or −196°C shouldn’t change anything regarding the person’s identity.
But what about a mountaineer, such as George Mallory, who disappeared while climbing Everest in 1924, and whose body was found seventy-five years later?* Even if we defrosted him and performed CPR, we wouldn’t be able to revive him (it seems utopic, but this is a relatively easy task compared to resuscitating a cryopreserved body at −196°C). But let’s suppose that in a couple of centuries, if the resuscitation of frozen bodies were possible, we find the body (until now still lost) of Andrew Irvine, who disappeared with Mallory during the 1924 expedition. Applying the latest scientific advances, let’s imagine that future scientists recover Irvine’s heart rate, breathing, and reflexes, and after a while, they manage to resuscitate him. Would he still be the same person? Would he feel as if he had just woken up from a prolonged coma? And if we argue that he is not the same, what’s the difference between him and the Swedish girl? Why are we still the same after one hour and not after several years of being frozen?
Perhaps a fundamental difference between hypothermia cases and that of frozen mountain climbers is that patients with hypothermia, in spite of not showing vital signs (breathing, heart activity, and associated responses), likely have had brain activity before being resuscitated.** During our entire lifetime, our brain never stops; the neurons never cease to be active, not even in the deepest sleep. This is not the case with the frozen mountain climbers in the Himalayas or those in Alcor’s tanks awaiting resuscitation. In their cases, the brain’s continuity has been interrupted, and it is not clear at all if they would still have their identities if they’re eventually resuscitated.
Andrew Irvine (left) and George Mallory (right), two mountain climbers who disappeared in 1924 while trying to become the first to summit Everest.
Let’s continue discussing this problem, but analyzing another variant of perpetuating ourselves provided by sci-fi. To do so, let’s briefly revisit Theseus’s paradox, described in chapter seven, but using a very interesting variation proposed by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Let’s imagine that as Theseus’s ship is being restored, someone commits to gathering the discarded planks and rebuilds the vessel at a distant port, using the original pieces. Which is Theseus’s ship then? If we put ourselves in the shoes of the people living in Ancient Greece, we would probably consider his ship to be the one that leaves every year for Delos Island. To them, the fact that someone gathered the original planks and rebuilt the ship somewhere else wouldn’t change anything; the second boat would be nothing more than a curiosity.
This is the basis of functionalism, which contends that what matters is the function of things rather than what they are made up of. Applied to the brain, functionalism says that mental states are determined by their function and not by the material substrates that generate them.
So, let’s imagine that one day, rather than cryopreserving our bodies, we are eventually able to reproduce our brains.* In other words, instead of keeping our brains inert for centuries, let’s consider the possibility of copying each of our neurons and the connections among them. This would be, by the way, a colossal job, since we have around 100 billion neurons and each neuron is connected to an additional ten thousand.** The number of possible connections goes way beyond what we could deal with nowadays, but let’s imagine that in the near future science could make it happen. To be more specific, let’s imagine that we reproduce the brain’s entire architecture in a supercomputer, that is, replacing neurons with transistors in tiny chips and connecting them in exactly the same way as in the original configuration. Following the principles of functionalism, the fact that cerebral activity is generated by carbon circuits (organic matter) or silicon (inert material used in computer chips) shouldn’t change anything and, consequently, this supercomputer’s configuration would store our memory and identity. But would it really be us?
The idea of synthetically reproducing a person—and the possibility of transcending death by doing this—has been vastly explored in science fiction.* Undoubtedly, one of the most popular phrases among this genre’s fans is, “Beam me up, Scotty,” Captain Kirk’s repeated request to Montgomery Scott, the Enterprise’s chief engineer, to be teleported in the TV series Star Trek. The principle of teleportation consists of disintegrating a person in their original location and reintegrating them almost instantly in a different place.** So far, so good. But the fifth episode of the show’s first season brings up the following situation: Due to a glitch in the transporter, a copy of Captain Kirk is created with a completely different personality.4 The replica behaves strangely, and we can immediately recognize the imposter. However, in an episode thirty years later, the problem becomes more interesting.5 In this case, Commander Riker encounters a copy of himself on planet Nervala IV, who had been waiting for eight years to be rescued. This situation happens due to a glitch in the transporter, which during a previous visit to that planet brought Riker back to the spacecraft, but without disintegrating the one remaining on Nervala. Who is who? Both Rikers have equally valid arguments for being the original, one because he continued his routine life on the spacecraft and the other one alleging that his crew abandoned him. This episode’s plot specifically plays with the fact that it is impossible to choose one over the other.
The arguments and dilemmas caused by the idea of teleportation are so interesting that they have attracted the attention of contemporary philosophers. One of them was Derek Parfit, who used teleportation to explore a dilemma regarding identity.6 He first considered the following scenario: Let’s imagine we enter a transporter and, when pressing a button, the machine scans the information of every one of the particles that constitute our body (including our brain) and then destroys it in the departure location to reconstitute it at the arrival destination, using the information transmitted by the transporter.* So, we are about to take our first “teleporter trip.” Although we feel somewhat nervous, we want to see Mars at all costs; in the end, our curiosity trumps our fears and we press the button. Soon after, we appear on a Mars colony and we observe the surrounding reddish landscape in awe, happy that everything worked out. But did it work?
Teleportation. A person’s body is disintegrated in an original location and instantly reintegrated at the destination site.
To make teleportation’s problem more evident, Parfit proposes a second scenario: Years later, we repeat the experience. We return to the transporter, press the button, but this time nothing happens; we’re still on Earth, waiting to be teleported. We leave the machine and let the technicians know that it is not working. However, they tell us that the teleportation did work and that we’re already on Mars. A machine error delayed the disintegration at the original location, but we shouldn’t worry because we will soon be disintegrated. With growing despair, we say we are still there, on Earth, that we weren’t teleported. However, they show us images of Mars where we have just arrived. The person on Mars is exactly like us, behaves like us, and can answer every question about our past, even recalling memories that we never shared with anyone. This is a very different case from Quaid and Hauser in Total Recall, because now the “original” on Earth and the “replica” on Mars don’t just have the same body but also the same memories. There’s an exact copy of us on Mars, someone who will be just as loving with our family, who will try to finish the book we have been trying to write for years, but this brings no comfort because, in the end, we are still there, on Earth, and we don’t want to die. We want to be ourselves, and not that other person on Mars, the one who will see our children grow and witness our future.
With this example, Parfit aims to demonstrate that teleportation is a death sentence. The original dies in the disintegration process, while the reintegrated person at the chosen destination wouldn’t realize that they have just been created. In fact, they wouldn’t notice anything strange and would believe themselves to be the same person who pressed the button on Earth because they have the same memories. In conclusion, if one day science allowed us to make an exact copy of our body (and our brain), that wouldn’t mean we would perpetuate ourselves. We would produce a perfect replica of ourselves (which won’t realize it is a copy), but we would cease to exist and would not witness what that copy will do the rest of their life. And just as we have our doubts about teleportation, it is also natural to wonder if we would maintain our identity through cryonics or a replica of our brain in a supercomputer.
Parfit continues arguing that the people who show up on the other end of the transporter did not experience our original memories but merely believe they did so because their brain (and the memories stored in it) is an exact copy of our own, and there’s no way of establishing the difference. And here lies the conundrum: the replica has our memories, but it is not us. With this reasoning, Parfit concludes that memory cannot explain identity. On the other hand, we saw in chapter seven that we are also not the continuity of our body. What then determines our self?
The only way Parfit is able to exit this crossroads is by concluding that the self doesn’t exist as such, that it is an illusion. The body obviously exists, as well as the brain and all the memories stored in it—the illusion is the person’s sense of identity. To illustrate this, Parfit considers a club with members that gather regularly. After a few years, those meetings stop happening, and a while later some members decide to get together again like they did earlier. Is this the same club as always, or is it a new club? Parfit views this as an empty question, one that makes no sense: What matters is that the members got together and interacted among themselves again; whether we consider it to be the same club or a different one is irrelevant.
Parfit’s view is not new. It is the anatta, or denial of the self, preached by Buddhism. When a king once asked a Buddhist monk his name, the monk replied that he was known as Nāgasena, but that Nāgasena was only a name because it didn’t represent a person. According to Buddhism, actions and consequences exist, but not the person who is acting.7 In Western philosophy, Hume also proposed the denial of the self:
For my part, when I look inward at what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure, or the like. I never catch myself without a perception, and never observe anything but the perception . . . [Someone] may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued that he calls himself, though I am certain there is no such thing in me.
—David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Book I: part 4, sec. 6), 1739
For Hume, the self, the notion of identity, is nothing more than a bunch of perceptions happening one after another. Continuing this line of thought, Dan Dennett says that identity is an illusion created by our narrative: It is the language that leads us to talk (and talk to ourselves) and think “as if there were someone inside.”8 Moreover, we earlier saw that our body’s sense of belonging is relative and occurs because of the coherence of our feelings: We believe the illusion that a rubber hand is part of our body, or we believe the opposite if an “alien” hand doesn’t behave according to our predictions. According to this perspective, we are nothing more than sophisticated organisms, but so complex that we can reflect on our own behaviors and even be conscious of our existence, creating the illusion of a self. And if the self doesn’t exist, wondering about death makes no sense because there was never someone who would die.
The denial of the self is much easier to accept if we abstract ourselves and analyze the problem in the third person, that is, if we stop thinking about what would happen to us and see it all from the outside, say from the perspective of a Martian who arrived on Earth and is trying to understand the philosophical problem that is the bane of our existence. Returning again to the world of science fiction, this is precisely how we see the army of clones in Star Wars. We don’t wonder about the identity of each of them; it is much simpler: They are a group of clones, with the same body and brain, living independent lives. Likewise, the person who remains in the transporter on Earth and the one who arrives on Mars—like the Riker on the Enterprise and the other one who remains on Nervala IV—are identical copies who carry out their lives separately.
Star Wars’ army of clones. By not putting ourselves in their shoes, we don’t wonder about their lives, identity, or fear of death.
Nonetheless, the idea that the self doesn’t exist is not an easy pill to swallow. It is a blow to what we consider philosophy’s first truth—I think, therefore I am—proposed by Descartes. The argument is still valid, but it radically changes the conception of what exists, since it would no longer be the self. But the feeling of existing, of being a person, is too strong. In fact, it is what I believe I know with the greatest certainty. It is not based on any rational argument; the feeling that there’s a self writing these lines is in my gut. And just like in a famous dialogue written by John Perry, where the character Gretchen Weirob is not satisfied by general arguments and starkly wonders about the continuity of her own life before dying,* we can’t avoid analyzing the problem in first person. That’s the perspective of movies such as Moon (2009) or Oblivion (2013), where we identify with the main character and his attachment to life—be it a person who supervises automated facilities to extract fuel on the moon, or a technician repairing drones that guard energy generators on the already abandoned planet Earth—only to find out he is just another clone. These movies skillfully remove us from the third-person position we take with Star Wars—except Episode VII, The Force Awakens (2015), where a clone also wonders about himself—and lead us to ask the same questions these clones wonder about, the same questions we have been asking ourselves for centuries.
To Parfit, asking about a person’s continuity is like asking if a precious gold watch that we are getting repaired is the same after having been taken apart and put back together by the watchmaker; there’s nothing to explain, the discussion is as irrelevant as asking how we should consider a group of people who have gotten together again. However, there’s a fundamental difference. Neither the club nor the watch are aware of themselves. In these cases, there’s no alternative beyond viewing the problem from the outside; we can’t put ourselves in the club or the watch’s place because they aren’t conscious beings. But if we think about a person, there is something that does have existence, even if it is only “nominal” (as stated by Buddhism). In other words, even if we accept the idea that the self is an illusion—actually, I would rather say a construction of the brain, like the mind or free will—it makes sense to ask ourselves about what determines the feeling we have of our own existence, of being the same person throughout time.
The feeling of existing, of being conscious of ourselves, is similar to qualia, the feeling we have when seeing the color red or smelling jasmine. Once again, we return to the hard problem we discussed in previous chapters. We don’t perceive electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency, or a specific chemical composition of molecules; we feel the color red and the smell of jasmine. Similarly, we don’t tend to perceive a handful of feelings (although introspectively we may be aware of them) but rather our self. Going back to the recordings we have performed with epileptic patients, in some cases we find neurons that respond to pictures of the patients themselves, meaning the patients have a conceptual representation (and not of details or isolated feelings) of themselves as a whole.
In my view, with the teleportation example Parfit demonstrates that there doesn’t necessarily have to be just one unique self; infinite copies of one person could coexist, and each copy would have a notion of self that will diverge with time, given each copy’s different lived experiences. Once again, the paradox happens when we analyze the problem in the first person, taking the Moon or Oblivion clone’s point of view. That’s when we must ask ourselves: What makes me be right here and not where my clone is, if we are exactly the same? Should we then reconsider materialism and accept that there is something beyond matter that determines that we are in one place and not another? The answer is that I am both here and there, and not because I have some sort of connection with my clone, but because there isn’t a unique self, and analyzing the problem from the outside, in the third person, we would realize that the clone is asking himself the same question, considering that I am a copy. On the other hand, the illusion of the identity’s continuity, of being the same person throughout time, is in effect given by memory. This organism that I call “myself” remembers what happened to it in the past and can plan its future based on that. Through memory we create a story, our story. Therefore, replicating our memory wouldn’t allow us to perpetuate, as Parfit showed us with his teleportation examples, but it is memory that creates a unified and coherent view of our existence. Memory (even though it is initially the same) is what makes each soldier in the army of clones feel like a person.
Let’s add a twist to Parfit’s thought experiment. We already saw that the transporter’s glitch would make the self on Earth ask about the abominable creation that appeared on Mars, just like the self on Mars, the one that experienced teleportation, will ask about the “waste” that remained on Earth. But let’s imagine that the transporter works well but doesn’t take us anywhere. It simply destroys our body (and our brain) and rebuilds it a while later, in the exact same location. Let’s imagine that we disappear and reappear after a split second. Will we be the same?
Let’s now imagine that the reconstruction happens after several years. Oddly enough, this would be similar to resuscitating someone from cryonics; the fact that we deconstructed the particles and reconstructed them exactly as they were shouldn’t make a difference. But we previously admitted that teleportation is a death sentence and, therefore, we would have to accept that after being cryopreserved, we wouldn’t be the same person. Following this line of reasoning, even if we were reconstructed after a split second, we wouldn’t be the same. That minute interruption would be our death and the appearance of someone just like us—who, due to the continuity of their memory, would feel that everything worked out and there were no problems with teleportation.
So, what is it that really matters? What maintains our identity and avoids our death? Perhaps it is the continuity in our brain’s activity, as we have speculated earlier. However, this is a weak argument since, in principle, there would seem to be no big difference between interrupting the brain activity and suddenly altering it. Our brain activity dramatically changes, for example, if we survive a high-voltage electric shock, a brutal knockout punch, or every time we go to sleep. So, the big question is: Are we constantly dying, reviving as another self that has the illusion of being the same as always because it shares the same memory? Accepting identity, even as a construction of the brain, implies conceiving amazing possibilities and grappling with enigmas for which we do not necessarily have answers.
I would like to cover one more big question before ending this book. Until now, we have reflected on what determines the perception of self and the continuity of our existence, but why does the brain generate this construction? Do we have an evolutionary advantage by being conscious of ourselves? To my understanding, the key is that our sense of identity leads us to ask ourselves about our future and to face death. The fear of death, in turn, leads us to cling to life, even trying to find ways to defy, or at least delay, that which we know is unavoidable.
Toward the end of Terminator 2, the T-800 model (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) doesn’t hesitate to destroy his arm to free himself from the machine that has him trapped, and he also doesn’t hesitate to plunge into a tank of molten metal to destroy the computer chip in his head.* The supercomputer HAL 9000’s reaction in 2001 or the one of android Roy Batty (the replicants’ leader) in Blade Runner is very different. In these cases, the plot tries to humanize them, so that we don’t see them just as machines and instead view them as beings with a sense of identity who worry about their extinction.
In the first few chapters, we wondered about what differentiates a machine from a human. Besides our unique ability to think, based on the ability to abstract and understand the meaning of things, the feeling of being a person, of having a survival instinct—a conatus—makes us different from machines. In other words, the fact that someone or something fears death shows that there’s a being that exists and is conscious of itself.
Picking up the discussion about how to know if a machine is conscious (based on the famous Turing test mentioned in chapter two), we can posit that, like HAL 9000, if one day a computer showed fear of being permanently disconnected (and without this having been specifically programmed, meaning that the behavior is not the consequence of executing an action established in its code), we would probably admit that it is conscious, that it can process and understand its context and have qualia. For example, a computer programmed to recognize faces or visual patterns that is conscious of itself could fear its own end, not wanting to stop feeling or appreciating what it sees.
This also differentiates us from other systems and organisms. With the interaction of billions of users, the internet is extraordinarily complex but it lacks a purpose by itself. The only reason for its existence is a function of the need of its users, just as if the different organs and cells in my body acted on their own accord, with nothing giving them a greater purpose: to preserve my life. If in the future we find a means of interaction that renders the internet obsolete, it would simply disappear without kicking or screaming, because there was never a higher purpose—a consciousness of identity and existence—that led to the preservation of the network itself.
Likewise, consciousness and the fear of death are very limited in inferior beings like insects. A wasp doesn’t hesitate for an instant to sacrifice its life when stinging someone, nor does it wonder about what will happen by doing so. In our case, that’s not natural; it only happens in extreme circumstances, when the reason that leads us to risk or sacrifice our life is so great that it surpasses our fear of death. It is the consciousness of our own existence that leads us to try to preserve ourselves.
Let’s then agree that the self is not a magical or ethereal thing that makes us a person, but rather a construction of the brain. We can ponder whether this existence is real or nominal; however, illusory or not, the feeling of our existence is very strong and it leads us to fear death, to want to prolong our existence, and to even try to become immortal. But beyond our innate reaction, is immortality what we really want?
Gilgamesh, the Immortal. (Image adapted by Candela Insua.)
In Lucho Olivera’s comic, mentioned at the start of this chapter, the Martian Utnapishtim keeps his promise to make Gilgamesh immortal and, after finishing the process, he tells the king that when he tires of eternal life he should look for him on the Red Planet. In this ancient era, Gilgamesh asks Utnapishtim how he might reach Mars. The Martian replies that Gilgamesh will have to wait thousands of years, which is insignificant to the now immortal king, until the technological developments of his species allow it. Although Utnapishtim constantly traverses the confines of the universe, Gilgamesh will have all of eternity to find him.
Gilgamesh witnesses the evolution of human civilization and must later spend centuries completely alone after its extinction in a nuclear war. On the one hand, hundreds of years are nothing to him, but he must nonetheless wait each year, each day, each hour until reuniting with Utnapishtim to free himself from the torment of eternal life. Clearly, this is fiction, but it helps us gather strength to face the great taboo and reconsider our attitude toward death. The problem with immortality is that nothing would make sense anymore: Why do something today if we can do it tomorrow, or in a thousand years?
We know we aren’t immortal, and yet we try to avoid facing the truth; we fool ourselves so that we can ignore our fate. It is no coincidence that people who have had near-death experiences, are recovering from a serious accident, or are suffering an illness with meager expectations of survival, tend to radically change their lives after asking themselves the questions we mainly try to avoid.
Death gives us an urgency to live. It gives our days meaning. Regardless of how distressing it is to be conscious of our fleeting time, death is life, and instead of trying to defy the inevitable, perhaps it is best to get used to the idea that the present flies by, that the years pass and don’t return, and that we have to enjoy the time we have to live because sooner or later everything ends in the sweet sleep.
* Unfortunately, Editorial Columba, founded in 1928, closed with the 2001 crisis in Argentina. Our childhood heroes barely survive as tattered issues in dark corners of a few secondhand bookstores and in the memories of their sagas, brightening endless summer afternoons.
* Beyond the possibility of transcending death, science fiction also uses this idea for crew members to go on long interstellar journeys: If we would like to send humans to distant planets, we could keep them in a state of hibernation, perhaps for decades or centuries, and wake them up shortly before they arrive at their destination. This idea is exploited in 2001: A Space Odyssey and in Planet of the Apes, which we have talked about in previous chapters.
* Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos) premiered in Madrid in 1997. The movie’s success led to a 2001 Hollywood remake titled Vanilla Sky, starring Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz (who also acted in the original film).
* This idea comes from the book The Prospect of Immortality (1962) by Robert Ettinger, a physics and math professor in Michigan.
* For cryonics to work (if it will ever work), it is essential that the process begins as soon as possible after the person’s death. The longer it takes, the greater the decay, particularly of the brain, given the lack of blood flow, such as in the case of strokes.
** Photo courtesy of Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
* This is a widely used process in neuroscience for in vitro research: slices cut from the brain are preserved in a solution that keeps the neurons alive while their behavior is studied for no more than a few hours through electrophysiological recordings, or recordings of images obtained through specialized microscopes.
* People who are in the cryonics banks used to be millionaires given the procedure’s high cost, currently no less than $100,000 to preserve the head, and more than double that amount to preserve the entire body. Oddly enough, it is not clear if these people will retain their fortunes in case they are potentially resuscitated, since if they’re legally dead, they have no rights over their belongings.
* The case of the Swedish girl is described in Birgitta S. Romlin et al., “Excellent Outcome with Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation After Accidental Profound Hypothermia (13.8°C) and Drowning,” Clinical Care Medicine 43, no. 11 (2015): e521–e525.
To resuscitate people in these cases, it is essential that hypothermia takes place before hypoxia, meaning that the person’s organs freeze and enter a state of hibernation before the lack of oxygen begins to cause cellular death. This is, for example, the case of children who remained submerged in freezing water and drowned after their body temperature dropped dramatically. Paradoxically, the chances of resuscitating a person shortly after they drown are greater if the drowning happens in freezing waters versus warmer waters. To review these cases, see: Peter Paal et al., “Accidental Hypothermia–An Update,” Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine 24 (2016): 111.
* It is still up for debate whether George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, his climbing partner, were the first to summit Everest before dying.
** There are no reports on this because in such a critical situation the last thing on the doctors’ minds is to do an electroencephalogram.
* To simplify, we’ll limit ourselves to copying the brain without trying to also reproduce the body. The brain would be isolated from the outside, but in principle it would maintain our memories—our self—and it would be a way of preserving ourselves.
** Considering only neurons that connect among each other is also a huge simplification. First, we have to distinguish between anatomic connectivity (the one we see in a microscope) and functional connectivity (the connections that are active). Second, neurons receive connections from other neurons in their dendrites, and the exact location of these connections within the dendrite tree influences their responses. For more information see, for example, Tiago Branco, Beverley A. Clark, and Michael Häusser, “Dendritic Discrimination of Temporal Input Sequences in Cortical Neurons,” Science 329, no. 5999 (2010): 1671–1675.
* It already shows up in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the first movie in this genre (released in 1927), where corrupt city rulers replace an influential woman, Maria, with a robot in an attempt to co-opt unwitting factory workers.
** Curiously enough, Star Trek’s teleportation idea—one of sci-fi’s most famous resources—comes from a ridiculous practical limitation. The Enterprise’s design made it difficult and expensive to film scenes of the craft landing on different planets. The solution was to teleport the crew so that the ship would always remain in space.
For an interesting discussion on the physics principles involved in teleportation, see chapter five in The Physics of Star Trek, by American physicist Lawrence Krauss (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
* It is worth noting that in order to avoid the problems that come with transporting particles at great speeds, the only thing that is transmitted is the information on how the particles are assembled, replicating our body with available particles at the final destination. Pure functionalism.
* John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978). Gretchen Weirob, a philosopher who lies on her deathbed, discusses with a minister and a former student the concrete possibility of life after death. Through this dialogue, Perry critically reviews different philosophical and religious positions on personal identity and its continuity.
* Curiously, in the movie’s original script, Sarah Connor asks the Terminator if he is afraid, right before dying, to which he answers yes. However, this dialogue does not appear in the movie, fixing in the last minute what would’ve been quite incoherent, since by presenting the Terminator as an emotionless machine, it would not make sense for him to fear death.