Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and how the Tech Area. It's time for a tech
Speaker 1: Stuff Classic episode. This episode originally published back on July
Speaker 1: two thousand fifteen. It is titled Who Wants to Live Forever?
Speaker 1: It's really about digital immortality, and the great Josh Clark
Speaker 1: of Stuff you Should Know joins the show on this episode.
Speaker 1: Hope you enjoy. I have a feeling the title of
Speaker 1: this episode will be who Wants to Live Forever? Because
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of Queen. Yeah, who wants to
Speaker 1: Live Forever? That came from the soundtrack to the hit
Speaker 1: film Highlander. Oh cult classic? Did Queen do the whole
Speaker 1: sound check? They did Highlander? And Flash Gordon? They did.
Speaker 1: I did not know Highlander and I saw Highlander the
Speaker 1: other day and I was like, does not hold up? No,
Speaker 1: the movie is one of those that I wish we
Speaker 1: could just wipe from history and redo because the concept
Speaker 1: is amazing. Yeah, but that's not what we're gonna talk about.
Speaker 1: Although there are immortals in Highlander, Yeah, yeah, there are, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's the that's the connection, right, I guess so,
Speaker 1: or Queen your love of Queen in Queen doing the
Speaker 1: Highlanders sound chracktality. Yeah, it's ultimately it all goes back
Speaker 1: to uh tesla. No, we're gonna be talking about digital immortality,
Speaker 1: this concept of using technology to extend our lifespans indefinitely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to immortality, Yeah, to the point where essentially until the
Speaker 1: sun burns out right and the great heat death of
Speaker 1: the universe. Yeah, I mean yeah, because you could in theory,
Speaker 1: if you were had digital immortality, there's nothing stopping you
Speaker 1: from hopping on a spaceship and high tailing it somewhere else,
Speaker 1: you know, or being transmitted it near the speed of light. Yep. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could be beamed from one point to another and
Speaker 1: sure if you I wonder what that experience would be like. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe that it's that's the future of space travel. Physical
Speaker 1: space travel is as digital beings rather than maybe that's
Speaker 1: the while we keep banging up against is the physical limitations,
Speaker 1: and then that will finally unbridle us and allow us
Speaker 1: to really do like interstellar travel, intergalactic travel, though presumably
Speaker 1: you would have to have something you're beaming into Well
Speaker 1: you're just purely digital, then you have to have something
Speaker 1: to house that information. I mean, I guess you could
Speaker 1: just be literally just information beaming around, but I don't
Speaker 1: know how. I wonder what that experience would be, like
Speaker 1: I wondered to be like going to sleep. Think about
Speaker 1: a laser. The laser doesn't have any sort of infrastructure,
Speaker 1: just beaming and you're transmitting light information in one place
Speaker 1: to another at the speed of light. Right. Well, what
Speaker 1: if we figured out a way to digitize ourselves, as
Speaker 1: we'll talk about um, and we were able to beam
Speaker 1: ourselves in much the same way that a laser beams light. Right,
Speaker 1: But the question is then, because if we are digitizing ourselves,
Speaker 1: we're usually talking about that with the the understanding that
Speaker 1: that digital information rests on top of some physical architecture. Right,
Speaker 1: just as software needs hardware to run off of, Right,
Speaker 1: you need like fiber optics. Now, yeah, I'm saying, what
Speaker 1: if you remove that, we figure out a way to
Speaker 1: remove it, then there's no Leyeah. If you can get
Speaker 1: to a point where we become pure information and there
Speaker 1: is no need for physical infrastructure beneath that, then we're golden.
Speaker 1: There's no limit. Then I guess we would need some
Speaker 1: sort of receptacle to beam into even on the end,
Speaker 1: even if we don't have something connecting the two points.
Speaker 1: That's what I was kind of if you're just gonna
Speaker 1: send someone ahead, like, all right, Bill, it's your job
Speaker 1: to set up all these these EPU talent. Bill, do
Speaker 1: not let us down. Make sure they're all plugged in,
Speaker 1: and please use one of those uninterrupted power supplies because
Speaker 1: if if there's a blackout, we don't want you know,
Speaker 1: we lost Lucy, and then make it over. Please don't
Speaker 1: smoke while you're setting them up, Bill, because we could
Speaker 1: smell it last time. It's dunk up the whole place
Speaker 1: right right. So to get down to what we're actually
Speaker 1: talking about, you probably picked up on this. The idea
Speaker 1: of digital immortality largely revolves around this concept of somehow
Speaker 1: transferring human consciousness and experience into a digital format. Usually
Speaker 1: the way we describe it as uploading your brain into
Speaker 1: a computer. That's kind of the easiest way to explain it,
Speaker 1: and there are a lot of really smart people who
Speaker 1: have been talking about this possibility beyond saying it's hypothetical,
Speaker 1: saying it will be possible or it will happen. A
Speaker 1: lot of people strut around like they're just cock of
Speaker 1: the walk, saying it's going to happen, and some sometimes
Speaker 1: they even put like DAYTI on things like this, Oh
Speaker 1: yeh know the guy we got to talk about to
Speaker 1: be at least Ray Kurts Watch Kurtzwile Uh famous for
Speaker 1: his futurism predictions, including the idea that we will reach
Speaker 1: what is called the singularity. There's the point at which
Speaker 1: technology is evolving so quickly that there is no meaningful
Speaker 1: way to describe the present because it's changing that fast
Speaker 1: and in the way I always think about singularities. Usually
Speaker 1: it's also the moment where UM one of two things
Speaker 1: has just happened. Either UM in AI has awakened and
Speaker 1: become conscious right and therefore we it is now the
Speaker 1: master of the universe as far as we're concerned, or
Speaker 1: we it's the moment we merge biology merges with technology
Speaker 1: at a point where we're able to UM remove ourselves
Speaker 1: from the limitations of evolution and chart our own course
Speaker 1: from that point on. Yeah, that's that's pretty accurate. I
Speaker 1: would argue that there's also, uh, there's the possibility of
Speaker 1: developing UM technology that allows us to genetically alter ourselves
Speaker 1: without having to directly incorporate like computers or electronics into
Speaker 1: our systems. That also can be It's transhumanism, is what
Speaker 1: we're talking about here. We're like right there. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: on a kind of happening, like very crudely, but it's
Speaker 1: we're like right there. As far as that last definition, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're there. Well, even with the incorporation of technology, we're
Speaker 1: getting there. You look at things like cochlear implants, and
Speaker 1: while this is this technology is specifically meant to give
Speaker 1: people who have either lost or never developed a particular
Speaker 1: uh sense or maybe some other form of neurological process,
Speaker 1: uh you know right now, it's meant to address that.
Speaker 1: In the future, it could be meant to augment, not
Speaker 1: just to to repair down image or to address a
Speaker 1: loss of something. Right, Like, the defining characteristic of trans
Speaker 1: humanism is that, um, you don't want a blade prosthetic
Speaker 1: leg because the one you were born with was removed.
Speaker 1: You want to blade prosthetic leg because you want to
Speaker 1: be able to run faster. Right, It's not to it's
Speaker 1: not to make up for a loss, it's to further.
Speaker 1: It's to go to the next step exactly. So, uh, this,
Speaker 1: this singularity idea is very closely related to digital immortality,
Speaker 1: and largely because of Ray Kurtzwild, because, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: I think it's fair to say Ray Kurtzwild has an
Speaker 1: issue with the concept of mortality. Yeah. I was wondering, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know that much about Kurtzwild. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: slightly familiar, but you clearly know a lot more about
Speaker 1: him than I do. And I was wondering if he
Speaker 1: is a like a fretful fannie, Like, does he constantly
Speaker 1: worry about misstepping and dying, you know, people dying really weird,
Speaker 1: random mundane ways every day. Yeah, and I wonder if
Speaker 1: he just lives in literal mortal fear of that. Well,
Speaker 1: he he is certainly taking great precautions to extend his
Speaker 1: life because he does believe firmly that we will reach
Speaker 1: this point in which technology will allow us to extend
Speaker 1: our lifespans indefinitely within his lifetime if he takes care
Speaker 1: of himself. So he he is determined, he doesn't. I mean,
Speaker 1: you would kind of feel like a like a dufus
Speaker 1: if you, you know, if you were capable of feeling
Speaker 1: if you died the day before they invented digital immortality. Right,
Speaker 1: it's the like the last guy to die in a war,
Speaker 1: right after like right before the ceasefires. Right, Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a there's a great um. Have you ever seen there's
Speaker 1: a British sketch comedy show called that Mitchell and Webb.
Speaker 1: Look you've told me about it though, Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: a two comedians, uh, David Mitchell and Robert Webb who
Speaker 1: do this series, And one of the ones they they
Speaker 1: have is it's just supposed to be off the cuff
Speaker 1: conversation between the two, so it's not in the context
Speaker 1: of a sketch so basically like what we're doing, kind
Speaker 1: of what we're doing now, except it's obviously scripted and
Speaker 1: ours is not. But in that case, they have a
Speaker 1: conversation where David Mitchell is very upset with the thought
Speaker 1: that his generation is going to be the last generation
Speaker 1: to die, and he is spiteful of the of the
Speaker 1: next generation. He's mad at them for being able to
Speaker 1: live forever while he has to die. Webb is like,
Speaker 1: you could just be happy for them. There's no same
Speaker 1: sort of thing I think with Kurt Swile is that
Speaker 1: he's um taking great pains to take care of himself.
Speaker 1: He's advocate for a healthy diet and exercise, which is fantastic.
Speaker 1: He takes something like a hundred and fifty dietary supplements.
Speaker 1: I'm going to have to correct you. And this is
Speaker 1: from the article that you wrote. Yeah two, or if
Speaker 1: the advice she is constantly taking pill you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that's uh. And and there there are plenty of
Speaker 1: studies that have suggested that unless you are suffering a
Speaker 1: deficiency of some sort, these supplements are not actually helpful. Well, um,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like um, vitamin A. I believe vitamin
Speaker 1: a UH is known to help you see better. Pretty sure,
Speaker 1: it's vitamin a UM. And it's been shown that if
Speaker 1: you're especially like night vision is a little deficient, that
Speaker 1: if you eat some carrots your night vision will improve.
Speaker 1: So carrots do help you, But if it's already up
Speaker 1: to whatever your baseline night vision level is, you can't
Speaker 1: all the carrots in the world and it's not going
Speaker 1: to help it. As a matter of fact, you will
Speaker 1: turn rage. My wife turned a little orange because she
Speaker 1: like carrots so much when she was a kid. So
Speaker 1: but she couldn't see any better beyond her baseline night
Speaker 1: vision level. And so I think it's the same thing
Speaker 1: as what you're saying. The same thing with vitamin C. Right,
Speaker 1: once you hit a certain level of vitamin C, anything
Speaker 1: beyond that you're such as just going to pee away.
Speaker 1: And in fact, vitamins can become toxic. Much of anything
Speaker 1: is is toxic to the human body because it seeks homeostasis. Right,
Speaker 1: So I'm wondering if kurts, Well, surely he's smart enough
Speaker 1: to know, like, maybe I should cut this one out,
Speaker 1: or maybe I'm taking too much of this. Well, it's
Speaker 1: also possible that the reported number of supplements that he
Speaker 1: takes has been you know, exaggerated, as it's been reported
Speaker 1: over and over again. I am personally a little skeptical
Speaker 1: that he takes that many, But at any rate, the
Speaker 1: whole point is that he wants to make certain to
Speaker 1: live long enough to see the day when his prediction
Speaker 1: comes true, that that we will have the technological ability
Speaker 1: to port a person's mind into some kind of electronic construct.
Speaker 1: We'll be back with more of this classic episode of
Speaker 1: tech stuff after this quick break. I have, just while
Speaker 1: you were speaking, pulled out my calculator and Ray Kurtzwell
Speaker 1: takes a pill every five point seven six minutes a day,
Speaker 1: assuming he stays up all twenty four hours in a day,
Speaker 1: assuming again that that number is in fact accurate, that
Speaker 1: the number of supplements. Not that I completely trust your math.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about some of the concepts
Speaker 1: here about how this could in theory happen. Now, obviously,
Speaker 1: we are not at the point where we can create
Speaker 1: any kind of hardware and or software that would allow
Speaker 1: us to uh to migrate and intelligence from our meaty brains, right,
Speaker 1: And that's a huge problem what you just said, We're
Speaker 1: we are dealing in something called software hardware when what
Speaker 1: the substrate that our our brains and consciousness exists on
Speaker 1: is what you would term wetware. Yeah, by all logical material. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and where it's not necessarily analogous to a computer. Even
Speaker 1: though people tend to think of the brain is such,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that it is the same thing. That's
Speaker 1: absolutely correct. I mean, let's let's take memory for an example.
Speaker 1: Memory is a great way to illustrate the difference between
Speaker 1: a computer system and the brain. All right, So in
Speaker 1: a computer system, you end up designating a certain space
Speaker 1: on some medium like on magnetic tape or in certain
Speaker 1: you know, it all depends on whatever the form is
Speaker 1: that you're saving it too, But at any rate, it
Speaker 1: all ends up being zeros and ones, and it is unaltered.
Speaker 1: If you call up a file and you know you
Speaker 1: haven't done anything to it since the last time you
Speaker 1: looked at it's going to be exactly the same there,
Speaker 1: unless there's some sort of corruption in the file or
Speaker 1: you have made changes to it and then saved it again.
Speaker 1: You're not you know, it's gonna be the same experience
Speaker 1: every time. Human memory totally different a memory is, and
Speaker 1: we only sort of understand memory. Uh, we don't have
Speaker 1: a full grasp on how memory works. But based upon
Speaker 1: what we do know, when you experience something, your brain
Speaker 1: creates a certain neural pathway in response to the stimuli
Speaker 1: you are experiencing. So, for example, right here in this
Speaker 1: room my brain is your hair. The heat in this room,
Speaker 1: the light in this room, little things, and I'm not
Speaker 1: noticing everything that's hair look pretty good, isn't it again?
Speaker 1: Start contrast with all the rest of the experiences is
Speaker 1: amazing hair. So the these these pathways are forming in
Speaker 1: my brain later on, assuming that I have converted this
Speaker 1: particular experience to long term memory, which is a pretty
Speaker 1: big assumption. Honestly, I can't remember what a podcast that
Speaker 1: about two weeks ago. Yeah, I think my hair is
Speaker 1: going to make it into your long term memory. But
Speaker 1: the more you say it, the more likely it's gonna
Speaker 1: happen when when I think back on it, my brain
Speaker 1: will reconstruct that same pathway. So the memory is essentially
Speaker 1: representative and the physical relationship between the various synapses that
Speaker 1: light up when I have this experience. Right, So there
Speaker 1: is a physical pathway that is retraced when you recall yeah, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: But it's not like your memory of how great my
Speaker 1: hair looks is sitting in one little spot of your
Speaker 1: brain like it would be on a computer's magnetic tape.
Speaker 1: It's distributed, and it's faulty because when I remember the
Speaker 1: process of remembering, sometimes that that pathway doesn't form exactly
Speaker 1: the way it did, and sometimes it adds new stuff exactly,
Speaker 1: I might fill in some gaps. Like imagine if you
Speaker 1: opened a power point presentation that you've made and uh,
Speaker 1: there are a few slides missing, but then there's some
Speaker 1: new stuff and maybe it was a little bit better
Speaker 1: than before. But you haven't done anything. I don't remember
Speaker 1: this transition it all right, we'll go with it. Just
Speaker 1: the very active retrieving it from your computer's memory and
Speaker 1: opening it again changes it. Right. That doesn't happen in
Speaker 1: a computer, but it doesn't in human memories, right, right, exactly.
Speaker 1: That is exactly what I'm saying. And the reason why
Speaker 1: I say it is that that's a problem because if
Speaker 1: we are ever to move from wetware in center brains
Speaker 1: to hardware and software in the digital realm, unless we
Speaker 1: factor that in somehow, like we create an algorithm that
Speaker 1: mimics the experience of remembering something, the experience is going
Speaker 1: to be fundamentally different. The experience of remembering will be
Speaker 1: totally different. I mean, one of the reasons why I
Speaker 1: very much argue against eyewitness testimony for things, especially for
Speaker 1: crimes that might have happened a long time in the past,
Speaker 1: is that our memories are faulty. Now, if we were
Speaker 1: in this other experience where we had moved to hardware
Speaker 1: and software and our memories were more analogous to computer memory,
Speaker 1: that would not be an issue. I witness that would
Speaker 1: be so. But that's a that'sn't just one illustration of
Speaker 1: how this is a tricky thing. It is tricky, and
Speaker 1: you say that, you know, comparatively speaking, it sounded like
Speaker 1: your take on it was that human memory is faulty
Speaker 1: compared to computer memory. I I would positive that there's
Speaker 1: also another way to look at it, that um, human
Speaker 1: memory is much more robust and rich than computer memory,
Speaker 1: because think about it, when you say, smell something for
Speaker 1: the first time, and then you smell it again and again,
Speaker 1: that that memory of what something smells like is going
Speaker 1: to become more detailed. There's going to be more to it,
Speaker 1: it will become more refined, and it will be totally
Speaker 1: different from that first sent memory that you created of
Speaker 1: whatever it was you smelled. And so I would pose
Speaker 1: it again. Sorry to use that word twice, but it
Speaker 1: makes me sound pretty smart when I does um that
Speaker 1: that additional adding new material, adding new stuff to it
Speaker 1: when you recall things or when you experience something. The
Speaker 1: ability to make your memory more robust and more rich
Speaker 1: and and to be able to refine it just through recall,
Speaker 1: to me, is superior to just straight Here's the information
Speaker 1: that a computer will give you, and it should be
Speaker 1: exactly what you have before. And also with memories, we
Speaker 1: can associate stuff that previously was not connected in our brains,
Speaker 1: whereas with computers, the way you do that as through
Speaker 1: meta data. You tag stuff. Right, You're like, okay, well
Speaker 1: let's tag this piece of information with all the metadata
Speaker 1: we can think of that that that describes what this
Speaker 1: information is really about. And then if I want to
Speaker 1: associate things, I have to look for similar tags like
Speaker 1: but but in my brain it doesn't automatically, and it
Speaker 1: does it in ways that you cannot necessarily anticipate, which
Speaker 1: can lead to things like innovation, creativity. Yes, precisely, and
Speaker 1: you also kind of hinted at something that's the big
Speaker 1: problem they seeing the idea of uploading ourselves onto the
Speaker 1: internet strick It is that with with memory, we can
Speaker 1: figure out memory will will eventually figure out how human
Speaker 1: memory works exactly. And that's what There's a philosopher called
Speaker 1: David Chalmers. That's what he's pointed out as the easy
Speaker 1: problem of consciousness. We understand, we're going to understand how
Speaker 1: the mind functions. Sometime down the road, we will figure
Speaker 1: that out. There's a hard problem is what what Chalmers
Speaker 1: has also pointed out in figuring out how phenomenal experience,
Speaker 1: our experience of reality is produced from those processes. That
Speaker 1: that is the big issue that is facing us trying
Speaker 1: to upload ourselves onto the Internet. It's like when you
Speaker 1: talked about meta. The computer is not writing meta itself.
Speaker 1: It might be able to simulate memory retrieval in its
Speaker 1: own way, but it's not writing its own tags. It's
Speaker 1: not making these connections. It takes a human consciousness to
Speaker 1: do that. And not only do we not know how
Speaker 1: to make a computer simulate that, we don't even know
Speaker 1: how we do that. We may never know. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of philosophers out there like we may never figure
Speaker 1: out the hard problem of consciousness. We've got more to
Speaker 1: say in this classic episode of tech stuff after these
Speaker 1: quick messages. Neuroscientists would say that clearly the mind which
Speaker 1: is what we could probably you know, use as an
Speaker 1: umbrella term for things like consciousness and experience, like intelligence
Speaker 1: and the kind of stuff that that emerges from the
Speaker 1: physical construct of the brain, because you can you can
Speaker 1: observe changes to the mind when someone suffers an illness
Speaker 1: or injury that damages the brain. And therefore it stands
Speaker 1: to reason that the mind in fact, is a product
Speaker 1: of the brain. So if you could figure out how
Speaker 1: to simulate a brain to a significant level of sophistication,
Speaker 1: hypothetically you could have intelligence emerge naturally from that simulation, hypothetically,
Speaker 1: hypothe because we can't do it yet. The best we
Speaker 1: can do right now is to simulate a few thousand neurons.
Speaker 1: But there are you know, we're talking about billions of
Speaker 1: neurons and synapsis in the human brain. Yeah, from what
Speaker 1: I saw, the low but average estimate is something like
Speaker 1: eight six billion normal human brain. I'm sorry, not synapthis neurons, neuron,
Speaker 1: it's trillions of synantha, right, So it's it's incredibly complicated,
Speaker 1: and in fact, there's some people who suggest that it
Speaker 1: may be to truly simulate a human brain, you may
Speaker 1: have to go down to the molecular level, at which
Speaker 1: point the computational requirements for simulating that brain are going
Speaker 1: to be so vast as to be impractical or impossible
Speaker 1: to achieve. Well, you mentioned the Blue Brain Project in
Speaker 1: this article that you wrote, um, and I was just
Speaker 1: kind of skimming their website and they mentioned that in
Speaker 1: their simulations it requires about a laptops worth of computing power.
Speaker 1: They didn't say what kind of RAM or hard drive
Speaker 1: for storage or anything it had. They just used a
Speaker 1: laptops words, you can kind of let your imagination from
Speaker 1: on with it, but that that was required just for
Speaker 1: one individual neuron to power. Yea, so we're talking about
Speaker 1: U billion laptops, which is that's you know, should be
Speaker 1: great news for the exactly any hardware manufacturers out there. Um,
Speaker 1: there are actually quite a few different uh projects out
Speaker 1: there that are attempting to simulate brains for one reason
Speaker 1: or another, not necessarily so that we can pourt consciousness
Speaker 1: to them, but also to just study things like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, how our brains work, how we might be
Speaker 1: able to treat brain damage or illnesses that that damage
Speaker 1: the brain, that how how certain medications might react to
Speaker 1: our brains. Building these very common plex simulation so some
Speaker 1: of them. M I. T has a course on the
Speaker 1: emergent science of connect tomics. I've seen that lately too.
Speaker 1: It sounds so full of bs, but apparently it's it's
Speaker 1: a real deal, and and once you look into it
Speaker 1: it makes total sense. Just the terrible name. Connectomics is
Speaker 1: all about the connections that happen within the brain and yeah,
Speaker 1: it does. Connectomics sounds like it's some sort of weird
Speaker 1: economics course or like maybe an l Around Hubbard book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like dineticsnets part two connectomics. Yeah. So that's an example.
Speaker 1: There's the US Brain project, there's an EU Brain project,
Speaker 1: there's the Google project. Yes, and there's the Google Brain project.
Speaker 1: They hired Ray Kurtzwile. Yeah, he's their chief engineer, director
Speaker 1: of engineering. Yeah, for for specifically for the Google Brain project.
Speaker 1: They mean, clearly Google has just put their cars in
Speaker 1: the table. They're like, we're putting some serious resources behind
Speaker 1: figuring out how to get people on to digital consciousness. Right.
Speaker 1: It's it's one thing to think about this kind of
Speaker 1: you know, armchair computer scientists neuroscientists sort of approach, but
Speaker 1: they're really putting actual money towards research and development on
Speaker 1: this stuff, including hiring another guy named Jeff Hinton, who
Speaker 1: is a British computer scientist who who specializes in neural networks.
Speaker 1: So they're looking at using neural networks for lots of stuff,
Speaker 1: not just to simulate a human brain. I mean that
Speaker 1: might be part of it too, but neural networks can
Speaker 1: be really useful for processing different types of information. For
Speaker 1: all sorts of applications, right, true. And also I mean,
Speaker 1: if you think about it, just figuring out some of
Speaker 1: the efficiencies that the human brain is evolved to include
Speaker 1: as far as networking goes, if you could just even
Speaker 1: get some insight or inspiration from that, that could help tremendously. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: There's some other great things I can mention. There's um
Speaker 1: Ted Burger, who is a professor at the University of
Speaker 1: Southern California's Center for neuro Engineering, who built a prosthetic
Speaker 1: of the hippocampus. Now, the hippocampus is, uh, hippocampuses is large. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's largely associated with the formation of memories, also with
Speaker 1: incorporation of emotion. But memory is a big part of
Speaker 1: what hippocampus is involved in. So I think it also
Speaker 1: um takes in century information, determines what region it should
Speaker 1: be transmitted to, if it should go into long term
Speaker 1: memory or that kind of stuff. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: a big engineer in this case. And so in two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven came up with a proof of concept hippocampll
Speaker 1: prosthesis and tested it in live rats. In two thousand
Speaker 1: twelve tested it in non human primates and supposedly sometime
Speaker 1: this year they're going to test it in people. Man,
Speaker 1: that is amazing. So like, if you have some sort
Speaker 1: of damage to your hipocampus and you're no longer able
Speaker 1: to form memories, than this would be the thing for you.
Speaker 1: Kind of yeah. I mean, this could end up being
Speaker 1: depending upon the nature of of the the problem. I mean,
Speaker 1: it could potentially be a treatment for things like Alzheimer's.
Speaker 1: Um Whether or not that turns out to be the case,
Speaker 1: we'll still have to wait and see, but it is
Speaker 1: very promising. Have you ever heard of Henry Mollison. I
Speaker 1: have not. He is like one of the one of
Speaker 1: the more facing, one of the more famous patients, or
Speaker 1: to save time, you could just say one of the
Speaker 1: more faithents um in as far as memory studies go,
Speaker 1: because he had some he had I believe epilepsy, and
Speaker 1: some old timey doctor gave him some brain surgery and
Speaker 1: messed up his his hippocampus and the guy was unable
Speaker 1: to form new memories from that point on. He could
Speaker 1: remember everything up to that point under the surgery. Then
Speaker 1: after that it was almost like his brain freshed every
Speaker 1: I think something like thirty seconds and he was just
Speaker 1: lived in an institution and was fortunately taken care of
Speaker 1: by a few doctors that like really studied him, but
Speaker 1: also like really kept him from the public limelight. His
Speaker 1: name wasn't published in the life he died, but he
Speaker 1: yielded a lot of information about how memories are formed
Speaker 1: thanks to the hippocampus. But it sounds like he would
Speaker 1: have been a great candidate for that. Yeah, I'm reminded
Speaker 1: of and I have to trust other people's uh details
Speaker 1: of this, because I have no memory of it. I
Speaker 1: uh had There was a time where I had a
Speaker 1: kidney stone. It was so bad that I had to
Speaker 1: go to the hospital and they treat me with a
Speaker 1: very powerful pain killer that just knocked your hipocampus out
Speaker 1: of convintion. I couldn't remember things. I had no short
Speaker 1: term memory. Well, it makes sense. Like also, when you're
Speaker 1: drinking um, your hippocampal function is is messed with your
Speaker 1: You are not forming new memories, and you require the
Speaker 1: hippocampus do this. So if you're doing something, if you're
Speaker 1: on drugs, if you have some sort of structural damage,
Speaker 1: if you have been drinking, like that's why you're you're
Speaker 1: not forming new memories. That accounts for a blackout, that
Speaker 1: accounts for amnesia. Your hippocampus is just not functioning properly exactly. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's another expert I want to mention, Ender's Sandberg of
Speaker 1: the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. I'm a
Speaker 1: huge fan of that institute. Yeah, yeah, one of my
Speaker 1: favorite people in the world works. There's names Nick Bostroma. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that guy I know of, Nick Bostrom. So Sandberg had said,
Speaker 1: this is a quote. The point of brain emulation is
Speaker 1: to recreate the function of the original brain. So this
Speaker 1: is talking about actually creating a copy of a of
Speaker 1: a person's brain, not just the concept in general, but
Speaker 1: in the specific case of this person's brain, we're going
Speaker 1: to recreate it. If run, it will be able to
Speaker 1: think and act as the original brain. We are now
Speaker 1: able to take small brain tissue samples and map them
Speaker 1: in three D. These are at exquisite resolution, but the
Speaker 1: blocks are just a few microns across. We can run
Speaker 1: simulations of the size of a mouse brain on supercomputers,
Speaker 1: but we do not have the total connectivity yet. As
Speaker 1: methods improve, I expect to see automatic conversion of scanned
Speaker 1: tissue into models that can be run. The different parts exist,
Speaker 1: but so far there is no pipeline from brains to emulations.
Speaker 1: Now he thinks that it may be very difficult to
Speaker 1: ever simulate memory in a computer the way that humans do,
Speaker 1: for the very reasons we mentioned earlier. Um He also
Speaker 1: points out that there is a problem with this particular approach,
Speaker 1: as the scanning essentially damages or destroys the brain tissue
Speaker 1: because there's not a non invasive way. It's all over again.
Speaker 1: You gotta pretty much crack the nogg and open and
Speaker 1: mush around in the gray stuff to find out, you know,
Speaker 1: to really scan it and get that resolution. This this
Speaker 1: scanning would either kill you or you need a freshly
Speaker 1: dead person, in which case there's no longer consciousness right
Speaker 1: right exactly. Problem, So you can make you can make
Speaker 1: a copy of a dead brain, which, as you point out,
Speaker 1: not really that useful, or you could make a copy
Speaker 1: of a living brain, but in the process you kill
Speaker 1: the living brain. You are left with the copy. Now,
Speaker 1: theoretically this copy would think and react in a way
Speaker 1: that would be exactly the way the original person thought
Speaker 1: and reacted. But the original person is still dead. So Josh,
Speaker 1: if you had this done, there would be a Josh
Speaker 1: computer Josh Bought two thousand and Josh Bought would think
Speaker 1: like you, would have quips like you with even better hair,
Speaker 1: with even better hair than you, and feel somewhat smug
Speaker 1: about it. Meanwhile, Josh Clark, the human being would be
Speaker 1: no more. And this comes to another big problem in
Speaker 1: the concept of digital immortality, which is continuity. Sure, so
Speaker 1: continuity being the continuous experience of you as Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: whether you are in your meat body or poured it
Speaker 1: over to some digital format. I don't think that's that
Speaker 1: big of a problem. Really think about it. Man. Every
Speaker 1: day there we we have gaps in continuity. We go
Speaker 1: to sleep and then we wake up. But you're talking
Speaker 1: about functional continuity. There's also a physical continuity, and there's
Speaker 1: the real problem. So functional continuity is exactly what you're
Speaker 1: talking about. It's our our experience that we are having,
Speaker 1: and it does have interruptions, whether it's when we go
Speaker 1: to sleep or we are put under for exactly all
Speaker 1: of that. It could end up being a break in
Speaker 1: our functional continuity. We can recover from that because is
Speaker 1: the physical continuity. The stuff that's in our brains is
Speaker 1: still there, so that even though we have that reset,
Speaker 1: we can come back and everything will be fine. If
Speaker 1: the physical continuity is destroyed, as in the actual brain dies,
Speaker 1: then you have a problem. Now. An interesting thing is
Speaker 1: that I've looked at some neuroscientists UH and their work
Speaker 1: and what they have to say about this, and it
Speaker 1: was really interesting to me. There's a guy named Stephen Novella.
Speaker 1: He's a neuroscientist works at Yale. He has a great
Speaker 1: podcast called Skeptics Guide to the Universe UM, and he
Speaker 1: is a critical thinker and a skeptic UH. He has
Speaker 1: talked a lot about this as well. He's blogged about
Speaker 1: it and his idea or his perspective. The way he
Speaker 1: communicates it is that as humans, we have brains that
Speaker 1: are divided into two hemispheres. Now, through drugs or through surgery,
Speaker 1: you can have one of those hemispheres separated from the other.
Speaker 1: It essentially is rendered inactive. But the two hemispheres are
Speaker 1: largely copies of each other. So even if this does happen,
Speaker 1: you can have a relatively normal experience. You might have
Speaker 1: find that some things are now very hard to do,
Speaker 1: like math. If your corps colossom isn't exactly. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he says, but these two halves, which individually can act
Speaker 1: as a single brain, work together, and we have you know,
Speaker 1: even if you have the one shut down, the other
Speaker 1: one can continue to work. You're still you, largely you.
Speaker 1: So he says, what if we then extend this and
Speaker 1: we make the assumption that yes, we have created the
Speaker 1: hardware and software that will allow for the simulation of
Speaker 1: a brain in some way, we connect that to a
Speaker 1: person's brain so that it becomes an extension. It's another
Speaker 1: part of the brain, kind of like a third hemisphere,
Speaker 1: I guess. And and so this one is starting to
Speaker 1: form pathways that mimic what your brain does naturally, so
Speaker 1: over time it helps you think the way you think already.
Speaker 1: It also starts to build in redundant memories, so it's
Speaker 1: essentially backing up your memories, and gradually it's going to
Speaker 1: act like it another hemisphere of your brain. And it
Speaker 1: could even be more powerful. Potentially you could do things
Speaker 1: like include algorithms that like make it way easier for
Speaker 1: you to do math. You'd be a math genius. I
Speaker 1: would hope that if I were uploaded on the internet,
Speaker 1: my math skills would just automatically improve. I would expect that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's certain little like base assumptions you want to make, right,
Speaker 1: that's one of them. It would be it would be
Speaker 1: funny to be intially immortal, but crap at math. So
Speaker 1: I guess you get me fun of by all the
Speaker 1: other digital immortals. Very likely, you know, the Kurgan is
Speaker 1: just taunting you before cutting off your digital head. Uh So,
Speaker 1: the his point being that over time you would be
Speaker 1: relying more heavily on the AI version of your brain,
Speaker 1: that even while your meat brain goes to sleep, your
Speaker 1: AI brain could stay awake so that you know, you
Speaker 1: you as you could remain active all day long because
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's it's your organic brain that's sleeping,
Speaker 1: but your AI brain takes over, and it could get
Speaker 1: to a point where you don't even really notice that
Speaker 1: part of you as asleep, and you could theorectly reach
Speaker 1: a point where your AI brain is doing the vast
Speaker 1: majority of the work, so that the time when your
Speaker 1: organic brain dies is a non event to you. Well,
Speaker 1: I hope that you really got a lot out of
Speaker 1: that classic episode of tech stuff. If you didn't, don't worry,
Speaker 1: Josh Clark will be back next week because this ended
Speaker 1: up being a two parter, so we will continue are
Speaker 1: just gusion about digital immortality on that episode next week.
Speaker 1: If you have suggestions for topics we should cover on
Speaker 1: episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The
Speaker 1: best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle
Speaker 1: for the show is text stuff h s W. I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon Y. Tech Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows