A friend of mine says he has disproved all ways of immortality and he wont listen when I try to say he's wrong! He says that "eternal life is impossible because the human body will not adapt fast enough,also it would wither away with age,also heart injuries and other desiese would kill the human not very long after they are about 70" and that if you try some form of reincarnation then "the brain is what ur main sequence is...if the brain dies,u die and from enough stress of death and age,it will soon die". Is what he says true? I mean there must be some way to get past all of these things with science eventually.
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The words of a friend.
#1
Posted 05 February 2005 - 01:34 AM
A friend of mine says he has disproved all ways of immortality and he wont listen when I try to say he's wrong! He says that "eternal life is impossible because the human body will not adapt fast enough,also it would wither away with age,also heart injuries and other desiese would kill the human not very long after they are about 70" and that if you try some form of reincarnation then "the brain is what ur main sequence is...if the brain dies,u die and from enough stress of death and age,it will soon die". Is what he says true? I mean there must be some way to get past all of these things with science eventually.
#2
Posted 05 February 2005 - 09:49 AM
NOTHING is for sure, but EVERYTHING is possible!
Which bring me to my second motto:
The hard shall be done today, and the impossible shall be done tomorrow...
Thanatos, I found you a young fellow, almost like me.
Welcome here, I definitely managed to learn alot while being a member over here.
Don't ever doubt the power of the humankind, so far my two main mottos are seem to be true.
(My third motto is just a sort of a tip, goes like this: Sometimes silence is best, not because there is nothing to say, but because some things are just too deep for words...)
Yours truthfully
~Infernity
#3
Posted 05 February 2005 - 06:23 PM
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#4
Posted 05 February 2005 - 06:36 PM
The technologies to do this are not so outlandish that they cannot be envisaged. Organ transplants, regenerative medicine based on stem cells, cures for cancer, gene therapies, nanomedical robots. People have outlined the form of future technologies in all of these cases and are working on at least the preliminaries at the moment.
Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
reason@longevitymeme.org
http://www.longevitymeme.org
#5
Posted 05 February 2005 - 06:42 PM
Glad you did Thanatos, now all that's left is to work out...Alright infernity, I agree with you and I like your mottos!
~Infernity
#6
Posted 05 February 2005 - 10:13 PM
As Reason described, there are dozens of sciences all in the works to make such a thing possible. Nothing happens unless it is attempted, even if we were all lost in the persuit of immortality would you believe it to be a wasted life? So what if something seems difficult? To never try out of discouragement is the same thing as giving up. Life is far too important to give up completely on the offchance that you may fail, because most certainly doing nothing is failure.
#7
Posted 06 February 2005 - 12:54 AM
#8
Posted 06 February 2005 - 02:12 AM
Yes, to a degree that is what I (and many of us here) think of. However, as much as we'd all like to have psuedo-magical powers there are limits to what can be done. Settling for no longer being vulnerable to the ravages of our own biology would be enough for most. The solution, however, might to some be considered questionable or downright unfathomable: I'm speaking of course of 'uploading.' It's not a concept unique to transhumanism by any means: a human mind in a machine is a plot device in many, many scifi shows (an episode of Stargate SG-1, Ghost in the Shell, and an episode of Batman Beyond, to name a few in recent memory), but I'm convinced that slow replacement is the only way it is actually possible. The kind of change in substrait is so dramatic that there is no way to 'copy' a mind onto a machine.What if you were to replace your body cell by cell with special comuterized cells that were programmed to do special things like cover your body with armor as tough as steel and it was as easy as moving your fingers. Imagine the possibilities.
Wetware (the brain) is a tightly bound combination of the influences of software and hardware, to change that configuration to something completely software-based is a major step. There are many methods to describe how this might work, but only something that moved so slowly as to change only a tiny portion or a single cell of the brain at a time would be sufficient to allow adaption without killing the person. To do it in one huge step you will have essentially killed the person and replaced them with copy, because it doesn't fulfill the requirement of continuity. Even if the copy is perfect in pattern, there exists no soul in a body to transfer instantly from one form to another across the separating space.
My favored idea of how to do this (because I thought of it first and then later found it had already been discussed on the net, drat [tung]) would be to fill the brain with nanomachines with the mission of observing neurons. Once a nanomachine had completely and assuridly determined it could mimic all the functions of the single neuron it kills it and takes its place. Meanwhile, via radio it is sending up all the signals that it is recieving and outputing and slowly the replaced neurons form a communication with an outside machine. The transition is that eventually the person's conciousness is expanded to include both their replaced brain and the machine, their mind existing in both stratum at once. The line continues to blur until finally a point is reached at which the initial components of the mind are now secondary to the function of the concious mind, and the original body is no longer necessary for a person to think. It's sort of like first turning your mind into a 'hard drive', networking it with another 'hard drive' and then running your 'program' simultaniously on both of them while you're coping it over.
#9
Posted 06 February 2005 - 02:26 AM
#10
Posted 06 February 2005 - 04:16 AM
~Infernity
Edited by infernity, 06 February 2005 - 03:32 PM.
#11
Posted 06 February 2005 - 05:41 AM
A friend of mine says he has disproved all ways of immortality and he wont listen when I try to say he's wrong!
Nice person. [hmm]
Obviously has no idea what is going on.
#12
Posted 06 February 2005 - 04:04 PM
#13
Posted 06 February 2005 - 05:26 PM
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