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

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