an option for near eternity

Saw an interesting news magazine feature last night. There are some research groups that have developed the ability to relate brain scan patterns to what the subject is thinking. Apparently most, if not, all people have similar brain wave action when they think of a screwdriver. They can even deduce prior thoughts and future actions.

This in itself is not so shocking but it does bring to mind an option for life extensive beyond incrementalism that diet and good health can provide and even further extensions the holy grail of gene therapy could someday provide.

Here's the top level logic:

- peoples bodies naturally age and will continue to do so until gene and cell repair is doable which is just a matter of time but likely too far out for most of us to benefit from.

- the essence of a person is their memories, thought processes, intuition, reactions, behavior, mannerisms ...... perhaps the spiritual soul one hears about. In crude biological terms it's simply the synapse/neuron information contained in our gray matter. Much like the bits and bytes of a computer database and operating programs. The computer gets old but the programs and memory are in large part still functional, albeit with some file corruption sparsed here and there.

- it's conceivable to me that we are within a generation of being able to capture this information. It could be by brain scanning. It could be by decoding the cell-to-cell connections. It could be DNA deconstruction.....................

- once it's captured then a few options come to mind. Does the computer with the data become the person. Maybe, but doesn't sound like a fun life to me. Perhaps synthetic gray matter will be developed that can be built and/or programmed with the info and a robot body used as the host. Still sounds a bit cold.

- The most intriguing option is to clone a new version of the original person and reprogram their new brain. Kinda like loading the former operating system and databases to a new (and faster) computer. The cloning part is already possible.

- The further beauty of this process it that brain data could be periodically downloaded for any future retrieval. Again similar to daily or ongoing backup files. Multiple clones could be in waiting for use at anytime. No more fear of death for any reason. Backups are always available.

BTW. That file and memory corruption thing could also be taken care of through data freshening. Much like disk de-fragmentation and virus cleaners work.

Seem far fetched? Probably. However, if it should come to past in some form like this then a major downside would be the potential perpetuation of stupid!