The Immortal Brain

If you worry about things, like “How to become biologically immortal”, then you might like this idea.

Even if you could clone your entire body and transplant your head to it, you still have a single point of failure, and that is your brain. If that brain grows too old or gets too injured, or too old, then that is it for you

However….

What if we made a nanotech prosthesis for your brain neurons? Imagine a dose of nanotech devices that migrate to your brain. Then each device finds a brain cell to mimic. It grows up and down each axon and dendrite of its chosen brain cell, and begins to record the firing of that neuron. After a time, it has ‘learned’ how that neuron is likely to fire. And if or when that neuron dies, it then takes over, doing a perfect imitation of that neuron.

After some years, you will have some natural neurons and some synthetic neurons. To say this another way, you will have some prosthetic neurons in your brain. It would be comparable to having a prosthetic leg, if you had lost a leg.

Eventually, all of your ‘natural’ neurons may die of old age, but your prosthetic neurons will have perfectly recorded the firing patterns, and will now imitate your normal brain functions.

Some might ask the obvious metaphysical question, “Is it really you?”

If not, when did you stop being you? Halfway? Two thirds?

If so, then what if you now put this synthetic brain into a spaceship? Is it still you now?

What if you built a factory and started making copies of your brain, so there are millions of your brains in use around the world? Is it still you?

And who gets the house, and the wife?

NOTE: yes I am aware there are other brain cell types, but you get the idea. And we haven’t even gone into this very much, but what if those nanotech devices are not mechanical and silicone? What if they are specially crafted stem cells, completed with your own DNA?

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