Overcoming Objections

Overcoming Objections to Brain Preservation

This page discusses a number of objections to and defenses of the value of brain preservation as a social option, beginning with the most common and proceeding to the less common. Of all the defenses, we think the most important, for most people, is understanding the patternist nature of self. What we call our "self" is not our matter but is instead a complex, special pattern in biology. We know this because when a sufficiently complex and special pattern is replicated in technology, as happens when a cochlear implant is put in a deaf person's brain, this small part of their "self" has been functionally replicated, or "uploaded" into technological patterns. The more people realize that science and technology are engaged in a stepwise process of replicating our biological patterns with ever-improving function and fidelity, and that this program of understanding and replication is both a prudent and natural course of action for society, the more they come to realize that brain preservation has potential social and personal value. It may in fact allow the memories and identity of all who choose it to be inexpensively preserved and transferred to the future, a question the BPF was founded to investigate.

The Scientific Advancement Defense

Perhaps the most common argument for developing better brain preservation techniques is to advance our sciences and technologies, from neuroscience, to medicine, to microscopy, to cognitive science, to computer science and to gain all the social benefits these and other sciences and technologies provide. This is generally agreed to be the most important place to begin a discussion of the value of brain preservation research, but note that it does not address the question of whether brain preservation may be useful for preserving the neural information within individual brains. 

The Exceptional Cases Defense

In our experience, some individuals are willing to grant the potential value of brain preservation for individuals in exceptional cases, though not for themselves. They may grant its potential value for a child or young adult who has been struck down early in life by disease or accident, to help the family with grieving, or for those individuals who feel they have unique and unpreserved history or knowledge that they wish to pass on to the future, to keep their culture or history alive for their descendants. Some will grant the potential value of preservation for someone who believes they have unfinished creative goals that they feel uniquely capable of pursuing, relative to other minds, for many years to come. The preservation of Albert Einstein's brain, which has been chemically preserved (though it was also sectioned) in formaldehyde (and which may or may not still retain and be able to restore the majority of his connectome, science cannot definitively answer this question yet) is commonly cited as an example here. Helping people to understand and support such "exceptional cases" can begin to move society from apathy or hostility to these technologies toward mild support for them. It takes another step to see that if these exceptional cases are common enough, society may be changed in positive ways as a result.

The Social Benefits Defense

As mentioned on our overview page, if any brain preservation technology can be proven to preserve the molecular features that neuroscientists believe contain our memories or identity, the availability of affordable brain preservation services, the option and freedom to use them by anyone in society, and their use by a significant minority (let's say 100,000 people or more) in any society, may begin to change those societies for the better today, regardless of the far future outcome of brain preservation efforts.

Specifically, we think such societies will move closer to what we call a Preservation Value Set. We believe that individuals and societies who are free to make or contemplate the brain preservation choice for themselves and their loved ones become significantly more science-oriented (more willing to advocate and support scientific advance within their society), significantly more future-oriented (more comfortable making long-term plans in all facets of their life), significantly more progress-oriented (more willing to see and support signs of social progress, as they desire to be revived in a better world), significantly more sustainability-oriented (less willing to harm their environment or their fellow humans today, as they expect to be around and to be held accountable in the future), and significantly more preservation-oriented (much more willing to preserve all the unique information and species in their natural environment, in human cultures, and in their own and their loved ones individual lives, long before their biological death). For many, achieving a significant shift toward preservation values in our societies today, regardless of how much neural information is eventually recovered in the future, is the most important reason to support the brain preservation effort.

Changing our perception of the finality and unfairness of death may even make our species significantly less dogmatic in our beliefs, more tolerant of social change, and more willing to champion cognitive diversity. As Sam Harris notes in The Moral Landscape, psychologists have discovered that merely reminding judges and juries of the fact of death increases their inclination to automatically punish those who have violated the law, and to reward those who uphold cultural norms. Others have replicated this association between death awareness and cognitive dogmatism and intolerance. Awareness of death can be a great motivator, as Steve Jobs eloquently reminded us in his Stanford Commencement Speech before his own death from the cancer he had recently acquired. But there are many other great motivators to excellence as well: curiosity, honor, duty, ethics, and intelligence, for example. Every idea has its day, and will eventuallly die. But in the future, outdated ideas and cognitive systems will die appropriately, when they have outlived their social usefulness, not beforehand, due to the limitations of biological nature.

The Religious Objection

While there has been very little guidance on this issue from religious leaders so far, adherents to most religions today might think that the preservation of their brains at biological death would go against their beliefs. We must be respectful of and sensitive to such statements, while at the same time recognizing that behavior and ethics here will never be uniform. Within every religion there will always be individuals who do not believe that the preservation choice conflicts with their faith. There are already patients from several religious faiths in cryonic storage. These individuals expect or hope to be revived in the future, if their God or the Universe permits. Also, there are individuals from a variety of faiths who would presently be willing to donate their memories to the future, but who would not wish to be personally revived in the future. The mother of one of us (J.S.), a devout Christian, would have gladly preserved her life's memories for her family if affordable (low-cost) brain preservation had been available at the time of her death (it was not, in our family's definition of "low-cost"), but she would not have wished to be revived as an individual in the future. If brain preservation techniques become increasingly affordable and proven in coming years, many other parents may consider either of these or other preservation options at death, particularly if requested to do so by their children. With time, if the science and technology continues to improve, we can expect a variety of responses to the brain preservation question, from a variety of faiths.

The Natural Aging and Death Objection

Many people today feel that living a long natural biological life is sufficient for them, and they have little to no desire, at the end of life, to extend it beyond what has been given to them by God or nature. Helping us to gracefully accept our biological deaths is the fact that our bodies naturally age and become increasingly frail and feeble after we reach sexual maturity. This makes the sudden cessation of life in our old age much easier to bear. As the great American freethinker Robert Ingersoll says in On the Life Cycle, 1887:

“There is something tenderly appropriate in the serene death of the old. When eyes are dim and memory fails to keep a record of events; when ears are dull and muscles fail to obey the will; when the pulse is low and the tired heart is weak, and the poor brain has hardly power to think, then comes the dream, the hope of rest, the longing for the peace of dreamless sleep.”

But the natural aging described here is under attack. Sanitation, public health, and medicine have greatly extended our healthspan (the healthy period of our lives), and longevity research and regenerative medicine are shortening our frailspan (the frail and enfeebled period of our lives), changing the nature of aging.  A landmark 2011 study discovered that much of the physiological degeneration that occurs in adulthood appears to be due to a small population of senescent cells that produce inflammatory proteins. When these cells are removed in middle age or earlier, as they were in the mice in the study, the body doesn't age "naturally", but retains its youthfulness well into old age, with a much more abrupt decline occurring much later in life (this is called "squaring the curve" of aging). If pharmacologic therapies to remove or block these senescent cells or their inflammatory proteins can be developed for humans, as is now being explored, those who use them will feel like death is a sudden collapse and loss of function at the end of a long and vibrant life. As our social acceptance of natural aging falls, our acceptance of natural death will also be challenged, at least by some.

The Expanded Nature Defense

Some individuals view the brain preservation choice as something that goes against the natural way of (biological) life. They may remind us that in life, the old must be removed to make room for the new. Winter clears the way for Spring. This is true from a biological perspective, and yet biology is only part of the story of modern humanity. As our civilization has developed, both our social minds and our technology have come to play ever-growing roles in the nature of humanity. Anthropologists have observed that the more complex society gets, the greater the social (and economic) value of each individual human life, and the more elaborate the responses of grief and injustice at the loss of each individual life has become. Society, via cultural memory, and technology, via writings and recordings and science, are far better at preserving mental information than our biological bodies, which die on a cyclic basis. When our minds and science were less imaginative and less developed, this cycle of life was more acceptable. Today, the cycle has come under scrutiny, and we can now imagine less informationally destructive ways of life.

Information technology in particular is very good at preserving everything that has gone before it, and computers, using less and less physical resources per "bit" of information storage are preserving more and more of our past and present world, and enabling more social creativity, diversity, resiliency, and progress than ever before. As social and technological systems advance, they increasingly learn how to preserve each life's learnings to allow our descendants to do and live better in the next life. In the future, we can imagine ourselves as technological or advanced biological beings, where the only deaths that occur are the "little deaths" that presently happen inside each of us every day, when less fit ideas in our minds are replaced by better ones, and the old ideas and their neural connections extinct themselves, making room for new ones--a life of constant growth and change, but no loss of information of value to us or to our communities. We soon may have a choice in this matter, a choice to greatly increase the diversity of mind on Earth.

Nature and life continually grow, learn, and change, and we must do the same if we are to understand ourselves as not only biological, but also social and to an increasing extent even technological beings. Today, no one would be considered fully human without learning the languages and social norms that our society has developed over the last two million years. Our technology, for its part, is not only the fastest new learning system on the planet, it is becoming an increasingly life-like and natural extension of both our environment and ourselves. When we enlarge our definitions of nature and self to include both our social minds and our technology, we can better appreciate and understand the value of brain preservation for all who might desire it.

Now, human beings are on the verge of being able to preserve their memories, minds, and identities at biological death. We are also gaining new and better abilities to improve and apply our minds using the laws and tools of society and technology, not only biology. This is natural, but it is a new, more complex nature than the old, just as early life on Earth evolved and developed a new, more complex nature as it grew into our modern forms. In nature, change, growth, learning, and new forms of diversity, adaptibility, resilience and complexity appear to be among the few constants we can depend on.

If we wish to argue the potential value of brain preservation for much or most of society today, not just for those few who presently desire it, we need to propose a number of not-immediately-obvious things: 

• Brain preservation is natural, once we realize that not only our biology, but also our social minds and our technology are natural.
• The preservation of any amount of neural information upon our death could prove very valuable to our loved ones and society in the future, if it could be inexpensively preserved today, and inexpensively read or recovered by future technology.
• Low-cost and validated preservation technologies may soon exist, addressing the financial wisdom (expected cost to benefit ratio) of the brain preservation choice, as preservation always involves taking resources from loved ones or society today for an uncertain future return.
• Rapid advances in computing and scanning technologies argues that neural information might be inexpensively and automatically read from preserved brains even a few decades from now, while one’s loved ones are still alive.
• Not just memory retrieval, but full revival of the individual, and their indefinite lifespan in the future may also be an outcome of brain preservation, for those who might desire either option. 
• Memory retrieval or identity revival will very likely be done in computers in the future, and computer technology is dramatically more miniaturized and resource efficient per computation with each successive generation. If present accelerating, miniaturizing, and efficiency trends continue, technology will support far more living, loving minds in the future than biology ever could, and this ever-increasing diversity of mind, creativity, and intelligence appears to be the long-term trend of nature on Earth.

The Patternist Defense

The last of these points leads us to perhaps the greatest challenge to seeing the value of brain preservation today: adopting an evidence-based and patternist understanding of the nature of self. The last 150 years of biological science have carefully uncovered the metaphor that our individual selves are entirely the result of the complex physical structures and processes, or patterns of our brains, bodies, and their interaction with the environment. 

In other words, our identities or selves are not simply contained in our material matter, which is replaced, or turned over, in our bodies and brains on a moment-by-moment basis. Every seven to twelve years the typical human being has entirely new fats, proteins, DNA, and carbohydrates in their body replacing their old matter with the food they eat. Our identities, then, are our unique and personal collection of intelligent patterns, expressed by our matter as structure and process in the physical world. Amazingly, these special patterns are independent of our biology, as we are now learning to recreate them in our technology, and intimately connecting this technology to our biological bodies and brains.

For example, artificial retinas or cochleas replicate and restore sensory aspects of the biological self. Even brain patterns are now being replicated in our technology--see for example Ted Berger's work with the artificial hippocampus, and other projects in neuromorphic engineering, where chips are designed to replace brain circuitry. This work is simple today, as neuroscientists still do not fully understand all the ways neurons process and store information, but we have every reason to expect continued progress in these efforts. Accepting and understanding the patternist nature of self allows us to realize that one of highest purposes of humanity appears to be a responsibility to continually preserve and improve our best biological, social and technological patterns.

As we have said, what is natural changes as our species changes. As our physical patterns have grown in complexity, humanity's natural abilities and responsibilities have grown in the same measure. Before humanity invented gestural and verbal languages, which were among our earliest "technologies," we had no responsibility to pass on to others, or make immortal, our individual experiences. But after language arrived, we gained a new responsibility to teach our descendants, and thereby improve our families and culture. Once written language arrived, we gained further responsibilities to physically record and pass on our discoveries and experience, and to further improve individual and social wisdom. Today's digital computer and communications technologies are direct extensions of these earlier technologies. We have a new responsibility to improve them as well, to broadly distribute their benefits, to try to minimize their downsides, and to endeavor to use them to increase our ethics, wisdom, awareness, foresight, and resilience.

If inexpensive and validated brain preservation arrives, we will be endowed with new capabilities to pass on our memories, learning, and identities to our descendants. In time, we will recognize new social responsibilities to do just this. Whenever we successfully improve the complexity and resilience of our individual and social patterns, we seem likely to achieve greater individual and social conscience and consciousness, new respect for the value, rarity, and uniqueness of each human life, and new levels of individual and social progress. This is perhaps the greatest potential benefit of the patternist perspective: we can be more effective and aware today, and make better choices in the present moment, ideally in greater harmony with universal reality.

In summary, the past century and a half of research in cognitive science and neuroscience have increasingly established that the entirety of what we call our mind is a complex information processing stream computed by the circuits in our brain, and in the society and technologies in which that brain is embedded. Once we recognize that our critical physical patterns are not only biological, but also social and technological, we can resist the resignation, isolation, and apathy that can accompany biological old age. We can recognize that even as our biological minds begin to fail us, our social and technological ones are growing faster, smarter, and more intimately connected to our biology every year. Furthermore, growing knowledge of brain health and neural plasticity offers us new ways to reduce or reverse "natural" cognitive decline as we age, to restore our mental abilities to more youthful levels and to remain lifelong learners. When learn to see our selves as not just our biology, but also as our social minds and technology, we can become champions of the kinds of scientific and technological developments that will increase innovation, wisdom, resiliency, and social and individual empowerment. 

For evidence of how our biological brains and minds can be continually improved throughout our lifespan, even in advanced age, read Norman Doidge's excellent book, The Brain That Changes Itself, 2007. For an understanding of the physical basis of subjective experience and consciousness as emergent, elegant, and entirely nonmystical processes of neural synchronization, read Gyorgi Buzsaki's excellent book, Rhythms of the Brain, 2006. For more on how our mind and brain are embedded in their social and technological environment, read Andy Clark's excellent book, Supersizing the Mind, 2011. For two very good books that discuss our increasingly intimate brain-machine interfaces, and our progress in simulating modular subsystems of the biological brain within our technology, and implanting those systems in living human brains, read Michael Chorost's World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet, 2011, and Miguel Nicolelis's Beyond Boundaries: The New Neuroscience of Connecting Brains With Machines, 2011.
 

Nine Other Objections and Defenses - For the Scientists and Philosophers 

We will conclude this page by considering nine of the most common scientific and philosophical objections to brain preservation, and suggest some answers that seem reasonable to us. If you have a scientific or philosophical bent and do not presently see the potential value of brain preservation, either for yourself or for others who might choose it, please let us know if you still have objections or questions after reading this article.

First, hypotheses in science are always conditional, including the patternist hypothesis of self. Not recognizing the potential truthfulness of patternism is probably the greatest single block most people have to seeing the personal or social value of brain preservation. But this is not the only block, as we've seen above. The real problem is that accepting this hypothesis also requires considering its implications, many of which are abstract, unsettling, and not among our normal cultural concepts. Nevertheless, a large body of scientific evidence can be marshalled in favor of the patternist hypothesis, so it makes sense to hold the hypothesis conditionally, and to explore its implications, at least until contrary evidence against it materializes.

Second, many scientists and scientifically-literate individuals do not recognize how close our species has come to having the technology to make memory and mind preservation a reality. They are not familiar with the state-of-the-art techniques available for preserving neural structure at the synaptic level, and for verifying this preservation and circuit tracing with automated sectioning and volume electron microscopy techniques. Please see the Technology section of this website for references on the current state of the art in these areas. Fortunately, objections based on the lack of our capacity to preserve are easy to define, and overcoming them in a definitive way is one goal of our Brain Preservation Prize.

Third, some doubt that future science will be able to decipher the code for long term memory storage in brains. Fortunately, this doubt seems unreasonable, as neuroscience is already gaining a molecular-level understandingof processes central to long-term memory creation, and has already deciphered many simpler processing codes, such as those involved in low-level visual processing, and in working or short term memory. In fact, as early as 1999, in an experiment by Stanley et. al., neuroscientists have even been able to reconstruct, in computers, accurate realtime images of what a cat sees, in working visual memory, by reading and interpreting the signals emitted by just 177 neurons in the LGN of the cat's brain, while it is watching natural visual scenes.

Fourth, even if we understand the code, some doubt we can retrieve memories from a preserved human brain. A primary reason is because neuroscience suggests that memories, when remembered, are not simply recalled but are actively recreated, in a holistic process, from networks of stored synaptic potentials which are distributed throughout the brain. Fortunately, neuroimaging studies reveal that humans share a common, or "baseline" brain, in which the vast majority of cellular and molecular structures and processes are basically identical from brain to brain. Simulating these baseline neural structures and processes, which allow humans to deeply share languages and experiences, is a top goal of current and future science, in the same way we try to predictively simulate bacteria today, down to the molecular interactions of their metabolome. Such simulations are quite limited today, but they get exponentially better over over time. On top of this shared baseline brain, we all have neural correlates of identity/individuality, or NCI's, which comprise our unique memories and individuality, and which are persistent, even in the face of chaotic molecular activity in the brain. Brain preservation is thus about saving the NCI's, which appear to reside almost entirely in our unique synaptic connections, and later placing these NCI's in a baseline brain. Fortunately, in addition to being predictable and persistent, NCI's are highly redundant and fault-tolerant. They survive even when the brain suffers major daily traumas and environmental fluctuations. For example, if you forget something because a particular synaptic connection weakens or breaks, you can very often recall and reestablish what you have forgotten simply by thinking of other aspects of the memory in question, routing around the damage and reestablishing the memory. All this suggests that memory and identity retrieval from preserved human brains, via both baseline brain simulation and scanning of NCIs will be a very worthy and exciting scientific and humanitarian endeavor with great chance of future success.

Fifth, while it may be possible to retrieve memories, some doubt that we will be able to retrieve them in a piecemeal, incremental fashion. In the worst case, for example, one might fear it will be necessary to resimulate an entire conscious individual in order to recall even a single memory from that individual's life. Thus, those willing to donate their memories to the future, but who do not wish to be consciously revived in the future, might see brain preservation as undesirable. Fortunately, this fear looks to be unfounded. We can already reconstruct realtime experiences from very small populations of neurons today (e.g., 177 neurons in the Stanley et. al. example above). Today's leading models of consciousness (e.g., Buzsaki's neural synchronization and Tononi and Koch's integrated information theory), though incomplete, are already powerful enough to suggest that this is a number of neurons far too small to be conscious. If long-term neural information is stored in a similar connectionist way to working memory, using small populations of distributed and redundant networks to encode information, we should in the future be able to extract memories and experiences from preserved brains in an incremental, divisible fashion, without restoring consciousness, if that is what the preserving individual desires. Just as an anesthesiologist can prevent consciousness today by administering anesthetics which prevent neural synchronization and allow a neurophysiologist or neurosurgeon to operate without the patient's awareness, future memory donation without identity or self-consciousness restoration may be a common option in the future, for those who desire this particular choice. Neural synchronization, the current leading candidate for a mechanistic understanding of consciousness, has made great conceptual advances in the last few years. See Wang's Physiological Reviews article for a recent review of this exciting field. The neural synchronization model of consciousness is consistent with the way disruptions of synchronization with anesthetics remove consciousness, and with the way patients who have been in a persistent vegetative state for years can be at least partially reawakened to consciousness and mental life by administering Zolpidem, a drug that modulates theta and gamma oscillations in the brain. The mystery and inaccessibility of consciousness as a physical process is rapidly disappearing as our neuroscience advances.

Sixth, some doubt that the full identity and self-consciousness of any particular person could ever be "uploaded," or emulated in a computer or other nonbiological life form. This objection often rests on the material identity metaphor,the belief that the human mind must be indivisibly attached to the particular type of matter, in this case biological matter, that presently generates it. But what comparative psychology and computer science have taught us so far is exactly the opposite. Information processing is, to a surprising degree, independent of the particular physical substrate it is run upon--any substrate of sufficient complexity will do. As biologist Simon Conway Morris states inLife's Solution, 2003, both simpler and higher features of the human mind and senses are shared in animals (including insects) with differently-built brains than ours, and a few features have already been successfully simulated (replicated) in computer technology. Furthermore these computer technologies, when integrated with biological brains, as in neural and cochlear implants in humans, produce replicable components of mind. If we can recreate the relevant patterns of sensation, memory, emotion, experience, consciousness, and identity in a computer or robotic body instead of living tissue, we have recreated the mind. If future society scanned your preserved brain at the molecular scale, and could replicate a living brain in a computer that generates sufficiently similar types of patterns, this copy would truly "be" you. Certainly, as several biologists have noted, the ability to replicate all the critical patterns of one material system (wet biology) in another (electronic computers) is not guaranteed. But to date, every new computational substrate that has emerged at the leading edge of universal complexity has not only contained all the capabilities of the previous substrate, it has exceeded them. As universal complexity has journeyed from physics to chemistry to biology to (today's still-primitive and non-autonomous) technology, each new substrate has contained all the physical abilities of the previous, and has introduced powerful new abilities as well. Certainly if future science discovered any pattern insufficiencies (structural or functional) in our computer simulation of human brains, we could always seek to use advanced nanotechnology to recreate a biological version of the person preserved. Advanced nanotechnology could even repair and reintegrate the same physical matter of the preserved brain into a future repaired biological form. In the very long term future,nanobots created by a society with advanced artificial intelligence might carefully remove the fixative or plastic resin embedding each neuron, repair aging and other damage, and revive the same physical brain that was preserved. Such a course of revival would likely convince even the most skeptical that "they" had been revived as the "same" individual. For examples of such revival scenarios, read Eric Drexlers' excellent Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, 1987, or this "realistic" scenario for nanotechnological repair of the frozen human brain, written by an anonymous biologist in 1991. While these scenarios are both plausible and fascinating, material repair and restoration of the preserved brain may turn out to be a very uncommon pathway for the recovery and reanimation of mind. While many of us might desire to be revived as a biological body, patternism suggests that placing such a restriction on our revival would serve only our own vanity, and might be a hindrance to our rapid revival for ourselves, loved ones, and society. Those not willing to let future society create simulations of themselves first may delay their revival and return to future society by many decades, as nondestructive pattern reading and emulation technology for preserved brains may arrive long before advanced nanotechnology. We may think we presently understand the future optimal course of our revival, but the reality is, there are many ways future science might revive us, and many useful and "true" copies of ourselves that could come back. If we don't let future science and future minds advise us on the best pathways for memory donation or reanimation, we are very unlikely to pick them today.

Seventh, while some will grant that all valuable biological structure and function may eventually be duplicated by technology, they believe that there is some metaphysical element of self which must exist independently of physical processes, and which could not be transferred in any material duplication. Such individuals would agree with statements like: “If you made an exact molecule-for-molecule copy of me, that copy might act just like me, have my memories and my personality, and would even think it was me, but it would still not be me.” The independent soul metaphor is the belief that the mind is not only an emergent property of the brain, but is also independent from (has an existence separate from) the physical patterns and matter that houses it. This is a tradition of many, but not all, religious, philosophical and cultural heritages. At the same time, there are also subgroups of all the major religions, philosophies, and cultures which either do not believe, or have never even considered, the idea of metaphysical independence of mind from matter. Most religious scriptures are silent on this question. As philosophers from Descartes to Whitehead have argued, it is certainly useful and appropriate to see our minds as in a different category from physical things. We can observe an apparently fundamental body/mind, material/virtual dualism in all complex matter on Earth. Certainly complex minds are not only emergent, they do seem particularly special in the universe. As human minds grow, over both individual and historical time, they gain astonishingly greater influence over their local material environments, as is reflected in the popular phrase, "mind over matter". We can even see an emergent dualism in the "virtual reality" that complements today's physical computing technology. Several scholars have argued that our computer games and simulations are components of an emerging and still-primitive "technological mind." Yet in all these examples, the material/mental and the physical/virtual are also fundamentallyintegrated (nondual) phenomena. Human minds have emerged on a smooth and divisible continuum from our physically simpler predecessors. While we can observe simple matter without higher mind, science has never observed, and we cannot reasonably imagine, mind without some physical basis to support its complex patterns. 

Eighth, some who grant the scientific plausibility of reanimation of their pattern still have little faith that our future ecological or political environment will be either able to sustain, or will be socially hospitable to, such reanimation. Our existing population of seven billion humans is already seriously degrading our planet's environmental systems, and demographers are now hopefully projecting an end to human population growth some time in the mid-21st century. Won't adding more humans, even "virtual" humans, just make our precious planet a far worse place? To answer this question, we must carefully consider the history and likely future of computing technology, which has seen exponential improvements in its speed, capability, efficiency, and miniaturization for at least 120 years, across at least five different design platforms, since our first complex mechanical computers, such as the 1890 Hollerith Tabulating Machine. This trend is commonly known as Moore's law. What is less commonly appreciated is that our computers have also become astoundingly more energy efficient over the same time period. As Gene Frantz observed in 2000, and named Frantz's law, digital signal processing power used per computation halves every 18 months in our leading computer chips. As computers continue to miniaturize, they also become exponentially more space-efficient and matter-efficient as well. While there are many short-term engineering blocks, physicists presently see no fundamental physical reason that will prenvent us from continuing to make accelerating advances innanotechnology. If we are able to "upload" billions of human minds into future highly miniaturized computers, planetary resource issues will have little relevance. Resource sustainability is an issue for biological humans, which use roughly the same or more level of resources with each doubling. Physical resource accessibility is an increasingly less important issue for computers, which become ever more miniaturized, resilient to damage (as they are able to easily "back up" their complexity), and as their intelligence grows, increasingly independent of space, time, energy, and material resources, per any standardized measure of complexity we choose (per computation, per mind, per society, per species). A world with widespead artificial intelligence will be both radically miniaturized and have abundances, such as fusion energy, that we can scarcely imagine today. Furthermore, the more minds exist, the more diversity, variety, and specialization society contains, and evolution always seems to maximize diversity, however it can. What about dystopian political futures? They certainly are possible, but as Matt Ridley notes in The Rational Optimist, 2010, it has been rational so far to expect, on average, social progress in surviving societies over the long term, even as exceptions always exist, and sometimes blind us to the long-term trend. Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2011, makes an even more evidence-based claim with respect to the long-term decline in violence frequency and severity in human society, and the increasing subtlety and sophistication of human ethics. One ethical concern we can imagine for future societies will be the voluntary and reversible nature of any reanimation or "uploading" option that is available. For example, if we observed a friend go through a Star Trektransporter, or be "uploaded" from biology into a virtual world upon their biological death, as long as they claimed to be either essentially the same or improved in some way at the other end, many of us might one day do either of these as well, to reap their benefits. We would not consider transported or uploaded people to be "zombies" (fake copies, not "real") and we would not view such technology as violent or immoral, as long as all of those using the transporter or uploader were doing so by choice, and as long as some degree of reversibility (even if it was not a perfect or an inexpensive reversibility) was available to those who decide they do not prefer their new state. In practice however, even a less-than-perfect uploading of a preserved human into a virtual world might be desirable, particularly if the original pattern (the preserved biological tissue) was still available for future use. Any previously biological human not appreciating the benefits of their new technological form, and not willing to live with any drawbacks (such as, for example, some memory loss or other deficits), would ideally have the ability to shut down and suspend their life further, and await the arrival of better revival technology. Such reversible, voluntary, and suspendable uploading scenarios may be necessary in a future more ethical society if humanity's moral development keeps improving as a function of our mental complexity, as several scholars (Norbert Elias, Ron Inglehart, Robert Wright, Matt Ridley, Steven Pinker, etc.) have proposed.

Ninth, the patternist perspective leads us to anticipate some of the unusual capabilities that our future selves and societies may one day possess, and these capabilities can seem so strange that we may decide they belong to a world that has no relation to our own. Consider the following thought experiment as one example. Imagine that you have the ability to reanimate a true copy of yourself using advanced brain scanning and simulation technology, and thus you also have the ability to create many copies. Recall for example the "duplicate" humans that were occasionally created in the transporter in the Star Trek science fiction series. If you were "split" during transport, or uploaded twice from your preserved biological brain, and found yourself in a room with your exact copy, there would, at that moment, simply be two self-aware versions of you in that room, no matter how counterintuitive this may seem. Just as biology can today make genetically identical twins, sufficiently advanced technology will one day be able to make mentally identical twins (triplets, quintuplets, etc.) of individual minds, as strange as this seems. Of course, these twinned selves would begin to diverge from each other the moment they were created, as they would begin to have different subjective experiences. But at the start they would simply be two identical, true copies of "you." If this duplication process wasn't too costly or difficult, we can also imagine that our future selves might engage in such mental "forking" on a regular basis, to generate two or more slightly different personal perspectives on complex and subtle problems. We might also reintegrate (merge) these separate selves later, after the problem was solved or no longer relevant. Science fiction authors like Charles Stross, Accelerando, 2006, are among those who have described this idea. We can forsee this future ability as a natural extension of the way we presently argue with ourselves, using slightly different yet largely similar neural structures within our own brain, whenever we are "mentally split" over the course of action on a difficult problem. In fact, we must admit that any individual human being today is already a Society of Mind, as Marvin Minsky observed in 1987. We might reintegrate these twinned minds/selves eventually, after some period of exploration and experimentation, and such a process, while it might involve the elimination of less adapted mental structures in the process of reintegration, would very likely be seen asgrowth, not death. We can understand this in the same way that, after long arguments within our own mind today, one set of synaptic structures may end up prevailing, and one or more of the less-fit synaptic structures end up dying. In this process, the less-fit connections end up being reweighted, in a way that involves effective information destruction in the network within our own brains, as the less adaptive behaviors, once ignored long enough, attenuate to extinction. To a healthy and mentally integrated self, this kind of information loss feels simply like creativity and growth, not death. So too we can forsee how a future technological self, which has the ability to make multiple copies, backups, and "instances" of itself, would be a system in which "little deaths" were constantly occurring, but in which deep resiliency, continual learning and growth, indefinite lifespan, and substantially less fearfulness and stress over the consequences of conflict would also be achieved. The inevitable competitions and deaths in such a future should feel far less subjectively violent, and involve far less informational destructiveness, than the world we live in today. 

Challenges for the Future

At present, roughly 57 million unique and precious human beings die every year, or 155,000 people every day. It is hard for us to comprehend the scale of this ongoing daily event. Today we largely avert our minds from this unprecedented loss of diversity, wisdom, social history, and individual life, as medical science has barely begun to make progress in preventing biological death. Yet technology continually accelerates in its ability to record and augment our lives, and now the preservation and later revival of human memory and identity appear on the verge of scientific reality. 

By advancing the appropriate sciences and technologies we can accelerate the arrival of the brain preservation choice for all of us, and end the tyranny of an unchosen death. Given historical rates of accelerating scientific and technological change, it is even reasonable to expect reanimation technologies to be available not centuries from now, but possibly even within this century, while our loved ones are still alive. Furthermore, all of our friends and loved ones who have also chosen preservation will also return to interact with us. For many, this is one of the most important personal motivations for preservation, the likelihood that one's individual pattern may remain useful to those we know today, and remain connected to and supportive of the social community from which it emerged. Once we understand and have internalized the implications of accelerating change on our science, technology, and economy, we can recognize how extraordinary the human future will be, and by direct extension, how extraordinary and opportunity-filled our own lives are here today.

As we consider our extraordinary present and future, each of us has the ability, regardless of our honorable religious, philosophical, or cultural backgrounds, to internalize the implications of accelerating technological change, to consider some version of the patternist hypothesis of self, to champion scientific and technological progress and evidence-based inquiry, and to gently reform our esteemed religious, philosophical, and cultural communities of heritage until they are in better alignment with apparent evidence and scientific truths.

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