Everlasting: The Problem of Death
There are some strange concepts and conversations that go on inside the scientific community. The ideas that are thrown around today are the witchcraft and science fiction of the past. One of these topics is the topic of mind transfer or mind uploading. The basic idea is that you map a person's neuronal sequence and make a copy or transfer the impulses to an artificial brain such as a quantum computer or perhaps a lab grown brain. This is proposed by some to be the future for the extension of the human life, a way to possibly gain immortality through the use of science.
There is one problem with this theory however and that is that these proposed processes don't actually extend the life of the real person. They extend the idea of the person. For instance, if I were to create a complete clone of my brain and copy it into another body that new body ceases to be me. It may act and think exactly like me and contain all of my emotions and memories but it is no longer me, it is just a copy. Once I die I am truly dead, my clone may live on but I won't have any knowledge of it. We may be able to create a copy of ourselves or even attempt to transfer our consciousness from one body to another or from body to machine, but how are we to know if we truly were transferred or if we are merely a copy of what we once were. This would scare me half to death, the idea that transferring my brain may in fact not be a transfer at all but would in fact be death.
What is even more scary, at least to people like me, is that you really have no proof that the person you are today is in fact the same person you were yesterday. It used to be believed that you were born with exactly as many neurons as you would ever have. Scientists did not believe that the brain had any ability to remodel itself. This was comforting to some as they believed our brains were the one constant in life. You are always the same person in your mind no matter how your body changes over time. In recent years this has been proven false. Your brain can and does in fact create new neurons. You can grow the number of synapsis in your brain. In turn, these synapsis are constantly being remodeled by the trimming process of microglia and the addition of myelin by oligodendrocytes. So in actuality you are not the same person you were several years ago.
This is quite frightening because it gives no continuity to life whatsoever. There is nothing to stop me from becoming a new person entirely. I can specifically testify to this by looking back at my own life just over the last 6 years or so. I am a completely different person now than I was then. In fact the person I was then would probably be horrified to know who I am now. This reminds me of Paul's "New man" allegory that he uses throughout his writings. It may in fact be true that the man Paul was at the end of his life truly was not the man he was in his youth.
The only relieving factor in this whole narrative is the fact that you don't readily notice this process taking place. You don't experience the death of yourself everyday, even though it is likely that you don't wake up the same person you were the day before. You see, we use continuity of experience as proof that we are the same person. Without this continuity you are left with no proof that you are in fact you. Any break in that continuity leaves you no longer the same person. The only thing that continues on after you pass away is the brain waves that propagated through space and that eventually diminish to nothing.
And here is where this topic meets religion. The church I grew up in believes that when you die you are dead, you have no more memory or knowledge of yourself or anything else. They believe, as do I, that apart from the body there is no life. There is no such thing as an immortal soul that goes on living after you pass. You are simply the make up of your biological processes and memories. Where I differ in my belief is what happens to you when you die. The church believes that God holds your memories and experiences in his mind and recreates an exact copy of you at the resurrection. He creates a more perfect body and simply "downloads" a stored copy of your brain into the new body. The only problem with this is the break in continuity of experience. Without that continuity you may wake up thinking and feeling like the same person, but you aren't. You are merely a robotic copy created by God to mimic what once was.
So what is my position on the afterlife? Well I don't know if I really have formed a concrete theology of death yet, however, as stated above I reject the notion of a soul that lives on after the death of my body. Our entire experience is exclusively tied to the biological processes of our brain. We are our body. The only contradiction to this is the discovery of quantum computing in our brains. It is safe to say we simply don't understand the complexities of our brain or how it develops, which leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
To me, however, it matters less about the details of the afterlife and more about what the afterlife represents. Jesus speaks extensively about the resurrection and it is evident that his closest followers firmly believed in the resurrection of the dead and the re-establishment of paradise. The theory Jesus and his followers propagated was a theory of hope for the future. Jesus was telling us something specific about God, mainly that God intended good towards creation. The ideal of heaven and the reuniting of lost family members inspired hope for a future, a future that could be positively altered by our actions in the present. The resurrection of Jesus filled people with the desire to change the world and indeed gave them the knowledge that it was possible to do just that.
So will I have a chance at eternal life in the future? At this point in my life I don't really care. What I truly desire is to make the most of the life I've been given and use it to change the world for a positive purpose. I desire to live my life in a way that reveals the happiness and joy that life can hold. When the continuity of my life comes to an end I hope to breath a sigh of contentment in the knowledge that no matter what lies beyond the grave my life has made a difference.
