Ask A Genius 501 – Death on Home Turf (2)
January 11, 2019
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Rick Rosner: We’re getting away from that as we live longer and longer until people who want to a century from now in developed parts of the world should be able to circumvent death altogether.
So, it is a different tragedy to die now. We’re so close to the era where you don’t have to die. Yet, we’re like Moses who can’t cross over into the Promised Land because people my age are just probably just a little too old to ride the technology indefinitely into the future.
But in the future, there’s going to be a different loss that will go along with our increasing technological proficiency. Now, every human; every conscious being or every being we acknowledge as conscious seems like a unique self-enclosed thinking entity.
In the future as we learn how to replicate the brain and replicate the conscious information processing; the uniqueness, the isolated-ness of individual consciousness will be eroded and we will be able to, the extent we want to, merge with other consciousnesses and then it will be the gold standard of existence, which is individual human consciousness, will be increasingly devalued as different ways of being conscious and of sharing consciousness and then of severing.
You’ll be able to merge with people and enter other entities and then unmerge with them and everything will be much more fluid say 200 years from now. The individual consciousness will be looked at much less wonderful than we’ve looked at humans as today.
And so we’ll gain control over being able to preserve and create consciousness and replicate it. The whole deal where to get in a train wreck you will have downloaded your consciousness that morning. So, you will be able to be brought back into existence minus only the three hours that you last downloaded your consciousness.
That’ll be a doable thing a 150 years from now or possibly a little less. But at the same time that our command over consciousness arises, it means that it won’t be mysterious and individual existence – the preciousness of it – will be lost.
We will look for persistence and immortality in other ways by sending our thoughts out into the world via technology and not just thoughts as expressed in words, but our actual thought thoughts via the replication of conscious thoughts and of being able to replicate the aspects of consciousness.
We’ll see a lessened threat by the loss of the self because our selves will constantly be transferable and merge-able; people who fully embrace the cultural life of 150-200 years from now may not fear death because they will feel that they will have immortality by merging their experience, their thoughts, and their memories into larger collective thought and storage structures.
More than two-three hundred years from now. There may be ways of existing that we can’t even imagine, but those ways are likely to value individual existences less than we do now because existence will be less individual because our skulls will be cracked open and will be free to share our thinking directly with other people and merge our information processing capabilities or consciousnesses.
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Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
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