Billionaires face one common limit for all their money: death. No matter how much you spend, no matter how many doctors you employ, you cannot escape the moment when you cease to be. So maybe until now.
As we report here, a start-up called Nectome has developed a technique to preserve the physical architecture of the brain in the minutes after death. So far tested on pigs but soon to be offered to humans, the idea is that it could be used to reconstruct the brain’s “connectome”, a 3D map of its structure – and thereby provide a path to resurrection.
To be clear, we have no idea how to create a functioning consciousness from the connectome, or whether it will ever be possible. As we explore here, consciousness remains a profound mystery—complete with a famous “hard problem” that we are still only beginning to understand.
Beyond the scientific problem of consciousness, there are questions—can the brain be digitally created on a computer, or does it have to be biological? And even if we solve them, legal hurdles remain because the Nectome technique requires the subject to undergo a medically assisted death, which is illegal in most parts of the world. And yet, since Nectome promises to preserve the brain structure indefinitely, anyone who takes them up on their offer can only hope that these issues will one day be resolved, if not in the distant future. Assuming it’s actually feasible, Nectome customers may find themselves waking up centuries after their deaths.
Or will they? Philosophically, we have no way of knowing whether an entity that sprang from a copy of a dying brain would be a continuation of its original owner, even if the entity believed it to be. In practice, our offspring can simply leave the brain unrevived. But with that in mind, the fact remains that anyone who undergoes Nectom’s procedure may very well be on the path to immortality. How we even begin to account for this is perhaps the most difficult problem of all.
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