by Kenneth J. Hayworth, PhD

Delivered at the 2009 H+ Summit in Irvine, California

Fellow transhumanists, like you I am very enthusiastic about the future and I want to personally experience the future a few hundred years from now. But I am also a realist.  I believe that one day medical science will find cures to the thousands of diseases that currently afflict us, and will even stop and reverse aging – but I do not think this will happen in my lifetime, nor in the lifetime of many of the people within the sound of my voice today. Perhaps not even in my children’s’ lifetimes. The technical problems involved in curing all human disease and degeneration are simply too complex, and too much basic science remains to be discovered.

SEEING THE FUTURE

If we wish to personally see the future there is only one rational alternative that I know of – brain preservation for long-term storage. Brain preservation technology is quite advanced and there is every reason to expect that, given sufficient intellectual and monetary resources, a standardized surgical procedure could be perfected within the next five years that would guarantee 99.9% of the synaptic connectivity of a human brain could be preserved, along with sufficient structural and molecular information to allow the person to be successfully reanimated by future technology.

THE PROBLEM

Unfortunately the proper intellectual and monetary resources are NOT being devoted to this research. In fact, the general medical and scientific community has turned its back on such research. Some within the scientific community have actually been outright hostile to such research. The few companies offering brain preservation services (i.e. cryonic suspensions) are unregulated and their methods have not been verified at even close to a sufficient level in open scientific journals.

Further, it is currently illegal to perform a brain preservation procedure before death has been declared, and no hospital in the nation provides the fast response stabilization procedures necessary to ensure proper preservation. This means that a person must often endure hours of ischemic damage before the preservation procedures can begin – the result is massive destruction of brain structure. This situation is far worse than the back-alley abortion clinics prior to the Roe v. Wade decision – this is like a back-alley emergency heart surgery clinic servicing the entire United States out of a small building in Arizona. And even under the most optimal of conditions, these companies are under continual legal and media attacks undermining their long-term stability.

This situation is intolerable. We have the technology to reach the future within our grasp, but ignorance and superstition are preventing us from developing and applying this technology. I am terribly angered by this situation, and I hope that I can get at least a few of you in the audience angered as well. Angered enough to do something about it.

SCIENCE VS. SUPERSTITION

How did we get into this mess? – Well I argue that it is mainly due to miss understanding and miss targeting of the goal of cryonics. Demonstration of viability after suspension has always been the gold standard by which cryonics has been measured. That is, can we lower a person down to temperatures low enough to stop all decay and then simply “rewarm” the person and bring them back to life. This goal is incredibly difficult to reach, perhaps on par with curing ageing itself. This goal is also completely unnecessary. This goal has not been set by the technical requirements of reaching the future as understood by our best present day science, it is a goal set by superstition – a superstition that your soul is somehow locked into the biomolecules of your body and that if your revival technique requires too drastic a change to that original biological substrate then ‘you’ will be lost.

Different people put different thresholds on how radical a preservation and repair technology can be before their ‘self’ is lost. Most dismiss the idea of long-term suspension out of hand assuming that a complete shutdown of neural activity cannot be recovered from. This is ludicrous since many people survive surgeries each year that do exactly that. Other people dismiss the idea of preserving only the brain, or are uncomfortable with significant nanotechnological repair of the brain.

Almost everyone I have talked to draws the line for revival techniques that require destructively scanning the information contained in the circuitry of the brain and uploading this into a computer. They say “this mind upload may be a copy of me but it will not be me”. Well I am here to say this is nonsense, utter nonsense based in superstition and not science. Furthermore, it is nonsense that will prevent you (and I) from reaching the future.

A COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF THE MIND

The past hundred years of research in cognitive science and neuroscience have firmly established that the entirety of what we call our mind, or our soul if you like, is in actuality a complex information processing stream computed by the neuronal circuits in our brain. Our subjective first-person conscious experience is synonymous with the particular symbolic and subsymbolic computations performed by the moment-to-moment firing patterns of our neurons.

This is called the “computational theory of mind” and it is about as well established as the fact that we evolved from a common ancestor with the chimpanzee or the fact that the earth is billions of years old. NOT BELIEVING IN THE COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND IS EQUIVLENT TO BEING A CREATIONIST. It is a willful ignorance of the last hundred years of cognitive and neuroscience research.

The key point I want to stress is that it is essentially a corollary of the computational theory of mind that long-term structural preservation of the brain, followed in the future by destructive scanning of its neural circuitry and uploading into a computer emulation will bring the original person back to life.

We understand enough about the brain’s functioning to define the requirements that such a long-term brain preservation procedure must meet to ensure successful revival – the precise connectivity between all neurons must be preserved along with enough structure and molecular information to infer the function of these neurons and connections.

PRESERVATION TECHNIQUES

The good news is that there is not just one, but two preservation techniques today that come very close to meeting these requirements at least in the laboratory – 1) cryonic vitrification followed by low-temperature storage, and 2) chemical fixation and embedding in plastic followed by room-temperature storage. And we have the tools necessary to comprehensively verify the quality of preservation of these techniques. Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that these techniques could demonstrate essentially perfect preservation of large brains in 5 years given relatively modest monetary and intellectual resources.

DETERMINING THE CRITERIA

Demonstration of such structural preservation of the brain should be the criteria by which cryonic and other preservation techniques are judged, not viability. We must get the scientific community to appreciate this connection between structural preservation and a medical cure for death, and we must bring them up to speed on how incredibly close we are to achieving the necessary level of structural preservation. Only when we get the scientific community to re-embrace this research will we have a real chance at overcoming not just the technical roadblocks but also the legal and practical roadblocks. Only then can we have a decent chance at personally seeing the future a few hundred years from now.

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS

How can we achieve this radical realignment of the perception of brain preservation? I have racked my brain over this, and have been especially frustrated with the continuing disregard of these ideas by the scientific community even in the face of powerful new research coming out of 21^st century medicine showing good structural and even functional preservation of small brain slices – even in the face of new techniques for 3D scanning of neural tissue at the nanometer level coming out of the Max Plank Institute at Heidelberg and my own lab at Harvard University, and even in the face of the first large scale simulations of cortical dynamics in the Blue Brain Project.

I believe that the general scientific community simply has not had the complete argument clearly laid out before them. I have an unwavering faith in the scientific method and in the true open-mindedness of the scientific community. If we clearly articulate the reasoning behind why we believe human brain preservation is a viable alternative to death, if we set the clear goal of demonstrating whole brain ultrastructural preservation, and if we adequately publicize this reasoning and goal, then I have faith that the scientific community will join us wholeheartedly in pursuing these goals and in lobbying for the eventual availability of these techniques as surgical procedures in hospitals where they have always belonged.

SECURING THE FUTURE | AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO BRIDGING THE GAP

The most efficient way I can think of to accomplish these goals is the formation of a Brain Preservation Technology Prize. A prize has the crucial advantage that it must very precisely define the criteria for success – and this will allow us to redefine in the minds of the public (and crucially in the minds of the scientific community) what the criteria for a successful cryonic or other preservation should be.

Contestants would have to demonstrate a surgical procedure for long-term preservation of a large mammalian brain that preserves 99.9% of the synaptic connectivity of the brain. Success would be judged by thick sectioning the entire brain and performing a comprehensive electron microscopic survey to verify that all regions have been adequately preserved. Then, crucially, 10 small subsamples would be removed from random brain regions and prepared for 3D electron microscopic volume imaging using the SBFSEM, FIBSEM, or ATLUM – three new devices for mapping the precise connectivity of neural circuits that Todd Huffman will be talking about in his talk on Sunday. This step is crucial because it will prove that the basic substrate that our memories are written in – the synaptic connections between neurons – has been preserved at a level sufficient to be precisely traced. In addition, it will vividly demonstrate the types of technologies that may one day be used to upload a preserved brain and restore the person to life.

The medical groups that develop the surgical perfusion and preservation techniques should not be required perform these electron microscopic survey and tracing tests themselves. That is too great of a burden to put on any one group, and it is also not in the spirit of an independently verified prize. I have spent the last five years developing machines for sectioning and electron imaging brain tissue, and I have plans on my desk for a new machine that could perform a thick section survey of a volume the size of a whole human brain. A well funded prize could ensure that all surgical contestants have easy access these or other types of imaging tools necessary to evaluate their attempts, and to independently verify their eventual success.

WHY THIS WILL WORK

A well funded prize will generate the kind of publicity and excitement necessary to spur a real revaluation of the principles behind brain preservation. One of the most useful things that a prize will accomplish is to publicize the existing progress that has already been made toward structural preservation of a brain. For example, the vitrification techniques developed by 21^st century medicine and the surgical techniques employed by ALCOR currently preserve structure far better than most in the scientific community even think possible. This is despite several peer-reviewed journal articles demonstrating such preservation with limited electron microscopic imaging. A well publicized prize will spotlight this research, pointing out what has already been accomplished and what needs to be further accomplished.

Furthermore, a prize will not be rejected by skeptics; on the contrary it will be embraced by skeptics. Such a prize is absolutely not advocating that people spend money on unapproved medical techniques, quite the opposite; it will be seen as providing a skeptical investigation of the practice much like James Randi and his million dollar prize for a real paranormal demonstration.

In closing, I think it is time for us in the transhumanists community to start embracing a more ambitious set of near-term goals. Here is my list of goals:

These are ambitious goals. I submit that one promising way to actually achieve them is through the formation of a well funded Brain Preservation Technology Prize. If I were a millionaire and not a low paid scientist I would fund such a prize myself. If called on, I will gladly offer my technical expertise in the area of nanoscopic volume imaging toward the task.

Hopefully we as a community can rally behind this or some other plan and will see in the near future the scientific community, and perhaps the public as well, embrace brain preservation as a medical cure for death and as a doorway to the infinite riches of the distant future.

Thank you.

Kenneth J. Hayworth, PhD is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Harvard University, Center for Brain Science. To learn more about Kenneth’s brain preservation technology, to see the prize proposal or to see links to technical papers that support arguments in Kenneth’s speech, visit www.brainpreservation.org

Ken was most recently featured in H+ 2009 Winter Issue, on page 54-55.

A LOOK AT WHO "OWNS" SPACE

A War and Peace article entitled “Who Owns Space?” writer Kevin Sanders takes on the question of which nation/group has authority over space. Taking on Alex Lightman, Sanders cites against the Kennedy School of Government graduate by arguing the case against the U.S. Though his specific arguments were flawed at times, citing acts committed by previous administration and thus having nothing to do with those in place now or in the future, Sanders does state some key points that deserve merit.

Fundamentally, Sanders is against U.S. authority in space. An alternative to U.S. authority is U.N. authority, which as Lightman rightly argues is a poor option since the “UN’s treaties are unenforceable.”  The U.N. has proved useless in this world. There’s nothing to suggest it’d be more capable in other environments.

Sanders also mentions Lightman stating that “the U.S. is the society most deserving of replication,” with which he disagrees. While the statement holds a degree of truth, while it's true that the U.S. has a great many qualities in need of replication, I think the issue is beyond replicating society.  The issue is dominion.

I’d have to agree with Carol Rosin, director of the Institute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space, who Sanders quotes  as saying “’The only alternative to weaponization of the inner solar system is a verifiable treaty to ban all weapons in space, combined with an international space program to convert the war mentality to a mentality of global cooperation.’ And as the late science writer, Isaac Asimov once said, ‘Every nation should be involved in the space program, even if it only to provide the paper clips.’”

This should be the real focus of space exploration, at least in its beginning stages.  The issue of dominion over space shows we’re outdated in our thinking, as if hoisting a flag on a country or planet really makes it yours – or that just because you have the most technology out there in space, you somehow have more rights over it.

What’s next, who owns the Milkway? This galaxy can belong to the Americans, the next to the Chinese?  Thinking you could actually own or somehow possess space is an unfortunate and unrealistic mindset, especially if we consider that other life forms may have their own ideas and would certainly see us as unevolved if we still fought over something that should be of a global inheritance like common apes throwing modern day sticks and stones in an effort to control and possess the surrounding environment.

Who’s to say that the U.N. owns space, and what right does America or any other country have to ‘control’ the heavens?  If the idea of ownership is the prevailing logic of scientific minds, then in that case, I declare that I own space.  Ridiculous? No more so than anyone else’s claim on it.

As a fan of Nat Geo and a space enthusiast, I was thrilled to see the cover of their December 2009 issue entitled “Are We Alone: Searching the Heavens for Another Earth”, written by Timothy Ferris.

The article gave an excellent detailed synopsis telling of the findings of over 370 “exoplanets” – worlds orbiting stars other than the sun.  Some of these may hold the ability to host carbon life forms familiar to us or brand new life forms beyond our imagination - an infinite unimaginable number of possibilities if we consider the endless number of galaxies in this one universe alone.

The article following “Are We Alone” was about Africa’s Hadza tribe who live in the bush of northern Tanzania.  They still use sticks to start fires and as writer Martin Schoeller describes, they “offer a glimpse of what life was like before the birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago”.

What surprised me was the nostalgic way Schoeller spoke of the Hadza, hinting that perhaps they’d discovered something about how to live life that we had missed.  He idyllically narrates a life without religious and social structures, without wealth, time constraints or duties.

But what he misses is that this is also a society that is without progress, without discovery, without curiosity.  Personally I would rather take drawbacks that come with modernity than live a life where I’ll never know of, let alone one day take a trip in Virgin Galactic for an up close view of the heavens spoken off in the article preceding Schoellers.  Without an evolving society, we would never have any concept of our place in the cosmos, with no idea of what lay beyond

I’d much rather live in a world that’s constantly moving forward, constantly working to better itself, even if it falls of course or finds the journey difficult.

Truth be told, there’s nothing nostalgic about the Hazda.  The tribe has not evolved, and that to me is not something that’s impressive.  Nothing has changed for them over the last ten thousand years – nothing in their art, their culture, their tools, their thinking.

The article stood out as a stark contrast to the one before it, where we’re told of the spectacular discoveries from sailing the unchartered heavens. Glorious and remarkable findings full of potential and new discovery – none of which would be possible if society as a whole had chosen to live a static lifestyle that never evolved, that still did things and thought the same way our ancestors did thousands of years ago. 

Personally, I’d rather live in society where the monkey discovered to use bones as tools and weapons.

A politically incorrect piece such as this one is likely to offend some people. But if you prefer truth over political correctness, then show your support today by donating to the Qudosi Chronicles.  Your support ensures we're able to continue offering more articles like this.

Scientific studies have continued to link religious experience to activity in the brain.  But now the new area of interest is the right parietal lobe, discovered to be the home of the ego.

Who was it that once said “the ego is the greatest trickster"?  It tells us exactly what we want to hear and what we want to believe.

With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that scientists are now discovering that those who walk a more spiritual path, with lessened ego, have reduced activity in this "ego" part of the brain.

Those of us unlikely to turn into monks, but who wish to quiet the mind and lessen the ego, have a few options at our disposal.  Art.

Studies show that experiencing art and nature reduces ego activity. But lovers of art, music, and environments void of modernism, have known this for some time.  Perhaps we didn’t know the scientific name for it, or exactly what the mechanics of the mind were, but we felt the sense of quiet and peace that came with it.  A spiritual experience in its own right and more powerful than any echoed words of preachers from pulpits.

However, everyone hasn't had quite the same experience.

Others, not exposed (or not exposed enough) to such treasures, have found it unsettling to be in environments dominated by nature, or when exposed to music that is not mainstream junk, to art that is so powerfully felt that it cannot be expressed in words.

The reason for this may be because that part of the brain, that right parietal lobe, home of the ego, is so strongly defined that not only has it become a measure by which we assess our surroundings, but it's become the only thing we know (or think we know):  I, me.

This "I, me" has become our reality.  Anything away from "I, me" destabilizes a fictitious sense of what's real - a feeling that is cemented into firm belief by synaptic connections every time the "I/me" thought is fired off.  Over time, the brain solidifies in it's thinking and new ways of thought create physical neural re-routes that are difficult for a mind that's already set in one thought mode. As such, when immersed in nature, an area void of direction or influence,  a space void of ego, the mind begins to panic. Anything that quiets this sense of “I” causes a state of restlessness because we are far removed a from one of the most the ego - a toxic element that entombs us in a false sense of security.

If it hasn't already been done, it would be interesting to research the effects of those with strong right parietal lobe activity and how the brain responds to heavy and continued exposure to elements that lead to spiritual experiences – such as art, music, nature.

I have a feeling it would be a lot of like rehab for most, even to those of us who feel like we’re Shaolin masters with our yoga and daily online meditations and words of wisdom.