Reminds me of a much earlier article by Athena Andreadis: http://www.starshipreckless.com/stories/archives/The%20Double%20Helix.pdf The Wired article's author is listed as 'admin'.... wonder if admin has read any of Athena's articles... Of course, there is nothing new. No doubt many have penned similar sentiments before. I'd take a slightly different tack and suggest that imaginative work in any realm is not only essential, but part of the human construct. We thrive on extending our possibilities through thought experiment. We stagnate when the imagination fails.

Some activity during sleep, really? It has been said by many sleep researchers that the brain is actually more active during sleep than when we are awake, though the activity is of a different nature. Then there is the discovery of the structure of benzene and related compounds, dreamt by Kekulé. Our conscious selves continue through our unconscious selves. There is no shutting off of the self during sleep. The only absolute discontinuity of the self comes with death... and it is said that many brain cell functions continue for almost an hour after that. It's becoming clear that for many, there is a sort of blockage of understanding, perhaps based in an unwillingness to let go of the fantasy of synthetic immortality. Immortality of one's ideas and memories may prove possible, some day, through copying from the original to something else. But with that separation comes the unfortunate reality, that the self is extinguished with the death of the brain. Wishing it to be otherwise, hoping for some magical transport of one's essence to this replacement being, is flawed logically and akin to religious faith.

No, of course not. Because the flesh continues. Just because a physician may not fully comprehend the dynamics of cellular integrity at low temperatures does not mean that the individual involved has not survived as the same individual, with the same awareness. The freezing thing is similar to the arguments regarding sleep, anesthesia, or coma. The individual awareness persists, so long as there is tissue integrity and surviving functionality. I do understand the temptation to assess identical awareness as being the same awareness, but while this is attractive semantically and emotionally, the problem comes in terms of the individual self. We do not discontinue while in the same body, unless we die, and from that there is no returning. The discontinuity of replication is identical to that of death for the purposes of this approach to immortality. Now, the anonymous coward suggesting braincell 2.0 has made a good point (as Tossrock did in the discussion on the essay page). If we can find a mechanism for downloading the complete functionality of each brain cell, including all connectivity with all related cells, into new, synthetic cells of some sort in situ, then we would have the necessary continuity of the self, of awareness, to be assured of immortality. Of course the quality of that experience would be the critical thing, with the user experiencing more or less loss of sense of self depending on the accuracy of the technology.

Forgot to comment on the "if in the course of 7 years" bit. The key there is the 'if' as in fact brain cells are NOT replaced every 7 years. Not replaced at all. While as the essay author notes there is some evidence of useful brain cell growth, supplanting the older wisdom that we stop growing brain cells in early childhood, the vast bulk of our brain cells are with us until they die and then not replaced. So continuity at the cellular level is, sorry to say, a part of the nature of what makes us 'us.'

Personal multiplexing to be sure. But how is it personal continuity? In a philosophical sense perhaps? But one can perceive two identical beings as being identical in every way... yet still point to the fact that they are two distinct beings, whose awareness is not linked. Think of identical twins. When they are born, are they the same being? Of course not. And experiential divergence makes them less and less alike by the second, as would be the case with a dumped copy of ourselves. While the ego insists that a copy is better than nothing, that's just not the same as continuity of the self. There is no 'germ' or 'spirit' to be passed along, no soul to drift out of one body and into the next. A backup of one's PC data, at least a really high quality backup, is essentially the same data. Unfortunately our brains don't work like binary data storage systems, no matter how tempting the comparison. The bits in us are interdependent in vastly complex ways. A backup would probably not even be relevant, as once separated from the hardware the data would cease to have equivalent meaning, as the patterns of access to that data are a part of that data.

(Okay, seems I made a mistake... or Firefox did. Result is a truncated posting, no idea why, to which the entire original text is now my reply. Perhaps some good moderator can mend this mess?) Reading Doctorow's 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom' to my daughter as a bedtime story when he published it, I recall that somewhere around the middle of the book she started asking me how it was that restoring from a backup to a new body, no matter how fresh the backup, would result in a continuity of awareness for the individual involved. Not my girl's words exactly, but that was her meaning. I had been struggling with this question since almost the beginning of the book, and to some extent had been for years earlier whenever the question of immortality outside the original body/brain came up in speculative fiction or mainstream scientific discussion. It just does not make sense, that something so subtle as thought can be dumped into another container and somehow continuity is experienced. Surely the original brain's death marks the being's death. The successfully transferred memory or being or self into the new machine or clone is simply starting a new life... which happens to have the same memories as the poor sap who just died, and considers itself to _be_ that same guy. Of course that latter part is an error of awareness, of perspective, very tempting to think of as continuity but it is an error to be sure. So what did I tell her? We discussed it, shared a bit of sadness that this mechanism would not provide us anything like immortality, and tried to enjoy the rest of the book anyway. More recently, John Scalzi brought us the 'Old Man's War' version of passing along the same awareness in a new body. Same sort of thing, different mechanism and schedule. A live dump, taking out the middleman of a backup being stored somewhere, replacing that with nearly simultaneous death in the old body and birth in the new. Enjoyable fiction, but no sale. Some pretty explanations and excuses but it's still a MacGuffin, a magic substituting for reason, wishful thinking. I find it strange that these, and some of the other worthy works of fiction she mentions in the essay, fail to acknowledge such an obvious fatal flaw. Surely it'd not be so difficult to have the brain's structure and functions 'flow' into a new warehouse somehow, you know, using pretty prose and making it sound all sciencey and stuff. Keep the cells, preserve the connections between them, just mess with the physical shape and even matter state of it, making it electric soup instead of jello. With a bit of buckminsterfullerene thrown in and some nifty cool fusion to supply power, someone could cook us up a more viable image of immortality. You know, until the real thing gets released in beta.

Reading Doctorow's 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom' to my daughter as a bedtime story when he published it, I recall that somewhere around the middle of the book she started asking me how it was that restoring from a backup to a new body, no matter how fresh the backup, would result in a continuity of awareness for the individual involved. Not my girl's words exactly, but that was her meaning. I had been struggling with this question since almost the beginning of the book, and to some extent had been for years earlier whenever the question of immor

I'm guessing it's because the post was submitted by Samzenpus or whatever the fuck his nick is... and the guy is a pile of piss. Still, some funny names in the story at least. Not that one cannot find this non-tech-related story in a thousand other news sites today....... most of which would be far more appropriate for such things than a 'news for nerds' site like this is SUPPOSED to be! I'm hardly an uber-nerd, merely hardcore Pocket PC user going back to the 'beginning' of the platform, but I still feel confident enough about what the hell /. is for to find Samzenpus' submissions a huge waste of space.