Will Human Beings Gain Eternal Life Through Consciousness Uploading?

41% of the richest people in the United States hope to upload their consciousness, will human beings gain eternal life?

Mind uploading has always been the way humans have imagined their existence in the future.
Our obsession with this idea is shown in Black Mirror and Upload, as well as some games.
Many scientists believe that human thinking is largely a process of information processing by networks of neurons.
Some eminent computer scientists and neuroscientists, including Koch and Tononi, Douglas Hofstadter, Jeff Hawkins, etc., predicted that advanced computers would be able to think and even gain consciousness.

Specifically, consciousness uploading is a speculative process of whole-brain simulation.
An individual’s mental state is fully simulated in a digital computer through brain scans, and the computer runs a simulation of the brain’s information processing so that it responds in essentially the same way as the original brain and experiences conscious thought with sentience.
On the other hand, since we live in an information age where most of our day-to-day activities are online, we leave a huge digital footprint.
This year’s chatGPT-like generative artificial intelligence fire has also provided conditions for cloning our digital avatars. Some scientists predict that by the end of 2023, human consciousness will be successfully digitized.

The reason why people are obsessed with uploading consciousness is to fight against the disintegration of their own existence and the fear of being forgotten brought about by death.
Consciousness uploading is a means for people to continue their own existence.
According to the latest consumer report jointly released by the strategy group A/B Consulting and the venture capital firm Maveron, according to Fortune magazine in the United States, 41% of the wealthiest people in the United States are willing to download their consciousness into a computer as a means of immortality .

From the rich’s love of anti-aging “biohacking” treatments, to the rumored brain freezing, and the vampire-like, youth-obsessed exchange…
Longevity and immortality are common pursuits of the rich and powerful.
In the fight against death, some of the world’s wealthiest people are also seeking to cash in on the lucrative market.
For example, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has invested $3 billion in immortality technology, hoping that research on “cell reprogramming” can defeat aging and deadly degenerative diseases.
Neuralink, developed by Musk, intends to strengthen humans from the computer level. It is reported that he has uploaded his consciousness to the cloud in 2022.
Ways of Consciousness Uploading
Whole-brain simulations are a potential avenue for mind uploading.

Detailed scans of the brain and its activity allow us to recreate in a computer a person’s biological brain structure and underlying thinking.
So how likely is it to achieve whole-brain simulations and potentially mind uploading?

In a report published in 2008, researchers at the University of Oxford described whole-brain simulation as “a daunting engineering and research problem.”
Among them, the core problem of whole brain simulation is the separation of mind and body.
But this is a controversial issue, because many people think the brain is “embodied”.
That is, the function of the brain arises out of its relationship to the rest of the body and the environment in which we perceive and interact.
The premise of consciousness uploading is that thinking is the result of brain behavior. But the human mind, and especially consciousness, is generally considered to be a greater, more complex, and more elusive function than the biological brain.
This controversy over whether consciousness can be independent of the body means that whether there is a basis for the realization of whole-brain simulation and consciousness uploading.
If the computational assumptions of brain function are correct, it implies that an exact replica of the brain would retain the person’s memories, would act, think and feel in the same way, and experience the person’s consciousness.
Whether this brain is made of biological cells or built of 0s and 1s.
Another way is to change our brains.

It’s a neurotechnology, a “method to directly record or modify human brain activity,” that is developing rapidly.
Examples of neurotechnology such as brain-computer interfaces and implantable devices such as the Stentrode have been piloted around the world.
They allow severely paralyzed patients to use their minds to control computers to help them regain mobility, or perform online activities such as shopping and sending emails.
These developments, along with advances in artificial intelligence (AI), have allowed us to better interpret brain waves.
In the not-too-distant future, they are likely to give us the ability to “write” or modify our brains.