The image below was taken at Club Neverdie - a private space resort on a virtual asteroid in the Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) Entropia Universe. Club Neverdie made headline news when the owner purchased it for 100k US$ (biggest sale of VR estate at that moment). Now the owner wants “to develop it into the Greatest virtual night club in the Universe”. Besides a night club, Club Neverdie has hotels, shops, virtual wildlife hunting grounds in “biodomes”, and many other attractions.
The club was named Neverdie after the owner’s avatar in Entropia Universe and other MMOGs. This word is also dear to transhumanists who wish -among other things- to transcend the limitations of the flesh and live forever. In another article on the mid term evolution of MMOGs I speculate on the technological evolution and social impact of MMOGs, aka the Metaverse, in the next couple of decades. Here I wish to take things to their logical endpoint: some persons will feel no permanent need for a physical body and migrate their consciousness to virtual reality. Someday we will wear physical bodies on special occasions like today we wear a suit for a business meeting - and some of us don’t like wearing suits.
Note that a purely computational consciousness is something that you can cut, paste, edit, backup, and reload from backup as needed. So this is practical immortality: Neverdie.
So the Metaverse is terribly important for transhumanists for at least two reasons.
Not only:
The Metaverse provides an ideal meeting space and workspace for the non-local, geographically distributed worldwide, scattered community of transhumanists,
but also:
The Metaverse is where we may well spend the rest of our very long lives.
The future technology that will permit migrating consciousness to virtual reality and living forever in the Metaverse is often called “Mind uploading”. It consists of: making a complete copy of the *important* information contained in the brain - storing the copy (mind file) on suitable media - uploading and “running” the copy on a new support different from the original biological brain. The new support can be for example a new biological brain, a robotic brain in a robotic body, or pure computation running in a computer generated universe - the uploaded personality goes on living in virtual reality.
When will mind uploading technology be available?
Short answer: not soon.
Long answer: I think before the end of this century, and perhaps much sooner. The operative words are is “*important* information contained in the brain”: of course reading and storing the position of each single atom in a brain would do the trick, but it would be an engineering impossibility. So, first we need to learn what is the important information, where and how it is stored in a brain, and how to read it out.
I think it is quite likely that a lot of data, like the ability to speak a foreign language or play a sport, can be discarded and later replaced with off-the-shelf modules without losing the information critical to consciousness and identity. Based on similar considerations, I have seen estimates as low as 10**15 bits for the amount of data that must be extracted from a biologic brain in order to transfer a mind, or personality, to another support.
In one, maximum two decades, we may be able to extract 10**15 bits of data from a living brain. But at this moment we do not know sufficiently well *which* bits are critical to consciousness and identity and *where / how* they are stored in a brain. At the same time I am reasonably confident that further advances in neurotechnology will uncover how a physical brain generates a thinking mind. This knowledge will enable us not only to read a mind file out of a brain, but also to “run” the mind file on another support.
A softer approach to uploading is also possible - in the next couple of decades we may develop “brain implants”: implanted computational devices able to interface with the brain. There is the possibility that the memories and personality of someone who wears a brain implant may gradually migrate to the implant. Then when the biologic body dies the subject’s mind may have “moved to” the implant, from which it may then be retrieved more easily than from the original brain.
See also the Wikipedia article ”Mind Transfer” and the ”What is uploading?” entry in Bostrom’s Transhumanist FAQ.
Giulio Prisco serves on the Board of Directors of the IEET. Giulio is a former physicist and computer scientist, and former senior manager in the European space administration. Based in Madrid, Spain, Giulio runs the consulting company
metafuturing and contributes to the science and technology online magazine
Tendencias 21. He serves on the Board of Directors of the
World Transhumanist Association, of which he is Executive Director.
IEET Blog