[Flyteryder]

I've done a lot of research into brain transplantation, and it seems feasible if scientists can perfect the joining of nerve endings. Head transplants have already been performed on monkeys and mice, and it has been shown that an isolated brain can survive on an external blood supply long enough to get into someone else's head and be connected to their blood supply, although the problem of nerve endings still remains.

If scientists could make clones of people old enough to receive a transplant, which I know hasn't been done yet, but there must be a way to speed up the growth process, do you think the whole thing is feasible to live forever, or at least much longer?

[Chronist]

(Original post by Flyteryder)
I've done a lot of research into brain transplantation, and it seems feasible if scientists can perfect the joining of nerve endings. Head transplants have already been performed on monkeys and mice, and it has been shown that an isolated brain can survive on an external blood supply long enough to get into someone else's head and be connected to their blood supply, although the problem of nerve endings still remains.

If scientists could make clones of people old enough to receive a transplant, which I know hasn't been done yet, but there must be a way to speed up the growth process, do you think the whole thing is feasible to live forever, or at least much longer?

Your question is wrongly formulated. First, long enough? A brain without oxygen supply (which comes from the blood supply) dies in few minutes. You definitely need more than few minutes to connect the brain to a whole new central nervous system
Second, can clones really be created anytime in our future? No.
Third, even if clones could be created, would you sever their heads to place your own there?
Fourth, even if you would, those clones are exact replicates of you with the same legal rights as you, thus, you cannot place your head over their body (which implies murder) without their permission. Since they are exact replicates of you, they must have the same desires as you and thus, they will also want to sever your head and place their own in your body.
As you can see it is not simple nor in realistic approach to ethics nor is it scientifically possible.

[Revilo1]

I imagine it will be possible to do this at some time in the not-so-distant future, although I highly doubt it will become common place anytime soon.

@Chronist - is it true that clones have the same legal rights as us? Or are you just assuming that is what they will be given?

[Publius]

Downloading your brain into some kind of computer seems more realistic.

[ufo2012]

(Original post by Flyteryder)
If scientists could make clones of people old enough to receive a transplant, which I know hasn't been done yet, but there must be a way to speed up the growth process, do you think the whole thing is feasible to live forever, or at least much longer?

Transplant brains, possibly.

But is it feasible to live forever, or much longer - probably no, because even as your body is getting older, science seems to reckon that brains slow down circa the retirement era of life - the reasons for this vary, but what happens in some cases when they start to "go backwards" and for example a person ends up with Alzheimer's?

We would be living forever a little like Benjamin Button, older in body but reverting back to being younger in mind.

Not in all cases, but brain diseases would need to be more fully understood first before this could be worthwhile.

Not to mention, there are huge ethical boundaries that would have to be crossed.

The first step of acceptance is probably more humanistic robots, before actual clones.

[cl_steele]

(Original post by Flyteryder)
I've done a lot of research into brain transplantation, and it seems feasible if scientists can perfect the joining of nerve endings. Head transplants have already been performed on monkeys and mice, and it has been shown that an isolated brain can survive on an external blood supply long enough to get into someone else's head and be connected to their blood supply, although the problem of nerve endings still remains.

If scientists could make clones of people old enough to receive a transplant, which I know hasn't been done yet, but there must be a way to speed up the growth process, do you think the whole thing is feasible to live forever, or at least much longer?

In the distant future i dont see why not, i seem to remember reading a scifi book a while back, i forget the name, about a chap who gets shot in LA in 2000 has his head frozen then attached to anothers body in the year 2300 or something fun like that sounded interesting

but there is that problem of, again i forget the name, some biological thing [it was on BBC news a little while ago] where this dna strand degrades over time hence the aging process and unless you can find a way to reverse that i doubt transplanting your brain a million times would help as your brain would continue to be able to function ... although as im by no means very well versed in science i could be talking complete tripe

[green.tea]

I seem to remember talk of using stem cells to join spinal cord with some success.

To me a more interesting question is if technology allowed us to live forever should we? The population would go out of control so we'd have to stop births so both birth and death would be abolished and evolution along with them. Is the replacement of evolution with our own tech, brain augmentation and the like inevitable and would this remove the need for birth and death anyway? Is it already starting to happen? What advantage does mental arithmetic give one in the age of pocket calculators?

[ufo2012]

(Original post by green.tea)
To me a more interesting question is if technology allowed us to live forever should we? The population would go out of control so we'd have to stop births so both birth and death would be abolished and evolution along with them.

It depends, would we freeze time at a certain age?

And even if living forever, you still have the age old problem of greed.

The eternal man now has forever to satisfy his greed, but someone always has to be better than another, so does that mean one man gets to live a life of luxury while another suffers a life of poverty struggling along?

[Formerly Helpful_C]

The Russians are already trying to accomplish this.

Make what you will from this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...-10-years.html

[green.tea]

(Original post by ufo2012)
It depends, would we freeze time at a certain age?

And even if living forever, you still have the age old problem of greed.

The eternal man now has forever to satisfy his greed, but someone always has to be better than another, so does that mean one man gets to live a life of luxury while another suffers a life of poverty struggling along?

It would probably reduce greed a bit because thered be no rush to do anything. People would start traveling round the world by bike.

I dont reckon thats what'll happen tho. I think once we can connect nerves to computers we'll end up exploring distant planets with small probes to which minds can connect to creating the impression of being there. Our competitive nature will be satisfied by total immersion video gaming. People wont be being greedy in this world because they couldnt have anything that would compare to the life such technology would enable. Eventually we'll decide our bodies take up too much space and since nobody really uses them any more and their functions are an irritating distraction we'll do away with them and just be brains so we can have more in the space we have on earth meaning a huge number of minds living in worlds limited only by imagination and exploring space and living in a world exactly like this if anyone got nostalgic. This no doubt sounds daft now but todays society wouldve sounded daft not so long ago. Once we're to the point where theres no point doing owt in your body when you can connect to a little submarine and explore to oceans depths or fly through space at close to light speed it'll seem like a natural progression and be thought good because of the huge increase in number of brains and so stuff we could do. Morality will become a simple case of increasing human knowledge and capability = good. Doubtless the doctor would be along to complain about it although he wouldnt be if someone had taken such an attitude to the development of his species with his regenerations and so forth.

[boba]

a clone would be a person with their own brain and life. They might not be the original but they would still be real people that you would be killing in order to transplant your brain. I certainly hope that the majority of the population would not be ok with this. So even if the process was technically ever possibly I hope that the practice actually happening wouldn't be possible.

your question kind of reminds me of the film the island.

[green.tea]

(Original post by boba)
a clone would be a person with their own brain and life. They might not be the original but they would still be real people that you would be killing in order to transplant your brain. I certainly hope that the majority of the population would not be ok with this. So even if the process was technically ever possibly I hope that the practice actually happening wouldn't be possible.

your question kind of reminds me of the film the island.

You could just remove the brain at an early stage of development.

[boba]

(Original post by Revilo1)
I imagine it will be possible to do this at some time in the not-so-distant future, although I highly doubt it will become common place anytime soon.

@Chronist - is it true that clones have the same legal rights as us? Or are you just assuming that is what they will be given?

I don't know if there has ever been a legal ruling on it, and there probably wouldn't be until a human clone was or was about to be created. But it makes logical sense that they would. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable assumption. They would be human.

"Human rights are basic rights and freedoms that all people are entitled to regardless of nationality, sex, national or ethnic origin, race, religion, language, or other status."

even if it was ruled that they do not possess these rights do you not agree that they should?

[boba]

(Original post by green.tea)
You could just remove the brain at an early stage of development.

what like at foetus stage? early enough that it would be considered acceptable to have an abortion?

how would this be possible surely without a brain the body would die?

[ufo2012]

(Original post by green.tea)
I think once we can connect nerves to computers we'll end up exploring distant planets with small probes to which minds can connect to creating the impression of being there. Our competitive nature will be satisfied by total immersion video gaming. People wont be being greedy in this world because they couldnt have anything that would compare to the life such technology would enable. Eventually we'll decide our bodies take up too much space and since nobody really uses them any more and their functions are an irritating distraction we'll do away with them and just be brains so we can have more in the space we have on earth meaning a huge number of minds living in worlds limited only by imagination and exploring space and living in a world exactly like this if anyone got nostalgic. This no doubt sounds daft now but todays society wouldve sounded daft not so long ago. Once we're to the point where theres no point doing owt in your body when you can connect to a little submarine and explore to oceans depths or fly through space at close to light speed it'll seem like a natural progression and be thought good because of the huge increase in number of brains and so stuff we could do. Morality will become a simple case of increasing human knowledge and capability = good. Doubtless the doctor would be along to complain about it although he wouldnt be if someone had taken such an attitude to the development of his species with his regenerations and so forth.

You're talking some crazy ass shizzle there.

Issue with that is though, you are almost talking about "brains just floating through time and space". Well at present, our speed in m.p.h. is not so fast.

I know you say we would have infinite time to travel everywhere, but considering right now we can fly to France or Spain in an hour or less (depending where exactly) I don't fancy the alternative of travelling at walking speed.

Could you imagine trying to travel to the USA or Australia at such speeds?!

[green.tea]

(Original post by ufo2012)
You're talking some crazy ass shizzle there.

http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Logically its quite likely that all we'd be doing is swapping one simulation for an identical one plus enabling all of the above. I dont see why its crazy. We're already living more and more in computer reality. I think our augmenting ourselves into posthumans is waaaaay more likley than us evolving into them. As i say technology is already starting to remove all the advantages of abilities we expect that posthumans would have more of and this will become more and more the case as technology develops further.

Issue with that is though, you are almost talking about "brains just floating through time and space". Well at present, our speed in m.p.h. is not so fast.

Brains wouldnt be floating they'd be here but theyd be connected to whatever device so our senses would be floating. We'd be able to transfer our consciousness into any device or any reality the whole of human imagination could come up with. Building things to transport our fragile physical selves would be a waste of time. Just look at the difference in capability of manned and unmanned space exploration. Once computer interfaces reach this point i really dont see the human body lasting very long. It'll simply be used less and less until not at all and then people will question the reason for maintaining it. The speed of technological development would accelerate massively because we'd all now have augmented brainpower and as it did the augmentation would improve so we'd accelerate ever faster so the speed at which things could travel wouldnt be an issue

I know you say we would have infinite time to travel everywhere, but considering right now we can fly to France or Spain in an hour or less (depending where exactly) I don't fancy the alternative of travelling at walking speed.

Could you imagine trying to travel to the USA or Australia at such speeds?!

I think we'd do everything more slowly if we achieved immortality before we'd also broadened our horizons since we'd have a limited number of things to do with which to fill an unlimited period of time. It'd be quite horrible actually.

[ufo2012]

(Original post by green.tea)
I think we'd do everything more slowly if we achieved immortality before we'd also broadened our horizons since we'd have a limited number of things to do with which to fill an unlimited period of time. It'd be quite horrible actually.

Well, with infinite time, if you were dedicated enough, you could learn everything and experience everything in existence, which would in effect make you a God of the entire universe in a sense.

But then you since you'd done everything, you would get bored.

So the only option would be to kill yourself to end the boredom...

(and maybe then reincarnation begins?)

[green.tea]

(Original post by ufo2012)
Well, with infinite time, if you were dedicated enough, you could learn everything and experience everything in existence, which would in effect make you a God of the entire universe in a sense.

But then you since you'd done everything, you would get bored.

So the only option would be to kill yourself to end the boredom...

(and maybe then reincarnation begins?)

I guess space is only the final frontier if its infinite. Otherwise imagination would be. It'll probably also be the final inequality among humans as it will be the most difficult for computers to better.