Day 326: Immortality by 2045 and the Fallacy of the Human Mind

Will human beings manage to extend their lives indefinitely by 2045? Some renowned technologists, futurists, and medical researchers predict exactly this.

In one scenario, medical advances successfully add more than one year to life every year, effectively pushing mortality to infinity.

Photo by Jacob Granneman on Unsplash

In another, more dramatic vision, human beings essentially upload their consciousness to robots or to the cloud, rendering the physical body obsolete.

They call this “singularity,” a point (like a black hole) that has infinite value. In human consciousness, singularity refers to the point at which human beings create a consciousness greater than themselves, with the capability to infinitely renew and increase its intelligence.

This is Your Brain on the Cloud

The Global Futures 2045 Conference described in the link above occurred in 2013.

Eleven years later, how are we doing?

Since 2023, technologists have begun to describe a dramatic transformation in life through Artificial Intelligence. So far (at least in the law), the results aren’t very impressive. (I wouldn’t even rely on it as a research assistant right now.)

I Think, Therefore I fail to see

But let’s assume we do manage to make the human body obsolete by uploading our brain activity to a technological center of consciousness.

That might enable some form of amortality. But mystics from the Buddha to Eckhart Tölle have said for millennia that the mind is not the essence of human life. On the contrary, they advise, the mind is the concealer of the essential human spirit.

As Tölle has said, Descartes’ famous expression, “I think, therefore I am,” may have stated not our true nature, but our greatest misunderstanding of the nature of our own existence.

If what we manage to preserve indefinitely is the electrical activity that currently occurs by way of the human brain, can we be sure we haven’t thrown out the baby and saved the bathwater?