关于让生命永远延续的探讨

摘要

长生不老是人类几千年来所追求的梦想，本人认为，在今天的科学技术下，这
一愿望将会成为现实，而且人可以“死”去无数次也无碍其生命的继续。本文
是一个对永生的理论假设和技术探讨。与宗教及神灵界的范畴无关。

**首先让我们看一下关于“生命”的定义。**

理论一：人的生命即是人的意识(Consciousness) 。 只要保持人的意识，人的生
命即得以延续。

试想一下有个不幸的人，丧失了所有的肢体，连心脏和肺等内脏都坏了，五官也不
工作了，但他的头脑还活着，护士用氧气和各种营养物维持着他的大脑。这人
还活着吗？是的，他还活着， 因为他还能思考，还有意识。

理论二：人的意识即是人的记忆(Memory)。 你之所以Self-identify，是因为你的大脑将
你的过去和你现在联系起来。

**理清了“生命”的定义，如何实现“永生”现在变得相对简单。**

理论三：计算机技术可以发展到Perform所有人脑的功能，因为一切事件和逻辑
都可以用数学来表示。这只是个时间问题。

理论四：“永生”的技术实现，即是在人的一个身体被毁灭之前，将人的大脑(Memory)
download到计算机上。之后，你可以选择永远活在计算机里，或者将你的大脑upload 给一个机器人，或者upload 给你的克隆体。无论如何，现在你的生命都
会在一个载体上继续。(当然在什么载体上是由你的钱包决定的，呵呵)。

是不是让你对很多事情重新进行考虑？

全文

Eternal life

Human being is looking for eternal life for a long history of time. Many attempts raise and fail. Is that ever possible? Yes, very possible, it might be closer to you than you might think before.

When I wrote this thing about the eternal life, you might think of some biological revolution that turning off one aging gene. I am not a biologist. I do not know how far science has gone on that direction. But I am sure even though someday if we found that magic gene. It will last our life, it will still not be eternal life. We will still face death of disease, subjected to car accident, murder. That is not eternal life. That is long life.

The eternal life I am talking about here is much better than that; it will change the very way we existing upon. Under this eternal life, you will never die no matter how many times you enemy killed you. You will stay alive as long as the universe did not collapse to a single point again.

You will be able to enjoy with your families forever. You can enjoy the passion and love forever. You will not be afraid of anything, anyone. Supposed you are one of those God- ???? hijackers on 9/11. After you smashed the airplane into those buildings, by the eternal technique i am talking about, on the next morning, you will be able to watch the TV and enjoy every moment of the show. There is no suicide attack anymore, because no one will die. The bad guys will not die. All the employees in the building will not die either. They will turn on the TV next morning and watched the destruction of themselves. Maybe themselves will form a team and hunting down those bad guys.

Sounds to be too good to be true? No, it is true and it is coming. It is around the corner of big break through. The technique is computer science.

LIFE

Before we can get into the eternal life. Let's talk about life first. Let’s try to understand what is life and then we can move on to eternal life. What is life? I do not want to get into trouble of discussion the long history of philosophy or different religions. What I am doing here is to think carefully and rationally what life is by it is physical meaning, and how can we create life and keep life.

Let's start with example of a human. We know for sure an alived human being has a life. It has consciousness, it can move and it can find food to make it alive and even give birth to next generation when it is too old to be alive anymore.

Ok, let’s move one step further. Say by bad luck, a human being, a poor guy had an accident, a very bad accident. He lost his legs, his arms and he cannot move and he can not reproduce anymore. Is he still alive? Yes, of course he is. He just lived in a life not as good as before. He only sleep on a bed and be fed by someone else. He is alive; he can still be a good storyteller. He can even still be a great physicist like that guy studying black hole in UK.

Now, let's go even further, say he has a bad heart and lung and we have to remove everything from his stem, now he has only one head exist. He loses his eyesight, he cannot talk anymore, he can not even more any part of his head to indicate yes and no. He has no hearing ability. He sleeps consciously on the bed, only head, a still head. Nurse put that head into a box and connected with all oxygen and nutrition supply. Is he still alive?

Yes, he is still alive, why? Because he can still think, he still has consciousness. He still knows his very existence. He can feel his sadness. He can think of past and future.

So, live is consciousness. Anything else is the just the support of this consciousness. The medical revolution will eventually be able replace any organ in human body by artificial machine, heart, liver, lung... You name it. But as long as it does not replace brain. That human is alive. He is still not a machine. Can we ever replay the brain with machine? No, we can not, because machine can never has consciousness. You might argue. Is that right?

So, what is consciousness? Since consciousness is the very only meaning for life. If we can keep our consciousness forever, we will be able to be alive forever. Can we?

Now, let's emphasize on consciousness. We know we human being has. We are not sure if lunatic person has. Let's assume they had. We know a dog has, since we can communicate with them, we can ask them to run to catch something, we know they don’t want to die. You might say dog does not have a soul. I do not want to get into trouble to try to make a religion person to understand my article here. Let's say we do not know what is soul and leave it alone, leave it to religious persons dreaming, they do not need eternal life anyway, since they have their God take cared of it.

Ok, dog has and human have consciousness. Maybe all living animal has. You would say. Does a tree have? We do not know. Some naturalist say they has, some redneck wood farmer say no. They all said these based on their feeling. Let's be more rational here. A tree might have, but we will never know even it has. Just like the head in the box we described above. We will never know unless we can somehow communicate with it.

So consciousness is based on how do we feel about them. Generally speaking, for most people, there is not a threshold for consciousness and non-consciousness. We know 100% human has because we knew we could communicate with that consciousness well. We know dog probably has 95% chance to have consciousness, 40% for ants and 10% for tree. Does tree has a life? Well, it does, because it can grow and change its physical appearance. Did we just prove that very essential part of life is consciousness? Where does it go wrong?

Does a computer program have consciousness? Wahl! Off course not! You would say. Suppose you are playing a game with a computer. In the game, it is a girl. You are playing love game with her. She is a super beauty, and you had to buy food to her, go shopping with her and earn money for her and you might also had to talk with her for hours to make she love u and sleep with u.

Now days the computer technique can be so advanced that the game is very well programmed and that you feel as if you are dating with a real girl, the girl next door to you. She can smile, be angry. Because she can do everything a girl can do. She can make physical changes, she can grow old and she knows how to dress up to attract you. I can foresee in near future that the program is so well that you can not tell the difference between the real girl and computer girl just from the message she showed on the computer screen, for example a chat room scenarios. There are lots of people fall in love in chartroom, although all they saw it he computer signal on their screen. Does that computer object have consciousness? Off course not, you would say. Why? Well, because i can shut down the computer and she will be gone. I can kill her any time I want to. Can you do the same thing to a tree or a dog? Does Hitler kill lots of human also?

Ok, let do some improvement on the program. The girls in the game will try every thing she could to prevent u to shut her off. She will send you warm message, she will talk sweet words to you and she will sing for u and tell nice story for you before you sleep. She will cry and beg u not to shut her off. We can even improve the program so well that if u shut it down, your very lovely girl will gone forever. And you had to start all over again to find and chase another girl in the game. Would u still shut her off when you start to have a feeling with her?

Let's go back the head in the box and do a comparison. Who do u think has consciousness? It is the head in the box or the girl in the computer?

You might say, well, although their appearance might confuse me. But once I know one is a human head and the other is computer girl. I will say that human head has consciousness and the girl does not.

Is that right? We need to think carefully about this. A tree does have life but no consciousness, a computer girl does not have life and consciousness, and a head in the box has both life and consciousness. This is our common sense about it. The truth is that it is wrong. The truth is that the girl and the head both has so called consciousness, both of them has no life and a tree has life but no consciousness, because in reality there is no such physical thing as consciousness. Consciousness is just an illusion human made to itself.

There is no consciousness for human being? I might surprise you. Yes! If human being has right to claim consciousness, the computer girl has the same right to say so too.

CONSICOUSNESS

Consciousness is one of the illusions of the human being imposed on themselves. Human being declares consciousness and so it has superior than other creatures and beings. It is more like white declare superiority against Chinese. Or even more like a Pentium IV declare it has fundamental difference against Pentium III, and Pentium IV is God Pentium III is slave.

The truth is that there is no fundamental difference between a human being’s brain and the computer girl. The feeling of self existing is the origin of the so called consciousness.

Let's go back to your childhood and find the origin of your consciousness. When do u feel the existing of yourself first time? You do not remember anything when u r 1 year old for sure. I am a mid level smart guy. I remember sometime when i was 2. I remember clearly one thing when I was 2. On that day I suddenly i feel there is a "myself", the existence of myself. I talked with different person. Someone remembered that and someone did not remember that.

So, what is this "myself", the very core of consciousness? What make you feel you are you, but not someone else? You would say “because I had past, i can control myself, and
i do not want to die".

A computer program can remember its past, it can control the message it sent out, it could be programmed that it does not want to die. Well, you would say" I am not programmed do not want to die, I just do not want to die myself". Well, r u sure? Are you sure your basic instinct is not something preprogram in your gene. The wiliness of not to die and the fear are no more than the self programmed chemical reaction in your brain?

So, let’s rule out the do-not-want-to-die part out of your consciousness. That is really just a programmed code. What left in the consciousness is the realization of yourself. It is why you always feel you are yourself.

When you sleep, did u feel anything? Do you still fee you are yourself during the sleep? You might have some experience of self-identity confusion when you sleep. Sometime you feel you are someone else watching yourself doing something. Sometime you even dreamed you are dead or dying. There is no consciousness during your sleep. The sleeping period is same as when you did a major surgery. You do not feel anything. If you are died during the sleep, you will simply die, like the computer girl was switched off.

So, why the second day when you wake up, you still know it is you, not someone else. It is because your brain make you feel as if you are still yesterday's you. So, how does your brain makes you feel you are still yesterday's you. Well, I still have the same legs and arms, you might argue. Your programmed brain and supporting memory make you feel that way. And because of this feeling, you declare consciousness, your superiority over computer girl.

Supposed the head in that box wake up after a night sleep, is he going to feel he is the same person? Yes, he will. Because he has same memory, he remembered the thing happened before he sleeps. What happened to a person losing long time memory? What happens to a brain with no memory? What happens to a person lose all his memory when he slept. Will he be able to claim he is still himself after the sleep? No, he will not. If there is no memory, there is no consciousness. Consciousness is just memory plus the memory to recall those memories. It is memory that linking the past to current to future. There is nothing mysterious about it. There is no super being stuff existing called consciousness. Every animal has memory and so animals have able to self-identity themselves. Tree does not have, dog has, we have, and the computer girls have.

It might still hard for you to accept this. It is more because the traditional way you are thinking, than the reality of the truth. Think careful, think from the view point of the computer girl. You will realize it.

The truth is that if you are playing with a sophisticated computer game, the players of computer that you are play against had not fundamental difference than you. The only difference is you are more advance programmed and had bigger memory, more like a Pentium III to Pentium IV. Physically there is no difference if you kill the girls on computer and kill a person in real life. You stopped one calculation process. You should feel as guilty as killing a real person.

BAIN and COMPUTER

After we lifted the cover of the consciousness and understand it is simply made up of the memory, algorithm and logic functions, it is much easier for us to understand and create eternal life now. Computer can simulate mostly every thing a brain can do, because the basic structure a computer and a brain are same, the way they treat single and process calculation are same. They all go to the basic 0/1 digital switch. The brain is slow computer. If we talking about the frequency of processor like Pentium IV, Pentium IV is about 2G HZ, for a brain, it is about 10 HZ. So, why our brain can function so fast and what makes me writing this article by such a slow "computer"? It is its algorithm. Our brain has a much better structure than any computer and it is something we are still working hard to understand.

But beside so-called consciousness, computer program can simulate anything a brain does. I hate to use word "simulation". It is actually can "do". It is the consciousness part that we think we can never be able to program and thus we can never create a human brain. If we proved that there is no consciousness, within next several generations, we will be able to replicate all the brains functions on a laptop.

Computer can simulate person's complicate feeling. For example, love, the most intriguing feeling of human being and also it is defined as the most distinct feature of a human brain, although some people even doubt whether a dog has love. However, an object in computer can love easily. Suppose we had a class called human. One of the parameter in the class is personal possession. Love can be defined as a transfer between two person's possessions voluntarily without anything else involved. If we had a more wide defined possession and more rich class of people, we can define any love in human society.

The simply C++ code for love can be like this

Define class HUMAN A B;
if (Transfter (A.Possession, B.Possession)==1 )
else if( (A==female && B==female) || (A==male && B==female))
( A.Straigtlove = B)
else if (A.sex == B.sex)
(A.HomoLove=B)
else if (A.son=B)
(A.ParentalLove=B)

This is just a simple example to describe love. To make more close to human being, we need it better structured and have more rich attributes. But in theory we can do that, it is just a matter of time and labor, and the complicate of the problem.

Another major feature of human being is the its ability of self- learning. That is not hard also, we did have the algorithm for self-learning already, the computer program can write music and novels already. We are on the way to solve all these problems. It is just matter of time.

You may claim the algorithm above is different than the way how human brain process signals. You are right. This is a way to show how we can simulate all the process in brain. We will be able to move to replicate these processes also. All we need is the waiting time for technique moving along. It will be too difficult, given the process we made in the last 50 years. Remember this, everything in the world can be describe as math. If it is described by math, computer can process it.

So, what happened, if we have a computer program basically do anything we can do with our brain? Well, on that day we will have eternal life.

ETERNAL LIFE

If we looked back to our evolution history, we know that eventually we need to get rid of this human body. Why? It is simply not efficient and reliable. All we really need is just a brain and all we did in everyday is basically to keep our brain running, running in a way that will bring joy and happiness to us. However, only 20% of body energy goes to brain. Our body that supports the brain is not reliable at all. Brain will stop working if there is a failure of our heart, lung, and liver or anything else. Our brain will not joy and happiness if there is some defection of the body, say a no-perfect-teeth which makes you hard to find a mate. Our human body is designed over evolution for hunting food and produce offspring. We really do not need this body anymore if we can support brain alternatively. The eternal life is the eternal life of the mind in the brain.

If we can do all our human brain function on a computer, eventually we can then basically load all our memory and function of our brain into the computer. We can even store multiple copies of mind in different machine. They will all be you starts from the day they are loaded. Our whole human society can live in a chip, a laptop. Who say the civilization must be in the form of carbon chemicals. Maybe there is a civilization in the Mars before and now they are all in a chip floating in the universe. You might think how no-creative for Star War, which assume we are still living in a form we are living now. We can exist in any media in future, in any form.

It might still hard for you to understand it, even you understand it, it might still hard for you to accept it. I do not want to live in a computer, you might say. Well, let's start with the very basic and see whether it is really a good news or bad news.

Supposed you had a bad car accident. The doctor tried to save you hard. But they cannot. You basically destroy every pieces of your body; you heart is smashed together with your liver like grinded beef for sandwich. There is no way to repair all those trash by the most delicate hands in the world. Before you lose your “consciousness”, the doctor called me in and asked me to give you an eternal life.

Since you paid me in advance, say $1,000. It will be relatively cheap since I will do this every day, it will be mass production effect since everyone want an internal life. I bring a laptop with some wire and panels that will hook to your brain.

What I will do is to download every pieces of the information from your brain to my computer, both algorithm and memory. Well, since it the only version one and because some Microsoft problem, i lose some of memory in your brain, memory such as you pee on your bed. They are bad memory anyway. However, the system works, i download 90% of your brain and created a human brain called same name as you, XuDaFa. You "die" very short after I finish downloading. Remembering the "die" I used here is more like a relatively word. The feeling of dying to your current brain has no difference than a deep sleep.

I turn on my computer the second day. You wake up and you find you are in my computer. First thing you feel is that YOU ARE YOU. I can guarantee of that, because there is no magical “consciousness” other that the memory I download from your brain. You will remember every single thing in your brain before the accident. But you feel nothing, you do not have hand, no legs, no body, no eyes, no ears, nothing! It is purely a world is silence and darkness. What you will feel is exactly the same as the brain in the box I mentioned above.

I then plug a microphone and a speak to the computer and we will start to talk.

"Where am I" you will ask
"You are in my computer, and since you did not pay the extra $10,000 for robot 900i, you will be here for a while", I will answer, “"How do u feel over there?"
"I feel, my brain is much sharper and works fast (sure you do, since u r 2G HZ, not a 10 HZ machine anymore), i feel i have a much clear mind (you will never lose any memory since it is all on hard drive, another evidence of human inferiority )." You will say, "And i feel lonely here".

This will be your first day. You will be able to think, to dream, to be angry, and to be sad, to do anything a human brain can do in that computer. But because there is no physical output and input to that brain, it is dark and lonely.

What happened if you paid $100,000 extra? Well, you will end up in a robot called 900i. It has feature of walking, movement, hands, and eyesight. You basically can do anything you are doing now, except you do not have a soft body and tissue. Your hands are always cold. But you are strong. No one dare to rob you anymore.

If you paid another extra $1,000,000 dollar and left a copy of your DNA before you die. We can grow another human body for you and load your mind from computer to that newborn baby. You will feel exactly the same way you live now after you grow up. You can go on this kind of process on and on. You can switch between machine to flesh, in any form you like to be. You can kill yourself many many times. They will be like a bad dream. You will be still yourself when a computer when your mind is switched on.

This is the blue print of the eternal life. Like it so far? You can have multiple copy of your mind and you will never die on less your enemy destroyed all the copies. You can have multiple of yourself and you can make different object feels like exactly as you, although they will choose different pathway later and be different person.

YOU

“Hi, all you talking about are science fiction, there is nothing close in real life as what you said” You might argue with that. Well, let's check how close we are to that day.
Since we proved that is no consciousness of human being that cannot be programmed by computer, it is relatively easy for us to model the rest of stuff in your brain. Once we know the internal algorithm of the brain, we can really design an empty brain on computer. There are still major milestone to this scientific successfulness. I listed them as below

1) The way to retrieve all the information in the brain. We need a program that can actively download everything from human brain. We know fundamentally brain is a collative connection of neurons. It is the connections between neurons represent memory and algorithm. We need a method to search and record all these connections. Once we did that, we can take a relive, since we will be able to store our mind somewhere, on a CD or a hard drive, which makes you alive. A big portion of the human brain is used to control human body. They automatically control things like your body temperature and heart rate. We do not need to download that part of information. That part is more like today computer automatic control, although we claim it is human brain. This is another evidence there is no fundamental difference between human brain and computer. All we need is the information you are consciousness about. My bet on that is that I can see it happened sometimes in next 50 years or shorter, roughly about the time I am going to die. I wish I could be a luck guy.

But if you want to keep on enjoying your life like today, we need to finish another two things.

2) Clone a human being, as a new carrier of your mind.

This task is relatively easy. We will see this technique matured probably in next ten years.

3) The way to reload information from computer to your brain. It is much harder than the first, because the brain is basically grow to what it is. This might takes longer, but eventually it will happen. It does not matter when it will happen now, since you are in the computer already, you basically can live as long as you want to. Feel lonely in the computer and feel awful with a mental body? You can choose to deep sleep. When you sleep, you will not feel a single thing. When you wake up, as if it is just 10 second ago, you will enter the new era of mind reloading and you will be free.

So, this is the end of my story now. What is the benefit to read your long crap? You might ask. Should I do anything in my daily work?

Everyone wants to have eternal life, because it is so helpless to face miserable death, no matter what regions you are. Living is always better than seeing any kind of God or heaven.

Here is a list of my advice for things you can do now.

If you are smart guy, try to do some research work for artificial intelligent. It will help you and human being. It needs some smart guy in this field. There is only such a limited resource put into this field now compared its potential benefit. This research will lift the pain and fear forever from human being. They need you!

If you are young parent, try to give birth of your next generation as late as possible. If they were borne too early, they might die as miserable as his previous ancestors. A ten years delay is long time for technology development. It might just mean the death and eternal life for your kids.

If you are an average young guy, try to keep health and be alive as long as possible. Before we can get your mind out of your retarded body, it is your shell to support your brain. Keep your shell working well before we get it out of the shell. That means no smoking, no drinking, plenty of exercise and be happy.

If you are old and rich, I am sorry for you, there is nothing magically going to happen in next ten years. You are just another bad luck human like all the previous in human history. It is time to donate your money to help this research and your next generation. They need your money! Haha!