Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
who was then in her or his mid-ifties. During our conversation, the scien-
tist told me that she or he fully expects to become immortal via computer
technology, whose power has increased exponentially for the past half
century.
8
The computer approach to human immortality presumes that the es-
sence of our personhood lies in brain function, not in the appearance or
functions of the rest of our body. if brain function gives rise to mind, and
if our minds define who we really are, it is reasoned that by making our
minds immortal, we can make ourselves immortal. A growing group of
people believe that in this century it may be possible to literally download
our minds, with all of their memories, emotions, and capabilities, onto
or into material more permanent than the biological tissue it now inhab-
its. once this is accomplished, so they say, it will not matter what type of
body houses the mind. There might be completely artificial bodies to pro-
vide the mind with sensory information like our present bodies do. Com-
puter scientist and artificial intelligence researcher ray Kurzeil refers to
humans at such a stage in their evolutionary history as spiritual machines.
And novelist Greg iles refers to a computer with a downloaded human
mind as reaching Trinity state: “it's mind and machine, yet greater than
both” (2003, 397).
Whether the twenty-irst century brings human life spans of a few de-
cades greater than what we have now or of thousands of years, it is not
too early to begin thinking about the moral implications of effective age-
retardation technologies. let's try to imagine the impact of significantly
longer life spans on individual and societal values.
Age retardation: human values
Age-retardation technologies will have striking effects on individual lives
and on the structure of society regardless of whether their use is limited or
widespread and regardless of whether the technology adds decades, centu-
ries, or millennia to present life expectancies. our discussion of the effects
of age-retardation technologies on human values focuses on four categor-
ies of concerns, those associated with (1) moderate life extension affect-
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