23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 37Helen Thomson is a consultant for
New Scientist. She is the author of
Unthinkable: An extraordinary journey
through the world’s strangest brainscomes down to our interpretation of one
important word in the definition of death:
irreversible. If you believe that one day we will
be able to resuscitate a brain, and if it has been
preserved intact, and if the injuries that caused
the original death could be repaired – then
these people aren’t truly dead.Where does this end?
That is a stretch of the imagination, although
progress is being made. Fahy has been working
on vitrification for decades – ultimately to
allow transplant organs to be stored indefinitely.
Using rabbits and pigs, his team has already
cracked the challenge of preserving the
delicate structures of the brain almost
perfectly using vitrification. He has also shown
that a vitrified rabbit kidney can be warmed up
and function perfectly well back in the body.
“It’s very possible that trials like the one
in Pennsylvania, and our own, are going to
change our definition of death,” says Fahy.
“No doubt we will ultimately conclude that
death depends on circumstance.” Before we
developed the defibrillator, you were dead
minutes after your heart stopped beating,
he notes. Then we realised that by reducing
the temperature we might bring someone
back to life hours after their brain has stopped
working. “Where does this end?” he asks.
“Is there a limit somewhere that you cannot
overcome? Are there opportunities to help
people who we’d otherwise assume are dead?
It certainly gives you pause for thought.”
Such questions have even reached the top
echelons of the Catholic church. Recently, the
Vatican asked to talk to Stephen Valentine, the
architect behind Timeship, a project aiming to
build a facility in Texas that could cryogenically
store hundreds of human organs, brains and
bodies indefinitely. “I didn’t hold back,” he says.
“They were fascinated by the concept of
storing people and organs, and of suspended
animation. There was a genuine interest about
life extension and what it meant for the soul
and for definitions of life and death.”
In performing this kind of research, we
are confronting issues that challenge all our
beliefs about what it is to die, says Valentine.
Admittedly, no cryopreserved person has yet
been brought back to life. “But the chance of it
happening is increasing every year,” he says. ❚Rowan Hooper is head of features
at New Scientist and author of
Superhuman: Life at the extremes
of mental and physical abilitya sentient machine that has
empathy and moral agency.
Then what?
Even if artificial intelligence
gets good enough to pass
as sentient, it is likely to
“live” in a dispersed state,
not situated in a single device.
“It will probably live in the
cloud or some other place
where its memory could
be retrieved and used in a
different format or body,”
says Carpenter. In that case,
a sentient robot could never
die. It could just download
itself somewhere else – like
Alexa and Siri, it could be in
many places at once.
Would we feel differently if
that sentient robot contained
an actual human brain? This
year, neuroscientists mapped
all the connections between
all the neurons in an animal’s
brain for the first time. It was
a simple nematode worm.
But transhumanists believewill be “alive” any time soon.
Nevertheless, a growing
feeling that robots are
becoming more sentient
will change how we behave
towards them, says David
Gunkel at Northern Illinois
University. “We keep moving
the line in the sand to protect
ourselves from the incursion
of the robot. We are now
making machines that
challenge those boundaries,”
he says. That is a good thing,
because exposure to them
will teach us new ways to
think about other entities.
Because our world is
changing so rapidly, Gunkel
believes we should now
start to think from the robot’s
point of view, considering
their rights and the question
of robot death and even
suffering. “We have to answer
these questions before we
get these things in our world,
so we are prepared.”that if we could create such
a “connectome” for a human,
we could replicate it on a
computer and transfer our
consciousness to silicon,
creating an entity that was
“alive”. However, Daniel
Dennett at Tufts University
in Massachusetts is sceptical.
“Having the complete
connectome would be a bit
like having a complete map
of a city’s telephone system
and thinking that was all you
needed to know to make
sense of all the events going
on in London or New York,”
he says. In short, there is little
chance that an uploaded brainCryogenics could
make death reversibleMU
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