Reconstitution

I know a lot of people who would be quite keen on some kind of brain preservation. There's been some interesting progress in phyiscally preserving brains in a way that, presumably, preserves their function until we have the technology to reanimate them. Though, of course, it's fairly unlikely that your recently-thawed brain would be transplanted into a new body directly. Instead, we'd likely have some way to store and transfer the information represented in that brain.

And for many others that digital transfer, mind uploading and so on, is the real point. If you could upload your brain into a computer, it would never be possible to really die. Of course, your body could die, but your mind could live on, either in a new body or, perhaps, simulated directly on a computer itself. There's some fairly significant ethical mazes to navigate, but there's no arguing that there's something fairly compelling about immortality.

But what if only part of your memories could be reconstructed? Or if the version of you that lived on was imperfectly duplicated – had some slight personality changes or quirks not present in the original. We seem fairly comfortable with assigning a continuous identity to people who experience personality changes or lose memory from strokes. Obviously it would be ideal if the replication was completely accurate, but something is, perhaps, better than nothing.

The craziest thing I've heard along this vein is the idea that once you accept imperfect replication, you might not need mind uploading at all. Maybe I die with no brain scan, no cryogenic process, and a direct copy of my mind is impossible. However, you have thousands of hours of video of me talking, thinking, interacting with people. Could you reconstitute a mind by working backwards from that material? What if it's not video but third parties' memories of me? Or my writing? Perhaps this post itself could someday be used to remake its creator – or, at least, someone pretty similar.

The uncertain question, of course, is how much that reconstituted person would be you. Or if it's not you, would that still be worthwhile? Our notion of identity is very limited, and seems unlikely to hold up in the face of the serious complexity the future will bring. For me, I think I'd be happy to know that someone who thinks like I think is out there, who remembers some of the things I remember or shares similar ideas. Whether that person is me or not may be beside the point.

Once you get that far, it starts to seem like the whole mind uploading thing might not even be necessary. If what I want is for my mind to live on beyond the lifetime of my body, and I'm willing to accept that it may happen imperfectly or piecemeal, I can start doing that today. Each time I share an idea, I'm imperfectly transferring that part of my mind. If the person receiving that idea likes it enough to share it with others, the process will repeat.

And if that idea lives on, jumping mind to mind through the generations, maybe that is a kind of immortality.