Avescope Memento Mori

Memento
Mori
Memento Mori. “Remember I must die”.
“Or must I?”, ask the transhumanists. The
impact of merging technology with the
human being will be felt no more
powerfully than within the plans of
transhumanists who seek to postpone and
even eradicate death by using technology.
Originally from the realms of the
conspiracy world, the idea that human
consciousness can somehow be harnessed
and uploaded as data now occupies a
serious place in modern research and
development.
There are some who believe human
consciousness can be transferred and
stored as data. And this may not be so
crazy as it sounds. After all, psychologists
are familiar with the computer analogy,
when it comes to human memory. The
alleged BT Soulcatcher project, a theory
promoted by conspiracy theorists in the
early 2000s is actually a real project
discussed in an Open University video
available on Youtube, some years ago.
The video discusses the concept that in
around 2030/2040, the technology should
exist to enable a person to get a simple
injection into their arm, containing some
nanotechnology devices which would
then connect to every neuron in their
brain, enabling an exact replica of their
Avescope | 25
Tamsin
McKenna-
Williams
brain to be transferred as data, containing
all the person’s thoughts and memories.
This could be a truly revolutionary
technology for Alzheimer’s and dementia
sufferers. If one’s brain were to be mapped
prior to the onset of such a condition, it
might be possible to effectively re-boot
key personal default settings and enable
those who are losing their memory to
maintain their identity. It could act as the
same type of health-related insurance as
harvesting eggs and sperm when a person
is young, to enable them to put having
children on hold until their finances
permit it.
This technology could also be utilized to
reanimate the dead. The implications of
such being very hard to really quantify,
given we still do not fully understand how
the mind connects to the brain and how
things work from a more spiritual
perspective.
If this technology were to advance to a
level where memories and entire lifetimes
could be transferred, as data. In theory, the
life experiences of everyone could be
preserved and possibly reanimated later in
a different, cloned or synthetic body. The
pros and cons of this are manifold and the
related ethics, legal ramifications and
potential regulation are about as complex
as it gets. It’s tough enough for regulators
and data processors to guarantee the
safety of our name and address, never
mind our entire consciousness and
memories. Goodness knows what levels of
exploitation and potential risk this type of
innovation could expose humanity to. And
there would likely be great inequality in
any system that promised to effectively
offer longer life or potential reincarnation
by design. Those who could afford to
become immortal (of sorts) would be
preserved, regardless of how important
their own life experiences were in the
grand scheme of things, yet those who
may have genuinely interesting data, who
may be too poor to preserve it, would be
lost to the world of human consciousness
data storing.