Uploading Your Brain: “The Strange Neuroscience of Immortality”

Harvard post doc with big ideas, Ken Hayworth may be going through the first of the three stages of truth. German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860) listed these stages for new ideas as ridicule, violent opposition, then finally accepted as self evident. To most of us, immortality is a long way off at best, closer to science fiction…but, we are not Ken Hayworth.

“If your body stops functioning, it starts to eat itself,” he explains to me one drab morning this spring, “so you have to shut down the enzymes that destroy the tissue.” If all goes according to plan, he says cheerfully, “I’ll be a perfect fossil.” Then one day, not too long from now, his consciousness will be revived on a computer. By 2110, Hayworth predicts, mind uploading—the transfer of a biological brain to a silicon-based operating system—will be as common as laser eye surgery is today. [via]