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WILLIAM SHATNER: Boston, Massachusetts, March 2018.
Nectome, a biotechnology startup company,
announces an audacious and controversial plan.
Their vision-- a groundbreaking technique that
can take the data stored inside a human brain
and transfer it into a computer.
There are companies like Nectome
that are attempting to preserve the brain and the mind.
Our methods of analyzing the connections
between neurons in the brain are getting really good.
And so eventually, we'll be able to model the connections
between all the neurons.
And at that point, we'll have a better idea
as to whether or not it's possible to upload
a brain into the Cloud.
But we'll have to wait and see what happens.
SUSAN SCHNEIDER: Uploading is the process
of basically copying and encoding someone's
mental life onto a computer.
Advocates of uploading believe that that
would really be a way for you to survive
the death of your brain.
MICHIO KAKU: And now people say, well, if I'm immortal
and I'm living my life inside a computer,
isn't that rather boring?
No, because this mainframe computer
will connect to a mechanical avatar that
is superhuman in every way.
And you will see through his eyes.
You'll feel through his sense organs.
So in other words, we will have a form of digital immortality.
WILLIAM SHATNER: Digital immortality--
the incredible notion that we might someday
be able to live forever.
But if the information inside our brains
can be copied and transferred like information
onto a computer hard drive, does that
mean it can keep and store everything,
like our personalities perhaps?
Or would something be lost in translation?
There are two issues to consider here.
First of all, why believe that a digital copy of you
is capable of being conscious?
The second issue is that it doesn't at all follow
that that being would really be you, that you are the survivor,
rather than a digital copy.
Consciousness is one of the most hard to define
phenomena about the human brain.
And it's also what separates us from all other species.
It's this idea that we have internal reflection.
Can we actually live on forever in a computer
and still be able to preserve all our memories,
all our friendships, all the different things that we love?
And I think that that's a very romantic notion for a lot
of people, that they want to feel like there's
a way to go on forever.
But you can't separate the brain from the rest of your body.
There are those who believe the human brain has more
potential than even the brain itself can imagine
and that its true capabilities might be limitless.
In some ways, we know more about the far reaches of the galaxy
than we do about the human mind.
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