Death is the end of everything. Our brain, which has functioned well for many decades, at the moment of our departure from the world, in the space of just twenty minutes undergoes anoxia and neurons and synapses fall apart. No machine, after such damage, will be able to revive us; it will be able to reactivate cardiac functions and circulation but our brain will be gone forever. And to say that the brain is "gone" for rationalist and transhumanist philosophy means that "we" are gone as we are our brain. In it there are our studies, our professionalism acquired at work and the memories of the emotions of our life, in other words our "I" which will never be able to return to consciousness.
« And all those moments will be lost in time… Like tears… in the rain. »
So said Rutger Hauer, impressing the android who was about to die in Ridley Scott's majestic film Blade Runner. Every year 57.000.000 human beings leave this world forever and will never be able to return. Yet there are ways to avoid all this, or at least try to avoid it. One of them is cryonics, that is, the preservation of the body (or just the brain), just after death, in liquid nitrogen. The damage caused by freezing may become reversible with future technology that could emerge at the end of this century or in the early 2100s. This involves taking an "ambulance to the future" by which we arrive in a state of suspension from which you can be resuscitated. A full Ralph Merckle popular article on cryonics is available on the site Futurology.it. We also remember that in Italy there is the initiative LifeXt by Bruno Lenzi promoting crionics and that much more documentation is available on www.estropico.org.
However, there is also another system, recently proposed, to achieve the same result without the use of the expensive machinery needed to permanently freeze a brain: chemical preservation.
In practice it is not a question of freezing but of preserving the brain through chemical preservatives, preventing it from being destroyed by the attack of oxygen or bacteria, if we want, this is a new and modern form of mummification. Proposing this economical system (costing between $3.000 and $10.000 when fully operational) is Brain Preservation Foundation whose technicians state that neuroscientists already today can preserve small volumes (about 1 cubic mm) of animal brain tissue immediately after death with incredible precision given that the characteristics and structure of each synapse within these volumes are well preserved until at the nanoscale, using an inexpensive, room temperature, chemical fixation method called plastination. The image in the photo is an example of plastination of a local brain circuit, already implemented in the main neuroscience laboratories. Starting from this, some neuroscientists today would agree that our memories are written in the brain at the level of synaptic connections, a synaptic preservation of an entire brain after clinical death would probably have the ability to preserve an individual's memory and identity that he subjected himself to this process, which, as already mentioned, was particularly economical.
Problem: How could an individual whose brain has undergone cryonics or plastination return to consciousness?
The only way it could do so is to wait for the evolution of connectome techniques, that is, those software programs that try to emulate the internal connections of a human brain via computer technology and therefore reproduce their functions. So, by conserving them properly, we could in the future (the conditional is obligatory) born again (in self-awareness and memories of a whole life) inside a new generation electronic computer. From here then the step of reconstructing an android body with which we can move and interact with the outside world would not be extremely difficult even considering that at that point, no longer having to live in a perishable organic body, we would have in fact achieved semi-immortality.
Finally, we must remember the great Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 A Space Odyssey, who before leaving us predicted, in an interview with Newton magazine, that in the future "we will reach electronic immortality".
