January 14, 2017
The current state of medicine
Today, if someone gets a dread disease, it’s bad news. Surgery, medicine or invasive treatments are usually the only options. But - what if you didn’t need to worry about retaining your body?
This probably sounds crazy to you.
But take a moment to read one of my favourite essays by neuroscientist Dr Ken Hayworth:
If you didn’t need to keep your body
The purpose of your body is to keep your brain running - by providing it with oxygenated blood.
Think about this:
Imagine you could effectively “reboot” your brain on a different platform.
You wouldn’t have to worry about diseases effecting your current body at all. So that’s great, but how?
Plastination
The first step in this process would be plastination.
This in essence, means replacing all the liquid in your brain with plastic resin. This would turn your brain into a block of plastic.
This has already been done in animals and tissue samples. Shawn Mikula has made great progress on a Whole Mouse Brain:
Mikula’s Whole Mouse Brain Entry
Scanning
The next step would be slicing this plastic embedded brain into millions of tiny slices.
Nanometers thick, and scanning each slice with an electron microsope.
The scans would then be saved as a computerized 3D map of your brain. Every neuron and synapse preserved perfectly.
Great progress has been made in this field:
Electron Imaging Technology For Whole Brain Circuit Mapping
Emulation
This map would then be run on a brain engine.
This would be a computer program that imports a brain arrangement map.
Once run, it then behaves exactly like a biological mammal brain would. Congratulations, your brain is now rebooted.
Why ?
Your memories, identity and personality are all stored in your brain arrangements.
This is your connectome. If this can be preserved and moved to a new platform, you will essentially have moved yourself. From there, there will be a few options:
A biological body, 3D printed. A new brain would be 3D printed, with the same connectome.
A robotic body, with a computerized verison of your brain. It would have the same functionality, but be digital rather than biological
A cloud based body. (a digital avatar - think Second Life, but connected to your rebooted brain).
The end of diseases
These options would mean the end of diseases as we know them.
A scenario
To put the above into perspective, imagine this scenario:
Dave gets diagnosed with Ebola.
In a matter of weeks he will be dead…
If he relies on conventional medicine.
But if he chooses plastination, his sick body will get incinerated after the procedure.
But a map of his brain will be available, allowing a new brain to be built.
A robotic body, 3D printed or virtual body could allow him to continue experiencing life.
The same procedure could apply to every known disease.
A way off
Of the technology stack above, two exist.
Plastination and Scanning.
The vital Emulation step is a while off.
But current trends in neuroscience seem to suggest that it will eventually exist.
The nice thing is that upon commerical plastination, we will not need to worry how far off the emulation step is.
Our brains could be kept on a shelf in plastic form, until the technology exists.
Support the Brain Preservation Foundation
Research for treatments for individual diseases typically gets funded.
It’s quite strange that a universal cure such as the one above has been overlooked.
If more support went into plastination, scanning and brain emulation technologies, we could cure all diseases at once.