The Strange Neuroscience of Immortality

Hayworth has spent much of the past few years in a windowless room carving brains into very thin slices. He is by all accounts a curious man, known for casually saying things like, “The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body.” He wants that brain to be his brain. He wants his 100 billion neurons and more than 100 trillion synapses to be encased in a block of transparent, amber-colored resin—before he dies of natural causes.

Why? Ken Hayworth believes that he can live forever.

But first he has to die.

“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.

…

“Here’s what could happen,” he said. “We’re going to understand how the brain works like we now understand how a computer works. At some point, we might realize that the stuff we hold onto as human beings—the idea of the self, the role of mortality, the meaning of existence—is fundamentally wrong.”

Lowering his voice, he continued. “It may be that we learn so much that we lose part of our humanity because we know too much.” He thought this over for a long moment. “I try not to go too far down that road,” he said at last, “because I feel that I would go mad.”

Evan R. Goldstein