Mortality - is there hope...?

A colleague's father just past away a while ago. I believe he was 55 or so... it brought back some of my own thoughts in the past couple of years on the issue of mortality.
I guess a few things came together for me in a loud wakeup call:

I began to notice that my dad was not able to function his usual...getting tired quickly and needing my help with some physical stuff

My own health, although still great is not what it used to be... feeling my younger self slip away.

My 47 year old brother had some health issues - they were all benign..but still

Reading Eli Weisel's Night - especially the part where he talks about his father's dying moments and the emotional torment that he felt was the darkest part of his Holocaust abyss

But most of all I think it was the birth of my first daughter - Zoe. It was really a revelation and an incredible experience in many ways (I am sure every parent knows what I'm talking about) but it also brought a new sense to time - children are wonderful yet frightening metrics for our own demise and to the passing of time. Since they change so noticeably you begin to feel time flowing by. It also made me realize that no matter how good I feel now, how cool I might think I am Zoe will never really know me as I perceive myself to be at this point. For her I will be a 50 something old man most of his life behind him!

Of course everyone thinks of mortality, and this is not the first time by any means for me (my mother still recalls how at the age of eight I screamed from the shower saying something like "we are all gonna die - you, dad and me") but i think that having children changes everything including your view of life and death. For me it sort of symbolizes the beginning of the end.

Obviously this issue has occupied many minds ever since the dawn of man...and I wonder where exactly are we going with this. Reading some of the recent issues of Scientific American and other papers on robotics and AI it seems there are some converging trends in Nanotech Biotech and computing that will eventually change the way we live and the way we die.

Some of these advancements have to do with health issues like fighting cancer, anti aging, nerve repair or organ regeneration - but the interesting part for me is reading about augmented brain technology and the fact that we are not very far away from being able to engage not only in turbo charging our memory but maybe in actual mind uploading so what will the outcome be? The consequences of robbing man kind of mortality are of course not clear. Probably, at least for non religious crowd, the real issue lies with the continuity of consciousness (a la immortality test) and assume linear causality (unlike quantum immortality). Obviously the mere physical reincarnation is, by most accounts meaningless (popularized by motion pictures like Island and AeonFlux ). One wonders what would unending existence type of scenario do to the structure of so called humanity. Some accounts talk about stagnation and lack of any motivation others tend to look at the outcome as engineered heaven while yet others argue that existence that cannot be terminated will inevitably lead to misery as the conscious entity will not be able to commit willful suicide in cases where it no longer desires to continue an unwanted existence.

ultimately it seems that humans' philosophy that consciousness is what separates man from animals will be our demise. With that kind of definition it seems more than plausible that artificial entities with sufficient memory space, computing power and probably parallel processing and self referencing will very soon be able to be effectively self aware and will thus be effectively human under these terms (see Hans Moravec and The Singularity Institute for some data). Beyond that point we will need to face the very difficult questions of what constitutes life and death and re-examine our consciousness based theories. It might turn out that multiple consciousness and mind connectedness scenarios where an abstract conscious entity of super human intelligence and infinite existence come to "life". In fact proponents of this school of thought believe that web2.0 with its massive collaboration and co creation abilities is the beginning of such an occurrence. No doubt we are at an Archimedian point. Will we all be part of one big virtual entity (like Gaia ), will we be able to live multiple co-existence lives in virtual domains.

Whatever the future of mortality is I just want to end with a little story that my thesis advisor told me about Lev Landau (who was his doctoral advisor back in the good old days):

So Lev is sitting some really cold afternoon with Ginsburg in the Moscow Academy debating some issue in statistical mechanics. Ginsburg says something like "....but this is an extremely improbable outcome. It is like saying that this fireplace will spontaneously transform itself on the quantum level to a beautiful girl!" So Landau pauses for a second, then smiles and says: "that is true - but if that does happen the chances that she will have cloths on are REALLY zero!!"

So whatever it is, I hope the girls don't have cloths on!

MC