Hi. My name’s Faggot. Today I’m going to be talking about immortality and specific parts that I want to research. My goal today is to not just give you information on a topic that interests me, but to get you interested in this topic too. Hopefully you guys will have some questions for me at end and I’ll try to answer them as best as I can.
So, immortality. What is it?  Immortality, using the context of senescence, is being immune to diseases that you get from aging. As you age, you become more and more prone to stuff such as cancer, arthritis, dementia, etc. To have immortality, in the context of senescence, means that you would no longer age, and therefore, no longer have an inevitable death.
Some pros of immortality are that great minds would no longer have a time limit, you wouldn’t have to deal with the death of friends or family, and the general rise of population would help humans create, produce, and progress faster. However, there are some con’s such as over-population, abuse of making people immortal for profit, and people becoming generally lazy because they feel they have forever to do something.
There are 3 basic types of senescence immortality, in the tree that I created. Biological, Module, and Digital.
On a little bit of tangent here, there is also something known as suspended animation, which is the process of organisms stopping, or extremely slowing, their functions, to a point that they no longer ‘age’, as we know it. Some animals naturally possess this temporary function, but humans do not and cannot replicate artificially. The closest thing that we have, which is also the only way to become immortal, is something called vitrification. Vitrification, as defined by Kirichek, and others, in a 2015 research article, called Strong Isotope Effects on Melting Dynamics and Ice Crystallization Processes, is the inducing of specialized chemicals, called cryoprotectants, into the human’s body. These cryoprotectants can then be lowered to a freezing temperature to preserve the human body. The main reason humans aren’t just ‘frozen’ is because the formation of ice crystals which can damage the tissue. This process, however, is a one-way street, and banks on the idea that in the future, humans will figure out how to reverse it.
Since I will be focusing on Digital immortality, I’ll only give a brief explanation of biological and module aspect.
So, biological immortality is where senescence is no longer a factor, through functions made by the organism. An example of this, is the jellyfish known as Turritopsis dohrnii. This jellyfish ages, and then reverse’s its state back to one of a newborn, under several conditions, and continues this cycle forever.  Researchers are currently trying to find a way so that humans can imitate the same functions through telomere caps.
The next type, module immortality, is the ability to change human parts when needed, such as organs, limbs, and other various types. These parts are either artificially made or organically grown. Currently, some parts are being grown, dubbed as organoids, which are just miniature versions of human’s organs such as hearts, brains, and livers. These parts would just constantly replace old and dying parts in a human to extend their life for an unspecified amount of times.
Finally, Digital Immortality. Digital immortality is the use of computers to preserve a human conscious. One idea is to upload the human mind to a computer or database, and therefore, be immortal through electronics. This, however, in my opinion, wouldn’t work. Uploading one’s brain to a computer would only make another instance of a person. Or, in other words, the mind in the computer would be only be a copy or a clone.
This brings me to my area of main interest. Module Digital Immortality. An artificial brain. The idea is that overtime, you would replace a part of your brain with an artificial piece (either organic, but computerized in this context). After a certain time, 100% of your brain would be made up of these artificial pieces. This brings up a paradox however known as Ship of Theseus. The paradox states, if you have a ship in which you replace each wooden plank overtime, is it still the same ship when all the planks have been replaced?
I believe it is, but of course this is open to debate. These are one of the questions that I want to research, even though it is a bit abstract and subjective. Not the actual paradox, but if you are still the same person after you have replaced your entire brain, in the context of having the same conciseness.
As an undergraduate in Computer Science, I want to try and set my starting point in artificial intelligence and connectomes, which I will explain in a second. Though I believe it is possible for us to create module artificial brains, I feel that through artificial intelligence, we would find the solutions needed exceedingly faster than we would just researching module brains. We can only think so fast, and connect the dots so much, that in comparison to a machine that can think faster than us and is smarter than us, it would take too long for us. The idea of creating a capable enough A.I to do this, would mean we would have to create a map of the human brain to model the A.I after. This is where connectomes come in. Connectomes are just maps of neural connections in a brain. Currently, from a report written by Hamid Noori in 2017, called “A multiscale cerebral neurochemical connectome of the rat brain “, states that researchers were able to map out a rat’s brain using machine learning, data mining, and network analysis. This shows that it is entirely possible to make a connectome of the human brain, though it will take time.
So, this is the general type of research that I would like to go into, and hopefully, this presentation made you a little bit more interested in immortality and its types.