Sometimes I think I should spend more time imagining the future.
By the future, I don't just mean 1 or 5 years from now, but 100 or 500 years from now. What will be completely different, completely unpredicted, for our children's grandchildren's grandchildren?
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I have not read very much science fiction, but I thought about the genre when Ray Bradbury died earlier this year. I don't think I've read anything by Bradbury (not even Fahrenheit 451, which I somehow missed in high school), but I liked the way that he was praised for his imagination.
I want to make sure that my imagination stays healthy. I am confident that having kids will help, but I wonder what else I can do to nurture imagination.
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Evan Goldstein has an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (here) about Kenneth Hayworth, a person whose imagination is definitely strong.
Hayworth and other people in the field of connectomics are studying ways in which human consciousness can eventually be preserved and transferred:
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.
To understand why Hayworth wants to plastinate his own brain you have to understand his field—connectomics, a new branch of neuroscience. A connectome is a complete map of a brain's neural circuitry. Some scientists believe that human connectomes will one day explain consciousness, memory, emotion, even diseases like autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's—the cures for which might be akin to repairing a wiring error. In 2010 the National Institutes of Health established the Human Connectome Project, a $40-million, multi-institution effort to study the field's medical potential.
I love that NIH is involved in this research! It sounds so far-fetched, crazy, kooky.
But it also seems like an example of the kind of imagination that is part of what makes us human. Thinking over the horizon, thinking about things that don't seem real.
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The idea of preserving one's brain brings to mind James Taylor's song Frozen Man (not one of his more famous songs), which was a pretty convincing argument for me as to why we shouldn't strive for physical/mental immortality. Spiritual immortality, on the other hand, sounds great.
That said, I like Hayworth's work the same way that I like people who devote tons of energy to searching for extraterrestrial life. It's big, and crazy, and inspiring.
