Immortality! Take it! It’s yours!

I thought it would be nice to take a break from the Bitcoin conversations and talk a little bit about something more more impactful. I guess you could say it's kind of hard to after listening to those videos even like thinking like what's more impact ful than Bitcoin. I can think of a few things. One thing that's been kind of a hot topic over the last five years is longevity. Extending people's lives. And on a couple occasions there's been discussions about immortality. What it would take to get there, what it would mean, and I just wanted to kind of sum up my thoughts on this topic. What is immortality? What do we define as a mortal? What would it take to become immortal? Is it possible even? And what would it mean for the world to have immortality? And this may seem like a really abstract concept like, for all the medical advancement that we've made, we're nowhere near. Or at least so it seems right. It doesn't seem like we're anywhere near to solving aging. Maybe, maybe, you know, there's breakthroughs here and there, all the telomere talks and. But maybe, just maybe, immortality is not going to come in the shape and form that we imagine it. Maybe it's going to be something else. What would that something else look like? And that's kind of what I want to discuss today. So, to define immortality, we first have to break it down to the basics. What makes a human? I think you have to start with that. If you don't understand what makes for a human, then you can't possibly discuss immortality. Because, yes, there's other life forms. But ultimately, we care about our life, not, you know, the bug on the ground. So, let's talk about what is a human. Besides the obvious flesh and bones and brains. What makes you, you, is it your behavior? Is it your thought? Is it your impact on others? Is it the touch of your skin on the skin of a loved one? Is it the ongoing persistence of your ideas after you're long gone? Your art? What does that mean to live? Is it the biological beat of the heart? Is it brain activity? Do you have to be conscious to recognize not conscious? I guess the conscious is the wrong word. Do you have to be aware of living? Do we even know for a life? There's a lot of talk about the possibility of being in a simulation. How do we know we're not in a simulation? That's not the topic for this talk, but you have to kind of think. How do you know that you're you? How do you know you're there? These are all complex subjects that you could talk about forever. But for this, for the sake of immortality. Let's define humans' life as follows. I see human life as the ability to interact, leave an impact, and communicate with others. Think about it when you're dead, when you die, when your physical being dies. You can no longer interact with people around you. You can no longer communicate your ideas. You cannot use your voice. All forms of interaction cease because your body is not capable of transmitting those functions anymore. It's up for debate whether there is such a thing as a soul, whether your life's energy goes elsewhere. Most people who are kind of in the realm of what's real of seeing for themselves. Trust in their evaluation systems. They would say there's no such thing. But it's not out of question, right? There is after what I call 'em close death encounters or cases where a person dies and they can see themselves on the operating table, for example, and accurately describe the things that happen to them. So there's this whole kind of area that's been explored for a while, but there's no definitive proof. You'll literally have to die to believe it yourself, to see if you can experience things out of body, right? So there's no way to prove it. We can hear it from other people's accounts, but there's no way to prove for yourself unless you actually die and come back. So for the sake of living, let's say, for me to experience somebody else, I have to be able to hear their thoughts, whether through an audible form or just being able to read it, right? If you wrote down your thoughts in the book, that book can live on for thousands of years, you can experience that person's thoughts, what they thought about. They can describe their surroundings, their life, how they lived, and you can experience things through another person's eyes who have lived many hundreds of years before you. If we were able to, maybe even thousands, right? Maybe if somebody wrote a detailed account of their life, but that's not really a mortality. That's legacy, that's history, that's written word. It's not quite what we're talking about here. You can't interact with written word, like it's there, but you can't go back to that person and say, "Hey, I'm from 2021. We have COVID going on right now. We've got blockchain, you know what that is?" You can't talk back to that person, right? And that's kind of a bummer. That's what makes life, being able to interact with somebody through some sort of communication channels. So, interaction, kind of important, right? You can have books, but you can interact with them, you can't send signal back to that person. And then you could argue that voice and being able to aud ibly communicate with people is also another form of a quality that defines life. And yeah, so being able to send and receive communication, I think that's kind of the gist of it. And everything else that's around it, texture, sound, the skin, the touch, that's kind of an additional. I don't think it's necessarily required. You could technically, that's just for a sake of the argument, assume that I transferred your brain to an Android, kind of robot. And it speaks like you talk, you know, it may even have skin that looks kind of like synthetic skin on it, like a skeleton, and I can touch it, maybe I think that I'm talking to you, right? Let's see, the makeup or whatever, the 3D printing of the face was really, really, really good. It followed all the facial gestures and muscle movements, and it was really kind of almost surreal, right? So you could probably, it might be hard to tell the difference between a robot and a human. Of course, there's lots of sci-fi movies where that happens, right? And you think you're talking to a human, turns out they're robot, they thought they're human too, and then get confused. So, you know, there's that possibility, the realm of possibility, where you actually transplant a person's memory, voice into a new body, right? And you can communicate with them that way, but it's really hard to do. I think, like, right now, I don't think that's possible, in other words, we'll be seeing these things in the future even. It seems quite unrealistic that you'd be able to do this. I can't think of any technology that kind of exists or might exist where you can transplant a human's brain in a way and still communicate with them and another body. Has that ever happened, you know? Like, I don't think so. So, maybe it's not practical to shift bodies and be able to speak as yourself, you know? We have to consider, like, what is the limit of human existence? Is it the body itself that ages and dies? Do memories fade? Is Alzheimer's part of that equation? Like, what happens? Let's say theoretically, if somebody is able to live, let's say 300 years or 500 years? What happens is their thoughts? Do they go on as usual? Do the thoughts keep the person alive if they're able to communicate those thoughts in their experiences? So, there's a lot of questions. On one hand, the turtle might be living, like, for 900 years. If it was able to communicate with you, it might say, "Yeah, you know, I still think the same ways and I'm okay. It's just my body. It keeps on going." But we can't, we haven't transplanted turtles, brains, and another body and say, "Hey, are you still you?" So, it's kind of, it's impractical to think about those things. So, that leaves us with another form of immortality. And that is digital immortality. And then you think to yourself , "Well, is it really possible to be immortal and to be digital?" So, like, that seems out of the realm of possibility too. But let's talk about the technologies that currently exist and that could possibly exist in the near future that might make that a reality as far fetched as it may seem, right? So, recently I did another recording on an app that was a deep fake app and it was kind of using other people's movements to apply like a filter on the photo, still photo and make it appear as though that photo moves. So, that's a pretty cool technology, deep fix. There was a video of Tom Cruise doing like a magic trick and it turns out it's just not a Tom Cruise at all. You can kind of tell from the video, it's not quite perfect, but it was just somebody else who created a deep fake of him. And these things are kind of getting better and better. They're still not perfect. You can tell something is off. A little bit, right? Like they're good, but they're not perfect. And then you have to wonder, like, what if the technology for deep fakes gets pretty damn perfect? Like, what if we are unable to tell the difference between a deep fake and a reality, real thing? Okay. That's one step towards kind of an image that you can conj ure of yourself as an eternal being. So, you've got the looks, you've got the appearance, right? Well, then you think, well, what about thoughts? You can't. You can't have thoughts that are living on. You can have books, but you can't be interactive. Like, you can't interact with thoughts. And I would say, yeah, you're right. We can't make a synthetic brain yet. Like, you can't communicate back and forth. But we do have kind of machine learning algorithms that can dissect various scenarios and pick out an answer that might seem plausible to that interaction, whether it would be a question or a statement. That's there. There is an app already that imitates another human being, like that's your digital friend. It exists now . You can kind of like a chatbot, you know, you load it up, you can talk. It's not speech, it's still typing, but you can interact with the non-human, although in a primitive fashion yet. But you can interact with the non-human who will anticipate your intent, what you're saying to them, and return their response. Now, like I said, it's very, very premature right now. It's very rough. But as the technology progresses, it is not out of the realm of possibility that you could have an intelligent interaction that is very not just coherent, but ... It kind of makes an impact on you because of what it tells you. Like, the communication back and forth could be so well done that it might seem like a real person is talking. It won't be as rough, you know. You won't ask it what's the weather and aspen is going to say, you know, aspen is a great town to go skiing or something, right? It's going to tell you the weather, it's going to make some other side comment, and it's going to talk about whether you're part of the world and you guys are going to have a coherent discussion, and it's going to be... It could be, in theory, near perfect or perfect. Okay, so we've got interaction. You still don't have quite cognitive ability to truly, right? It's not a true interaction, it's not a human, it's still digital, it's still machine learning, it's still AI, but it's not quite the real thing. Then we have voice, let's imagine voice like, okay, let's say your grandparents died, you really missed your grandparents. How do you bring them back? How do you talk to your grandparents? Well, A, you can't bring them back, you can't talk to them, they're not going to answer you, they don't have a clue anymore, right? They're gone. But let's say there are plenty of recordings of your grandparents, and you have advanced algorithms that listen to all their speech, and then mimic that speech to whatever text you apply to, or data, a channel of communication. Sounds impossible? Exists already exist. We have things like Liar Bird, which imitates voice, it's still also very, pretty mature, very young. You literally can do only a few words, or maybe a sentence at maximum, where it sounds like the person who's talking, from what I know, I don't have full access to it, I just have preview. But I imagine there's a ton of companies out there that are working on this right now, very hard, who will eventually come up with a solution, where you can synthesize any voice , and make it say anything you want. You can stream data to it, and it's going to communicate just like whatever the data set that's based on. So let's say if I recorded thousands of hours of my voice, let's say I'm a YouTuber or something, you plug that data in, and then it's going to say anything you'd like it to say, in a manner with all the mannerisms and all the pron unciations and little tiny details of that person. It's not quite there yet, from what I know, I don't know everything, right? I'm just guessing, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that this could exist sooner, pretty soon, like things get better over time, right? And so when you pair voice, plus processing of data of information through algorithms that can reason and come up with, I guess they would be kind of canned answers, but eventually you'll come up with answers, they're not necessarily canned, right? We have open AI that works on all kinds of these kinds of things, and then you combine it with defects. So you bring those three things together, you could have eventually a digital representation of anybody alive. Even after they're dead, like you could take a little sample of their voice, you could take all of their writing, let's say they died 500 years ago, take all their writing, take a little sample of their voice, not 500, there probably won't be any voice records of 500 ago, but whenever there is an earliest record of voice. And, gosh, that must be like maybe late 1800s, maybe early 1900s. So yeah, you take that and you make, you bring them to life, you create a deep fake of them based on their photos and things like that, then you can have that quote unquote person come to life and talk. Yes, it's not really them, they're not there speaking to you, but is it sufficient enough that we could treat them as them? Like that's, you know, we have the interaction, they can intake our words as an input, they can reason quote unquote reason and return answers, that's an output. They have the looks, the shape, you know, the defects, and they have the voice. That's pretty close to a human, it's not quite there, you still have the body maybe if you want to go that far, but in the digital format, I would argue that is immortality. If somebody could do that to me, take my voice, take my, my reasoning, my logic, the way that I think, and after analyzing all of my audio and then there's videos of me out there, right, get my defect created and then bring them all together. It might as well be Jean, like how would you know, let's say the technology gets so good that you wouldn't be able to tell. How would you know if that's me still alive? If I'm not there, if I've never met you in person for all intents of purposes, I'm still there. Let's say we only met on Twitter, you only heard my voice here, you only saw my video on indie log. So what you've got is this image that somewhere on earth there is this gene who's alive and well, he's talking to me all the time. But maybe I'm not, maybe I'm already dead, how do you know that this is not fake, right? Of course, you know, because we're not there yet, but down the road in the future, that might not be such a crazy thing to think about for, you know, I'm immortal at that point. And, you know, you could still work on that body aspect, touch, skin. And there's different ways to go about that as well. You could try to mimic the person or you could try to just channel them through another person. So you could have an actual actor who is not going to look like the person that you lost, for example, let's see you want to get back and touch with the person you lost. They're not going to look like that person. But there's a way for them to interface their voice and their reason, their mannerisms, everything that made them seem like them onto themselves and to you. So you could possibly interact with another person who seems like the person that you've lost. I don't know if you'd want to, that's kind of weird, creepy , and I don't know, maybe, I don't know. That's hard to decide whether that's something I would do or not. But just even taking a step back, just with the defects, I think you could argue that the person who is being kind of imitated is for all intents of purposes, immortal. So, I think immortality and the sense that we think of it, I've been able to live longer. I think that's going to be much harder to achieve than it is to achieve the digital immortality. And yes, you, the person who dies may not be able to experience all that, but the people who live on, who have been exposed to you in some form, will be able to continue communicating with you many, many years after you're gone, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Who knows? Then you can get really creative with this, like this can go in so many ways. AR, VR, holograms, if you want to, I mean, those don't exist as far as I know, but it'd be kind of silly to just have it in the physical world. You'd have it in AR, maybe you put on some AR glasses, and you see this digital representation of a person. Then who's to say that you couldn't live with that person? Who's to say you couldn't have a relationship with that person? Maybe it's not physical in nature, like I said, if you're living in AR glasses. But who's to say that you couldn't similarly physical touch too? Maybe not through a body, but through something else. If everything boils down to a brain signal, if touch is a brain signal, who's to say you couldn't trigger the brain signal through an AR experience? So in that sense, it makes things even crazier and interesting. So it makes me want to think about it more. Yeah, I don't know what else to say. I just think it's cool . I think mortality is going to happen much sooner than most realize in the form and shape that I describe it in the digital form. Instead of the physical person living longer. And yeah, once you have newer link, uploads and downloads to your own brain, I can't imagine. I don't know what I don't know. So it might not be that far away. I would not be surprised that within 30 to 50 years, a human can quote unquote live indefinitely in the digital form through all the technologies that exist. I wouldn't be surprised when it shocked me one bit. If you came back from 2070, you said, you know what? I'm not a genius to alive, but I'm talking to you right now . I'd say, yeah, it's quite possible. It's crazy. So yeah, I think I'll wrap it up here. It's a long conversation with myself. I hope I didn't bore you. Maybe if you have some other input or thoughts of your own, feel free to reply. And if not, that's cool. Just something to think about. Peace.