Want to live forever? There are major questions to confront, first 

Billionaires, despite all their money, face an ordinary limit: death. No matter how much you spend, no matter how many doctors you employ, you cannot escape the moment when you will cease to be. That may be the case so far.

As we report here, a start-up called Nectome has developed a technique to preserve the physical architecture of the brain in the minutes following death. Tested so far on pigs, but soon to be brought to humans, the idea is that this could be used to reconstruct the brain’s ‘connectome’, a 3D map of its structure – and, in doing so, pave the way for resurrection.
To be clear, we have no idea how to create functional consciousness from a connectome, or whether it will ever be possible to do so. As we explore here, consciousness remains a deep mystery – accompanied by a famous “hard problem” – that we are only beginning to understand.

In addition to the scientific problem of consciousness, questions arise: can a brain be recreated digitally on a computer, or must it be biological? And even if we resolve these issues, legal hurdles remain because Nectome’s technique requires the subject to undergo medically assisted death, which is illegal in most parts of the world. And yet, because Nectome promises to preserve brain structure indefinitely, anyone who accepts its offer must simply hope that these problems will one day be resolved, even if only in the distant future. Assuming this is actually achievable, Nectome’s clients could wake up centuries after death.

Or will they? Philosophically, we have no way of knowing whether an entity born from a copy of a dying brain would be a continuation of its original owner, even if the entity believed itself to be such. In practice, our descendants can simply leave their brains without resuscitation. With all of this in mind, however, the fact remains that anyone who undergoes the Nectome procedure could very well put themselves on the path to immortality. How to begin to take this into account is perhaps the most difficult problem of all.