IMMORTALITY REVISITED
Raymond D. Gastil
The following article is essentially unchanged from the version that appeared in Futures Research Quarterly Volume 9, No. 3 (1993), pages 51-64. It suggests one of the useful ways in which we might think about the future.All forms of life behave as if persistence into the future — immortality — were the basic goal of their existence. Human desires for immortality subsume those of less complex forms as they add new levels of complexity. The previously inevitable failure of efforts to achieve that most human immortality, that for individual consciousness, has embittered and discouraged people of all ages — no matter what humanity has achieved on other levels. The probability that, in the near future, computer technology will offer a path to immortality for individual consciousness prompts a reexamination of the concept and the current state of our search, a reexamination that will force us to confront the existential crisis that daily life so artfully conceals.
According to the psychologist, Robert J. Lifton, individual human beings understand immortality in several modes. 1 The first is the biological sense of living on in their offspring. The second is the sense of spiritual survival after death. In popular Christian thinking, this is conceived of as individual survival, as a continuity of individual consciousness, but for other Christian thinkers and other religions survival may be understood in terms of less individualized continuities. The third is individual survival through the persistence of influences on others after death. These influences may be through works of art, scientific discovery, or simply through the cumulative effect of the way we live our lives on those who survive us. The fourth meaning is that the natural or cultural order within which we as individuals have lived will persist long after we have disappeared-that whatever happens to us, "the mountains and rivers remain". In Lifton's fifth mode, immortality is understood as a transcendence of self, of living, at least for a few moments, outside immediate individuality and present time, a mystical feeling that carries us beyond the limits of our individual lives to connect with past and future.
If we leave aside its mystic senses, the variety of meanings that may be attached to the concept include questions of whether immortality is to be understood as the persistence of group or individual values, of biological or cultural values, or of unconscious or conscious values. To understand the point that humanity has now reached in its quest, we need to understand immortality across this full spectrum of meanings.
Biological life as reproductive life came into being because it could. We do not need to pause to try to understand why or how it could. Pre-life no doubt produced life on many occasions; it may still be doing so today. However, the difficulty scientists have had in finding precisely how this happened or could be happening, and their inability to discover biological individuals that appear to have been produced by pre-life, suggests that life as we know it is not significantly added to by such transitions. Once life forms came into existence, then biological individuals existed. Most individuals died almost immediately. Those that lived gradually filled the space for life in primordial times. We could assume that most individuals represented forms that were unable to replicate themselves successfully or did so slowly. Those few more able to reproduce, or more "interested in" reproduction, soon filled the available biological space. The more reproduction occurred, the more opportunities existed for error, for incomplete replications. These errors became, in effect, a secondary form of reproduction for each biological form, for imperfect copies supplement the more or less perfect copies that reflect the past successes of a biological form by offering possibilities that may be necessary for success in the future.
Immortality for individuals representing each replicating biological form was attained, then, through two processes: through the exact replication of the form that the individual represented in a chain of species stretching back into the past, and through the inexact replication of this form in ways that might make possible a new species that would allow for the persistence of most of the past genetic inheritance in new environments. Nearly all innovative reproductions were failures, but a few succeeded. As new species developed, biological space was extended: evolution continued.
In this world, immortality meant the ability of a species to exist beyond the deaths of its individual representatives. It also meant the ability of aspects of a life form to continue to exist in other species beyond the existence of the species. In this manner, the extinction of a species did not mean the complete extinction of its evolutionary contribution, and through this same means the danger of absolute extinction for the individual was indirectly overcome. The continuity of life forms in endless and endlessly divergent reproductive lines was represented by the preservation through these lines of genetic information, whether in one species or a series of successor species.
The strategies devised to make possible the success of reproductive lines were many. Most significant for the creation of complex organisms was the strategy of organizing self-maintaining community support systems that increased the chance of continuity and expansion for a genetic line, and thereby, on the average, increased the chance for continuity for individuals of a species. In this way, biological life that had for eons been represented by single cell or simpler forms developed many-celled forms. The success of primitive many-celled organisms led to a spiraling development that divided into many streams. The flow of one of these streams eventually led to the complexity that we find in ourselves.
The immortality of many-celled biological forms and individuals exists on many levels. It is both the immortality of the organism as a whole and the immortality of the units of life that exist within the organism. Our apparently highly structured human bodies can be viewed as loose assemblages of more or less independent units of life. Our bodies produce many specialized cells that subsequently live semiautonomously. For example, the large, single-celled macrophages that move independently in response to signals inadvertently sent out by their "prey", destroy the body's enemies by ingestion. These serve us as they do this work within our bodies, yet were similar organisms found freely swimming in a nearby creek ingesting their "enemies" as food, they would appear to be independent amoebas analogous to those that have never participated in the life of more complex organisms. The sperm that the human male manufactures lives its short life as a single-celled creature moving within and between human individuals. In shape and form it is analogous to the independent cell stage in the life of slime molds, wherein individuals live and feed as single celled organisms that eventually join together into fruiting bodies of loosely organized individuals that grow or "move" together and reproduce as a unit. On a more microscale, the mitochondria that live within every human cell have been determined to be separately descended from ancient "creatures", or genetic lines, that became associated with our own at a point very early in the evolutionary line from which we derive. Within our cells, their genetic codes remain distinct from ours-they are, for example, transmitted only through the human female. The immortality of mitochondria exists only through us; ours is made possible only by theirs.
An ant colony can be viewed either as a group of individuals programmed to work together for the benefit of the whole, or as a single organism structured somewhat more loosely than an individual mammal depending on its billions of genetically coordinated cells and multicelled organs. The transfer by most ants of reproduction to the colony's queen is analogous to the transfer of body reproduction by most human cells and organs to specific sexual organs.
Contemplation of these relationships has led some biologists, increasingly cognizant of the self-regulating nature of the web of life and chemistry on earth, to conceive of the earth as itself an organism-the Gaia hypothesis. 2 Although the obvious inability of such an "organism" to reproduce as well as maintain itself suggests that the hypothesis stretches the concept of a biological organism beyond the breaking point, the seriousness of its proponents illustrates the necessity to continually redefine the units of life with which we should be concerned when we speak of immortality for any biological form.
The inception of cultural evolution meant that immortality could now be achieved through two routes, through producing the children of the body or the children of the soul. A Catholic father achieves immortality through perpetuating a spiritual order as surely as a biological father through his family. Culture as learned patterns of behavior transmitted from generation to generation existed prior to human beings. Pre-human learned traditions may be illustrated by the dialects of bird songs developed by the same species living in different geographical areas. Where present, culture supplements the "hard-wired" genetic information that is passed from generation to generation. Without this supplement, the success of many culture-carrying species might be in doubt. However, for present purposes, we will confine our attention to human culture.
Culture contributes to the survival capability of human individuals and thereby to species viability. It contributes directly to the viability of the individuals who have learned a particular local "dialect" of human culture, and thus to the viability of the communities within which they live. Since what is learned varies from area to area, we can speak of many "cultures". Thus, culture produces a new form of speciation that is layered over the biological. People in different groups survive, thrive, or disappear to different degrees because of differences in both their biological and cultural inheritance.
But cultures can be seen from quite a different perspective. Whole cultures, and cultural elements such as individual languages, can be thought of as superorganic forms that strive to fill the cultural space provided by humanity just as precultural forms strove to fill the biological space. They have their own forms of immortality, achieved through both reasonably exact replication and endless experimental variation, some of which will eventually "take", forming in turn new cultures or cultural elements. However, except for the cultures of isolated island peoples that have long been isolated from the rest of humanity, whole cultures do not exist as bounded units in the sense that biological individuals or species exist.
Cultures make possible a variety of institutions that form a particularly important subclass of cultural elements. Here, "institutions" should be understood to refer to concrete institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church and the United States. These appear to strive for immortality in a manner analogous to biological species, transcending the lives of individuals through the efforts of those individuals who identify their interests with them. However, such institutions are much more brittle and insubstantial than either whole cultures or species, since their reproductive capacity is limited if it exists at all. Their striving for immortality consists primarily in attempts to preserve their separate structures; when these attempts ultimately fail, the continuity of the institution is preserved only to the extent that its elements rejoin the more general streams of human culture or of particular cultures.
When we say then that all life represents a striving for immortality, we are saying that individual lives, or units of life, strive to extend their existence beyond their individual life spans. Without this striving, life would have not been preserved and extended during the history of the earth. What has historically been preserved, however, is not the individual unit of life, but the specialized information that made possible the creation and thriving of that individual. Before the rise of consciousness this was sufficient, the individual did not count.
Consciousness changed the nature of the problem. When we speak of consciousness, we are speaking not of a particular level of neural activity, but of that quality of self-awareness or introspection associated primarily with, but probably not limited to, human experience. This form of consciousness evolved and grew in importance as people became increasingly aware that their life eventually ended in death. They were individuals with a finite existence; they understood as no biological unit before them had understood that this particular existence was going to come to an end. Their main defense against this realization was renewed emphasis on the significance of the preconscious continuities of biology and culture. Their future was in their children, biologically and culturally. With this understanding in mind, they could struggle against the pain of their personal impermanence. These continuities were often, especially in the past, more communal than individual. A man might sacrifice his life in war for the community even before he had fathered children, because the biological and cultural continuity of the community was what mattered.
In the conscious age of humankind, meaning in life comes through perpetuation of the past into the future, however we may accomplish this. Meaninglessness overwhelms us when we begin to doubt the reality of this afterlife of our existence. Even if our lives are very humdrum and ordinary, they can achieve meaning through an understanding that they will be reflected in the lives of those who come after. One family will have another and that another; the language I speak or the recipes I follow in the kitchen will be imitated by others. The imitations will not be perfect, but they will be close enough that I will remain indefinitely alive in the traditions I have transmitted or added to in my lifetime.
To achieve meaning in this sense was an essential goal in the mind of the great poets. In the Persian literary tradition, this struggle for a legacy led to the dramatic affirmation of the poet Firdousi, who saw in his massive quasi-historical literary epic a means of glorifying and preserving both Iranian national history and his personal individuality. "From poetry I have raised a castle high/ That neither wind nor rain can harm". He adds: "After I'm gone, I will remain, /My words are seeds well sown." 3 Two centuries later, the scientist-poet Omar Khayyam despaired of any meaning beyond the grave: "You are a collection of chemicals following physical laws. /So I say 'Drink up'; /You will not return; once gone, you're gone." 4 The poet Hafez, two centuries further on, summed up the great age of Persian literature with miniatures that combined an essential ambivalence to the possibility of an afterlife with an earthy sensuality and a mystical grasp that went beyond the moment. As a much later Persian poet insisted, Hafez strove "to establish a relationship with all the intimate moments in the lives of all future humankind." 5 Significantly, for Hafez and Khayyam-right down to the suicide/literatures of our time and culture-when we doubt immortality, when everything imaginatively turns to dust, we lose ourselves in alcohol and sex, the most obvious ways to forget our impermanence. We should note that alcohol and sex for many mystics became avenues to the divine, and thus to immortality in Lifton's fifth mode. And, as we have seen, the ultimate meaning of sex, culturally and biologically, is its ability to reach out beyond our time, to produce in the intensity of the moment, or through the creation of a child, the possibility of our immortality.
People have always understood the final hopelessness of their hope. They have known of family lines that died out, of information that has been lost, of great institutions that have been cast down. Kings and nobles strove with great expense to preserve the memory of their glory, but in the end the memories of glory lose context and become indecipherable. As Omar Khayyam said of the empires of the past, 'They went, we go, and others come and go."
But we are again dealing with a side issue. Even should we succeed in achieving the immortality of Shakespeare, or become the Shah Jahans of our age, we still know that we will personally die, that our consciousness will not in itself achieve immortality, that the soul will follow the brain into dissolution.
Conscious human beings have always needed something more than hopes for a continually dissipating and unconscious future existence. As increasing numbers have come to see their lives in individual rather than communal terms, this need has become progressively more urgent. Between bouts of passive acceptance, they strive to preserve their conscious lives into an indefinite future. Desperation tinges both their passivity and activity.
Humanity has used both spiritual and material approaches to an immortality of consciousness. The spiritual approach has led to the elaboration of beliefs in individualized life after death. These prayers for the future are based on the supposition that each individual human consciousness is too precious for the gods to let it simply disappear. The material approach is to try to indefinitely extend the human life span, to discover a fountain of youth through either magic or medicine. Today, suspended animation is a parallel approach with considerable promise. Yet, even if eventually successful, it will only postpone extinction from one period to another, without changing the inevitable outcome. The break in continuity in life experience that suspended animation requires degrades its usefulness as a solution to individual death.
Every year medical and technological progress presses back a little further the biological limits of human life. Medicine advances against the diseases of the aged. The health of the body we are born with becomes progressively less relevant as body parts become replaceable, first with biological parts borrowed from elsewhere, and then with mechanical devices that imitate the shape or function of these parts. Through study of the genetic factors involved in aging, a new microbiological frontier has been pressed back with near-term implications for extending survival. But these advances are likely to put off biological inevitability by a few decades at most.
Cloning the human body rather than using the usual sexual means of reproduction will eventually pose a more significant challenge to human limits. Traditional biological immortality carries forward only half of the genetic endowment of each parent; it frequently and notoriously fails to produce either a physical or psychological copy of either parent. Studies of identical twins suggest what the relations of parents to offspring might be were cloning possible. The essential identity of these twins seems capable of producing almost a telepathic relationship, if not an interpenetration of consciousness.
Substantial progress toward an immortality of consciousness is more likely to come through the development of new computer hardware and software. The ability to replicate and miniaturize computer memory and calculation appears to have few near-term limits. As progress in these areas proceeds, ever more complex robotic forms will be produced that are capable of self-reproduction. It is probable that such forms can through training and trial and error become psychological or mental clones of human beings, both generally and individually. As computer scientists begin to reach such objectives, they will be helping all of us reach out for the Holy Grail.
To consider this possibility, let us go back and think about what it is that enables biological and cultural immortality on a nonindividual basis. It is the transmission of packages of genetic information from one time period to another, such that the structures and organizations possible in the previous period are reconstructed, with relatively little change, in later periods.
We have now reached a point in the development of computerization and miniaturization that allows us to believe that soon all the information in an individual human head, as well as those rules for imputing, processing, and outputting that information that have come to characterize the individual, could be preserved in physically very small computer-accessed data storage media. One should have few doubts here. The more material side of the technology will develop far ahead of the less material.
The difficulties that have been encountered in the development of robots and artificial intelligence suggest that we are still a long way from understanding how the human brain actually works. While we may be able-by making end runs-to construct a computerized system that emulates many if not most human capabilities, we cannot now make a facsimile that thinks in a manner recognizably like our own. But these are problems that scientists understand well and are making intensive efforts to resolve.
More serious are problems that scientists do not understand how to confront because of the largely subjective nature of the evidence. The first is that of consciousness as self-awareness. Although subjectively perhaps the most important aspect of our existence, objectively no one knows what introspective consciousness is. Many scientists appear to believe that a sufficiently complex machine will generate the equivalent of self-consciousness, that within such complexity conscious robots such as the fictional 'Hal' of the movie 2001 will come into existence without our even noticing it. The problem is unlikely to be solved this simply. No one knows what it would mean to have a subjectively conscious robot. Only when subjective consciousness becomes possible in a robotic form can we begin to work on ways in which a consciousness might be moved more or less intact from one robot to another, or from a human being to a robot.
Equally serious is the problem of incorporating emotion in a robotic facsimile. Our lives have personal meaning largely because our thoughts are informed by, and based on, our emotional lives. Without an emotional life, what pleasure would there be in even the most rarefied intellectual exercises? What would be the point of imputing, processing, and outputting? We know a great deal about emotions and their biochemical basis, but we do not know how this knowledge might be integrated with the development of a facsimile human being. It is likely that, as we begin to work on these two problems, we will find that emotional life and self-consciousness are closely related and interdependent.
When these problems are overcome, and they will be in the short or more distant future, movement toward the creation of an immortality system for individual human consciousness should be rapid. Hans Moravec, from the robotic research community, has already developed a number of useful ideas as to how an immortality system might work?nbsp;6 Summarizing and building on some of these suggestions, the following steps might be sketched.
Before biological death, an individual would spend many months exchanging personal and other information with a facsimile robot of equal neural complexity. The facsimile's computer should have access to as much information as possible about the biological individual, and would ideally be capable of scanning brain waves or observing the individual's daily life to obtain additional information. Then the two would spend a more protracted period in interactive training, correcting and improving the robot's version of the biological self wherever the facsimile has missed the nuances. This first stage would be complete when the robotic facsimile reacts to and understands the past, present, and future of a biological individual in a way that individual finds acceptable.
To achieve technological immortality by this route, the biological individual needs not only to be assured of the existence of a trained robot with the individual's memories, knowledge and personality, but also to be assured of the indefinite replicability of this facsimile into the future. Fortunately, combining developing technological possibilities with new development in understanding the looseness and decomposability of all organismic organizational structures provides a key to providing such assurance.
In this vision, a complete individual immortality system would consist of two or more robots constructed in such a way that they incorporate the received information, in an extended form in their central processing centers, and in a more summary or compressed form throughout the "cells" of their bodies, much as genetic information is replicated throughout the biological body. Constructed in this manner, each facsimile in the system can be made capable of self-disassembly as well as reassembly (such as that accomplished by the slime molds in their life cycle). Replications of either whole facsimiles or their parts (at any level of disassembly) could then be warehoused at different places on earth, or outside the earth, either in active or inactive states. The smallest disassociated units could be made extremely small and able to survive passively under extremely hostile conditions, a form analogous to that of a plant seed. Since such "seeds" would miss life events after their formation, more complete facsimiles in the system should maintain periodic communication to update their correspondence or identity and to regularly refresh the seed supply. This system of multiple selves at several levels of complexity would protect against isolated accidental deaths as well as massive catastrophes. Although in a drowning, for example, some immediate experience would be lost to the system as a whole, the loss to the overall sense of conscious continuity could be kept to a minimum.
The ability of such immortality "seeds" to faithfully preserve both the nature of a biological individual and an ability to build from scratch the facsimile of such an individual might be questioned. However, we do not know what can be packaged and transmitted by the biological genetic system we already possess. Although one is tempted to dismiss out of hand tales that psychological information capable of conscious recall has been transmitted between generations, it should be remembered that most of the human genetic code is dismissed by the present generation of microbiologists as "junk"-just as the information reported by our nocturnal dreams is dismissed by our day-time minds as "junk". Perhaps we will learn later that much of this apparently undecipherable genetic code transmits meanings of a now unimaginable kind. In any event, the biological ability to encode the complete human genome in billions of cells In every human body, and yet to apparently "waste" most of this capacity, suggests the possibility that computer scientists will learn in the foreseeable future how to encode sufficient information in the extremely small seed cells of a facsimile system to preserve both memory content and plans adequate for reassembly.
Even such a system must eventually fail. In some ultimate sense, "nothing is immortal." But if such systems become available, and such an achievement is no longer beyond the range of the possible, it would represent a previously unimaginable step toward achieving an individual, cultural, conscious, and thus fully human continuity of life beyond the biological grave. The successful fulfillment of this dream will in all probability lie well beyond the horizon of generations now living. But it seems most likely that it will be fulfilled.
The reader may question whether this dream deserves to be pursued amidst the conflicting demands of the everyday, of the rise and fall of economies and states, or of more urgent human tragedy. Feuerbach, in his "Thoughts on Immortality and Death", argued that the emphasis by Christian ministers in his time on personal immortality had the corroding effect of turning citizens away from concern with the future of the community in which they lived. He thought Christianity made too many people selfishly pursue their own survival when they should be pursuing the only immortality that was available to them, that of the group, as expressed primarily through the group's institutions and culture. In Feuerbach's idealistic resolution of the striving for immortality, as people aged their egoistic interests should gradually decline while their interests in serving the community, that is, in the welfare of those who will continue after them, should increase. Individual biological death should come as the culmination of this spiritual dissolution of the individual into the larger whole. 7
Other criticisms are advanced by those who fear the consequences of achieving human life spans of hundreds of years. Two concerns seem uppermost. First, with such life spans, fear of accidental death will greatly intensify. In this world a fatal accident would deprive an individual of hundreds of years of potential life instead of the few years generally lost today. This could make for a timid humanity unwilling to take the least risk of accident. A further psychological consequence might be a calcified people afraid of change of any kind. Secondly, such life spans would lead to the rapid obsolescence of children. In a finite world with life spans in the hundreds of years, countries would be forced to curtail childbearing, even if there were not an equivalent lengthening of childbearing years. Some believe that a civilization without the beauty and excitement of new generations would inevitably produce a suffocating and ugly world.
Clearly, critics raise serious, if not crushing, arguments against pressing forward with the lengthening of life spans. In any event, the possibilities for self-duplication adumbrated by our vision of technological immortality reduce these concerns. Timidity produced by dangers of accident should be reduced by the facsimile system to a level lower than that which exists today. Because of the low spatial requirements of facsimile immortality, reducing the part that biological children play in life would be less urgent than in a world characterized by extremely long biological life spans, as we understand this possibility today.
The immortality that may be made possible through computerized facsimile systems should serve to strengthen the sense of community at least as much as Feuerbach's vision. If and as it is realized, immortality achieved in this manner will give each individual an interest in the future beyond what is likely to be attained by depersonalized altruism. If individuals believe that in a self-rewarding sense they can extend their consciousness indefinitely into the future through individualized immortality, and understand that only the continuing health of the future community and environment can guarantee the persistence of contexts that will support such continuity, they will be willing to sacrifice present interests for future returns to a degree impossible to imagine today. For the future return will always be in part a personal return. Technology may at last open the way to creating values that can carry us beyond the spiritual tragedy of the Nietzschean relativism that progressively strengthens its hold on our biologically dependent civilization.
NOTES
1. Lifton, Robert J. The Future of Immortality and Other Essays for a Nuclear Age. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
2. Mann, Charles "Lynn Margulis: Science's Unruly Earth Mother," Science, No. 252, (April 1991), pp. 378-381.
3. Firdousi, Tusi, Abu'l- Qasim. Shahname (Tehran, Vol. V, 335, n.d).
4. Dashti, Ali. In Search of Omar Khayyam. New York: Columbia U. P. 1971.
5. Hafez: Dance of Life. Washington: Mage Publishers, 1988; afterword by Michael C. Hillmann, p. 95 on Forughi etc.
6. Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
7. Feuerbach, Ludwig. Thoughts on Death and Immortality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980 (orig. 1830), translated, with Introduction and Notes by James A. Massey. (My discussion is based largely on Massey.)