transistors to bring you back to life. The Connectome Project, as we mentioned, is still far from being able to record a human’s neural connections. But as Dr. Seung says, “Should we ridicule the modern seekers of immortality, calling them fools? Or will they someday chuckle over our graves?” MENTAL ILLNESS AND IMMORTALITY
Immortality may have its drawbacks, however. The electronic brains being built so far contain only the connections between the cortex and the thalamus. The reverseengineered brain, lacking a body, might begin to su er from sensory isolation and even manifest signs of mental illness, as prisoners do when they are placed into solitary con nement. Perhaps the price of creating an immortal, reverse-engineered brain is madness. Subjects who are placed in isolation chambers, where they are deprived of any contact with the outside world, eventually hallucinate. In 2008, BBC-TV aired a science program titled Total Isolation, in which they followed six volunteers as they were placed inside a nuclear bunker, alone and in complete darkness. After just two days, three of the volunteers began to see and hear things—snakes, cars, zebras, and oysters. After they were released, doctors found that all of them su ered from mental deterioration. One subject’s memory su ered a 36 percent drop. One can imagine that, after a few weeks or months of this, most of them might go insane. To maintain the sanity of a reverse-engineered brain, it might be essential to connect it to sensors that receive signals from the environment so it would be able to see and feel sensations from the outside world. But then another problem arises: it might feel that it is a grotesque freak, an unwieldy scienti c guinea pig living at the mercy of a science experiment. Because this brain has the same memory and personality as the original human, it would crave human contact. And yet, lurking inside the memory of some supercomputer, with a macabre jungle of electrodes dangling outside, the reverseengineered brain would be repulsive to any human. Bonding with it would be impossible. Its friends would turn away. THE CAVEMAN PRINCIPLE
At this point, what I call the Caveman Principle starts to kick in. Why do so many reasonable predictions fail? And why would someone not want to live forever inside a computer? The Caveman Principle is this: given a choice between high-tech or high-touch, we opt for high-touch every time. For example, if we are given a choice between tickets to see our favorite musician live or a CD of the same musician in concert, which would we choose? Or if we are given a choice between tickets to visit the Taj Mahal or just seeing a beautiful picture of it, which would we prefer? More than likely the live concert and