After I'm gone - Haaretz

Subscribe to Print Edition

Thu., August 09, 2007 Av 25, 5767

Israel Time: 23:38 (EST+7)

web haaretz.com

Back to Homepage

Print Edition

Diplomacy

Defense

Real Estate

Arts & Leisure

Jewish World

National

Sports

Advertising

Magazine

Week's End

Opinion

Business

Rosner's Domain

Anglo File

Travel

Q&A

del.icio.us

Digg It! new

After I'm gone

By Marit Slavin

In the movie "The Matrix," life is an illusion, and the world is actually a sort of sophisticated reality program, a simulated environment created by intelligent computers. The seemingly real world is shaped by the visual experiences produced by the computer and made to flow directly into the brains of the human beings who are connected to it. The film was released in 1999, went on to win four Oscars and has inspired countless articles. Today, the illusory reality depicted in the movie already seems a bit less farfetched. For Professor Naftali Tishbi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, it represents the best possibility of virtual immortality. He believes such technology holds the key to preserving in perpetuity the inner world of each and every individual, which is the closest thing to the soul or the ancient idea of the immortality of the soul.

Tishbi, a physicist at HU's School of Engineering and Computer Science and a senior researcher at the Center for Computational Neuroscience, has been grappling with the most fundamental questions throughout his academic career. One of these, which he and his colleagues are examining, is how biological systems, which are completely physical, represent in the brain information that is not physical, such as personal memory or behavior. Where is this intellectual information coded in the nervous system?

He likens the duality of looking at a single biological phenomenon by means of two different conceptual systems (material and spiritual) to the possibility of capturing the same picture in two different ways. We understand the physical process by which information is transmitted and processed via the nervous system in the concrete terms of physics and chemistry, but how is it translated into the language of the soul when it turns into anger, love or compassion? Tishbi believes that quantitative answers to these questions will open a window onto true understanding of the principles of operation of the human brain. He is attempting to find such principles using concepts borrowed from physics, computer science and engineering.

	Advertisement

Speak, memory

Prof. Tishbi, given your unique field of endeavor, how do you relate to the concept of death?

"There are many aspects to the question of our attitude toward death, but in essence this is a cognitive problem that's related to our inability to accept that our consciousness, our inner self, will one day cease to exist. We accept the fact that this consciousness did not exist in the past and that it changes significantly in the course of our lives, but we have great difficulty accepting the fact of its disappearance in the future. Mainly, it's hard for us to accept this because we think our lives would thereby become meaningless and purposeless, more or less a waste of energy, because when it's over, it's over. This question takes on special significance when, on a daily basis, you're trying to understand the mechanisms by which biological information is processed and the fascinating transition between matter and intellect as it occurs in the nervous system. We perceive consciousness as an abstract, intellectual entity, but in fact it is fixed deep inside the brain in a concrete way.

"Even if we leave aside the issue of the disappearance of self-consciousness - which by definition is completely internal and private - we are left with a no less disturbing problem: the disappearance of our public self. That is, the complete cessation of our connections and relationships with other living people. It seems to me that the older we get, the more we fear our public death and the less we fear our private death. What I mean is that it becomes more important for us to preserve ourselves for other people who are important to us, than to preserve our sense of self-consciousness. Fortunately, this public death may possibly be postponed or prevented by technological means. I see it, this is the only kind of 'immortality' that can be seriously discussed."

What do you think will happen to humanity if it attains immortality?

"If you mean immortality in the naive sense, that is, an end to biological death, then in the same generation in which humanity discovers the possibility of such immortality, human society will cease to renew itself. The processes of life and death are inseparably interwoven on the axis of time and react to changes in their environment. Since the physical and biological environment is constantly changing, living creatures must also change and adapt themselves to it. This is the essence of evolution, a dynamic, ongoing process in which individuals, populations and biological systems continually adapt to the environment. The environment, then, is constantly changing, primarily because of the life within it.

"Immortality in the naive sense, therefore, means freezing and preserving what already exists, without renewal. All dynamic processes are halted. If that happens, we will become a society of adults that is not capable or interested in renewing or developing itself, a society in which there is no room for the young, in every sense. Is this what we really want? Have we really attained the ultimate model with which we want to be stuck? Will we ever reach that state? After all, when a biological system ceases to develop it's basically dead. In a changing environment we must make room for those who are better, more adapted to the new environment. Paradoxically, perhaps, stopping death is actually stopping life."

So what is it that you really wish to preserve?

"What I'd theoretically like to preserve is my inner self, the self-consciousness, the 'inner voice' with which I conduct a dialogue my entire life. But this is really an illusion, something that has no objective existence, certainly not beyond a given time, for I am certainly not the same person today that I was 30 or 40 years ago. In each decade, in each year of my life, I'm a different person. My personality is constantly changing. So who is it that I would want to preserve? Would it be worthwhile, say, to preserve me with the strength and energy of a 20-year-old and the experience and knowledge of age 50? Or maybe to preserve my 'public persona,' which is in essence a peculiar integration of my personality - the inner and outward - throughout my life?"

Would it perhaps be possible to preserve something of ourselves in a computerized fashion?

"That's an interesting question. Personally, what I'd like to preserve of myself certainly isn't my body or my physical abilities and experiences, but mainly my ability to interact with others, that is, the ability of others to interact with me even after my biological death. I'd like to know, for instance, how my grandfather or Ben-Gurion, or Herzl, would react to a certain contemporary situation.

"There are questions, for example, that I would have liked to ask my father and never did. Alternatively, there's the desire for there to be someone like me who could speak with my children after my death. These are questions that occupy all of us. They are of course hypothetical and seemingly baseless questions, but they're interesting because they're directly connected to our public death. The ability to ask questions and receive intelligent answers after biological death - to have the ultimate virtual seance, if you will - that's really my concept of immortality.

"And it's not completely fanciful anymore. In principle it's possible to describe an interactive computer program that would contain the entirety of my }associations. The program would be accompanied by a graphic interface that would look just like me and speak in my stead, instead of a static photo album or a video. We're progressing in this direction faster than we think. It will be very easy to build a virtual graphic object, a kind of avatar (the term for a representation of people on the Internet) that will speak like me with all my mannerisms and quirks. It almost exists already. But will it be possible to reconstruct my world of associations with a sophisticated computer program that will give answers similar to those that I would give?

"It's totally clear to me that a computer could respond in a manner that appears human - we're practically beyond that already. But I want the computer to contain my world of associations, and so when asked a question, it will do a search in my 'world' and find the answer there. The computer could learn who I am from the texts I read and write, from the pictures I take, from the music I listen to, from the films I like and from my conversations with every person who is a part of my world, and obtain from all that something very close to my inner world of associations. It doesn't sound completely farfetched to me. Advanced computational learning technology will make this possible.

"Already, from all the e-mails that I write and receive you could learn a lot about my inner world. Most of my world is already on computer, and consists of texts, sounds, pictures, films. For example, I travel the world with my digital camera and sort out the things that interest me. All that needs to be done is to organize the material in an intelligent manner, and then to do an associative search in it, like an Internet search. Later on a search engine could be developed to search my world of associations and memory to obtain responses to questions asked of me, as it were, and that sounds quite doable. In this way, the imagined and active picture of my associative memory could remain forever after I'm gone."

Einstein's memory

"The mechanism for expanding the personal associative search engine I described is much more than it seems. It will be possible to toss it a word or a phrase and it will compose sentences that I never composed but that I could have. I definitely expect the virtual character that is a reflection of me in the computer to have creative elements, too. In essence, it will be like a clone of me, and I'm already having a dialogue with it throughout my life. It will be like a copy of our inner voice. We have this dialogue with ourselves, with the inner character that generally reflects us. This is the thing I want to copy and preserve, and when we get there, it will be the closest thing to immortality.

"Let's say that we could pose questions to Einstein's virtual associative memory, which was preserved on computer. It's reasonable to assume that there would be a difference in his answers if we asked him the same question at age 20 or at age 50. Therefore, I would want to tell that computer program at which age or date I'd like to be spoken to."

Is it possible to play with such a program and get to things that are beyond reality?

"I'm certain it is. You could let the program continue to develop and learn from the questions and interactions with it even after my death. There's no reason for a program that represents my inner world to stop learning upon my biological death. It could include events that I didn't get to experience in my lifetime and enter them into my world of virtual experiences. We could also alter events that happened or people with whom I was in contact and make them better or worse than they really were.

"Just think, for example, of writers, artists or musicians who leave behind significant cultural assets. Would the same people have left the same cultural assets in our changing world? How, for example, would Mozart have changed his music had he written it today? And what would Herzl say about the Jewish state today? These are questions that are currently considered groundless, but perhaps, with virtual preservation, it will be possible to answer them, as an extrapolation - a kind of continuation of life. I would like for my virtual existence in the computer to be a dynamic, continually developing thing, something that would make it possible to see me at different points of time in my life, and in situations totally different from the ones I actually experienced. One could argue about what in all this is really me, but then the historical memory we have of figures from the past is also completely distorted and biased."

Is something like this already being attempted?

"Yes. I know people who are talking about similar ideas. Google Desktop (the associative search engine on my personal computer) is a small step in this direction. This search engine essentially constructs a network of associations in our personal world of data, and comes up with different and totally individual results on every computer. It's perhaps a bit scary how quickly this is happening and how blurred the boundary already is between our inner world and the public Internet world. Basically, almost everything goes through the computer nowadays. The computer is an integral part of my world. It remembers appointments for me, it keeps telephone numbers and pictures and it preserves and essentially shapes my most personal experiences. My life has become more and more dependent upon it. Without it, I don't feel like a whole person.

"Let's take it further. Let's say that I'm spared the need to type or speak into the computer, that the computer will be connected directly to my brain. I'll convey to it some of my thought processes and it will complement and enrich my associations. Very basic interaction with a computer via a direct electrical connection to the brain is already being done today with monkeys, and in special cases also with humans. The day is not far off, whether we want it or not, that this could become a routine procedure with humans, too.

"Imagine that we could all receive sensory communication directly into the nervous system. We could then maybe 'watch' a film not with the eyes but directly via the cerebral cortex. In that case the 'film' or 'book' would be an aggregate of nerve stimuli that would give each one of us a different experience. We're still far from attaining this kind of technology, and there are researchers who are skeptical about its feasibility, but the more the nanoelectronic technology of a direct, multichannel connection between electronics and the nervous system improves, the less farfetched the idea looks.

"We're getting closer to the somewhat frightening situation depicted in 'The Matrix,' where people's 'true' life experiences are really computer simulations, and in their biological-physical lives, people are nothing but passive systems used by the machines (or the aliens). I believe that in the very near future the virtual world will fill a majority of our lives. Intellectual and social gratification, and eventually physical gratification as well, will be immeasurably enhanced by the computer.

"If and when the sensory stimulation bypasses the sensory organs, it will reach directly into the brain and control our entire biology. In the end, in a situation like that, the body would have no importance and we'll have to work very hard to keep the physical body relevant.

"Even now the direction is clearly toward the reduced importance of the body, not only because technology is replacing the use of the body and muscles but also because it is heightening the senses and enhancing experience. It is improving upon, and will continue to improve upon, the body with its natural senses, by enhancing vision, hearing, touch, etc. The danger lies in an addiction to the enhanced virtual senses; that the perception of the world through the natural senses will seem meager and unsatisfying in comparison.

"Such direct enrichment of our world will enable us to use the computer to create a personal virtual world that in effect represents the sum total of our lives, and in which we'll be able to wander. At the same time, we'll also be able to wander around in our real world. And thus a total blurring will take place between the biological and virtual bodies. If such a significant part of our experiential world is to be found in our virtual part, then the moment there's a copy of it, the dream of preserving our world of experiences after our death will come true. That will bring us closer to the immortality of the soul."

Humanity will split in two

So how much significance does physical life have then? What's really left of those 80 or so years?

"It's obvious that what characterizes our finite lives above all is the agglomeration of experiences, insights, social interactions and what we have heard and learned. We're a combination of what we received in the genome, what's imprinted in our biology, and our experiences since birth - an intriguing and complex combination. But in the not too distant future it is possible that most of our experiences will become less and less dependent upon the body and the senses, as soon as the neural connection is established with the computer.

"It seems clear that in such an amazing - but possible - situation, the significance of the finality of our physical lives would change completely. We would be aware that long after our death people would be able to search for and communicate with the world of our experiences and memories. Like today's artists and scientists, who consciously work and create in order to achieve public immortality, each person will try to give much more meaning and content to his life and his experiences, meaning that exceeds immediate gratification and pleasure. This could make us a less materialistic and hedonistic society, and in a certain sense - more spiritual and 'religious,' since there will be a very concrete meaning to immortality. Perhaps it will also be harder to hide behind masks and lies since our true essence will be more easily revealed by following the detailed virtual footprints we leave behind. By the same token, I can imagine that many people will be repulsed and frightened by the whole idea and will prefer to disconnect from the computer and from all it enables and represents, in order to continue to live their finite, 'natural' lives.

"It's possible that this technology will dramatically split humanity into two types of people. For those who agree to involve the computer consistently and intimately in their lives, eventually giving rise to a completely new type of entity, biological death will have much less significance. Such an existence would effectively liberate people from the life-and-death trap of biological evolution we described earlier. There will be people who will not consent to losing their privacy and their biological, finite existence in this way, and will prefer what is mistakenly known as 'nature.' The price they pay for this 'freedom' will be the loss of the chance for (public) immortality. This might be a modern and somewhat ironic version of the story of the choice between the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life."

And those who choose the first option, will they be alive or dead?

"Like many other questions that in the past seemed too deep and inaccessible to science, such as the transition from inanimate to animate, the question of death may also end up dissolving and disappearing, for physical-biological existence will be only one phase in our collective existence. We'll be able to continue to be an active and living figure in many senses currently ascribed only to biological existence, even after our physical death. You could continue to communicate with us, to hear our opinion, and maybe we'd even be able to be genuinely creative after our death. Would we be alive or dead? That's not entirely clear." W

Bookmark to del.icio.us


	Do not panic
	It is ridiculous to claim that Friedmann's proposal undermines the legal system.


	Lucky number seven
	Six Israelis will compete in Beijing for a seventh national Olympic medal.




1.	not soon enough	20:59	\|	Sandy	04/08/07

Today Online


	U.S. university heads slam U.K. boycott of Israeli academe
	Responses: 183


	Israel Harel: Arab war with Israel is over ideology, not territory
	Responses: 208


	Bar Ilan University may discipline prof. who wished officer dead
	Responses: 90


	Israeli government sends conciliatory messages to Syria
	Responses: 53


	Shlomo Shamir: The disobedience of the ultra-Orthodox
	Responses: 31

More Headlines
23:09 IAF helicopter strikes defunct airport in Gaza; no casualties


23:09 Council refuses to recognize West Bank college as University


23:10 Army charges IDF officer over wrongful shooting of Palestinian


21:45 Bar Ilan U. mulls disciplining prof. who wished officer dead


19:47 Court rejects petition to cancel ex-MK's reduced sentence


20:40 Abbas reiterates to Jordanian PM refusal to talk with Hamas


22:00 Labor Court to rule Friday on lifeguard strike planned for weekend


19:17 Polish police analyze tapes of alleged anti-Semitic comments by priest


23:06 Source of pollution causing eye irritations in Haifa area identified


22:41 Last batch of Palestinians stranded in Egypt returns to Gaza Strip