Actually there won’t be mortality by the end of the twenty-first century. Not in the sense that we have known it. Not if you take advantage of the twenty-first century’s brain-porting technology. Up until now, our mortality was tied to the longevity of our hardware. When the hardware crashed, that was it. For many of our forebears, the hardware gradually deteriorated before it disintegrated. Yeats lamented our dependence on a physical self that was “but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.”30 As we cross the divide to instantiate ourselves into our computational technology, our identity will be based on our evolving mind file. We will be software, not hardware.
And evolve it will. Today, our software cannot grow. It is stuck in a brain of a mere 100 trillion connections and synapses. But when the hardware is trillions of times more capable, there is no reason for our minds to stay so small. They can and will grow.
As software, our mortality will no longer be dependent on the survival of the computing circuitry. There will still be hardware and bodies, but the essence of our identity will switch to the permanence of our software. Just as, today, we don’t throw our files away when we change personal computers — we transfer them, at least the ones we want to keep. So, too, we won’t throw our mind file away when we periodically port ourselves to the latest, ever more capable, “personal” computer. Of course, computers won’t be the discrete objects they are today. They will be deeply embedded in our bodies, brains, and environment. Our identity and survival will ultimately become independent of the hardware and its survival.
