40
The War on Aging
axons are extremely short, small parts of the new brain could
be constructed in separate vessels, leaving only a small minor-
ity of connections to be made to link these modules together.)
If this were performed at close to zero degrees Centigrade,
no electrical activity would occur during construction; such
a brain (after installation into a much more straightforwardly
reconstructed body) could then be awakened simply by slow
warming, much as people often recover from hypothermia-
induced comas. In this way, a human could be created with
the cognitive (and, if necessary, an improvement on the physi-
cal) state of someone deceased, even in the absence (which
I suspect will be with us for a very long time indeed) of a
detailed understanding of how that cognitive state results from
that synaptic network. It is the lack of need for such under-
standing that distinguishes this procedure from the transfer of
our cognitive state to radically different hardware on which
it would actually run, which is the essence of the full-blown
uploading concept introduced by Moravec. [21]
If so, who would the constructed person be? They would
surely claim to be the deceased person. It would be difficult
to disagree, because we already have a precedent: corporeal
continuity is not the basis for our emotional attachment to
the person who fell asleep in our bed last night or the one
who will wake up in our bed tomorrow. Rather, we iden-
tify with that person because we know that their state of
mind irrespective of how many atoms their body shares
with ours was/will be so deeply similar to our own that they
were/will be unarguably us. This line of thought plainly raises
phenomenal philosophical questions about identity (in cases
where someone is constructed from a backup of someone who
is not dead, for example), but I suspect that such esotericisms
will not long restrain us when we see it as a way out of the by
then intolerably risk-averse character of our existence. This is
the final step in my argument for supposing that even the first