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Certainly, it’s not quite immortality, but it is, most definitely, as the saying now goes: “an interim solution.”
    2.
    It was University of Washington biogerontologist George M. Martin who first proposed this interim solution, in his aptly named 1971
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
paper, “Brief proposal on immortality: an interim solution.” Or, at least, this was the first time the idea was proposed in an academic setting.
    In the nonacademic world, the concept of saving self in silicon, of storing our personalities on a computer chip — what is technically termed “mind uploading” — stretches back further. The concept made its first minor appearance in Frederik Pohl’s 1955 story “The Tunnel Under the World,” then a more major debut the following year, showing up in both Arthur C. Clarke’s novel
The City and the Stars
and Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Last Question.” In philosopher Bertil Martensson’s 1968 novel,
This Is Reality
, the notion took a darker turn — people are uploaded into computers as a way of combating global overpopulation — and this darker turn was also the turning point. Afterward, mind uploading went wide, becoming a pervasive and perennial meme, appearing in nearly one major sci-fi offering a year, with James Cameron’s
Avatar
and Christopher Nolan’s
Inception
being only two of the more recent examples.
    At the same time this science fiction lineage has been unfolding, so has one of scientific fact. Recently, a bevy of new playershave gotten involved. In May 2005, for example, IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne announced the Blue Brain project, whose goal is to create a computer simulation of a mammalian cortical column down to the molecular level. A few years later, in July 2009, the NIH entered the game with the Human Connectome Project, the idea here being to construct a “network map” of the brain’s synaptic connectivity — and a big deal in mind downloading, as researchers now believe that memories are encoded at the synaptic level and mapping those connections is the necessary first step to preserving those memories. Then there’s Google’s efforts to build conscious computers, real AI, and, at least in their minds, the end-all-be-all search system if there ever was one.
    When will all this work be completed remains an open question. Peter Cochrane — who is arguably taking a more limited approach to the problem, believing that the combination of sensory experience and the resulting neurochemistry is enough to recreate memory — thinks the Soul Catcher will be working by 2025. In
The Singularity is Near
, futurist, author, inventor, and director of engineering at Google — and thus the man in charge of building a conscious computer — Ray Kurzweil almost agrees with this timing, arguing that 2029 is the year man and machine will truly merge.
    To many, these predictions seem overly optimistic. For certain, there are long and complicated arguments about the true nature of consciousness and our ability to capture it in a computer. There are even more arguments about whether a self stored in silicon would be our actual essence or some sorely diminished version. Both are fair points. Yet it is worth noting that Moore’s Law states that computers double in power every twelve months, and this is the reason that the cell phone in our pocket is a million times more powerful, and a thousand times cheaper, than a supercomputer from the 1970s. Biotechnology, meanwhile, the field where mind uploading most squarely sits, is currently progressing at five times the speed of Moore’s Law. With this in mind, it is not inconceivable to say that there are people alive today who willlive long enough to see their selves stored in silicon and thus, by extension, see themselves live forever.
    3.
    No one knows, exactly, when our omnipresent sense of self-awareness (aka consciousness) first arose, yet we do know that once it appeared,