Immortality

One names immortality the fact of escaping the Mort and of existing for one period of time indefinite, even eternal.

Opposite chronology

It is difficult to know when this concept appeared. We will try here to go up time gradually.

  • the Symbole of Nicée (first Creed , established by the council of Nicée into 325 - there will be modifications thereafter) mentions “I believe in the resurrection of the flesh”. It is there something again compared to the religion gréco-Roman where one could at most hope for a posthumous existence at Pluton (Hadès), but this one did not let in theory any member of its manpower return on Earth. Only the right to do it its occasional visitors had (Orphée, Télémaque), and of course, six months per annum, his wife Proserpine (Perséphone).

  • If one believes the philologist Renan of it, the majority of the Jewish people adores God of his fathers without hoping for the least reward in beyond, nor even the existence of beyond. It is not certainly interdict to believe in it, nor even with physical resurrection (vision of Daniel Chapitre 12), but the religion does not decide on this subject. The Ecclésiaste, for example, declares that deaths do not see anything and nothing feels . The Pharisiens believe however in immortality of the heart , according to the historian Flavius Josèphe and delivers it of Tobie (2nd century before our era) evokes a life after death. If deaths do not hope any more in the life ici-bas, it is judged conceivable to awake them and question them, since God of the Old Testament prohibited with his faithful to do it.

  • With, Plato writes his remarks on the immortality of the heart.

  • the bricks having been used to build the Tower of Babel (Etemenanki) - makes a Ziggourat of it - to carry the following inscription, which was engraved in their mould:

I have, Nabuchodonosor, wire of Nabopolassar, makes set up this tower in homage to the god Mardouk. Mardouk lord, grants to us the eternal life .

In the same cultural sphere, the Epopee of Gilgamesh describes the search of a hero seeking immortality following the death of his/her friend Enkidu. It will not obtain it, only the gods being immortal, and will be condemned to also die him, and to lie down in the sleep of death.

  • Egypt of the Pharaons had his Osiris for a long time, weighing the good and the evil of the life of the death to determine where to direct it, but we do not have an element allowing to affirm that this immortality was promised with the totality of the population. (to be checked)

  • Further still, the men of Cro-magnon and even of Néandertal buried their deaths with flowers or tools, the presence of ocher in its burials is regularly attested, but nothing makes it possible to determine if it were because they thought that would be useful for them in beyond where if it were more simply about posthumous marks of affection as well as we flower the tombs of our deaths. In all the cases, that indicates a ritual of burial.

Modern vision

We do not understand by modern the fact that the visions of the religions are antiquated : even if several disappeared in the past with civilizations which had adopted them, all those which survive are regarded as timeless. This term specifies simply that these other visions appeared more recently, which does not constitute a value judgment.

Carrel: The chicken " heart; éternel"

The Nobel Prize of Médecine 1912 Alexis Carrel succeeds in maintaining alive In vitro a heart of chicken for one duration whose estimates vary, according to the sources, 28 years to 37 years. However the typical lifespan of a hen is 5 years. This experiment brought to wonder whether the longevity of an organization only by that of its components or if had to be sought another cause were really limited, internal, with the process of mortality.

Rostand: The flower or the chair

The biologist Jean Rostand (1894-1977) declares in an interview which “ we do not know if the man is a flower or a chair ” and is explained of this provocative matter: the chair is potentially eternal since it is treated carefully and is repaired regularly. The flower, on the contrary, already carries in it the program of its own destruction. In both cases, the men can hope to discover one day physical immortality: a maintenance, it is in general business of technique and discipline; a program, that can undoubtedly deteriorate on the level of gene. But, for Rostand, most urgent is there to see more clearly in order to know in which of the two directions to work .

To the evening of its life, Rostand will be said persuaded which “if one had devoted to research in biology all the sums devoted to the military budgets of all the countries, the question of immortality or at least of eternal youth would be already settled”.

Limit of Hayflick. Télomères

In 1961, the biologist Leonard Hayflick discovers that certain specialized cells seem to be able to divide only approximately 50 times successively. Better: if one lets them divide 30 times, then that one puts them then at rest during a raised time, a resumption of the reproductions will limit them to 20 successive divisions: these cells thus seem to have a kind of countdown intern. Its pars give him the name of Limite of Hayflick . It will be discovered thereafter that this limit is due to an incomplete reproduction of the ends of the bit of DNA (Télomère S). However this reproduction is complete with regard to the sexual cells. One ends up discovering agents inhibiting these Télomérase S. However, while making cells immortal, it is necessary to take guard not to make cancerous cells of them (see Henrietta Lacks). In addition arises the difficulty to treat the totality of the cells of a living organism.

Ettinger: the cryologic waiting room

In 1964, Robert Ettinger his book is the man publishes immortal? .

This book contains fourteen experiments of thought on the topic of the identity. Its concern is to encircle which are the transformations of an individual which appear acceptable to us (cryogenisation included/understood) to consider that it is always itself . The question still arises with a larger acuity if one creates (experiment of thought) a remote copy of an individual: can one then without problem of conscience destroy the original and consider that the individual simply was téléporté ?

Gamow and Hofstadter: what it “me”?

In Mr. Tompkins itself (work not republished) is explored the Gamow physicist wonders about the question of knowing where me in an individual is the . He imagines by the thought a population of clones to the virgin preserved spirit (it does not matter how) and in which one could transfer by a process given all knowledge and practices from an individual like his tastes. Once the spirit transferred in the new individual, can one consider that the person changed body and simply to get rid of old? It is difficult to answer this question, close to the preceding one.

Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, impassioned by this question of the Cognition and the identity, decides to establish a kind of state of the art to create a compilation of the most interesting articles, according to them, written on the subject. It will be The mind' S I , translated into French under the name Vues spirit. One finds there many experiments of thought, of which one which makes it possible to think that the me can extremely well be delocalized in several places if the communications follow ( “Where amndt I? ” ). See also the article Noosphère.

Beautiful Gordon and the Mylifebits project

In the immediate future, Gordon Bell estimates that have it must be able to store most of lived of a person on one or more terabytes, and there to have access in a direct way by the process of hyperlinks imagined by Vannevar Bush. It is especially here about an auxiliary and in theory perfect auxiliary storage, but if the memory constitutes the base of the identity, then would perhaps be there in this kind of Backup what to reconstitute in an at least virtual way an individual. This research project is financed by the company Microsoft.

  • Project Mylifebits

The thesis of Bruno Marchal (CPC)

This thesis, in theory of data processing, develops a quantity of experiments of thought taking as a starting point the Virtual reality, the quantum Mécanique and reflections on the identity to come to the demonstration, pled in its chapter 4 that “the mechanism is incompatible with the materialism” . The question of the individual immortality is tackled, although not constituting the principal subject of the thesis which is rather that of the identity .

  • Thesis of Bruno Marchal (full text)

Kurzweil and the dream of immortality by the Artificial intelligence

Kurzweil takes again the example of progressive substitution also reported on Bruno Marchal:
  • If one replaces a neuron by his functional equivalent, did one deteriorate in anything the individual? Not, since its behavior will be in all points similar.
  • If they are replaced all one by one, one ends up having a complete individual, functionally identical to the precedent, in electronic form. For Kurzweil, such is the way by which the man is likely the most to reach, if not with immortality, at least with a hope of prolongation of its life conscious of a factor 10, even 100… as long as political stability and economic makes it possible to ensure the maintenance of the machines and to pay their invoice of electricity.

On the practical level, the problem arises in three phases:

  1. One needs initially scanner the brain not with a resolution of the tenth of millimetre as the processes of Medical imagery by nuclear Magnetic resonance allow it, but indeed to go to seek information on each cell where it is. Kurzweil recalls that there is something well which passes everywhere in the brain and which is blood flow. Its reasoned bet is that a few million Micromachine S could leave to discovered the ground, to immediately transmit the information (which they could not of course store), and this one to be collated by computer
  2. the process could not be instantaneous , and one could not undoubtedly even hope that it is total. We do not know which duration would have a scan (probably between a few tens of hours and a few years), and in the interval our opinions on a quantity of subjects would have changed, like our “me”. Kurzweil does not worry in addition to measurement about the question: during one night of sleep, our “me” changes also slightly, without we worrying some in addition to measurement (except very the young children, then in full phase of training); in addition it arrives us during our life to forget some knowledge old or recent without large damage for our integrity mental
  3. More complex will be reconstitution of state mental scanné (with very strong redundancies since a place will be analyzed during time by quantities of microsensors), the representation of each Neuron and Cellule gliale, and finally the engraving of the whole in silicon or its reconstitution on machines of data processing of a type or another. However this third phase can be made wait if need be several decades, the two first alone having to be realized the alive one of the interested party.

It is important in other words to remember that all that remains for the moment speculative, theoretically possible , but for the moment by no means some . Monetary flows likely to be invested in the question are however probably some share between the market of the PDA (which promise an extension very limited cerebral capacities) and that of the religions, of which some also promise immortality, but on bases judged by part of the population like dubious.

  • Page Kurzweil AI

The company Imagination engines (start-up created by the old ones of the Massachusetts Institute off Technology - MIT) affirms to work on a project of this kind named InItsImage which is detailed on its site.

Aubrey de Grey and 7 biological causes of ageing (SENS)

The project SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (2002)) the purpose of the radical extension of the human Life expectancy (and youth is) by means of medical procedures created in order to counter the dysfunctions of the organization.

For example the ambitious sub-project and innovative WILT envisages to block the repair of the Télomère S in the organization by prohibiting the synthesis of Télomérase (in order to return the impossible Cancer) while repopulating periodically the organization using healthy Original cells (the télomères of these original cells being intact, the Limite of Hayflick is not any more one problem).

The strategy of financing rests on Methuselah Mouse Prize (Prix of the Mouse Mathusalem). William Haseltine, the pioneer of the sequencing of the human genome, declared on this subject: “ It has no effort comparable with this one there, and it already significantly contributed to the awakening that regenerative medicine is a very close reality, not an assumption ”.

  • official site

For and against

Arguments and actions in favor of biological immortality

(in English)
  • SENS: Important Why curing aging is good and.
  • Death Is An Insult, Robert A. Freitas Jr.
  • eternity is not worth the sorrow to be lived? An example of against-argument: paradise-engineering.
(in French)
  • the artificial Réincarnation was proposed to alleviate the fear of a trouble eternal.
  • " Ideas of simple and important actions " to promote biological immortality.
  • Information on the paradise-engineering : article Engineering of the paradise.

Some against-arguments

  • Paul Valéry estimates in Such as it is that just as the men has need to change clothing, the ideas need to change men : the renewal of the generations prevents in its opinion that the company is not sclerosed.

  • Georges Wolinski, in an episode of the complicated life of Georges the killer , answers indirectly the concerns of immortality of Cavanna by explaining why immortal eternally gives to the following day what it does not have desire for making , and which thus it is as a whole the certainty (or almost) of dead which pushes the man to be acted.

  • Robert Ettinger mentions the generous opinion of the people who refuse immortality because it is necessary to make place with the future generations, while finding this philanthropy strange when it emanates people " who do not even give to charity works the 1% deductible from their revenu".

Immortality like source of inspiration

Immortality in the literature

  • 1845 : Eugene Sweats: the Jew wandering : can immortality be a calamity for which is equipped with it? This idea will be included in Highlander

  • 1862: Edmond Butt, the man with the broken ear : the reanimation under the Second Empire of a cold grognard during the retirement of Russia, and some problems related.
  • 1891 : Oscar Wilde, the Portrait of Dorian Gray ( The Picture off Dorian Gray ): In England victorienne, a man preserves his youth while its portrait ages in its place.
  • 1939 : Aldous Huxley, Youth (" After Many Summer "), test on eternal youth
  • 1946: Simone de Beauvoir, All the men is mortals : Novel on a man, the count Fosca who, once become immortal, realizes to its depend that keep silent immortality… the spirit, the will, the love, the desire for living…

  • 1976 : François Cavanna, Stop-bad cold : Test on the official absence of interest of the public authorities on the subject.

Immortality inspired much the authors of Science-fiction:

  • 1950 : A.E. van Vogt, the eternal House : To avoid ageing while protecting itself from cosmic radiations, sources of changes.
  • 1956 : John Wyndham, the grass with living ( The seeds off time ): on which ethical criterion to decide to consume, or contrary to preserving to increase of it the number, a rare plant specie blocking Net the process of ageing?
  • 1963 : Vladimir Volkoff, Subway for the hell : to survive eternally… but at what a price!
  • 1967 : Clifford D. Simak Eterna : The cryogenation of Ettinger become a lifestyle, the goal of an existence, the graal of each and everyone.
  • 1969: Norman Spinrad, Barron Jack and eternity : Sociological aspects of one blackmail to immortality.
  • 1973 : Rene Barjavel, the great secrecy : And if some had it already?
  • 1978 : David Rorvik, With its image : a leader of multinational, which is not without pointing out Thomas J. Watson, is made cloner to have a son with his image; is its clone “him”?
  • 1989 : Joe Haldeman, Immortality to sell : With the 21e century Stilemenan Enterprise immortality by 10 year old section…
  • 1995 sells: Greg Egan, the city of permuting the : Paul Durham proposes with some billionaires of XXIe century, of living eternally thanks to data-processing Copies of themselves. Titrate original: “Permutation city”. 1996 for the translation.
  • 2004 : Minouz, Minouz, according to the manuscripts recently discovered in Greece, would be a figure representing immortality among under-educated people. Still today, this figure would be still present in several religions, but in the form of symbols.

Immortality with the cinema

Immortality in the video game

See too

Internal bonds

External bond

  • the immortality of the heart on philosophical Bouquet, Christian site
  • philosophy immortalist of [[Léonard Orr], iniator of the Rebirth]
  • immortality International (in English)

Random links:Jonathan Archer | Fifi Brindacier (televised series) | Príncipe Guillermo Sound | Fountains off Wayne | Borma | Area of Boké | Banlieue_noire