The Neuroscience of Immortality

Ken Hayworth, a 'veteran' of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a self-described "outlandishly futuristic thinker", believes that he can live forever. It's just he has to die first. Most people are unconvinced, though:

To Hayworth, science is about overturning expectations: "If 100 years ago someone said that we'd have satellites in orbit and little boxes on our desks that can communicate across the world, they would have sounded very outlandish." One hundred years from now, he believes, our descendants will not understand how so many of us failed for so long to embrace immortality. In an unpublished essay, "Killed by Bad Philosophy," he writes, "Our grandchildren will say that we died not because of heart disease, cancer, or stroke, but instead that we died pathetically out of ignorance and superstition"—by which he means the belief that there is something fundamentally unknowable about consciousness, and that therefore it can never be replicated on a computer.