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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Impossible Dream of Abolishing Death

Transhumanism and the fantasy of defeating mortality

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

The oldest human ambition

Few human desires are more ancient than the wish to escape death. Religions have promised immortal souls, heavens, reincarnations and resurrection. Alchemists searched for the elixir of life. Modern medicine has progressively extended human life by attacking disease, infection, malnutrition and physiological decline. Transhumanism represents the latest—and in some respects most technologically ambitious—version of the same aspiration.

The transhumanist does not necessarily want to go to heaven. Heaven may be replaced by a laboratory. The soul may be replaced by a genome, a brain scan, a cryopreserved body or a digital replica. The promise is no longer that God will save us from death, but that biotechnology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and engineering eventually will.

This gives the ancient dream a distinctly modern vocabulary. Aging becomes a disease to be cured. The body becomes a biological machine to be repaired. The brain becomes information that might be copied. Death becomes an engineering problem.

But this raises a deceptively simple question: what exactly would it mean to abolish death?

The more carefully we examine the proposal, the more the dream seems to dissolve into a collection of different projects—some scientifically meaningful, some highly speculative, and some based on conceptual confusion.

Extending life is not abolishing death

There is nothing inherently irrational about trying to extend healthy human life. Medical science has already demonstrated that mortality is not a fixed number. Better sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines, cardiovascular medicine and cancer treatments have dramatically changed survival.

Likewise, research into the biology of aging may eventually produce interventions that delay some forms of biological deterioration. If people can remain healthy for considerably longer, that would be a genuine medical achievement.

But life extension and immortality are not the same proposition.

Suppose aging could be completely stopped. A biologically ageless person could still die from cancer, infection, poisoning, accident, violence, environmental catastrophe or any number of other causes. Even an extraordinarily robust organism remains a physical system embedded in a physical world.

The transhumanist dream therefore often moves from "we can reduce the probability of death" to "we can reduce it indefinitely." That is a much stronger claim.

And indefinitely reducing a risk is not equivalent to eliminating the event.

If every year carries even a tiny probability of death, then over an indefinitely long period the cumulative probability becomes important. An immortal biological individual would have to survive not merely aging but an unlimited succession of contingencies.

Immortality therefore requires much more than a cure for aging.

Death is not one disease

One of the most revealing features of the immortality project is the tendency to treat death as though it were a single technical problem.

It is not.

Aging is one contributor to mortality. Disease is another. Accidents are another. Violence is another. Environmental disasters are another. Eventually the physical structures on which biological life depends are subject to entropy, damage and disruption.

Even if medicine eventually eliminated virtually every conventional cause of death, the resulting organism would still inhabit a universe governed by physical processes.

The problem consequently changes from "How do we cure aging?" to "How do we guarantee the indefinite persistence of a particular physical person?"

That is a radically more difficult proposition.

The engineering fantasy

Here we encounter a recurring feature of technological utopianism: a real technological capability is extrapolated into a limitless capability.

Computers can preserve information, therefore perhaps the mind can be preserved.

Brains contain information, therefore perhaps consciousness can be uploaded.

Genes can be edited, therefore perhaps aging can be eliminated.

Damaged tissues can be repaired, therefore perhaps any biological damage can eventually be reversed.

Artificial intelligence can reproduce aspects of human cognition, therefore perhaps a person can eventually be reconstructed digitally.

Each step contains a legitimate scientific question. The problem arises when the collection of possibilities is silently transformed into a guarantee of personal immortality.

Technology does not abolish the distinction between possible in principle, technically feasible, and actually demonstrated.

A technology can be imaginable without being possible. Something can be physically possible without being engineerable. And something can be engineerable without preserving the person who originally possessed it.

The uploading problem

Perhaps the most famous transhumanist escape route is mind uploading.

Imagine that a sufficiently advanced technology could scan a human brain down to an extraordinarily fine level of detail and reproduce its functional organization in a computer. The resulting system might remember your childhood, recognize your friends, reproduce your characteristic speech patterns and insist that it is you.

But an uncomfortable question remains.

Would you have survived?

Suppose your brain is scanned tonight and an exact digital replica is created tomorrow. From the outside, the replica might be indistinguishable from you. It might sincerely believe that it is you.

Yet your biological consciousness would still be sitting in the original brain.

The existence of a perfect copy does not logically demonstrate the transfer of subjective experience from one system to another.

The problem becomes even clearer if two copies are made. Both wake up claiming to be you. Both possess your memories. Both insist that they are the continuation of your identity.

Which one is you?

If both are you, personal identity has ceased to mean what we normally think it means. If only one is you, what determines which one? And if neither is you, then copying information has not accomplished immortality at all.

Uploading may someday produce extraordinary forms of digital preservation or replication. But that is different from demonstrating that the original conscious subject has migrated into the computer.

Cryonics: preservation is not resurrection

Cryonics operates on a related hope. A person is preserved at very low temperature after legal death in the expectation that future technology might repair the damage and restore the individual.

There is a perfectly legitimate scientific intuition here: information about a person's biological organization might survive longer if physical deterioration is slowed.

But preservation is not resurrection.

For cryonics to deliver personal survival, future technology would have to reconstruct an enormously complex biological system, repair damage caused both before and during preservation, restore functioning, and somehow preserve the continuity that makes the revived organism the same person.

None of this has been demonstrated in humans.

The crucial distinction is between preserving a structure and guaranteeing the future continuation of a conscious subject.

The former is an engineering challenge. The latter is also a philosophical and conceptual problem.

The Ship of Theseus enters the laboratory

The deeper difficulty concerns identity itself.

Our bodies are dynamic systems. Molecules are continually replaced. Cells die and are renewed. The brain changes through learning and aging. Memories are modified. Personality develops.

Yet we ordinarily regard the resulting organism as the same person across decades.

Transhumanist proposals push this ordinary continuity problem to an extreme.

If neurons are gradually replaced with artificial components, at what point does the person cease to be biological? If the brain is reconstructed molecule by molecule, is the resulting person the original? If the entire brain is replaced while preserving its functional organization, what exactly has remained?

These are versions of the ancient Ship of Theseus problem, but with much higher stakes.

The transhumanist answer is often functionalist: preserve the relevant information and organization, and you preserve the person.

That may eventually prove to be a powerful scientific theory of cognition. But it does not automatically establish the metaphysical conclusion that your first-person consciousness has survived.

The continuity of consciousness

There is another problem that is easy to overlook.

Our concern about death is not merely concern about the preservation of information about ourselves. We are concerned about continuing to experience.

A biography can survive its author. A photograph can preserve someone's appearance. A recording can preserve someone's voice. An AI could perhaps reproduce someone's conversational style.

None of these things would ordinarily be regarded as the survival of the person.

The transhumanist challenge therefore cannot simply be "preserve the pattern."

It has to answer a much harder question:

What constitutes the continuity of subjective experience?

Neuroscience has made enormous progress in understanding the biological mechanisms associated with consciousness. But we do not currently possess a demonstrated method for moving a first-person point of view from one physical substrate to another.

Until that problem is solved, "uploading yourself" remains a speculative proposal rather than an established route to immortality.

Even immortality would not mean invulnerability

There is an amusing paradox here.

Imagine that transhumanism succeeded spectacularly. Aging was eliminated. Organs could be repaired indefinitely. Cancer could be defeated. Neural damage could be reversed. Bodies could be rebuilt.

The immortal person would still need somewhere to live.

A truly immortal being would require extraordinary protection against fires, floods, earthquakes, wars, asteroid impacts, cosmic radiation, technological accidents and eventually large-scale changes in the planetary environment.

At this point immortality starts to look less like medicine and more like a demand for indefinite cosmic engineering.

And the universe is not obliged to provide a safe room.

The universe has no immortality setting

There is a fundamental physical asymmetry here.

Living organisms are maintained far from thermodynamic equilibrium by continuous energy flows. They are organized processes, not static objects. Their persistence depends upon continual repair and environmental support.

That does not prove that extremely long-lived organisms are impossible. Nor does entropy provide a simple argument that every imaginable form of technological immortality is impossible.

But it does undermine the popular image of immortality as simply pressing the biological "pause" button.

An organism is something that continues by changing.

To preserve a living person indefinitely would therefore mean maintaining an extraordinarily complex physical process indefinitely. That is a very different ambition from preserving a static artifact.

What happens when "immortality" becomes infinite life extension?

There is an important conceptual escape route.

Perhaps transhumanists do not really need literal immortality. Perhaps they mean something weaker: keep solving each cause of death as it appears.

Aging is controlled today; another disease is cured tomorrow; a new repair technology appears later; damaged organs are replaced; and so forth.

This is sometimes imagined as an indefinite sequence of medical breakthroughs.

But notice what has happened. Immortality has been transformed from a destination into a research program.

That is a perfectly legitimate research program. We can reasonably ask whether particular interventions extend healthy lifespan and by how much. We can investigate cellular senescence, DNA damage, protein maintenance, stem-cell function, cancer and other mechanisms of aging.

What we cannot legitimately do is treat the success of one intervention as evidence that all future causes of death will necessarily become solvable.

The distinction between "we have not yet found the limit" and "there is no limit" is enormous.

The psychological attraction

The persistence of the immortality dream is therefore not difficult to understand.

Death presents an intolerable asymmetry: everything we value appears from the inside to be centered on a continuing subject, yet we know that this subject eventually disappears.

Technology offers a seductive reversal.

Instead of accepting mortality, we imagine ourselves becoming projects of indefinite maintenance. Instead of asking how to live well within a finite lifespan, we ask how to escape the condition of having a lifespan at all.

This is where transhumanism unexpectedly meets ancient religion.

The vocabulary has changed, but the structure of the hope is familiar.

The priest promises resurrection.

The mystic promises liberation from death.

The alchemist promises the elixir.

The transhumanist promises radical life extension, cryonics, uploading or machine-based continuation.

The laboratory has replaced the temple, but the human longing remains.

A secular religion of technological salvation?

This does not mean that transhumanism is simply a religion in disguise. Much transhumanist research concerns entirely respectable scientific questions. Improving medicine, reducing suffering and understanding aging are worthwhile goals regardless of one's philosophy of death.

But the movement can become quasi-religious when technological possibilities are treated as articles of faith.

The crucial difference between science and technological salvationism is methodological.

Science asks: What can we demonstrate?

Technological salvation asks: What might technology eventually make possible?

The first question can produce knowledge. The second can produce inspiration, speculation and hypotheses—but also fantasies.

There is nothing wrong with imagining the future. The danger begins when imagination is mistaken for evidence.

What should we actually aim for?

The failure of immortality does not make medicine pointless. Quite the opposite.

There is an enormous difference between accepting death and accepting preventable suffering.

If a disease can be cured, cure it.

If blindness can be prevented, prevent it.

If aging can be slowed without unacceptable costs, investigate it.

If healthy life can be extended, extend it.

But none of these achievements requires the metaphysical promise of abolishing death.

Indeed, the most defensible objective may be considerably more modest: increase the number of healthy years people can live while improving the quality of the years they already have.

That is a scientific and medical program rather than a promise of salvation.

Death is not an engineering defect

The deepest mistake in the transhumanist dream may therefore be conceptual.

Death is sometimes described as though it were a design flaw in an otherwise permanent human machine. But organisms were never designed to last forever. They are evolutionary processes with finite persistence.

Evolution does not optimize organisms for immortality. It favors reproductive success under particular environmental conditions. Aging, repair mechanisms, cancer suppression and cellular maintenance are consequently products of evolutionary trade-offs, not components of a defective immortal design.

To say that death is undesirable is perfectly understandable.

To say that death is therefore technically abolishable is a non sequitur.

The first is a value judgment.

The second is an empirical hypothesis.

The final paradox

There is a final irony.

If transhumanism succeeds in extending human life dramatically, it will have achieved something genuinely extraordinary. But if it succeeds only in extending life, it will not have abolished death.

And if it eventually produces digital replicas, artificial bodies or radically altered descendants, we may have created something new without having answered the original question of whether we ourselves survived.

The dream therefore keeps changing its meaning whenever its original goal proves difficult.

First: defeat aging.

Then: defeat disease.

Then: repair the body.

Then: preserve the brain.

Then: upload the mind.

Then: reproduce the informational pattern.

Then: create descendants who remember us.

Each step may be scientifically interesting. But none should be confused with the demonstrated abolition of personal mortality.

Death may someday become rarer, later, and less medically burdensome. Human beings may live much longer than they do today. We may transform the biological conditions of aging beyond anything imaginable now.

But "very long life" is not "eternal life," and "a copy of me" is not obviously "me."

The transhumanist dream is therefore best understood not as a demonstrated technological destiny, but as the latest expression of humanity's oldest refusal to accept its own finitude.

Science can push the boundary of death.

It cannot simply declare that there is no boundary.

And perhaps the most important question is not how to make death impossible, but what we choose to do with the finite consciousness we actually possess.