Imagine being 10^10 years old....
The only thing worse than dying is living forever.
(But give me a thousand, please)
Director Tarsem Singh has something of a fascination with technology and medicine. His first film, The Cell, posited using a virtual reality mind meld system and his latest, Self/Less, is all about swapping minds though the power of high tech. Daniel, a cancer-stricken New York property developer (Ben Kingsley), receives an …
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Why is having the option to live 10 billion years a bad thing? I doubt you'd be forced to do it and prevented from ending your own life.
Anyway, assuming it is accomplished by downloading your consciousness into a machine - whether permanently or as a way station before it is downloaded into a new body, you could take a "break" from the rat race for as long as you liked during that period. Sign up for a sublight ship traveling the universe and tell them to wake you when they've found some intelligent aliens or the ruins of a long lost advanced civilization.
Could've guessed most of that from the TV advertisement, frankly. And the review (which I read in less time than it would have taken to watch the trailer) confirms it.
I generally avoid these SF thriller films anyway. Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: I'm more easily entertained by pop culture that relies on abusing subjects I know less about.
SF novels are another story, since they have the opportunity to treat their subjects properly. Reading Stephenson's Anathem and Mieville's Embassytown at the moment (among other things - I'm usually in the middle of half a dozen or so books) and finding them quite satisfying.
The biggest problem with this kind of mind transfer (be it to machine or new body) from my perspective is that, ultimately, you are making a copy. From the copy's perspective looking back, it has all your memories and feels that it is you. But from your perspective looking forward, it is a copy: not actually you. You still die.
Which sort of defeats the purpose for the individual. Unless you are so narcissistic that you can't believe the world can possibly go on in your absence!
Obviously if we are copying someone's mind because the continuation of that mind has external value (someone with difficult-to-replace skills, for example), then it is a different matter, but for the individual being copied, not so much.
(There are potential ways around this issue, but they are a bit too tedious and convoluted for this thread! - I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader ;-) )
@LeeMing - Aren't you a copy of yourself though? Have you ever been knocked out? If they could grow a copy of you, and the copy woke up and didn't see the original, it wouldn't know that it was a copy.
This will probably never be possible, but it makes for some fun thought experiments. See the Christopher Nolan's film "The Prestige" for a good example of this in fiction.
it is a copy: not actually you. You still die
That too is a theme that's been dealt with ad nauseum in speculative fiction for, well, pretty much as long as fiction has existed. Though it is occasionally still used effectively (and affectingly), particularly when it's not asked to carry much of the plot, as in Mieville's Kracken.
Outside of speculative fiction, of course, it's been the subject of a good deal of philosophical debate, since any rigorous conception of the self has to engage with the issue of the continuity (whether posited as real or illusory) of the self. A Heraclitan might say that every instant of the self is a copy, and there can be no authentic self except as a chain of such copies; even having two or more copies at some moment wouldn't be qualitatively different.
Over hundreds of years;
languages change ( see 'Struldbrug' Gulliver's travels -they can't understand anything of current speech 200 years after they are born)
technologies change rapidly; try explaining high tech to anyone over 90
societal norms change;
You may be able to get a younger body, but getting without getting a younger mind you would gradually become a stranger to everyone.