craschworks

What are you passionate about in life? Why?

I was raised Mormon. Mormons are unusual among Christians in the that they think that in the afterlife, the righteous will grow to become gods themselves, and create worlds and spirit children of their own. “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.”

At age 18, I decided that Mormon theology was a load of hooey (as is my opinion of all other theologies I've since encountered). However, I still wanted to become a god, or at least approach godhood asymptotically. But if religion is a crock, how could it be done?

Fortunately, while at National Youth Science Camp, I heard a lecture by Hans Moravec. He is the director of the mobile robots laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. He had just published a book called “Mind Children”, in which he argued that our understanding of human and artificial intelligence was increasing, and that eventually, we would be able to build robots ('mind children') whose capabilities exceeded our own.

Moravec argued that our minds result from the pattern of connections between the neurons in our brains. Eventually, we would be able to build artificial brains so sophisticated that we could transfer the patterns of our minds (“upload“) from our current biological substrate to these new, artificial substrates.

An uploaded mind would be effectively immortal. Unlike our current brains, uploaded minds could be backed up and widely distributed. Even if one of the backups was destroyed, most of “you” could still survive.

Unfortunately, I believe I was born too soon to see uploading become possible in my lifetime.

However, during my sophomore year at Stanford, I came across an article in Reason magazine about mathematician Thomas Donaldson. Donaldson suffered from a brain tumor, and he was planning to starve himself to death. All suicides, by law, are autopsied, and Donaldson was fighting a court case to prevent an autopsy.

Donaldson wanted to die before the tumor destroyed his brain, because he had signed up for cryonic suspension with Alcor. He planned to have his brain frozen, in the hopes that future medical technologies would be able to a) repair the damage caused by freezing b) cure the brain tumor c) clone and repair his body.

Eureka! As I read the article I became increasinly excited. Here was the solution to my dilemma. If I died before uploading became possible, I could have myself frozen. Assuming cryonics worked (a big if, I know), I could wait as long as it took before uploading became possible.

So I switched majors, from computer science to biology. I read everything I could about cryonics. And after I graduated I worked for several years doing research in organ cryopreservation, first for the Navy, then for a small biotech startup.

I got out of research (for a variety of reasons), but I'm still very passionate about cryonics and uploading. Right now, my plan is to make a ton of money, then fund an prize for the successful cryopreservation of a human being.