The concept came with a child’s question, on a busy train careening through picturesque Vienna: “Siri, do you have a mummy?”
As Emil Jimenez, founder and CEO of MindBank AI, watched his young daughter interact with Apple’s digital assistant device, he was gripped.
“Imagine this moment: Everyone around us just stops what they’re doing — and seeing this little 4-year-old have a conversation with Siri,” he says, as we speak by video call.
It was January 2020 when Jimenez began reflecting on the world his daughter would grow up in, and that interaction with Siri would become the catalyst for a more personal product.
“Today she talks to Siri, but I want her to talk to me like this even if I’m not alive,” he says he decided at that moment, envisioning a system where his daughter could hear his answers to life’s big questions.
At this stage Jimenez didn’t know what the concept of a “digital twin” was. He initially called the invention “Dada,” a portmanteau of “data” and “daddy,” and over the years he worked to split his human form into an online digital presence, inputting detailed emotional response data. During this process, MindBank AI was developed — a company that creates digital twins with positive applications for mental health and productivity, Jimenez says.
He shows me the back end dashboard of his own digital twin, pointing to a series of wiggly lines mapping his emotional rhythms after the sudden death of his ex-wife and the birth of his second child.
“Here is death and life meeting each other literally, like months apart,” he says. I peer toward my screen as he talks, following the little data points that indicate the pitfalls of sadness and the highs of happiness — a geography of pain and joy.
Seeing the project come to fruition was the closest thing to watching a child being born, Jimenez says. Today the work is so good and complete, he sees his digital twin as a soul.
Search for a cure
Death has always bookended life — it’s referred to as life’s one certainty, the great equalizer — but our unease about this fact has persevered, spurring quests for eternal life through medicine or spirituality. Through conversations I’ve had with friends, colleagues, family and interviewees, it’s evident that how we feel about death and dying varies greatly. Some view it like a veil that we must pass through when our time comes. Others speak of it akin to a terrifying, sudden grab from the dark. Some consider the concept too morbid to entertain.
Cultural attitudes toward death also shape our views. In Japan, some homes are furnished with butsudan (ancestor altars), while Michiko Iwasaka and Barre Toelken write in “Ghosts and the Japanese” that spirits share standard positional markers: Just as there is a koko (here) and asoko (over there), there is a konoyo (the physical world) and anoyo (the other side). While spirits will gravitate to their eventual anoyo destination, ghosts exist in konoyo.
Omine Akira’s “The Genealogy of Sorrow” found in historical poetry and texts, death was described as a “disappearance” from this world, evident in the expression “kumogakuru,” or “hiding behind the clouds.”
When it comes to “immortality,” we are as divided on the topic as we are on death.
Leiden University philosophy lecturer Adam Buben spends his time considering such notions, having developed his academic focus after a stint living in Japan. Buben, who has applied a scholarly lens to the question of “whether an immortal life would still be meaningful,” is more comfortable talking about death than most, discussing it with gravity, honesty and humor.
“It seems like there is something bedrock, constitutional, built into your character, that says, ‘You know what, 80 years is about enough, it’ll start to get boring after that,’ and other people who just have this insatiable lust for life and go in the other direction,” Buben says.
When it comes to immortality, “We have to start defining our terms. We use the word immortality in a variety of ways, sometimes we just mean living a really long time, sometimes we mean living indefinitely.”
The idea of a godlike, indestructible immortality where we couldn’t die, in a scenario where “all your limbs chopped off and your senses poked out,” sounds hellish, we agree. But Buben suggests, “Some kind of indefinite life extension, where we’re not indestructible, we’re technically mortal ... I think that wouldn’t sound bad to most people.”
(Conditional immortality — particularly where the impacts of aging or illness are controllable and which we could choose to opt out of — is a very different proposition from living endlessly.)
Enter technology
While you and I may think seriously about our own mortality only after the loss of someone close to us or after a brush with danger, a crop of scientists and technologists are expending serious brainpower searching for a cure.
Technology now spans various aspects of our lives, including those once viewed as sacred or private like pregnancy, menopause, sex and mental health. But can it bridge the great divide between life and death?
Advocates for “mind uploading” believe it will.
Mind uploading specialist Masataka Watanabe, an author and associate professor at the University of Tokyo, believes the technology will be achievable within the next 20 years, through the development of a digitized version of the brain — which he plans to eventually trial on himself.
Watanabe says for a price he would leave out certain bad memories. “It’s a half joke, but I’m quite serious,” he says, smiling wryly.
His concept involves a brain-machine interface using fine electrodes, calling this approach “seamless,” because it would be achieved by connecting a device to a living brain, before then transferring or sharing memory — in contrast to a method of slicing a brain and then scanning it, favored by groups like Carboncopies.
U.S.-based Joe Strout, a long-time advocate on the topic of mind uploading and one of the founding members of Carboncopies, became fascinated with the practicalities of building a brain when he was in college.
Strout predicts that in the future death will be rendered a relic of the past.
“I think that 100 years from now, it’s going to seem so strange that people used to die, and everyone just accepted that,” he says.
If mind uploading becomes the norm, Strout suggests an eventual populace comprising biological people, those with their minds uploaded who live in virtual environments and without a physical body, and those with robotic bodies living in the real world.
Still, the notion of digitizing a person invokes a plethora of ethical and practical questions, and causes for concern quickly arise.
Watanabe suggests a scenario of “forcible uploading.”
“We can say, let’s upload you ... so that we can decrease the population ... (but) there is no technology yet. The government might pretend (they’re) uploading you,” he says, calling this a joke better fitted to a “Black Mirror” plot line.
And then there are other questions: Would there be a socioeconomic death divide? Could we digitally alter uploaded minds, and who should have authority over such decisions? And perhaps most pressing when it comes to the topic of immortality — would that person actually be “you?”
This is a question that divides philosophers. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy outlines two schools of thought when it comes to personal identity — that we’re who we are because we continue to biologically exist in the same form, or if we’re who we are because of our minds and consistency of character traits and memories.
When it comes to mind uploading, Strout suggests a book metaphor: picture a world in which no one had ever thought to copy a book — that every book was a single object handwritten by an author and if it is destroyed, it’s permanently gone.
“If I say, ‘Have you read ‘Moby Dick?’ I mean, have you read this particular book?’ It would seem very strange to say, we could copy that book and ‘Moby Dick’ could exist in two places,” says Strout. “That’s the situation we’re in with people right now.”
“Just like with books, or any other information entity, once we can do it, we’ll get used to it really fast ... Nobody worries ‘Is it really my Ph.D thesis or is it just a copy of my Ph.D thesis.’ It’ll be the same with people, but because we have no experience with that it seems strange to us,” he says.
Watanabe is skeptical of the method and sits firmly on the other side of the philosophical divide, arguing this wouldn’t be the same “you.”
“You’re not the one who’s going to survive,” he says. “It doesn’t meet, at least my desire to avoid death.”
Regardless of method, there is something jarring about the notion that a mind could travel through the ether like any other piece of data. The idea of what makes a person is complex. Even for the non-religious, the concept of a spirit or soul of some kind is hard to shake.
Strout puts this down to human exceptionalism.
“That’s something we’ll get over, as we always have,” he says. “We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and everything revolved around it, and it was a real blow to our egos when scientists proved that wasn’t true.”
Practically speaking, what is likely to happen is pet mind uploading as a precursor to human mind uploading, Strout says, noting that animal brains are smaller and such testing doesn’t invoke the same kind of ethical issues as human research.
Scientists have found that humans have some 86 billion neurons threaded through our brains, with some 100 trillion connections to each other. By comparison, rodents have 12 billion neurons.
Last year, Harvard Medical School announced a new field of neuroscience called “connectomics,” which is focused on mapping connections between neurons in the brain in order to understand how brains function and how this affects behavior. At present, researchers are focused on the brains of mice and fruit flies. They predict that mapping a whole mouse brain may be possible within the next 10 years.
While there may currently be no technology available that has been proven to extend our lifespans, some consider “the great divide” already narrowed somewhat by grief tech — the digital world is no longer just populated by memorial Facebook accounts but interactive AI-optimized chat bots that talk back, mimicking the messaging style of loved ones who have died.
While experts have expressed concern about the risk of emotional harm, the newness of the technology means its impact is not yet known. AI ethics-focused academic Nora Freya Lindemann has argued that “deathbots” should be classified as medical devices and restricted as users may become dependent on them but suggested they could have positive application under some conditions.
The great project's end
It’s inescapable that our perspective of death comes from those who outlast us. That’s why immortality has so often been chased through achievements like creating great works of art, procreating and winning awards — the leaving behind of things and individuals who will outlive us and even transform us into great figures from beyond the grave.
In the face of our mortality, living purposefully in this temporary world and in our temporary bodies drives us. It’s a reason to pursue careers that are creatively fulfilling but not economically wise, to travel to countries vastly different to our own and see things, touch things, smell things firsthand, to tell someone we love them. The logic is to do something daring and a little risky so we can feel that when we reach the end of it all, we lived.
This also shapes how we hope to be remembered once we’re gone — perhaps as the kind of person who told silly jokes in rooms full of serious people, as someone who never missed an opportunity to say something kind, or as the friend who pointed out flowers.
But while there is plenty about life to revel in, the great irony is the more we find meaning in our lives and appreciate the beauty, possibility and richness of it, the crueler death and its irreversibility appears.
Watanabe is personally afraid of death, but beyond that, he says his fear extends to “becoming nothing.”
“There’s going to be an endpoint in the universe, whatever we do, whatever technology we have, we won’t likely survive (that) ... and I even feel afraid of that. It sounds crazy,” he says, but notes that many other people have told him they share the same fear.
“I’m really curious (about) why some people have this genuine fear of disappearing and some people don’t,” he says.
Buben, who describes himself in a somewhat “privileged” position of being “somebody who likes being alive,” has considered his own feelings toward death in great detail.
“I think for me, it’s not a fear,” he says, “I think it’s sadness. We tend to see our lives as projects, or as made up of projects, so you think about building something up, and the idea that that’s all going to go away — how could that not make you sad?”
In spite of the precarious nature of our lives and even in the face of such existential sadness, most of us do continue to build up our lives right to the very end.
When neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks learned he had terminal cancer, he wrote about his feelings for the New York Times, acknowledging that while he was afraid, his overall feeling was one of gratitude: “I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return. ... Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
It is certainly a theme that when many of us seek to ground our lives in something that isn’t tied to a specific achievement, love of some kind is the anchor.
When Jimenez speaks about his work, he keeps coming back to how much he loves his daughter. The type of immortality he is seeking is a means of being a supportive force in her life, even after he dies.
“The one thing you worry about as a parent is, ‘Did I do a good job?’ ‘Will my kids be OK?’ When you’re going, this is the thing you worry about: ‘Are they well educated, do they have a good job, do they have a good husband?’
“When you build that framework of support around your baby, then it’s like ... I can go,” Jimenez says. “And then she’s got my digital twin.”
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