Project Vision 21

I think there is something worse and more complicated than trying to solve a puzzle without a complete image serving as a guide and it’s trying to solve a puzzle that changes every time you add a piece, so even if with all the pieces at hand there will never be a complete image to guide you.

Let's do that mental exercise. Let's think we have all the pieces of a puzzle and we have connected several of these pieces together, although there many more pieces to be connected. And let’s suppose that each time we connect another piece, the image formed by the pieces already connected changes, precisely because a new element has been added.

Let's also assume that we have a fairly clear idea of the final model and that model helps us choose the next piece we want to add to the puzzle. But once that piece is in place, everything changes, so that no image can be taken as the final image.

To further complicate the issue, other people are also constantly adding (or removing) pieces of the puzzle, sometimes accurately (in accordance with the model image) and sometimes insanely (although that doesn’t mean a new image will not emerge).

In short, the pieces are added one by one, in no particular order, and without necessarily connecting the new piece as one would have anticipated with the pieces already connected. And each new piece changes the whole image.

Is it possible under these conditions to solve the puzzle? Certainly, it is, although there are no guarantees that it will be possible to reach an "end", when all the pieces will remain static and with the “final” image looking more like a painting than something in movement.

But what is this experiment for? It serves to understand what is currently happening with the scientific and technological advances related to the search for human immortality and, more specifically, with the arrival of a techno-scientific transhumanism.

As in the puzzle of our thought experiment, many of the "pieces" to (potentially) achieve immortality are already emerging, such as connections between brains and computers, technological connections between brains, quantum super computers, and even new kinds of materials and states of matter hitherto unthinkable.

But every time a new piece is added to the puzzle of human techno-immortality, the whole puzzle changes, to the point that in many cases the interconnection between all the pieces is no longer seen. And it is not that the interconnection has been lost, but that the image that connects the pieces has changed.

For the inattentive person, the many announcements of scientific and technological advances seem to lack a unifying goal, a "guiding image". But that image exists and day after day becomes more and more clear, to the delight of Ray Kurzweil, who expects immortality by 2029. 

Obviously, following the example proposed above, there are no guarantees that the puzzle will be resolved definitively. But what if the puzzle is solved and we become immortal?