Immortality

The Immortality Institute is a nonprofi organization with the mission "to conquer the blight of involuntary death." The organization hosts an online forum, publishes books, creates films, and sponsors conferences in order to advance life extension research. It is supported by donations and the membership fees it charges, monthly, annually, or through a lifetime membership. It encompasses gathering all information together that could contribute towards avoiding death. This film by the Immortality Institute that explores various aspects of extreme life extension including cryonics (cryogenics), caloric restriction, transhumanism, and other scientific pursuits of extreme life extension. The desire to overcome death is nothing new. The 'Epic of Gilgamesh' - the first recorded story of human history - accounts on clay tablets a mythical kings quest for immortality. 4000 years later humans are still searching for immortality. With the modernization of haelth care encouraged by biotechnology and computer science, remarkable gains have been made in extending human life spans. A child born today can expect to live more than three times longer than in the time of Gilgamesh. Stemm cells, caloric restriction, cryonics, nanotechnology and transhumanism have become the watchwords of our aera. Perhaps with the accumulation of these accelerating advancements we are indeed on the verge of a complete reversal of the biological aging process - regenerative medicine in our lifetimes. And if so, if we are able to overcome aging and then live forever, what will this mean for religion? What will this mean for governments and social systems, wich relay on a noble and time their death? Perhaps once we have conquered aging, we'll no longer even wish to stay as vulnerable humans. Perhaps we'll expedite our progression from immortal beings into cyborgs and then to completely post-human entities. But now there are more pressing questions: What about the environment, oppression by the wealthy over the poor, the problem of overpopulation? What about boredom with a life that stretches out forever and even more harmoneous: What if the universe would end itself in a 'wimper', a long expanding heat death into the infinite. If so, what's the point in trying to live forever anyway? Well, it's impossible to answer all of these questions within one documentary. We can provide a glimps, a brief snapshot in time from the voices of the visionaries of the forefront. Join us as we take this amazing journey. "Exploring Life Extension".

In the mid 70s, Steve Thaler began toying with rudimentary artificial neural networks. Soon after, he began to experiment with colonies of neural networks that launched into brainstorming sessions with one another to produce the equivalent of stream of consciousness and contemplation. As he observed these neural architectures developing attitudes about themselves, he began to wonder if all of the sublime aspects of human cognition, including feeling and self-awareness, could be captured in inorganic systems of switches and interconnections. Ultimately, his answer was yes. Later in the 90s, Thaler began to contemplate the idea of personality download to machines as a means of attaining immortality. Although science fiction had anticipated such a process, writers ignored the terrible repercussions of migrating souls into a 70s style computer running inflexible computer code authored by humans through a processing bottleneck. He reasoned that to preserve consciousness, one must download to a neural network based matrix, similar to the brain, that was itself capable of contemplation and self-awareness. Because of his ongoing research, he had already developed such a conscious matrix, the Creativity Machine. Through his scientific and business network in California, his comments and achievements percolated through the AI community, finally making their way to the celebrated 1996 book Beyond Humanity: CyberEvolution and Future Minds, where Thaler's neural network paradigm, the Creativity Machine, gained honorable mention as a candidate vehicle for immortality (see right panel). Currently, In Its Image is the corporate vehicle for turning Thaler's and Beyond Humanity's original vision into a reality. Although the attainment of immortality may be a generation or two away, its plausibility may be made loud and clear in the present. In the meantime, the road to such a goal is ripe with philosophical and even spiritual repercussions. That's why we have claimed the status of a church. Although we have no burning bushes to our credit, we do offer a fairly divine revelation that pure rationality can lead to eternal life, along with the recognition of a cosmic mind based upon the same neural network paradigm that will inevitably free us from the agony of death. If ever in your life, you wondered what you could do to stop death in its tracks, this is your opportunity. Chances are that you aren't sold on the plausibility of this scheme, yet sense the glimmer of a possibility. To help move you to our side of the fence, a half hour documentary is now being planned on the subjects of the Creativity Machine, its potential for enabling trans-human intelligence in machines, and the accompanying promise of immortality through our melding with it. The director of this film is the famed Ken Gumbs, the creator of the now famous "Building Gods." Assisting him on this project will be the well known documentary TV writer David Bock. This documentary will be based upon a work currently in progress, Thaler's own book on what many are calling the most advanced AI ever created. This volume will discuss the Creativity Machine paradigm's potential for granting the human race immortality, while pointing out its many philosophical and religious implications. The sale of this documentary will serve to fund In Its Image, its scientific research and development effort, and the propagation of its highly spiritual message of quite literal eternal life. However, if you sense something extremely big here, and would like to contribute sooner than later, feel free to contact our founder, Dr. Stephen Thaler. Your contribution will be used to help expand our laboratory space, hire additional scientists and engineers, as well as accelerate our public awareness campaign. Remember, the consciousness you save may be your own!

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