University Receives $5 Million Grant To Study Immortality

Hugh Pickens writes "Humans have pondered their mortality for millennia. Now the University of California at Riverside reports that it has received a $5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation that will fund research on aspects of immortality, including near-death experiences and the impact of belief in an afterlife on human behavior. 'People have been thinking about immortality throughout history. We have a deep human need to figure out what happens to us after death,' says John Martin Fischer, the principal investigator of The Immortality Project. 'No one has taken a comprehensive and sustained look at immortality that brings together the science, theology and philosophy.' Fischer says he going to investigate two different kinds of immortality. One is the possibility of living forever without dying. The main questions there are whether it's technologically plausible or feasible for us, either by biological enhancement such as those described by Ray Kurzweil, or by some combination of biological enhancement and uploading our minds onto computers in the future. Second would be to investigate the full range of questions about Judeo, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and other Asian religions' conceptions of the afterlife to see if they're theologically and philosophically consistent. 'We'll look at near death experiences both in western cultures and throughout the world and really look at what they're all about and ask the question — do they indicate something about an afterlife or are they kind of just illusions that we're hardwired into?'"

Comments

Re:The Answer for $5M

[AK Marc]

No, there is experimental data as well. Lobotomies are a result of "change the brain, change the intelligence/personality" experiments. There is direct experimental data, not just external observation.

Re:The Answer for $5M

[SoftwareArtist]

That's not an answer. And I think you know it as well as I do.

First, I'm quite familiar with computability and Godel's incompleteness theorems, and they have nothing at all to do with the question. There is absolutely nothing in them that implies AI is a fundamentally unsolvable problem. In fact, most AI researchers probably understand those subjects far better than you do - and they still consider AI to be a worthwhile problem to study.

Second, the current state of the art in AI is irrelevant. You didn't just say there were things computers can't currently do. You said there are things no computer can ever do, no matter how powerful. That claim needs to be justified.

Third, AI has actually been making dramatic progress in recent years. After decades of following paths that didn't lead anywhere, researchers have finally found some techniques that enabled major breakthroughs. If you want to see practical applications of that, just look at Watson or Siri or the like. A mere five years ago, both of those would have been science fiction. Today they're real.