Is it possible to place the brain in a nutrient solution and achieve immortality in a virtual world?

Human memories and thoughts all originate from brain activities, so the death of the brain is regarded as a person’s true death. Then, conversely, if the brain can be kept alive, would it be equivalent to achieving immortality?

This idea sounds a bit fantastic. If the body dies, how can the brain survive alone? This is actually possible, that is, to place the brain in a nutrient solution to continue to maintain the basic physiological activities of the brain. However, simply maintaining the survival of the brain may be an extremely painful thing for the brain owner, because from the subjective perspective of the brain owner, he may be living in a dark and empty space, which is a powerful mental torture, so it is also necessary to connect this brain living in the nutrient solution to a computer through technical means to simulate a virtual world for it.

For people living in a virtual world, they have no way of telling whether the world they live in is real, so it is equivalent to achieving eternal life in another world.

Death is scary, but people are not afraid of falling into the eighteen levels of hell ruled by monsters and demons, but of endless unconsciousness and no connection with this world or any other world. So even if they can achieve immortality in the virtual world, many people are willing to do so. But does such immortality have any meaning? In the virtual world, everything you have and everything that happens to you is not real. Their essence is just a bunch of electrical signals. From this perspective, such immortality is very absurd.

Some people think that the absurdity of the virtual world is unimportant because the real world is just as absurd.

In the real world, although everything that happens and everything that we have exists in reality, they will eventually disappear with death, just like a game account that has been practicing hard every day, but the final outcome is permanent deletion. This is indeed absurd. But even without considering the absurd nature of the virtual world, there is another question: Is consciousness completely generated by the brain? This is a question that cannot be proven for the time being. Modern science can only confirm that the brain is the birthplace of memory and thinking, but it is unknown whether consciousness is equivalent to thinking. If consciousness does not originate from the brain, then the immortality of the brain is meaningless. If consciousness does originate from the brain, there is still a dilemma to achieve the immortality of the brain, which is the same as the dilemma of freezing the brain.

We are not unfamiliar with brain freezing, because we have seen many related reports in recent years. Among them is the well-known female writer Du Hong, who froze her brain in liquid ammonia solution, hoping that the development of future technology will be able to awaken it again.

Although cryonics has been around for more than 50 years and the technology has become increasingly mature, there has still not been a single successful awakening of a frozen person. In fact, many people do not realize that awakening is basically impossible with the current freezing method, because it is not a question of "awakening from cryonics" at all, but a question of "resurrection from the dead." If "awakening from cryonics" can still give hope, then "resurrection from the dead" is completely irrelevant.

The biggest problem with cryonics technology is that it cannot freeze living people. Whether it is freezing the whole body or the brain, one must wait until the patient dies.

It is impossible to bring a dead person back to life even if he is not frozen. Even if the entire freezing and thawing process does not cause any damage to the cells, the person is already dead. Therefore, a basic prerequisite for cryotherapy is that the frozen person must be alive, and freezing living people is not allowed in any country. This is the dilemma faced by freezing the brain. Similarly, brain immortality also faces the same problem. It requires a living brain, not a dead brain. This is why the "brain in a vat" experiment has always been just a thought experiment.

Whether it is human cryonics technology or the brain in a vat, they are more like mankind's beautiful expectation of immortality. If such technology is to exist in the real world, the obstacles it faces are enormous, both in terms of science and technology and in terms of ethics and morality.

Finally, let's think about an interesting question about the real world and the virtual world. A person living in a virtual world cannot know that the world he lives in is virtual. This is different from "The Truman Show". It is not a huge studio. Everything in the virtual world comes from the stimulation of the brain by the computer, so the brain itself will never doubt the authenticity of the world. From this perspective, we can't be sure whether the world we live in is real. Maybe we are already enjoying eternal life in the virtual world. Of course, this is just a wild fantasy.

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