Immortality, an ancient fantasy revived by transhumanism

From being “brain dead” to the “mind down­load” envis­aged by tran­shu­man­ists, the bound­ary between life and death con­tin­ues to be shroud­ed in mys­tery. But in the face of the hopes of immor­tal­i­ty that they raise, the lim­its of sci­en­tif­ic real­i­ty and the human con­di­tion must be faced. Recent advances in neu­ro­science have led to a rejec­tion of this desire to “kill death”, which has more to do with ide­ol­o­gy than with a seri­ous tech­no-sci­en­tif­ic project.

Thanks to advances in sci­ence and med­i­cine, human­i­ty has nev­er ceased to delay its own demise. While a con­tem­po­rary of Charle­magne was born with a life expectan­cy of bare­ly 30 years, INED pre­dicts that a cit­i­zen of the Euro­pean Union born in 2022 will live an aver­age of just over eight decades. But some peo­ple imag­ine going even fur­ther. Recent sci­en­tif­ic rev­o­lu­tions in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, genet­ics, biol­o­gy and neu­ro­science, com­bined with the emer­gence of tran­shu­man­ism (a move­ment that pro­motes the idea of tran­scend­ing the human con­di­tion), have brought the quest for immor­tal­i­ty back to cen­tre stage, or at least for a sig­nif­i­cant exten­sion of life.

But before we can under­stand how and why we delay death, we need to be able to define it. And the ques­tion is not so sim­ple: “As a sci­en­tist, I don’t know what death is”, admits Stéphane Charpi­er, pro­fes­sor of neu­ro­science at Sor­bonne Uni­ver­si­ty and direc­tor of the Brain Neu­ro­science team at Inserm. For him, it is a “pri­ma­ry con­cept” that only takes on mean­ing in oppo­si­tion (“in the neg­a­tive”) to life. This is why his work involves “study­ing death by try­ing to under­stand what is hap­pen­ng in a brain that is still alive”.

The idea that a human being with a beat­ing heart is nec­es­sar­i­ly alive is still wide­ly held. How­ev­er, when Pierre Mol­laret and Mau­rice Goulon dis­cov­ered brain death¹ in the mid­dle of the 20th cen­tu­ry, they dis­proved this prin­ci­ple and “engen­dered,” accord­ing to Stéphane Charpi­er, “a new sta­tus of human exis­tence”, by describ­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of hav­ing a corpse with a beat­ing heart, but whose brain has been destroyed. The two resus­ci­ta­tors were in fact the first to con­cep­tu­alise the prin­ci­ple of brain death. They defined this sta­tus as a “coma in which, in addi­tion to the total abo­li­tion of the func­tions of rela­tion­al life (editor’s note: absence of mus­cu­lar and ner­vous reac­tiv­i­ty), there is not only dis­tur­bance, but also total abo­li­tion of veg­e­ta­tive life (editor’s note: absence of spon­ta­neous respiration)”.

In this way, the car­dio­cen­tric vision of exis­tence is no longer rel­e­vant and, from a med­ical point of view, what makes a human being not dead is no longer his beat­ing heart, but his liv­ing brain.

Since 2012, the WHO has also adopt­ed this brain-cen­tric view­point in its def­i­n­i­tion of death: “the per­ma­nent and irre­versible dis­ap­pear­ance of the capac­i­ty for con­scious­ness and of all func­tions of the brain stem”. A human being is there­fore con­sid­ered to be alive as soon as his or her brain is capa­ble of gen­er­at­ing “elec­tri­cal back­ground noise”, as Stéphane Charpi­er points out. This phe­nom­e­non, which results from the brain’s spon­ta­neous, endoge­nous activ­i­ty, can be mea­sured using an elec­troen­cephalo­gram or micro­elec­trodes that sci­en­tists insert inside neurons.

Elec­tro-neu­ronal stud­ies enable researchers to “dif­fer­en­ti­ate three phys­i­o­log­i­cal dimen­sions of exis­tence: liv­ing, awake and con­scious”, to which par­tic­u­lar elec­tri­cal sig­na­tures cor­re­spond. As Stéphane Charpi­er, author of La sci­ence de la résur­rec­tion², explains, this trip­tych makes it pos­si­ble to under­stand that “what makes a human being not dead is no longer just his beat­ing heart, or his abil­i­ty to breathe spon­ta­neous­ly, but his capac­i­ty to pro­duce a con­scious sub­jec­tive experience.”

So, if death coin­cides with the inabil­i­ty to be con­scious, does the quest for immor­tal­i­ty cher­ished by tran­shu­man­ists amount to keep­ing our brains alive after our bod­ies have failed us? “Not exclu­sive­ly,” replies Cecil­ia Cal­heiros, a soci­ol­o­gist spe­cial­is­ing in health and reli­gion who devot­ed her doc­tor­al the­sis to the sub­ject. “Tran­shu­man­ism aims for the end of the human as it exists and the advent of a new one,” she sums up, “which will be either immor­tal or amor­tal, depend­ing on whether you’re a North Amer­i­can or French tran­shu­man­ist.” By amor­tal, we mean a human being whose lifes­pan in good health is con­sid­er­ably extend­ed, with­out being eter­nal. In short, the tran­shu­man­ist project amounts to propos­ing a soci­ety where “the human con­di­tion frees itself from its bio­log­i­cal limits”.

The wave of death is not fatal

In 2011, bored by a sci­en­tif­ic pre­sen­ta­tion at a con­fer­ence, Stéphane Charpi­er chose to read an arti­cle pub­lished in the jour­nal Plos One³, the title of which men­tions a mys­te­ri­ous “Wave of Death”. In it, the authors assess the brain activ­i­ty that occurs at the moment of death, “by study­ing what hap­pens in the brain of a rat before, dur­ing and after decap­i­ta­tion”, he explains. And, as expect­ed, “they found that this activ­i­ty died out very quick­ly, but that after a while a gigan­tic wave appeared on the elec­troen­cephalo­gram, which had flat­tened out!” This is what the Dutch researchers call the “wave of death”, sug­gest­ing that it is the last sig­nal a brain pro­duces before it final­ly shuts down.

Noth­ing less was need­ed to arouse the neuroscientist’s curios­i­ty, and to get his Inserm team at the Insti­tut du Cerveau (Pitié Salpetrière Hos­pi­tal in Paris) involved in a project to study this phe­nom­e­non in greater detail. “We aban­doned the prin­ci­ple of decap­i­ta­tion and set up a pro­to­col enabling us to switch off the brain, then rean­i­mate it after­wards, while study­ing brain activ­i­ty using micro­elec­trodes insert­ed into the neu­rons of our test sub­ject,” sums up the researcher.

After con­firm­ing the neu­ronal phe­nom­e­non of the wave of death, when the test sub­jects were rean­i­mat­ed, the researchers wit­nessed the appear­ance of “a sec­ond wave! […] An elec­tri­cal sign of the brain’s return to life”, which they named the “rean­i­ma­tion wave”. The sci­en­tists have thus char­ac­terised two neu­ronal mark­ers that help deci­pher the bound­ary between life and death. Para­me­ters are still lack­ing to define death pre­cise­ly from a neu­ro­phys­i­o­log­i­cal point of view, but their work makes it pos­si­ble to attribute a sig­na­ture to two dis­tinct states: “I may be dying” and “I may be com­ing back”.

A flat elec­troen­cephalo­gram doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean that every­thing is over, which is why Stéphane Charpi­er says that “death is an asymp­tote”. A curve whose point of con­ver­gence with the end line is a more than inde­ci­sive horizon.

Accord­ing to those who claim to be part of this move­ment, immor­tal­i­ty is only a “speck on the hori­zon” for the time being. To achieve it, some tran­shu­man­ists advo­cate a bio­log­i­cal approach to counter-aging (or “‘longevi­ty”), with the aim of halt­ing or even revers­ing the aging process. Oth­ers believe that “true free­dom con­sists in detach­ing one­self from one’s phys­i­cal body”, says the researcher. In this case, the essence of exis­tence lies in the brain, whose mem­o­ries and func­tion­ing should be pre­served “to make it imper­ish­able” by cryo­gen­ics, as pro­posed by the Alcor Life Exten­sion Foun­da­tion in the USA, or by mind upload­ing process­es. While these meth­ods fail to approach the realm of the pos­si­ble, they do have the advan­tage of fuel­ing the imag­i­na­tions of many artists and sci­ence-fic­tion writers.

Illu­so­ry, then? “With­out a doubt,” says Stéphane Charpi­er. In his view, “the tran­shu­man­ist project is a meta­phys­i­cal fable. We can increase our life expectan­cy, cor­rect defects and com­pen­sate for cer­tain weak­ness­es, but increas­ing the human being as an enti­ty, or cryo­geni­cal­ly stor­ing their brain, is quite sim­ply a pipe dream.” The neu­ro­sci­en­tist acknowl­edges that humans are capa­ble of pro­duc­ing arti­fi­cial neur­al net­works, of “tin­ker­ing with brains”, but con­sid­ers it unimag­in­able that a machine could pro­duce, or even repli­cate, the neur­al process­es under­ly­ing subjectivity.

Ulti­mate­ly, the inno­v­a­tive char­ac­ter of tran­shu­man­ism does not lie in the quest for eter­nal life. “What is new is the asser­tion that immor­tal­i­ty is plau­si­ble, thanks to a dis­course based on tech­no-sci­en­tif­ic advances. Tran­shu­man­ist objec­tives are thus con­vinc­ing play­ers in key spheres of our soci­eties: indus­try, research, health, etc.”, points out Cecil­ia Cal­heiros. As a result, tran­shu­man­ism is, in her view, “the most exac­er­bat­ed expres­sion of neolib­er­al soci­ety, which urges every­one to be the best ver­sion of them­selves and to con­stant­ly improve their skills.” The soci­ol­o­gist sees this move­ment “above all as an ide­ol­o­gy, which rein­forces a pow­er that is already present.”

In the tran­shu­man­ist con­text, the max­im that the end jus­ti­fies the means no longer holds true, since this end (death) is des­tined to dis­ap­pear. The tran­shu­man­ist myth is based on a reverse move­ment in which the means (techno­sciences) jus­ti­fy a new end (immortality/amortality). The ambi­tion is “infi­nite mas­tery of the world” and of the bio­log­i­cal con­di­tions of exis­tence, which brings tran­shu­man­ists back to the myth of Franken­stein, accord­ing to Stéphane Charpi­er. In his view, “with this nov­el, Mary Shel­ley wrote the first tran­shu­man­ist text. She imag­ines a body made of frag­ments of corpses that lives and ful­fills the dream of tran­shu­man­ists: to deprive human beings of death.”

The quest for immor­tal­i­ty and longevi­ty has punc­tu­at­ed the his­to­ry of mankind since its ear­li­est begin­nings. It is embod­ied in count­less myths about mor­tals who dared to aspire to the immor­tal­i­ty of the gods and were con­demned to tor­ment in return (Prometheus, Icarus, etc.). The rise of tran­shu­man­ism is a mod­ern update of this ambi­tion. Unfin­ished, this move­ment comes up against the wall of objec­tiv­i­ty and the sci­en­tif­ic approach. “Can we be con­scious with­out a body? Can a machine real­ly pro­duce sub­jec­tiv­i­ty?” asks Stéphane Charpi­er rhetor­i­cal­ly, by way of conclusion.

As long as tran­shu­man­ists can’t pro­vide an objec­tive demon­stra­tion or proof that it’s pos­si­ble, death will remain the shared hori­zon for each and every one of us.

Samuel Belaud