I attended a conference last weekend dedicated to the goal of creating an “immortal” version of a human being by transferring our “mind,” or possibly our brains as well, into an android by 2045. The conference was called GF2045. The GF stands for Global Future. The Russian who created the conference, Dmitry Itskov, did a good job of bringing together a lot of diverse people from the forefront of futurism, brain research, robotics and spirituality/religion, including Peter Diamandis, Marvin Minsky, Ray Kurzweil, Dr. Stuart Hameroff, Dr. Roger Penrose, and Dr. George Church, though some appeared via a canned video presentation.

It seems that there is still a wide variance of opinion about what constitutes the mind and what it means to be human? Age-old questions persist. Does consciousness arise from the biological mechanisms of the brain or does it simply reside there while the body is alive? Can we be human with a replacement body?

Some presented research showing that we should be able to repair damaged parts of the brain with replacement circuitry. Others thought that computers would soon be sophisticated enough to mimic human intelligence. Others saw it as a no-brainer (pun intended) that someday an individual’s consciousness could reside in something other than our original human birth bodies.

But nobody, in my opinion, got to the root of what it means to be human—what characteristics of consciousness we all share and what motivates us to make “progress.” Death was the problem that the conference was trying solve. The operative assumption was that we’d be better off if we could all live forever and that we had to take control over our own evolution to get there.

I’m not sure that should be our goal. Where we put our energy determines the results we will get. I’m of the opinion that we have much more pressing issues to solve than human mortality. How about we aspire to not killing each other before we try living forever.