Step 1: Create a brain/computer interface

The first step in getting our minds outside our body is creating a conduit through which it can travel.

Elon Musk is already working on this of course, with his company Neuralink, which I covered in detail on a previous video.

Ultimately the idea is we’ll be able to integrate our minds with the internet, have instant seamless access to information, store our memories, communicate telepathically, and enter virtual worlds in our own mind.

New technologies required to get there would be advanced brain mapping technologies and developing the ability to interface with enough of the brain’s surface to be able to fully integrate it. And that would require nanobots.

Really the only viable option for doing that would be microscopic bots that would travel to the brain cortex and build themselves into a lace across the surface and the folds of the brain. Anything else would just be too invasive to be feasible.

This leads us to the second step:

Step 2: Replacing neurons with synthetic circuitry

The only way to ensure that your continuity of consciousness goes unbroken is for your brain itself to become computer hardware.

So in the same way that the nanobots formed a neural lace across the surface of your brain, the next step would be for them to build synthetic neurons at the cellular level, slowly over time replacing your organic circuitry with digital ones.

This whole thing should be painless because there are no sensory nerves in the brain. And the experience could produce a feeling of heightened cognition, enhanced creativity and memory retention… If everything goes right.

If things don’t go right, you could expect massive feelings of deja vu, mood swings, fogginess, hallucinations, and maybe even seizures.

Nobody ever said immortality was free, son.

In order to get here we’d need to see advancements in synthetic neurons and nanotechnology.

Step 3: Build simulated worlds

Virtual reality and simulated worlds are everywhere these days, and video games have become near photorealistic.

But still those experiences only involve two senses: Sight and sound.

There are some tactile devices that simulate touch in the works but still, that’s interfacing through the body.

We’d need to be able to hack all the senses, sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, and pair those sensory stimuli with the physics of the virtual world.

Want to play basketball on Pluto? You could do that.

Want to engage in all manner of sexual perversions? You will do that.

An endless number of doorways you could step into that lead to different worlds with different rules, some free, which means they’ll be filled with billboards and advertising, and some premium rooms you pay for.

Everything that we use the internet for today will take real, physical form that we can step into and interact with.

And just like professional gamers make a living in these virtual worlds, entire economies and job markets will spring up in the simulation with opportunities that we can’t even imagine right now.

The earliest versions of this VR world would probably be like recalling a memory. Later versions may feel more like stepping into a dream, ultimately one where you can interact like lucid dreaming.

This is a direction that many, many futurists believe we’re headed, a future with multiple layers of reality, both simulated and real where we can choose which reality we want to exist in. This will be an interesting time.

Step 4: Permanent Residence in the Simulation

Now, ultimately, one way or another, our consciousness has to get inside that computer. Luckily, our brains have become computers.

So when time has its way with you and your body finally kicks, your digital brain can be removed and physically connected, permanently, to the supercomputer housing the simulation.

One of the arguments many people give for this kind of simulated immortality, that it would still be a kind of death because you’d be leaving all your loved ones behind.

But maybe not. For one thing, they would be able to visit you in this world.

They could come by your simulated house, you can take simulated trips together, when grandma dies, she really would just be going to another place. A place you can actually visit.

But she could also visit you through an avatar. A humanoid robot that an expired person could step into. One that translates all the senses of the outside world back to the person in the simulation.

Just like real people enter the virtual world, virtual people could enter the real world.