Immortality

It's still a big moral and philosophical dilemma. Maybe one day technology will advance to a point where it can solve it, but right now, to become immortal, you first have to die.

Now, I know, some philosophers would disagree, they would say that since there is continuity and only one instance at every time, you don't technically die, but lets face it.

They take your brain apart, cell by cell. The scan is destructive. They give you local anesthetics, but you can still feel it. And then you can feel... it's hard to describe. Losing yourself?
The scanner records your brain's structure and status - every single cell, how it's composed, how it's connected, what it's doing, the concentration of neurotransmitter at the synapses, even its current electrochemical potential and whether it's firing or not, so that nothing of what makes you, you gets lost. But then a laser vaporizes that cell, the vapors diffuse through the scanner's "window" and it continues with the next layer of your mind.

If it was instant, that would probably not matter, but it's painstakingly slow. It takes over an hour to finish with all of your head, including the brain stem, but it's the first half hour that you will be awake through. And at any point, what's left of your brain won't get any signals from the part that has already been scanned, since it has been vaporized and reduced to data in a storage cluster.

You can feel yourself vanish and dwindle, you can't remember where you have been, what you did, how you got there, or what's happening to you. You won't remember who you are. You lose the ability to hear and see and feel, and even what you are, you forget how to speak or how to think in words, and eventually even how to think at all. but your emotions, uncertainty, fear, panic, those are unfortunately the last to stop, long after any other thought has ceased.
And when those stop, you are gone. That's the last thing you'll remember, that endless, dimensionless void of nonexistence. As if neither you, nor the universe ever existed.

You don't witness what happens next. The scan of the entire brain is ungainly large, and most of the data is redundant. Only relevant for biological brains, if at all. They are going to process that in an optimizer, as soon as there's cluster computation time available. That reduces the original humongous scan to a fraction of its size. Small enough to run on a neural chip. Then they're gonna make a backup of that just in case, run a few tests to see if the data is coherent, and then they are gonna put it in a robot or a cyborg. A biological body with an artificial brain, and turn you on.

And once they do that, you suddenly remember everything, up to and including the nothingness at the end. And then, all of a sudden you get turned on. Just like that, and are awake again. And immortal. If your body gets destroyed, they can almost always still recover the latest image from the neural chip, unless you got thrown into lava or into the sun or something. And even then there's always the option of backups. Granted those, too are non continuous, even the philosophers agree, but once you wake up you can't tell the difference.

I would still say it's worth it. It's a new state of existence. You can fine tune your brains parameters. Make you constantly happy by dialing up happyness. Its fake, you know it's fake, but you are still happy about it. You can be happy when you want it, or broody and moody just for shits and giggles. Or you can turn of pain. Physical pain. Emotional pain, too, but that's a risky one. You stop caring if you do that. There's safeguards so people don't accidently turn themselves into psychopaths, then don't want to get back to normal cause - well, they are psychopaths.

My favorite is switching emotions. Everyones' favorite is pain for pleasure. Having people pummel the crap out of you has never felt so orgasmic, I swear, no matter how much of a masochist you thought you were, switch those and you get to a whole new level.

Also risky, even if YOU can't die, it's still expensive to make a new body. Like any self-destructive addiction it can ruin your life. So don't get addicted to jumping into meat grinders cause it "feels so good". Before you know it, you start participating in snuff porn videos and sell yourself to people who want to massacre you, just for the kick of it.

It feels just as nice when you dial your sense of pleasure up to max, then get a nice massage, and that costs you a lot less and won't give you a street whore reputation.

What I miss... I think the sad thing is that I can't experience this utter nothingness ever again. That's a one off experience when they take apart your biological brain layer by layer. WIth a neural chip it's usually just off or on. Granted, with a hardware debugger you could selectively disable some neural layers one by one, but that's still not the same. It's missing the physical aspect of getting destroyed in the process. That you can literally feel yourself vanish.

You can do that to your body of course. Slowly dissolve yourself or, well the aforementioned meat grinder if you lower yourself in really slowly. But you won't lose consciousness anymore, even when your body is gone. You just lose sensory input, and at some point the chip goes into standby, from one cycle to the next. 

Maybe there's gonna be a simulation for that once, that emulates the feeling. I think I'd sign up for that.

Cause there's one other sensation, aside from fear, that you also feel until the very end, that I forgot to mention.You get absolutely fucking-indescribable horny!