One of the most intriguing and fascinating aspects of The Horizon Project for many is the possibility that their DNA will be recovered and accessed by a future advanced technology to re-animate them along with their loved ones, friends and even pets if they have also been stored.
The members willingness or otherwise for this possibility to be enacted in the future will be clearly displayed within the Time Cells as a simple binary choice ( Yes - No ).
There will of course be present day moral and even religious concerns for some over this, but we are looking ahead here to a time where these questions will presumably have been resolved, and our members
will naturally have given consideration to this already.
In a statement, to be preserved in various mediums ( ie. in both analogue and digital forms ) and stored alongside the Time Cells, requests that the re-animation of the members occurs only when the conditions are conducive to be what would be considered a good and suitable environment for the individuals concerned.
We can fairly safely presume that the bioengineers of the future
will continue to develop and enhance these technologies, and so
at some point humankind could be able to not only re-animate
an individual human being, but also in the event of a member's
death due to accident or disease, be able to repeat that process
again to bring back to life that individual once more, and indeed
indefinitely.
Consciousness
Here the perplexing question of an individual's consciousness inevitably arises.
"Would it be me or a clone of me with a different consciousness that has been re-animated ?"
Well, nobody knows yet.
Despite various claims about humans having been cloned, we have no real evidence of this, and so for all practical purposes we must assume that it has not been done, and so do not yet know the relationship between the cloned person and the donor with regards to consciousness.
We have presumed previously that clones would have a very similar relationship with the donor to that of identical twins, and this may be the case, but the genesis of the cloned individual is not the same as twins.
The American Journal of Human Genetics ( March 2008 ) has intimated that identical twins are in fact not genetically identical despite them sharing the same chromosomes, thus resulting in the variations in their appearance and behaviour, rather than just environmental as was previously presumed.
This variation may even result in the separation of an original single consciousness into two distinct minds.
Whereas clones are genetically identical.
One idea that has been postulated is that if every genetic element of a person is replicated by future bioengineers, that a sort of 'parallel consciousness' might then exist, in other words your consciousness could co-exist in another body, which could be akin to having two ( or more ) computers and their monitors sharing, processing and showing the same information at the same time.
So perhaps the many anecdotal reports of identical twins having a strong mental connection, even over great distances, may actually turn out to be due to a level of a shared consciousness between them.
There is also a growing interest and serious pondering of the idea of 'Mind Cloning', that is the transferring of an individual's cognitive functions onto a different substrate other than brain tissue, ie. software, which is referred to now as Mindware.
It has been proposed that it may even be accessed from an individual's digitally stored personal information ( ref: http://mindclones.blogspot.co.uk/ - Dr Martine Rothblatt ).
With regard to this, The Horizon Project suggests to our members that they also consider digitally storing in their Time Cell recordings of themselves on the provided memory stick, this of course is just a suggestion so as to embrace this future Mindware possibility.
