Making a very crude analysis based on the size of data, I would say solving aging is a piece of cake comparing to scanning someone's brain content. Our proteins that eventually break down with aging are coded by the DNA. The DNA is a few GB across. Sure there are mutations, folding and other complexities, but it is still mostly digital data. The brain has 80B neurons, each with thousands of dendrites. You'd need to scan not only the (real valued) state of the neurotransmitters in each of these dendrites, but also the topology of the (varying) connection to other neurons. Not that it isn't a daunting challege, but I would bet my money on beating aging, rather than scanning the brain.
It depends on how close the biological cells are to being immortal. What I was referring to in somewhat sarcastically in another post is that modern senescence research is basically operating from the position that the cell just has, you know, maybe one or two or three things wrong with it, and if we can "just" extend the teleomeres (presumably with just ingesting some substance), and maybe supplement our diet with a couple of substances, and maybe fix cancer or something, we'll be there.
There are some reasons to believe this may be true, such as the existence of cells in the wild that seem to be effectively immortal, like certain jellyfish and such. (Nothing terrible close to us taxonomically, but at least they're from planet Earth.)
On the other hand, it may turn out that after a couple of quick wins worth, say, 20 or 30 years, that the whole thing devolves into dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of interventions, all complicating each other, a good number of them unique to the individual, as you try to pick up the pieces in your ever-aging organs as they continue to find new and exciting ways to fail. Imagine trying to keep an old car running, but you're not actually allowed to just replace parts, and you have to do all the fixes while the car is on the road, and this is just barely the tip of the iceberg. Senescence research may be one of the worst examples of a light-post problem in human history, as they search for this or that substance that will fix aging but the minimal solution is in fact literally gigabytes worth of information converted into biological machines we can barely even conceive of.
If you can read one neuron, you can read two; those problems are not independent. (That's a simplification to some extent, but at this level we'll take it.) If you can understand one protein's function, that doesn't help anywhere near as much with the next one, and the state of the body is roaming through a very high-dimensional space over time, with the interventions all also affecting the next intervention that will be necessary... it can get pretty ugly in there, potentially. Amusingly, the brain is the problem in both cases; biological immortality probably wouldn't be so hard, we could probably solve everything by transplants of freshly-grown organs based on our genetic code... except transplanting a freshly-grown brain in kinda defeats the whole purpose. In the end, both problems may come back to scanning brains one way or another.
Simulating the micro-environment is the tricky part. Humans go great distances and interact a lot with the world, and that, plus time, is what aging is, isn't it?
Can you simulate all the different ways DNA can mutate?
Wow. I understand that you are a layperson, but that’s a very strong statement in my view. What do you base it on? Or did you just pull it ”out of a hat”?
Changing genetics seems to me a bit like changing an engine in-flight. Mappping the brain to a computer is more like building a plane from scratch in a hangar.
In a computer, we build the materials but we also build the world around them. With biology, all we have to work with is are the real-life materials, which are harder to grok than their digital equivalents.
Piece by piece migration/replacement into a computer/ artificial neurons seems more likely. Still a gargantuan task with the requirement of a gargantuan amount of neurons.
First, the goal I'm shooting for is the conquest of aging, effective biological immortality, not just living 150-200 years.
When understanding a complicated existing system, like a program, with the intention of making changes to it or fixing it, I find there are characteristic phases to it. There's the part where you have no handle on it at all. At this point you think there maybe isn't that much to the system. Then you get a handle, and you view the whole system through that handle for a while, and everywhere you look you see new stuff. Every time you find something new, your estimate of the size of the task grows. Slowly, but surely, you begin to go more places and look at more things and you encounter stuff you've already seen before. Your estimate of how much work you have to do goes up, but the rate of change starts to decrease. You find more useful handles to understand more bits of the system as you encounter new subsystems and bunches of code. There's a long period of consolidation, where your understanding finally starts matching the complexity and you start getting to the point you know what you are doing, and the rate of surprises you encounter slopes off, perhaps never quite reaching zero, but certainly dropping off. You then have the long slog of actually doing the work, because now you understand it.
In biology, you can argue about exactly where we are, but we are certainly not at the "long period of consolidation" yet, because we keep finding entirely new subsystems that we weren't even aware of. For the past several decades, it seems like every 5 or 10 years we keep finding new subsystems and the apparently complexity of what's going on keeps going up. The ratio of "things we know" over "things we know we don't know" has been steadily going down over the past decades, even as the "things we know" may be increasing in absolute terms. At this point I would have no confidence in anyone's claim that "no, this is the last complication we'll find, we're on our way now!"
Trying to get into that mess and fix it for the long term may just be an unrealistic goal entirely. I suspect modern research into fixing senescence and this or that promising treatment option (oh, look, maybe if we supplement with this, oh, look, maybe if we supplement with that!) may be the equivalent of trying to fix an architectural issue in a large-scale code base armed with the equivalent of three letter "a"s you can insert into the code base, or trying to reassemble a supernova armed with a BB gun.
Not that brain simulation is easy either. In fact, I'm not even convinced the simulating is the hard part. It's the reader I can't hardly imagine how we're going to build without some serious borderline-magic nanotech. You need to be able to read millions of neurons in parallel if you have any hope of finishing before the patient being scanned dies of old age. (And what does "reading" a neuron even mean? Can a "reader" fit into the space between neurons? If not you've got some serious scheduling problems with how to cover everything. And it's not like 'a neuron' is a point, either... one of their major purposes is to spread.) There's also a chance you'll have to be dynamically simulating the already-scanned parts as you go, since the system is changing as you scan it and it's basically the equivalent of a stroke if everything scanned is just dead afterwards, and who would want to be scanned that way? It's an insane machine to build.
It's really hard to tell which is harder, because they are both insanely hard. Neither would particularly surprise me. It's like an ant trying to judge which Redwood is higher.
Even if we could separate your mind from your body and run it on an immortal computer (or rather succession of computers), I don't think we have any evidence to suggest that making a mind immortal is easier than making immortal tissues and organs.
It's not just making the machine immortal or serviceable. You also need to make the program robust enough to run continuously without crash/reset conditions or other pathological bugs. But, the techniques we understand to engineer "immortal" programs are at odds with the complexity of a real mind, in much the same way as our techniques for engineering machines are at odds with real biology. I.e. it isn't really preserving a real mind if we have to strip away the stateful learning and memory, the moods and emotions, and the inherent potential for bouts of irrationality or even psychosis.
Finally, to "solve aging" for one organism or one mind just raises more questions which are equally as hard. What is an immortal society or civilization? How do new people ever relate to their immortal forebears or participate on equal footing in an economy where some have literally had forever to gather wealth and power? Or does sexual reproduction cease in a future with backup-restore options? Immortality means solving all these levels, otherwise you just replace illness and senescence with accident and violence as the common cause of death...
Just to your first sentence: even if we had biological immortality, the current estimate is that you can only make it about 250 years before on average you suffer a fatal accident.
Beating aging isn't really enough - we have to beat death.