It's brilliant

Rating: Null/10 (18 October 2011)

This is an all time favorite of mine. When I was an undergraduate I became friends with a fellow math major who was obviously brilliant. His father had died when he was young, and he was obsessed with living forever. Even during the time I knew him, he taught himself neuroscience (while studying math), and came up with various ideas for preserving our brains. He used to bounce these ideas off of me, but his learning rate was so far beyond mine, he quickly lost me. When we parted ways, he was building a machine to slice up brains. That's right--his idea, after studying neuroscience was to slice up the brains of a cared-for deceased so thinly that the neural connections to be saved as data. He even began building a machine to do it in his garage. He must be pretty smart because he's a post-doc at Harvard now. In any case, we used to talk about the prospect of saving the configuration of a person's brain. If, for example, the reader were to have all of their neurons wired the way mine are right now, that person would think like me. That person would _be_ me. When suitable technology comes, will they go fix the brains of people in cryogenic freezing? I don't think so. They'll figure out how their brains are wired and then use a computer to simulate them. That person would suddenly become alert as computer program ran, thinking exactly like they do. This is science. It's hard science. It's futuristic--the details are fantastically complicated, but if society rolls on, it will be a reality. Maybe people will live out what is shown in this film. In this respect, this movie is excellent. I think Tom's acting is superb. Aside from just the science, I enjoyed the film itself and was intrigued the whole time because it is real. This film gets it right. People aren't quite ready for it. But maybe they think it's just too silly. Well, it's not that silly as this old friend of mine has proved.