Essay, Research Paper: MIT Essay

I may seem to be someone with many unconnected facets and talents once you have read all the other essays on this application. This essay is intended to slap together a few of the pieces of myself that I have displayed here.

The human race is immortal ( that was a doozy wasn't it ). There is nothing that forces us to decay into old age and die, this is merely our body destroying itself once our purpose ( reproduction ) is complete. Evolution not only did not bother to select against genes that kill off people past 40, but to some degree selected for such genes: the faster we go through generations, the faster we evolve. If the genes that cause the changes we associate with old age were suppressed in some chemical way, we would be capable of eternal life. Another way to immortality would involve the building of a biomechanical body of some sort, something right out of a Terminator movie, that would support the brain with only the chemicals necessary to survival ( if we could determine which those are ) and thus avoid the effect of aging genes. All of this genetic, biochemical and hydraulic research would be based on knowledge gained in college. One other thing: we've all heard of cults that claim they have discovered immortality in some way, which supposedly have members who've lived 200 years. If there's even a shred of truth in any of that, my guess is that these 200 year veterans have managed to order their minds in some way ( through some arcane style of thinking perhaps ) that erased the biological clock.

All in all, immortality is only one small thing that humans might be capable of. The strange abilities seen in autistic people, like incredible number crunching speed, really are not unique to autistic people. These abilities are buried deep in everyone's subconscious, and it is just a matter of our minds letting us use them or not. In fact, I think that along with those mathematical abilities are buried many more abilities. I feel sure that among them is perfect coordination, and there might be some really strange psychic or time-related abilities as well. The subconscious is driven by its creator, evolution. It is only concerned with reproduction. Evolution has erected a barrier between ourselves and our potential, and lets ability seep through to those who have desirable traits and are intended to reproduce. If we could somehow break this barrier to the subconscious, and obtain full conscious control of these abilities, we might suddenly have control of the world around us in addition to full control of ourselves. We would be a race of gods.

I intend, through learning psychology and bioscience, through studying the creativity of fiction and the pure logic of AI, to reach for the connections that need to be made to understand and break this barrier.