In his latest book, The Future of the Mind, physicist Michio Kaku focuses not on antimatter but on gray matter. He just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit, answering several queries about the nature and future of consciousness and the corporeal. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

If I can make it 50 more years, will we be able to slice up my brain and cram my consciousness into a machine? That’d be swell.

Dr. Michio Kaku:

By midcentury, we may have Brain 2.0, a backup copy of the brain, the byproduct of the ambitious BRAIN project of Pres. Obama and the European Union. Hence, when we die, our Connectome and Genome still survive. So our consciousness does not have to die when we die. And this consciousness, I write, may be placed on laser beams and sent into outer space. This might be the most efficient way to explore the universe, as laser beams carrying our consciousness into outer space.

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Question:

I remember watching a documentary you made for the BBC on extending life expectancy in humans – do you still follow recent advances in this field and if so, can you tell us what excites you most recently in this particular area?

Dr. Michio Kaku:

We are slowly isolating the genes involved with the aging process. We do not have the fountain of youth, but I think, in the coming decades, we will unravel the aging process at the genetic level. For example, we share 98.5% of our genes with the chimps, yet we live twice as long.

We will find these genes very soon that doubled our life span. However, I don’t [think] the current generation will be able to slow and stop aging. Our grandkids, however, may have a shot at it.

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Question:

Of all the things you have covered, what are you looking forward to the most that you expect to happen within the next 20 years?

Dr. Michio Kaku:

There are so many wonders awaiting us. If we can upload memories, then we might be able to combat Alzheimer’s, as well as create a brain-net of memories and emotions to replace the internet, which would revolutionize entertainment, the economy, and our way of life. Maybe even to help us live forever, and send consciousness into outer space.

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Question:

Dr. Kaku – do you think that consciousness is created entirely in the physical matter of the brain or does man possess a soul or some non-physical entity that survives death?

Dr. Michio Kaku:

A soul might very well exist, but we, as physicists, try to measure and quantify everything. So far, no one has been able to create an experiment to do this for the soul. Efforts have been made to weigh the body after death, but each time we find no evidence of a soul. So a soul may very well exist, but it is not a testable theory.