Latest / The Smart Cookies podcast / Are we on the verge of LIVING FOREVER? With dr. Ariel Zeleznikow - Johnston

Transcript

Are we on the verge of LIVING FOREVER? With dr. Ariel Zeleznikow - Johnston · The Smart Cookies podcast

0:00
Dr. Ariel Zalesnikov-Johnston is a neuroscientist, currently a research fellow at Monash University
0:10
in Australia and the author of the outstanding book, The Future Loves You, How and Why We
0:16
Should Abolish Death.
0:17
Ariel, welcome to the show.
0:20
Thanks very much for having me.
0:21
Well, just what a thoroughly enjoyable and thought provoking book.
0:26
So much to talk about, but I thought it would perhaps be best if we begin this conversation
0:31
with a story that features in The Future Loves You and that's the Elizabeth Hughes story.
0:38
Why is she relevant?
0:40
Yeah.
0:41
So, the book, in very brief, and we'll get into it, is about medical progress and the
0:47
possibility of being able to live just long enough that a treatment is developed so that
0:52
one can live longer.
0:54
In the case of the book, I'm talking about weird sci-fi stuff like brain preservation
0:59
and mind uploading and that sort of stuff.
1:01
But I think to start off with, it's worth thinking about the development of medical
1:06
treatments we take for granted today that once upon a time were themselves science fiction.
1:12
So I start this book with the story of Elizabeth Hughes, who in 1919, at the age of 11, was
1:21
diagnosed with what was then called juvenile diabetes.
1:25
And at the time, there was no insulin.
1:27
We didn't really know what caused diabetes and the prognosis, the survival for someone
1:32
in her circumstance, was only a few months.
1:35
So basically everyone else who developed diabetes died shortly thereafter.
1:42
Now Elizabeth's parents were understandably very upset at this prospect and they weren't
1:48
looking for anything they could do to try and help save their daughter.
1:52
Now they didn't come across insulin because it hadn't been discovered yet, but what they
1:56
did come across was one weird and new therapy that had been invented, which was starvation
2:02
therapy, which was the practice of taking diabetic children and feeding them only just
2:08
enough food so that they didn't starve to death.
2:11
But in doing so, reducing the ill effects of having too much sugar in the blood, which
2:17
is what happens in diabetes, and thus stopping things like getting acidic blood and other
2:22
complications of diabetes.
2:24
So Elizabeth was kept in this starvation-like state, just teetering on the edge of being
2:30
alive.
2:31
But as a result, instead of dying after a few months, she lived for a few years in this
2:36
way.
2:37
And then in 1921, when insulin was discovered and did become available, she was able to
2:42
receive it and then gain back her weight, gain back her health, go on to go to university,
2:49
to get a job, to have kids, and live into her 70s.
2:53
So as a result, it's incredible, this progress that she just lived long enough to make it
3:01
so that she could make use of this new technology.
3:04
And I think it's a good example of how unprecedented circumstances, somebody suddenly not dying
3:13
from a disease that up until that point killed everyone who had it, sometimes things really
3:18
do change.
3:19
So would you say that, I mean, I guess that's what you're saying, that we're at the precipice
3:23
of a similar kind of event when it comes to, I kind of don't want to say immortality because
3:29
it makes me feel like we're discussing Highlander or something.
3:32
But yeah, in a way, abolishing mortality.
3:35
Well, yeah.
3:37
So I mean, immortality is a big term and I avoid using it because obviously, I don't
3:42
think there's any proposal anyone has that could make someone be totally immune to the
3:47
forces of destruction that exist in the world, whether that's car accidents, whether that's
3:52
nuclear war, whether that's the eventual heat death of the universe.
3:55
Like, there's plenty of things out there that can get someone.
3:59
But what I think is relevant from the Elizabeth story is it's an example of somebody surviving
4:05
long enough to make use of newly developed medical treatments so that they could then
4:10
live longer into the future.
4:13
And what I talk about in my book is the prospect of maybe being able to take people who are
4:18
dying today and preserve them in some way, shape or form, such that they're able to be
4:23
revived in the future once future medical advances can fix whatever it was that caused
4:29
them to be dying in the first place and restore them to health that way.
4:33
And hopefully through doing so, give them considerably more time, as much time as is
4:38
practical and as that they would want to take up.
4:41
Okay, let's just jump right in.
4:44
How would preservation work?
4:46
What's the idea or the mechanism behind this process?
4:49
Yeah.
4:50
So weird sci-fi idea, right?
4:52
Like people have probably come across it in movies or books, this idea of taking someone,
4:58
putting them in a cryopod or stasis or something where they're unconscious and unchanging for,
5:05
I don't know, some duration of time, a year, 10 years, a century.
5:09
And then at the end, they come out and they're like basically the same as when they initially
5:13
went in.
5:14
That's the notion in science fiction.
5:16
But the question I wanted to ask with this book is like, is anything like that actually
5:20
possible?
5:22
And if it could be made possible, like what would be real and what is hype and what would
5:26
the constraints be?
5:28
That's the set of things that I work through over the course of the book.
5:33
So it's a science fiction idea, but it does have some precedence from the natural world.
5:40
So we see, for example, there's a kind of frog called the wood frog that lives in the
5:44
Arctic.
5:46
And each winter, most of its body freezes, its heart stops, its brain activity stops,
5:52
but then come spring, it thaws out and it goes back to hopping around.
5:56
So that's one example of how something like this works.
5:59
Or another example, even with human biology that we use today, is the sort of preservation
6:06
methods we use for storing sperm and eggs and embryos that are used in IVF procedures,
6:14
where what happens is you can take these groups of cells or individual cells and you can cool
6:19
them down to really low temperatures and through doing so, essentially stop biological and
6:25
chemical time.
6:27
What's fascinating about that is the technology to do that has improved quite a lot over the
6:32
past few decades as well.
6:35
So initially, people tried naive ideas of just like straight freezing biological material,
6:40
just like cooling it in liquid nitrogen.
6:42
And that kind of worked, but it causes some problems where just straight freezing causes
6:48
ice formation.
6:49
So you get these crystals forming, they can damage the cells, they can dehydrate cells.
6:54
It's not so good.
6:56
So better techniques that have been developed are those that use something called vitrification,
7:02
where essentially what you do is you add some antifreeze or cryoprotectants to things before
7:07
you cool them down.
7:08
And through doing so, you prevent the formation of ice and you can get better survival rates
7:13
for embryos and other material that gets stored.
7:18
Now that works really well for small amounts of biological material, like embryos and sperm
7:23
and eggs.
7:24
But the problem is it doesn't scale so well as you get to bigger and bigger things, whether
7:28
that's organs or whether that's whole human bodies.
7:31
And that's because the cryoprotectants, the antifreeze itself can be a little bit toxic,
7:37
but also it can cause dehydration.
7:40
So if you look at the brains of people who've been preserved using vitrification techniques,
7:46
you'll see that they've shriveled by something like 50%, which is really not ideal for a
7:51
procedure that's supposed to preserve someone fully intact with the hope of being able to
7:55
revive them in the future.
7:58
But that's not the last technique that's been developed.
8:01
And the one that I am most bullish about is a newer technique called aldehyde-stabilized
8:06
cryopreservation, which is a big mouthful.
8:09
But basically it's a technique that involves something called fixation.
8:12
So the idea here is before you cool down a person's body, you can use preservative chemicals
8:19
that you introduce into them, fixatives.
8:22
And what they do is they infiltrate someone's body, they get everywhere, and they essentially
8:27
lock everything in place, like all the molecules, all the structures down to the nanoscopic,
8:33
microscopic level.
8:35
And in doing so, they prevent any decay of the synaptic neural connections that store
8:40
someone's memories, personality, all those sorts of structures.
8:45
And they ensure that everything that's critical to making a person who they are, all those
8:50
structures, all that information, stays intact for an indefinite period of time.
8:56
So that's the short, well, the long answer, I guess, to what techniques we're talking
9:01
about when I talk about preserving individuals.
9:03
Okay, just so I imagine this better.
9:06
So you say with this technology, I'm not going to be able to repeat it, we can preserve our
9:10
brains, right?
9:11
So let's say a person is terminally ill and wants to proceed with this procedure.
9:15
What happens next?
9:16
Do they need to remove the brain and put it in some sort of a vat with these chemicals?
9:21
No.
9:22
Or do they just freeze the whole body like they did with the 60s or whatever?
9:26
Yeah, no, I'll run you through it.
9:28
So I go through this at length in the book, and the short version is what you would do
9:33
is you would take someone who's terminally ill.
9:35
Now, in most jurisdictions, you'd only be able to do this procedure from once their
9:40
heart stops and they were legally declared dead.
9:44
But at the point where someone's just after someone's heart has stopped, what you would
9:47
do is you would insert a catheter, essentially a big needle, into their heart, and you would
9:53
then drain, wash out the blood from their body and introduce these fixative chemicals
9:58
instead.
9:59
So this would permeate throughout their body and their brain, their entire circulatory
10:06
system.
10:07
And in doing so, the preservative chemicals would get everywhere and lock everything in
10:11
place in that manner and ensure good quality preservation.
10:15
What you could then also do is once you've got the fixative in place, you could then
10:19
introduce some antifreeze cryoprotectants.
10:24
And because you've done this initial fixation, you won't get the associated dehydration
10:28
after.
10:30
And that means you can then also store people at cold temperatures if you want without having
10:34
to worry about those issues as well.
10:36
It sounds really gruesome.
10:37
I understand that.
10:39
But I assure you all surgery sounds really gruesome once you start talking about the
10:43
technical details.
10:46
But you said the heart needs to stop beating in order for us to be able to do that legally.
10:53
Wouldn't that defeat the purpose?
10:54
Because that would mean that you have to be dead first.
10:56
So this gets into the definition of what exactly death is, which is also a fascinating aspect
11:02
of this whole set of philosophical questions.
11:05
And I think what really helps is a bit of a historical perspective when trying to keep
11:09
in mind what it means for someone to die.
11:13
Because it can seem really clear cut and like we're always sure that doctors and lawyers
11:18
and ethicists have a clear idea of when someone's alive and when someone's dead.
11:22
But if you look at how the definition has changed over history, you can see it's actually
11:26
much murkier.
11:28
So prior to the middle of the 20th century, doctors used to define someone dead just based
11:35
on their stopped breathing.
11:37
Because before that point, there wasn't really anything you could do for someone anymore
11:41
once they'd stopped breathing.
11:43
But then with the invention of things like mechanical ventilators, things that could
11:47
breathe for people once their lungs had stopped, or cardiopulmonary bypass machines, machines
11:53
that could circulate someone's blood after their heart had stopped beating, it became
11:58
clear that a definition of death just based on someone stopped breathing wasn't really
12:03
going to cut it anymore.
12:05
So in the 1970s in the US, there was the development of a new definition called, sorry, there was
12:13
a new law developed called the Uniform Determination of Death Act.
12:18
And what it did is it defined someone is dead based on one of two criteria, either one,
12:24
irreversible cessation of all heart and lung functions, or two, irreversible cessation
12:32
of all functions of the brain.
12:34
Now that was better than the previous lack of any formal definition.
12:39
But even at the time, it became apparent that there were issues with this newer definition.
12:44
The first issue being that the technology for keeping someone alive even when their
12:49
heart and lungs had stopped was continuing to get better and better.
12:53
And nowadays we use something called ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machines,
12:59
that are essentially able to fully substitute someone's heart and lungs for a period of
13:04
days or weeks by taking the blood out of someone, removing the carbon dioxide, introducing the
13:10
oxygen back into the blood, and then returning that blood back into someone's body.
13:14
So that's why nowadays we don't really think about heart and lung function being critical
13:19
to a person being alive.
13:21
We're much more focused on the brain functions aspect, which is the definition of brain death.
13:27
But the issue with the brain death one as well is that in the same way that we've gotten
13:31
better and better at developing technology, which can replace the functions of someone's
13:37
heart and lungs, we're slowly getting better at doing the same technology for replacing
13:42
damaged brain functions.
13:44
So there's examples where people have had spinal cord injuries and they've been given
13:48
implants that can give them some control over their limbs again or some control over their
13:53
blood pressure.
13:54
And there's newer fancier implants that are helping people with language difficulties
13:59
or other kinds of motor difficulties.
14:01
And these prosthetics are continuing to improve.
14:05
So the question is, if these things continue to evolve, if we continue to replace more
14:10
and more damaged brain functions with machines, then what will it mean for someone to die
14:16
based on a definition of loss of brain functions if you can just always replace brain functions?
14:24
And what some philosophers have said is that actually what we really care about when we
14:29
talk about a person being alive or having died is not whether they can grow their nails
14:34
or beat their heart.
14:36
It's whether they still have their memories, their personality, their goals and desires,
14:41
all the psychological properties that make them them.
14:44
That's what's important to still being alive.
14:47
So to bring this back to your question about someone's heart stopping.
14:50
So already at the moment, there's frequently circumstances where people survive having
14:54
their heart stopped for a period of time.
14:58
But we can legally define someone as dead once their heart is stopped.
15:03
But we can do so even while their brain and all the structures in their brain that give
15:08
them their psychological properties are still intact.
15:11
So that's why I distinguish between the legal definition of death and what I think is actually
15:16
the philosophically correct definition of death.
15:19
Wow.
15:20
Okay.
15:21
If we take this process further like you do in the book, how would our descendants in
15:26
the future, if they choose to do so, then revive or reproduce this kind of hibernating mind?
15:33
Yeah.
15:35
So that's a great question and obviously a speculative one.
15:39
I try and stay mostly as grounded as I can in modern neuroscience, modern medicine.
15:44
But when we're looking to the future, we've got to have some guesses about what might
15:47
happen.
15:48
That's not to say I think it's complete guesswork and that there's nothing that can inform what
15:52
I'm saying.
15:53
Just to say that I am cautious when I'm guessing at what might be possible.
15:58
So that being said, there's two main ideas people have in mind when it comes to future
16:02
revival.
16:03
One is mind uploading, the idea of taking someone's brain and somehow giving them a
16:10
new artificial digital format based on the original biological brain.
16:16
And the other version is just fixing the brain and body that the individual had directly
16:21
through maybe some kind of nanomedicine or just much more advanced medicine than we have
16:25
today.
16:26
Sorry, if I can interrupt just for a second.
16:27
In the first option, do we mean like they just upload you into some sort of a very detailed
16:32
and advanced version of Minecraft or something?
16:36
So yeah, let's get into the details.
16:38
So there's all sorts of different ways you can imagine something like mind uploading,
16:43
giving someone a new digital electronic brain could work.
16:47
So I was talking before about the brain implants and prostheses that people have been given
16:52
where for example, they have loss of a limb and they get an implant which can help them
16:57
control a limb.
16:58
Or when they have a bit of their brain is damaged that they get given some implant that
17:01
can replace what its functions were.
17:04
You can imagine taking this to its logical extreme where you have a digital electronic
17:10
version of a brain that perfectly recreates the previous functions of the biological brain
17:17
on which it was based.
17:18
So that would be called a whole brain emulation.
17:21
Where what you've done is you've looked at all 86 billion neurons that make up some human's
17:27
brain and you've looked at all of the roughly quadrillion connections that exist between
17:33
those neurons, those synapses, and then you've recreated them in some format.
17:38
Now that might be just digitally or virtually inside standard computing hardware that we
17:43
think about in the memory of a hard drive or it could also alternatively possibly be
17:48
in what's called a neuromorphic format.
17:51
So that's a kind of still digital electronic format but where the hardware is much more
17:56
similar to what we normally think about with biological brains.
18:00
But either way, you've taken the biology, you've scanned someone's brain at very high
18:05
resolution, you've used that information to recreate their brain, and then you have to
18:10
connect it up to some sort of sensory inputs and outputs, whether that's a robotic body,
18:15
whether that's a virtual body, something that can give them back their vision and their
18:20
taste and their feeling of having a body.
18:23
That's the coarse-grained idea of what people have in mind when they're thinking about uploading.
18:29
Okay, this is all speculative, of course, but if we upload my personality and my memories
18:35
and then upload it and bring it back online sometime in the future, wouldn't I just be
18:40
a clone then?
18:42
You know what I mean?
18:43
Would that still feel like me?
18:45
Yeah, it's not obvious that that would be you, right?
18:50
I share that intuition as well.
18:52
But what I would say is when you take a step back, what it is that makes someone the same
18:56
person over time ends up being pretty weird and complicated.
19:00
And you can prompt this intuition almost immediately by considering the fact that you're not really
19:05
even made of the same stuff that you were a few years ago, nor will you be made of the
19:10
same stuff in a few years from now.
19:13
So about every year and a half, you fully replace the or almost entirely replace the
19:19
physical material of your body through eating and drinking and breathing and having your
19:24
cells change over, all this material change over.
19:28
So the question is, what is it that makes you the same person today that you were a
19:32
year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, or will be in a few years from now?
19:37
That's the question of personal identity.
19:41
And what's interesting is that the question of personal identity comes apart from the
19:44
question of what is it that makes you who you are in any given moment?
19:49
So when you're conscious right now, when you're sitting at this computer talking to me, feeling
19:53
your chair or listening to this podcast later, you're conscious in that moment, you have
19:58
those experiences right then, but that's a separate question from what binds your experiences
20:04
together across time?
20:06
What makes your experience from a year ago or 10 years ago somehow be part of the same
20:10
person that you are right now?
20:12
Okay, so we got two questions.
20:15
What makes you conscious at the moment and personal identity and how does this relate
20:18
to whether you're a copy or not a copy?
20:21
So you can go through it quite laboriously.
20:24
You can go through, well, maybe it's having the same body.
20:26
Well, that doesn't seem to work because we're made of different stuff over time.
20:29
Or you can say, well, maybe it's about having the same memories or the same consciousness
20:33
or the same personality.
20:36
That I think is a better argument for what makes someone the same person over time.
20:41
And indeed, if you look at all the different options available, I think the best answer
20:46
to the question of personal identity or what makes someone the same person over time is
20:51
that they're able to hold on to their memories, their personality, their goals and desires
20:57
through the maintenance of the particular structures of their brain that encode those
21:01
things.
21:03
And if you accept that is what helps you survive over time, then it does have the weird implication
21:08
that even if you change someone's brain into completely different format, if you switched
21:13
it out from biological components to electronic components or you transferred it over into
21:20
a computer, that as long as the memories, personality, all those things were still there,
21:26
then that would indeed still be the same person in the same way that I'm the same person,
21:31
even though I'm not made of the same stuff I was 10 years ago.
21:34
Yeah.
21:35
I wanted to answer with like, oh, of course it's the continuity of self, you know, obviously,
21:40
but that's even murkier than, I suppose, personality.
21:44
But personality does change, you know?
21:47
Yeah, it does and it doesn't.
21:49
So like people's personalities are actually quite stable across their lifespan.
21:52
You can like ask people the same questions or how would you react in these scenarios
21:56
at different points of their lifespan?
21:58
And they're much more similar to themselves over time than they are to the answers that
22:02
other people give.
22:03
Like if you're an extroverted person now, you'll probably be an extroverted person in
22:07
20 years from now.
22:08
And if you're an anxious person now, you'll probably be an anxious person in 20 years
22:12
from now.
22:14
But I just wanted to note that what the self is and what consciousness is also aren't necessarily
22:19
the same thing in that it's definitely not the case that we have an unbroken stream of
22:26
consciousness over our lifespan, where we go to sleep at night and we're maybe unconscious
22:31
for a time or we undergo anesthesia and we're almost certainly unconscious for a time.
22:36
Or even more radically, there's an already existing procedure that's used today where
22:41
we induce hypothermia in people.
22:43
So this isn't the brain preservation stuff.
22:46
This is what they use in surgeries all over the world today.
22:50
Well what they'll do is they'll take a patient, they'll cool them down to like 18 degrees
22:54
Celsius or so, their heart will stop, their brain activity will stop.
23:00
They'll look for all intents and purposes like a corpse, but it gives surgeons an operating
23:04
window where they can operate on the blood vessels around someone's heart or the delicate
23:10
blood vessels in their brain that they wouldn't otherwise be able to operate on.
23:14
And it gives them like 30 to 45 minutes to work before they can then warm the person
23:18
back up again and they're restored to consciousness.
23:21
And somebody definitely wasn't conscious during this period of time.
23:25
They didn't have any brain activity or really anything that could sustain consciousness,
23:29
but they definitely survived this, meaning the self can survive even periods where consciousness
23:34
isn't there.
23:37
If I forced you to risk a prediction on when we would be able to achieve all of this preservation,
23:43
scanning, reviving, et cetera, what would you say?
23:48
So there's a difference between my view and what I think the community of neuroscientists
23:53
would say.
23:54
So I'm slightly more optimistic.
23:57
I look at extrapolating the history of computing performance and I think about, well, so a
24:03
brain maybe has something like, well, we know it has about 86 billion neurons.
24:09
We know it's got about a quadrillion connections.
24:11
We have an idea that we could model those things with maybe like each neuron could be
24:16
modeled as like 10,000 different compartments interacting with each other.
24:20
And you can put these sort of numbers together and get a guess at like what amount of computing
24:25
power would be required to create like a digital version of a brain.
24:30
And then you can look at like how computing performance has been improving over the years
24:34
and you see things like, I think we've had a hundred million increase in computing speed
24:39
since the 1990s to today.
24:41
And if you think there's a chance that that will continue to hold, that Moore's law will
24:44
continue to hold, that would give you an estimate of maybe we could produce an equivalent digital
24:51
version of a human brain sometime in the late 2040s or early 2050s.
24:57
But that's assuming everything went right and it never does in science.
25:01
So probably at some later time point than that, maybe towards the end of the century.
25:06
But actually I did a survey of neuroscientists recently of like randomly selected neuroscientists
25:13
asking them these sorts of questions, being like, when do you think the first whole brain
25:17
emulation of a human would possibly be created?
25:21
And the average response I got from people was about 21, 25, I think.
25:25
So sometime early in the 22nd century.
25:29
Now these are all sort of ballpark numbers.
25:30
I wouldn't put too much stock in them.
25:32
I wouldn't be putting big bets down on like, this is the precise year, but that's sort
25:36
of the vague numbers people have in mind for when these things might become possible.
25:41
I just got a terrible idea.
25:43
What if this actually happens, but then people in the future decide, for example, that I
25:48
was a total piece of shit or something and then they just upload me in some nightmarish
25:54
scenario like the final level of the video game Doom, which is basically in hell or something.
26:00
You know what I mean?
26:02
Yeah.
26:03
So there's plenty of sci-fi stories that sort of explore these hellish possibilities.
26:08
And like, they're obviously impossible to completely dismiss the idea that that might
26:13
be something that happens.
26:15
Because if you're saying this technology is possible, then it enables all sorts of scenarios.
26:19
But my response would be is it's very strange to imagine a world in which someone would
26:23
go to the bother of preserving you, of maintaining your preserved body for all this time, of
26:28
working out how to revive and upload you, of restoring you to consciousness with all
26:33
the expense that it would take to do that, to then just decide to like, torture you.
26:38
I think in almost all circumstances, if people don't care about you, they're just going
26:43
to let your body rot or like, not do anything.
26:45
And the default state would be just to leave people in preservation or let them decay.
26:51
I think what's actually much more likely is the only circumstance under which anyone is
26:55
getting revived is if our descendants look at the world in which they live in and they
27:00
see that that world is a better world than the world that we live in today, that we've
27:05
solved climate change, we haven't destroyed ourselves with nuclear war, we've solved
27:10
poverty issues, we provided wealth and prosperity to everyone.
27:15
And they think, you know what, this is actually a pretty good world to live in.
27:19
Like, maybe it would be a fun challenge to try and revive our ancestors and let them
27:23
share this world with us.
27:24
I mean, that's why I called the book The Future Loves You, because this is the sort of thing
27:29
I think we should be working towards.
27:31
And I think it's the positive vision of like, the kind of future we would like to live in
27:36
is one that would be good for our descendants and then hopefully also good for us.
27:40
Because in the same way, like, there's plenty of terrible things that exist at the moment,
27:44
whether that's climate change, conflicts, inequality.
27:48
But if you take a bit of a historical perspective, and you look back at the fact that like, 200
27:53
years ago, one in two children died before they were 15.
27:56
Most people lived in extreme poverty.
27:59
There was considerably more violence than there is today.
28:03
Women were oppressed, we still had slavery.
28:06
Like, it's not that the world doesn't have problems, but it's getting better.
28:10
And I hope that it will continue to get better in that way.
28:15
So sort of like the Star Trek scenario, where we overcome these issues.
28:19
But I don't know, I'm just imagining, since we're still very tribal, that in the future,
28:25
if the conservatives have this technology, they're just going to revive the conservatives
28:30
or vice versa, you know, this sort of scenario.
28:33
Let's just revive the people that look like us or think like us.
28:36
Well, there's all sorts of scenarios you can imagine.
28:38
I mean, I think the default state, so we can imagine, I mean, I think there's a reasonable
28:43
chance, unfortunately, that like the world does get destroyed or ends up impoverished
28:48
or we don't end up producing a flourishing future.
28:50
And if that scenario comes to pass, then none of what I'm talking about is going to work.
28:54
So already we're assuming, you know, at least some groups of people have enough wealth and
28:59
prosperity to be able to create the sorts of technologies I'm talking about.
29:04
Then in that scenario, there's the question of like, well, how expensive will it be?
29:07
Who will it be distributed to?
29:10
Will it be distributed to everyone?
29:12
Even if it is to everyone with what time costs, like who will get it first, those sorts of
29:16
things.
29:18
What I imagine, though, is like you can look around at medical technology we have today
29:22
to give you maybe some hint of how it will go.
29:25
Where certainly there's things that are very expensive and very unequally distributed,
29:31
things like very expensive cancer therapies that only rich people in Western countries
29:36
have any hope of getting access to.
29:38
And that's tragic that more people can't use these who need them.
29:42
But the general trend with all these medical technologies is we mentioned insulin before
29:48
at the start of this chat.
29:50
So Elizabeth, one of the first people to get insulin, she only really managed to get insulin
29:54
because her dad, I think, was the former Supreme Court Justice, maybe a former vice president
30:01
of the United States.
30:02
So she was really on the short list for getting it.
30:04
Yeah.
30:05
So in 1919, that's 1921, sorry, that's what you needed.
30:09
But today, a century later, basically everyone with diabetes has access to insulin.
30:14
And in most places in the world, it's quite cheap and affordable and readily accessible.
30:19
And that's mostly what we see for all medical technologies, where they start off being restricted
30:23
to particularly well-off groups, but then they become easier and easier to access and
30:28
more broadly distributed.
30:29
And that's kind of what I guess would happen with this sort of revival technology as well,
30:33
where maybe initially it's only used for those who have connections and money, but hopefully
30:38
would become accessible to everyone over time.
30:42
So suppose the future goes your way and we start doing this preservation en masse in
30:48
the hundreds of millions.
30:49
Where would the future humanity put all of these confused ancestors?
30:54
Yeah.
30:55
Well, there's the question of what do we do with people we preserve today?
30:59
And what do we do with people once we revive them in the future?
31:03
And so the first thing I would say is it seems like a lot of people, I think it's like, I'm
31:07
going to get the exact number wrong, like 70 million people or so die every year at
31:12
the moment, which is quite a lot of people, but people actually aren't that big.
31:17
And we could fairly easily warehouse that number of people per year in an ongoing effort.
31:22
It would cost a reasonable amount of money to do so, but an amount of money that's a
31:27
few percentage of preexisting healthcare budgets typically.
31:33
In fact, we talk about a lack of housing and a lack of land, but I think it's only something
31:37
like 1% of all of Earth's surface, like landmass is currently built up on.
31:43
So there is space for this sort of stuff.
31:45
And you don't need prime real estate for warehousing bodies that are just preserved for a long
31:49
period of time.
31:50
But then there's the question of like, yeah, what do you do with people once you revive
31:54
them?
31:55
And then it really depends on the technology you have in mind.
31:59
So if you live in a world where there is too many people, not enough space, not enough
32:04
money, they're probably just going to not revive people.
32:08
They'll leave them in the warehouses.
32:10
It's only a world in which either we've worked out how to produce enough space here on Earth
32:14
or space travel has gotten cheap enough that there's plenty of land up in the stars these
32:20
days or where we've worked out how to do uploading and people can live in digital formats, taking
32:26
up very little space, that I think anyone's going to start reviving people.
32:31
Because the great thing about preservation is if our descendants don't have the resources
32:35
to do it at the time, they can just leave people preserved until they do.
32:40
Speaking of confused ancestors, here's my last gripe with the idea.
32:44
Technological progress, like we talked about, seems to have gone light speed ever since
32:48
the scientific revolution happened.
32:51
And if anything, it's only speeding up as we go along, which means that 250 years from
32:56
now, let's say, the world would be unrecognizable to us living here in 2024.
33:01
Don't you think someone who's revived a quarter of millennia from now would basically just
33:06
immediately become either severely depressed or maybe even insane due to shock and this
33:14
insanely intense feeling of alienation?
33:17
I have no doubt that the future, no matter what happens, will be extremely weird.
33:22
So I agree with you on that one.
33:24
Again, to pull up historical analogies in the same way that if we took someone from
33:28
the 1800s who was, I don't know, a peasant farmer into today's world of supermarkets
33:34
and aircraft and TikTok, they'd be like, what is going on?
33:38
They'd be so confused.
33:41
But that being said, I think if they were given supports to adapt to the language, to
33:45
work out what was happening with technology, then they may well live, despite a period
33:51
of confusion, a still satisfying life once they started to adapt.
33:55
And we can see sort of analogous circumstances even today when occasionally there are people
34:00
who've come from war-torn, developing, impoverished countries into rich, developed, first world
34:06
countries.
34:08
And when these people are given language classes, when they're given technology classes, when
34:12
they're provided some sort of social community integration, typically they do describe having
34:18
very high life satisfaction, particularly if they're able to take their friends and
34:23
family and escape with other refugees with them.
34:26
So I imagine in the scenario I'm talking about, we would all be as temporal refugees, we'd
34:31
be arriving very confused into this future world.
34:35
But again, my hope, and this is optimistic, but I think not entirely unrealistic, is that
34:41
if our descendants bothered to revive us, they'd probably bother to help us integrate
34:45
as well.
34:46
Okay, I want to switch it up and just ask you, what do you think personally would be
34:51
a good number of years to have, like just in general as an idea?
34:56
Should we put a cap on it?
34:57
Are we talking 150, 200, 1,000 years?
35:01
Or just basically an indefinite life if no accidents happen or something?
35:04
You could basically end whenever you wanted to.
35:07
Yeah, I mean, the shorter answer is I think it should always be up to the individual.
35:12
Like choices of health and lifespan should as much as possible be for individual people
35:17
to decide.
35:18
And if they want to live 150 years and no longer, fine.
35:21
If they want to live 80 years and no longer, that should be up to them.
35:25
But it's really a matter of giving people choices.
35:27
Now, it might seem to people who are in their 20s and 30s and 40s that when they get to
35:33
their 80s, they'll be like, well, I've done everything I set out to do, and I'm finished
35:38
with life.
35:39
But if you actually go and you survey those who are terminally ill, you go into hospices,
35:45
you find people who are sadly dying of cancer, and you ask them like, what is your will to
35:51
live?
35:52
What you will see is that I think something like 70% of them in surveys that have been
35:56
done still describe having a very strong will to live.
36:00
And I think that's because for most people, whether they're 80 or probably even 100 or
36:05
120, if you give them the option of another day in the sun with their relatives and some
36:11
music and some ice cream or whatever else they enjoy, or if you give them more time
36:16
to pursue their goals and their passions, people would generally like to live longer
36:21
lives than we currently do.
36:23
And like you can compare to some other animals where there are tortoises and whales that
36:28
live for something like 200 and 250 years, and that seems like a better amount of time.
36:34
Or you can look at darker versions where our ancestors lived something like 40 to 60 years.
36:39
And that certainly seems like too little time, I think, to most people today.
36:44
But the short answer is, yeah, I think people should just be able to choose for themselves.
36:48
Well, speaking of years, why are we hardwired to only live about 75 to 80 years?
36:54
Seems quite random.
36:55
Although I guess any number would seem quite random, to be honest.
36:59
But you mentioned whales.
37:00
For example, I just read that they recently found a Greenland shark who was a 400 years
37:06
old, 392 years old.
37:09
Hardly fair, isn't it?
37:10
Yeah.
37:11
I mean, it's sort of it's a question we don't think about very much.
37:14
We'd only just think, you know, humans live for 80 years, dogs live for, I'm going to
37:18
get this wrong, I'm not a dog owner.
37:19
Is it like seven to 10 years or something?
37:21
It depends on the breed, but it's up to 15.
37:24
It sucks.
37:25
Yeah.
37:26
Yeah.
37:27
It's like one to two years, and then there's these like whales and sharks swimming around
37:31
for centuries.
37:32
Like what gives?
37:33
How come we don't get to live that long?
37:35
Essentially what it comes down to is an evolutionary trade-off between how quickly animals of a
37:42
species can start reproducing and how likely they are to be killed by their environment.
37:48
And it has to be this trade-off because actually, what would be evolutionarily optimal would
37:54
be an animal that had really short reproductive cycles that bred all the time and was also
37:59
immortal.
38:00
It never died.
38:01
Like that would be a perfect organism.
38:03
It would just like continue breeding, continue breeding, continue breeding.
38:07
But you can't do that.
38:08
There's no way evolutionarily to design that.
38:10
So what ends up happening instead is a trade-off between making something start breeding quickly
38:17
and not really caring about how long it's built to last or building something to last
38:22
a really long time, but making some sacrifices on how long it takes to start breeding.
38:28
And this essentially comes down at a genetic level to choices that are made with individual
38:34
genes and individual variants of genes that affect a whole bunch of different things.
38:39
And you have to calibrate them.
38:41
I say you, but evolution calibrates them either a bit more towards living longer or a bit
38:46
more towards shorter reproduction.
38:49
And the thing that really applies the pressure is how likely that kind of animal is to be
38:53
killed by its environment.
38:55
So for example, if you're a little mouse, you could build a mouse that didn't age and
39:00
that had slower reproduction, but something's going to step on it or a cat's going to kill
39:05
it or a snake's going to kill it in a pretty short period of time.
39:09
So there's not really any reason to build a mouse that could theoretically live to 50
39:13
years if it's just going to die from external causes within a few months anyway.
39:20
But on the other side, if you're a giant whale, until humans invented harpoons, basically
39:25
nothing could kill you.
39:27
So it made sense to build it so that it didn't get cancer, it didn't get heart disease,
39:31
it just lasted a really long time.
39:33
And so it doesn't matter if it doesn't start breeding until it gets to 13 or 15 or something
39:38
if it's going to live 200 years afterwards anyway.
39:41
So that's where it comes from.
39:43
So with humans, we live 80 years, which is pretty good for most species, basically because
39:48
we are pretty good at sticking around for a while and not being killed.
39:52
But we still, compared to whales, have some significant sources of things that kill us.
39:57
And the two things historically that did that, one was infections, getting cuts or pneumonia
40:02
or any of those sorts of things.
40:04
And the other thing sadly was other humans, where I think historically we had something
40:08
like a 15 or 10% rate of homicide or being killed by other people.
40:15
So yeah, that's why we live 80 years.
40:17
Yeah, it's fascinating how it's all about perspective.
40:21
Like you said, when I was 19, I was like, 80 years, what am I going to do with all this
40:25
time?
40:26
You know, Jesus Christ.
40:27
And now, and I'm almost 40.
40:29
I'm like, what the hell?
40:31
Only 80 years?
40:32
That sucks.
40:33
A common experience, I think, for people.
40:36
And when you were explaining how it works, it's so brutally functional in a way.
40:43
So in a nutshell, the more dangerous there are out there trying to kill us, the shorter
40:47
our reproductive age, the faster we die.
40:50
Is that it?
40:51
Yeah.
40:52
Yeah, pretty much.
40:53
I mean, like nature and biology is like beautiful and fascinating, but it is also extremely
40:59
cruel.
41:00
Like evolution doesn't care about anything except inclusive fitness, reproductive ability.
41:05
And it'll sacrifice years of people's lives or health or anything if it will slightly
41:11
improve fitness.
41:13
And it's pretty horrible.
41:16
I watched an interview you did for another podcast discussing your book.
41:19
And most of the comments underneath basically kind of coalesced around the same idea.
41:24
And there was people saying, you know, by the love of God, I don't want to go to work
41:28
for 200 years more.
41:31
And I just want to live a better, not a longer life.
41:34
But I guess those two aren't mutually exclusive necessarily.
41:38
However, there seems to be the idea that people want to live in a much better world first
41:44
before we begin talking about living drastically longer lives.
41:48
Yeah, it seems a little odd depending on how you ask the question.
41:52
You get different answers from people.
41:54
And I even am not entirely sure how to square this all together yet.
41:57
So I have heard comments like that.
42:00
But what's a bit odd is if you also ask people, how satisfied are you with your life?
42:05
Or is your life worth living?
42:08
Most people, at least in developed countries, actually say, yes, my life is worth living.
42:13
I think out of a score of one to 10, where one is not good at all and 10 is the best,
42:19
people in Europe and the US and Australia typically give something like a seven out
42:23
of 10.
42:24
That doesn't mean everyone.
42:26
Some people sadly don't have great lives for all sorts of psychological, medical, social
42:34
reasons.
42:35
But the typical person does say and does think that they have a good life.
42:40
So even if all we could offer people was a continuation of their current existence, but
42:45
for longer, I think many people would quite like to take that up.
42:50
But that being said, also, I agree with them when they say, you know, we should be working
42:54
on producing a better world and focusing on that.
42:58
I just don't think they're exclusive.
42:59
In the same way that we should be trying to ensure that wealth is distributed to more
43:04
and more people instead of captured by an elite, in the same way we should be trying
43:08
to cure diseases that are still afflicting people, we should be doing all of those things
43:13
at the same time as improving living standards and improving working standards for people.
43:18
I don't think you have to choose one or the other.
43:20
Since I can only relate to these things in like trashy pop culture terms, have you seen
43:25
the movie Elysium?
43:26
It's a sci-fi starring Matt Damon, where the oligarchs, the elites live on like a private
43:32
moon where they have the technology to live endless and endlessly healthy lives while the
43:39
rest of the folks live in squalor in these sort of giant favelas on Earth.
43:45
This also seems like a pretty plausible scenario, no?
43:49
I think if we had a world in which we developed some sort of anti-aging medicine, but it costs
43:54
like $50 million for it to work, that would be really like dire.
44:01
I still think it would be good to have something that we could work on making cheaper, but
44:05
we would be dealing with these really difficult ethical questions of like, how can we ensure
44:09
access?
44:10
Is this equitable and fair?
44:12
I guess, unfortunately for billionaires, but fortunately for everyone, I don't think that's
44:17
going to happen anytime soon.
44:20
My proposal is much weirder, where I'm saying I don't have a way to keep only billionaires
44:25
alive for centuries.
44:27
I think we have a preservation technique that has an enforced period of stasis, but which
44:32
could actually be done fairly cheaply.
44:35
My estimate is something like $10,000 per procedure to preserve someone and maybe a
44:41
few hundred to $1,000 a year in storage costs if these procedures were provided at scale,
44:47
which is well within the sorts of surgical medical costs that are provided to people
44:51
generally, again, in Western developed countries.
44:57
It's not the case, I think, that in the near term, we're going to be seeing only these
45:00
sorts of things being available only to the super rich and everyone else just left to
45:04
die.
45:05
I think the main constraints are do people actually want to take up these sorts of preservation
45:09
technologies, not will they be able to afford them.
45:13
That's separate to the revival.
45:14
I think revival might be quite expensive at some point in the future and more like other
45:18
things where it starts super expensive and then gets cheaper.
45:21
But again, the great thing is as long as someone's preserved, they can wait until it becomes
45:25
cheaper.
45:26
Yeah.
45:27
Also, what's cool about this idea is that if we do become a better society or better
45:32
humans in the future, they could choose individually who to revive and who not to revive.
45:37
They would basically say, oh, this person was really cool.
45:41
They weren't just hoarding wealth.
45:44
Let's revive this person.
45:45
Maybe they're there.
45:47
We don't have any more use of these.
45:49
This is an idea I speculate on in the book where I hope that future generations will
45:54
be better people than we are today.
45:56
In the same way that we don't have slaves, we're nicer to women.
46:00
We generally, despite our flaws, I think nicer to animals in the world than we were in times
46:08
before.
46:09
There's still a lot of improvements that we could do.
46:12
I hope that people a few centuries from now will look back on us and be like, yeah, they
46:16
did some pretty hard stuff, but we're graceful and kind and generous and we'll revive them
46:21
regardless, particularly if we've done a good job of improving things.
46:25
But I definitely think it's the case that if you're the sort of person who contributed
46:30
to making the world a better place in the future, if you're one of the people who did
46:34
nice things, solved problems, otherwise overcome the difficulties and challenges of our time
46:41
to contribute to advancements, maybe you get bumped up the revival list or something.
46:47
Who knows?
46:48
But this is very speculation.
46:51
All right.
46:52
I want to talk about the more quote unquote philosophical implications of potentially
46:57
living forever.
46:58
What do you think would happen to our very nature if we did end up being basically immortal?
47:07
Would we still be humans or would we be something else?
47:11
I mean, it again depends on what you define as core to being human.
47:15
If you mean that to be human is to have the particular genetic makeup that makes up a
47:21
human cell and differentiates a human cell from a chimpanzee cell from a mouse cell,
47:27
then I guess if we start messing around with the fundamental building blocks of what we've
47:30
made of, arguably we wouldn't be human anymore.
47:34
But I don't think that's what most people think or really care about when it comes to
47:37
being human in the same way that I don't think somebody thinks they're a different person
47:41
if they get a prosthetic implant, whether that's false teeth or an artificial heart
47:45
or any sort of artificial device.
47:49
I think what most people think is core to being human is having love for one's friends
47:54
and family, experiencing the world in the particular way they do or having particular
47:59
tastes or musical preferences or professional goals, those sorts of psychological things.
48:06
And I think that if revival is successful, the only way it could be successful and it
48:11
could really bring a person back would be if it held on to those things which are core
48:15
to making people who they are.
48:18
And in that sense, I'd say that people would still be human or at least this wouldn't work
48:23
unless it kept that part of our humanity.
48:26
I guess I was maybe asking about a sort of existential motivation that is derived from
48:32
the awareness that the number of years on this earth is limited to us.
48:37
So we better do something useful or meaningful while we're here.
48:41
With this removed, would we still care about anything?
48:45
I don't think most people really go about their lives and are motivated to action because
48:50
they're worried that in some time period from now, they're going to die.
48:55
When people are going to a party, I don't think they're like, well, I've only got X
48:58
many parties left before I end, or when they go for a promotion, I think that they're more
49:03
motivated by proximate goals of wanting to achieve things in the meantime or enjoy a
49:08
particular day or a holiday in a shorter period of time.
49:11
That's not to say people don't have goals that take years or decades to complete.
49:15
But again, I think it's the goal itself that mostly is what's motivating people rather
49:20
than the knowledge of there being a deadline at the end.
49:23
And I think this becomes a bit obvious when you think about the fact that if we knew that
49:26
we lived for 200 or 300 years, I don't think that would put people off from doing things
49:32
at the moment.
49:34
Maybe on the margin, it might make them procrastinate a little bit more.
49:38
But I think for the most part, people already procrastinate today knowing that their lives
49:43
are short.
49:44
And a lot of people get a lot of stuff done with no regard for the fact that it's because
49:49
they're going to die.
49:51
So I suppose you don't believe in this Freudian death drive that basically deep down we all
49:57
want to die at some point.
49:59
I imagine especially if we indeed have lived healthy, full and meaningful lives.
50:05
No, it both doesn't make sense to me on a personal emotional level.
50:10
I don't see the argument for it at a philosophical level.
50:12
And it would be a very weird thing to evolutionarily program into an animal to have it be okay
50:18
with or even strive for its own eventual death.
50:22
What do you think would happen to relationships if you were married to somebody or friendships
50:29
even that you're like, oh, damn, I have to spend the next 500 years with this person
50:34
now?
50:35
It would change pretty much everything when we talk about these timescales.
50:39
I think it would get...
50:41
Sorry, I keep interrupting.
50:44
I think it would get complicated, but probably better in a lot of ways despite being weirder.
50:50
I mean, I think about people I've been friends with since I was a child.
50:54
And I used to have maybe when I was at school, much like stronger and more frequent interactions
50:59
with.
51:00
But nowadays, I still have very rich relationships with these people.
51:03
Even if it's one of my best friends who I only see every couple of months or every six
51:06
months these days.
51:08
What I imagine is you would start to develop many, many more of these sorts of things where
51:12
there'd be people who'd be really intensely part of your life for a period of time.
51:16
And then you might drift apart for a while, but you'd still hold on to these strong connections
51:20
to people.
51:22
That would be my guess in one sense.
51:24
And also, there's already relationships today, whether it's people who have family members,
51:31
whether that's your brother or sister or a child or a partner, where it doesn't really
51:35
seem like over the years and decades, people get sick of each other or want to stop spending
51:40
time with each other.
51:41
I haven't really come across a parent or a grandparent.
51:44
Well, I shouldn't say haven't.
51:46
But most parents or grandparents are still quite happy to see their kids and grandkids,
51:51
even if it's for the hundredth, thousandth, ten thousandth time.
51:55
Now there's more complication, I admit, when it comes to romantic relationships.
52:00
Many couples are...
52:01
I suppose the argument is out of the question.
52:02
Well, I think that's up for each couple to decide.
52:05
It works well for some people.
52:07
Perhaps it would become more strange for others.
52:09
And that would be complicated, but I think it's a much nicer problem to have than the
52:14
one of it being till death do us part, which is what we have at the moment.
52:18
Better they have to talk about it again in 50 years or 100 years from now.
52:23
Do you think there's some sort of like a hard drive that we have a limit when our brains
52:28
are concerned of how much information we can retain?
52:31
If we do end up living for 500 years, would you be able to remember things?
52:38
Or like basically process new information?
52:41
Or would you just be like oversaturated and overwhelmed by everything that's happening
52:46
all the time?
52:48
This is a fascinating question.
52:49
And I think, unfortunately, one that we really don't have a clear answer to as of yet.
52:53
But I'll talk through how one thinks about it.
52:56
So we know, as I mentioned before, a brain has something like 86 billion neurons and
53:01
a quadrillion connections.
53:03
So a huge number of connections, but still a finite number of connections.
53:09
It's not expandable at this point in time.
53:12
So there's presumably only so much you can pack into it.
53:14
But what we don't know is like, what is the limit of what can be packed into it?
53:19
Because it could well be the case that a lot more that can be packed into a human brain
53:23
than ever actually fits into it during a typical human lifespan.
53:27
Because it's not the case that people die because their brains are oversaturated and
53:31
their memories are falling out in the end.
53:34
Typically people get cancer or heart disease and die before those limits get reached, whatever
53:39
they are.
53:40
Even in things like dementia, that's not being caused by people's brains filling up.
53:44
That's called, we don't really know what the cause is, but we know that it's associated
53:48
with synapses, brain connections being destroyed, and then the neurons themselves actually dying.
53:54
Not that like there's too many connections forming and somehow it stops functioning.
53:59
So the question is like, well, actually, maybe you could pack 150 years, 200 years, 500 years
54:06
worth of memory in there.
54:07
We're not sure.
54:08
Certainly, there's other precedents of human brains being able to do amazing things that
54:13
you wouldn't have been able to predict ahead of time.
54:15
So some obvious examples being, our ancestors would only have met a few hundred people in
54:22
their lifetime back if you live like 500,000 years ago.
54:26
So they wouldn't have had to recognize that many faces, but it turns out that like human
54:30
stay can end up recognizing thousands and thousands and thousands of faces.
54:34
So a much greater capacity was built in than what was actually needed.
54:39
And there's other cool things like we're able to read, even though reading is only something
54:42
that's existed for a few thousand years.
54:44
Essentially, again, because of like spare capacity in our brains compared to what was
54:50
evolutionarily designed for.
54:52
So my guess is it would be you could store a lot more memories than typically fits into
54:57
a human lifespan, even if maybe it starts to become a problem at some point, and then
55:02
we'd have to work on brain implants, other solutions to that problem once we got there.
55:08
So this sort of neuroplasticity could be potentially endless.
55:12
But I had a high school reunion recently.
55:15
And while I did remember the faces, I can't remember like the last names, even though
55:20
it was like, you know, 19 years ago.
55:22
So I don't know, I'm a little bit skeptical.
55:25
Maybe that's just my core cognitive performance.
55:28
No, no, no, we do obviously forget things.
55:31
We do tend to forget things that are less important, less salient to us.
55:35
We discard mostly information that is less meaningful, and we hold on to the things that
55:39
are really core to us.
55:41
So it's not that there's nothing lost.
55:43
And it would be great if we had means of preventing those sorts of losses.
55:47
My point is just that like we can pack a lifetime of experiences in.
55:52
Elderly people outside of cases of dementia typically are able to recall a truly staggering
55:57
number of memories and episodes from their lives and amounts of material that they've
56:01
recalled and remembered.
56:04
And my suspicion is, if we were able to get around these other health issues, even typical
56:10
human brains could store a whole heap more than they are currently able ever get to.
56:16
At the end, I just had another horrific kind of thought.
56:21
I personally don't believe in it, but I hosted Dr. Bruce Grayson, who's studying NDEs a while
56:27
back.
56:28
Near-death experiences?
56:29
Exactly, yes.
56:31
And he sort of convinced that there is something after death.
56:35
It would kind of be tragic if we did end up living forever, end up being almost immortal,
56:43
and then denying ourselves the chance to experience the afterlife if it does exist and it's just
56:49
like an amazing endless party or something.
56:52
Would be ironic in a dark sort of sense.
56:55
Absolutely, that would be tragic.
56:57
I just think the evidence for an afterlife is not particularly strong insofar as people
57:03
have not proposed clear mechanisms through which something like that could really work.
57:10
I mean, if it is the case that, for example, humans have souls and when a person dies,
57:15
the soul leaves the body and goes to the afterlife, I guess what I would say is I don't think
57:19
the preservation techniques I'm proposing would be able to bind someone's soul.
57:24
If it's an immaterial soul, then the preservative chemicals presumably aren't going to hold
57:28
onto it.
57:29
So you'd still get to go to the afterlife.
57:31
But from what I can see is arguments involving souls or sort of spiritual dualistic accounts
57:42
of what it is that gives us our consciousness, makes us who we are, don't have a lot of explanatory
57:48
power at being able to say why it is that someone's memories or personality changes
57:52
when they get a head injury or why it is that we lose consciousness when we undergo anesthesia
57:58
or are hypothermic.
58:00
These things seem much better explained by suggesting that what is core to being a person
58:05
is having particular kinds of brain activity in the particular structures of our brain.
58:10
And the flip side of that is if that activity stops permanently or those brain structures
58:15
are destroyed, then there's pretty strong evidence to think that the person's just gone
58:19
forever from that point onwards.
58:21
Yeah.
58:22
I did tell them during our interview that I did undergo anesthesia and there was just
58:26
like an absence of everything.
58:28
So I was like, okay, that's it when you die.
58:30
That's probably it.
58:31
Yeah.
58:32
But his argument was...
58:33
That's exactly what I think happens.
58:34
Yeah.
58:35
But his argument was more in the line of like our brain being a receiver of some sorts.
58:39
So if you damage the receiver, of course, you're not going to get a clear picture.
58:45
Yeah.
58:46
I mean, so I understand what I'm proposing sounds super weird and people are probably
58:50
really skeptical of what I'm saying.
58:52
So I encourage skepticism.
58:55
And I would say that if you have really weird claims like my brain preservation ones or
58:59
this guy's near-death experiences due to spiritual connections to souls or something, I don't
59:05
want to necessarily just like completely dismiss things out of hand just because they're weird.
59:09
But what you have to do is you have to say like, this is how my argument could be proven
59:12
or disproven.
59:13
Here's an experiment that you could run.
59:15
And I know that because people have tried running experiments with these near-death
59:19
experiences that there doesn't seem to be much experimental evidence to back them up.
59:23
I think the most famous one is there's this proposal that like people would ascend out
59:28
of their bodies during near-death experiments.
59:30
And then they would put something, some object somewhere.
59:32
Yeah.
59:33
And so they put objects up, they ask people if they could like report the objects that
59:36
they saw and nobody's been able to show that that happens.
59:39
So that's sort of experimental falsification of the claims to a degree.
59:44
Ariel, thank you so much.
59:46
I can recommend your book enough.
59:49
Who knows?
59:50
Maybe I'll see you in the year 225 where we're both like revived in our sexy new bodies or
59:55
minds or whatever.
59:56
Yeah.
59:57
I'd love to do this interview again then.
1:00:00
I'd love to see you and all your listeners then.
1:00:02
Thank you so much.
1:00:04
Last thing, do you have social media where people can see what you're up to these days?
1:00:08
Yeah.
1:00:09
I've got Twitter, which is ariel-underscorezj and I've got Blue Sky, which is arielzj and
1:00:17
I've got a whole bunch of like YouTube interviews and print interviews.
1:00:21
If you go to my website, arielzj.com, everything's linked from there.
1:00:25
Awesome.
1:00:26
And where can people get your book, find bookstores everywhere?
1:00:29
Amazon, bookstores, anywhere.
1:00:31
Just have a Google and you'll be able to find it.
1:00:34
Awesome.
1:00:35
Thanks again.
1:00:36
This was an absolute blast.
1:00:37
Thanks.
1:00:38
It's been a pleasure to be here.
1:00:39
Please subscribe to the podcast on YouTube.
1:00:40
Follow on Spotify and Apple podcasts.
1:00:42
I've been told I have to say that otherwise nothing happens.
1:00:45
Weird.
1:00:46
Also, if you feel like it, support me on Patreon.
1:00:49
This is a one person pod.
1:00:50
I do everything myself.
1:00:51
There's no team behind me.
1:00:52
So please feel free to hop on Patreon and find smart cookies on there.
1:00:57
And then last but certainly not least, I have to thank my existing patrons, tovarisin tovarisice,
1:01:02
you legends, you, without you, there would be no pod, which makes you actual producers
1:01:08
of this show.
1:01:09
So eternal thanks to Jus Premro, Nate Cirk, Goran Ivasic, Andrzej Sever, Ola, Marin Ferrara,
1:01:16
Aljasch Macher, Strole, Aida, Mancian, Micha Medved, Medinjo, Goran, Gordon, Lorenzo,
1:01:23
Jurečuk, Mila, Carmen, Veronica and Taichi.
1:01:26
Seriously, untouched.
1:01:29
Thank you so much.