Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston | The Future Loves You

[00:00:00] Beatrice: Welcome to another episode of the Existential Hope podcast, where we dive into the ideas and visions of the world's most forward thinking minds. I'm your host, Beatrice Erkers, and today we have a truly fascinating guest with us, Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston. Ariel is a Foresight Institute fellow and a neuroscientist currently working as a research fellow at Monash University.

[00:00:18] His work focuses on exploring the potential of brain preservation to extend life. And he also recently wrote a book called The Future Loves You: How And Why We Should Abolish Death, which is set to be released on November 28 in 2024. And I highly recommend you pre-order the book. I'm gonna put a link up to the Amazon page where you can pre-order the book.

[00:00:37] In this book, he really goes into the details of what is death. How can we prevent death? Why should we prevent death? It's really an examination of the medical, the neuroscientific and the philosophical underpinnings of life and death and the future of humanity. For a full transcript of today's episode, recommended resources and other exclusive content visit existentialhope.com. And don't forget to sign up to our newsletter to stay updated with the latest episodes and community news. And yeah, now let's welcome Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston to the Existential Hope Podcast.

[00:01:08] Thank you, Ariel, for joining us. Why don't we just dive right in and why don't you start with telling us who you are and what are you working on?

[00:01:16] Ariel: Okay, my name is Ariel as we've covered. I'm a neuroscientist, so I'm currently a research fellow at Monash University. In my day job I do consciousness science, so one of many different labs around the world trying to solve, either solve or dissolve the hard problem of consciousness, trying to work out how our brains or any creatures really can be conscious, what gives rise to consciousness, those sorts of things. But previously in my spare time and now a bit more dedicated, I've also written a book examining the prospects and issues and promises of brain preservation as a means of life extension. And I'm hoping to promote that and to make that more accessible and have more people thinking about it.

[00:01:56] Beatrice: Yeah I'm very curious to talk more about the book. I had the pleasure of reading it and it's really good. It's called The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death. Published November 28. Tell us about this book, what inspired you to write it? And I think one of the things that I really liked about it was that it's like anyone can read it, I think, it's not meant to be like, you have to be an expert in the field or anything. So yeah, like why, what prompted you to write this book?

[00:02:19] Ariel: Yeah, essentially I got into neuroscience in the first place because I was interested in what it is to be a person, how our brains make us who we are. The neuroscience is this fun intersection of philosophy and computer science and biology and medicine and all these sorts of things.

[00:02:35] And as part of that, one of the things I was really interested in is can we do anything about the fact that we get older and we start to degenerate and we age and eventually, at least at the moment, we all die. And certainly one of the ideas that had been out there, at least since the 1960s, was this idea of cryonics.

[00:02:52] So the idea that maybe you could cool someone's body down and keep them in a preserved state, such that even if there isn't medicine that can cure whatever disease they have now, at some point in the future with advancing medicine, maybe you'd be able to warm them back up and restore them to health.

[00:03:06] And I thought this was an interesting idea and it's been explored a lot in science fiction, like lots of people traveling through space while in cryosleep or emerging hundreds of years into the future in new worlds. But when I started to get more seriously interested in this and I started to look into the academic literature around it, I was surprised at how little academic literature there was really exploring the ideas.

[00:03:29] There were some articles by doctors and neuroscientists, mostly very skeptical, but mostly very dismissive, very quickly saying, here's reasons why it can't work either with current technology or new emerging technology, but typically not very detailed analyses. And then there were articles from proponents who were pushing for cryonics technologies with varying levels of academic rigor.

[00:03:50] Some were like just very optimistic in a way that I found a bit skeptical because science is pretty hard, and some that were more critical but still not really providing anything that sort of systematically looked at the whole picture. The closest I managed to get to it was, there's an organization called the Brain Preservation Foundation, which has existed, I'm not sure exactly for how long now, but maybe 10, 15 years or so.

[00:04:16] And they did a good job of trying to, from a neuroscientist perspective, go into these ideas, look at what would be required in order to properly, reliably preserve a brain. But even then, their writing and their analysis was mostly geared towards neuroscientists. So essentially what I thought would be useful as part of this conversation, and to make the ideas more accessible, was to do some sort of analysis and write up for the general public of these ideas and all the issues associated with them.

[00:04:42] Beatrice: And my experience of hanging out with like longevity people is that it's been with them since they were children. Like they did not want to die or it's always been something that they've been terrified of. Is that like the case for you personally?

[00:04:55] Ariel: Yeah, I would say that's definitely the case for me. I don't specifically remember when I first learned about death, but I certainly enjoyed being alive.

[00:05:02] And I imagine at the time was not very happy about learning about the fact that people stopped dying and stopped living at some point. I think what's interesting, and maybe this is jumping ahead a little bit to what we'll talk about later, I think if you spoke to a typical child and you asked them, do you want to continue living indefinitely?

[00:05:18] They'd probably say yes. And really on the mirrored end, as part of the research I did for the book, I looked into surveys of the terminally ill and what they say about their will to live. And I think what would be a surprise to many people is if you survey these people, a lot of them still describe a very strong will to live.

[00:05:34] So I would say probably most people who are still cognitively intact, who are dying, say that they want to continue living. It's just that somewhere in the middle, adults of some sort are somehow coming up with these ideas that maybe, one day they'll have had enough and be ready to let go. But it doesn't seem at either end that people are committed to that idea most of the time. Obviously, individuals differ in their own preferences, but that would be my guess.

[00:05:57] Beatrice: Yeah, I definitely want to get to that. There's some, there, yeah, there's some stuff about learned helplessness and these sort of things. But yeah, maybe we dive into the basics a little bit of what the book is about because like how do you even define death in, in your book? What does it mean to die?

[00:06:12] Ariel: So it's interesting, I think it helps to give a little bit of a historical perspective first. Before the mid 20th century or so, death really wasn't defined beyond someone stopped breathing, they stopped moving, their heart stopped beating, because it wasn't necessary to have a more sophisticated definition.

[00:06:27] With the advent of machines that can sort of ventilate, things that can breathe for people during surgery, and particularly with the advent of things like cardiopulmonary bypass machines that can keep people's blood circulating even when their heart has stopped, doctors realized they'd need to develop a more sophisticated view than just someone stopped breathing or their heart stopped beating.

[00:06:46] So particularly I think in the 1970s and the 1980s, most places shifted to a death that was more focused on the loss of all brain functions. So I think the typical definition in most jurisdictions around the world will be based on irreversible cessation of all brain functions. Now, the issue with that definition is increasingly we have better and better neural implant technology and brain computer interfaces and those sorts of things, which are doing for brain functions, what happened for heart and lung functions in the 20th century, which is that all these things that used to be irreversible will slowly become more reversible. So somebody will have a stroke, which will destroy a little bit of brain tissue somewhere, and will be able to restore those functions. Somebody will have a spinal cord injury and will be able to restore those functions. Now, modern technology to do that is very primitive, and I go through some examples of what we're getting to work, but we're a long way from finished with that.

[00:07:36] But if you look at where the technology's going, it looks like that will become easier and easier. So then, in the long run, you have to ask yourself, if you can reverse all of these damaged and destroyed brain functions, what should a definition of death be? Like, where is the person irreversibly lost? And what I argue for in the book, and what some other philosophers and bioethicists have argued before, is a definition based around the loss of personal identity.

[00:07:59] So that is to say that a person dies when all the core things that make them, their personality, their memories, their beliefs, and goals and desires, when it's those things that are lost. And because to a large degree, those things are encoded in the structures of people's brains. It's when those things those memories and personalities, those brain structures are irreversibly destroyed. That I think should be the correct definition of death.

[00:08:21] Beatrice: Yeah. And you have there, it's a big chunk of the book is around personal identity and what it is, what is personal identity then maybe specify a bit more. Okay. If everything that makes you, you is gone, but what does that, what is that then?

[00:08:35] Ariel: Yeah. So the question is, if you take someone when they're 10 years old, and they're 20 years old, and they're 30 years old, 40 years old, the question of personal identity is what makes some individual the same person across different time points. And it seems at first glance like obvious, but it's pretty complicated when you start thinking about it.

[00:08:53] So for one thing, it's not the case that they're just made of the same stuff over time, because we're constantly like eating and drinking and breathing and excreting and changing out all of our physical materials. The 30 trillion cells that make us up turn over reasonably regularly. Even the physical material of your brain, like the synapses that connect your neurons, are changed out.

[00:09:13] The components are changed out on the orders of weeks to months. So you've got to ask yourself then, what is it that makes me the same person I was five years ago, or will be in five years? And if you poll people and people have done these sorts of surveys on what it is that makes someone the same person over time, the majority of people will say that the core things are psychological attributes.

[00:09:32] So we can identify our friend, our parents, our children as the same because they have the same goals. They, they like playing video games. They like volunteering for a particular charity. They like the taste of, I don't know, blue cheese or something. It's this consistency of their values and their goals and the accumulation of memory.

[00:09:52] So you can talk to them and you can say, Hey, do you remember when we went to the beach five years ago? Or do you remember this holiday we took to Spain? Those sorts of things that give someone the same sense of connection with their past selves. And they can imagine themselves in the future as well. And it's those continuation that they expect to have the same goals in the future, they remember what they tried to achieve in the past, that I think is the key to making someone the same person over time.

[00:10:15] Beatrice: Planks on the boat have been changed. Is it still the same boat? Yeah,

[00:10:18] Ariel: Exactly.

[00:10:19] Beatrice: Yeah. It's a very tough question, but then for example, you mentioned cryonics in the beginning. That's what led you into this. What are your thoughts on cryonics? Do you think that you said it didn't seem too promising, but what do you think today that we stand on cryonics?

[00:10:32] Ariel: I think the problem is that cryonics talks about, it has a few different names now, right? So there's like cryonics and biostasis and brain preservation and all of these things. It's a field of possible technologies and possible ideas rather than there being like one single technique that's used and one single technique that people think are gonna work.

[00:10:51] In terms of whether any of these technologies could work. In principle, what I care about, and what I think is likely to work, is you need some technique that can hold onto the personal identity defining information that exists in someone's brain. So the key point I make in the book is so long as that information is intact, so long as someone's memories and personalities are intact in some way, shape, or form, then the person has not yet truly died.

[00:11:16] And in some ways this is trivial. So like when we go to sleep at night, we're not conscious, but that information's still there and we access it in the morning. If someone undergoes anesthesia, they're not conscious, but that information's still there. And I even go through some examples where people have hypothermia and that all their brain activity stops for a while, but they can still be revived.

[00:11:35] And we do this routinely as part of surgery these days. If they're cooled down for maybe up to an hour or so and they're revived. And we know people can survive through that. The question is then what sort of techniques could preserve someone for longer and longer durations, not just an hour, but months, years, decades, that, that sort of question.

[00:11:51] And this is where the question of whether particular cryonics, biostasis, brain preservation techniques could work starts to become interesting. For example, there were some early cryonics ideas of just straight freezing someone, putting them in liquid nitrogen, which almost certainly it seems like they would not work.

[00:12:07] And the reason we don't think that would work is because if you just straight freeze someone or their brain, then you get all of this ice associated damage. Ice forms in their brain. It punctures all of the neurons, it punctures the cells, it does a lot of physical damage to the synapses. So I would be very surprised if a brain frozen in that way managed to hold on to memories, psychological attributes, all those sorts of things.

[00:12:29] I'm just checking I'm still answering the question properly, I can continue on. And then over time though, cryonics has started to recognize this and develop more sophisticated techniques. For example, nowadays the main technique that's used is something called vitrification, where what you do is you add some cryoprotectants and antifreeze to a person's body.

[00:12:48] To a person's brain and you try and cool them down that way such that you don't get ice formation happening. Now this works really well for small tissues and it's used routinely in things like IVF procedures to store sperm and eggs and embryos and it's really helped improve the success of IVF procedures.

[00:13:07] The issue is that the bigger the tissue is, the bigger the thing you're trying to preserve, the harder it is to get that to work properly. And that's for a few reasons. It's one because it's hard to get cryoprotectants to diffuse nicely inside of bigger tissues. And two is it's difficult to cool these tissues down fast enough even while adding the cryoprotectants to prevent decay.

[00:13:30] But the key one is that first one, where it's hard to get the cryoprotectants to diffuse nicely into the tissues. The problem is that as you're adding these cryoprotectants, they're viscous, it's hard for them to get into tissues, and what they do is they suck water out of the tissues, and they cause them to shrivel down.

[00:13:46] Which means that when cryonicists have tried to use vitrification on humans to do human brain preservation, if that's like a whole body with the brain still inside, what you typically see is a reduction in volume, so the brain shrinking by about 50 percent or so. And if you look at tissue that's shrunk like this, these brains that are shrunk, it's not at all obvious that the tissue is still intact and all the synapses are nicely preserved and that you'd be able to trace it and analyze it and show that everything is still there.

[00:14:15] Now that's not to say it definitely wouldn't work. It's not that anyone's confirmed that straight, that vitrification destroys the material in someone's brain and all of the information. It's just that no cryonics organization that I'm aware of so far has been able to rigorously prove that information is still there in a vitrified brain.

[00:14:33] And when it's been shrunk down to 50 percent of its original size, we have reasons to be worried, I would say.

[00:14:39] Beatrice: And that, that, that makes sense. But, like what do you think is the most promising? It would be interesting to hear how long you think that you'll get to live maybe and what method is the most likely to extend your life.

[00:14:50] Ariel: Yeah, so there's two very different questions. Maybe I'll get to the method first and then we'll go to the first part. So the most promising technique I think that exists currently, the most promising brain preservation technique, is one called aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation. So what it does is it combines an initial fixation step, which is when you introduce chemicals that sort of form a gel-like matrix inside a person's body and brain, before you do the vitrification and before you do the cooling.

[00:15:18] And by introducing these chemicals, what they do is they lock everything in place, they ensure that when you do the subsequent cooling and the subsequent introduction of cryoprotectants, that there's no shrinkage associated and there's no volume reductions and there's no obvious damage that occurs during that process.

[00:15:34] And it's for that reason that aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation was awarded the Brain Preservation Foundation's large mammal prize, I think in 2018. Because they're able to show, the developers of it, that when you took an animal brain and you preserved it in this way, and then you imaged it under electron microscopy, that it looked like it was essentially perfectly preserved.

[00:15:55] You could clearly trace out the neurons, clearly trace out the synapses. It looked very similar to what standard textbook images of well-preserved brains used in neuroscience experiments generally look like. So I have a lot more confidence that a technique like that holds on to the information that's required to specify someone's memories and personality and all those sorts of things.

[00:16:16] And if I were dying today, or it'd be a bit difficult to arrange today, but if I were dying sometime in the near future, that's what I would opt for in order to preserve myself.

[00:16:26] Beatrice: And the other question of like, how long you think you'll be able to extend your life. Do you have? Like, how hopeful are you that your life will be extended and for how long?

[00:16:35] Ariel: Do you mean just using things like cryonics, brain preservation, that sort of thing?

[00:16:39] Beatrice: Feel free to pick and choose in terms of all the little things.

[00:16:41] Ariel: In terms of, that's got multiple parts. It's like, how long do I think I will last in this body, in this way, just naturally? And then how successful do I think brain preservation will be?

[00:16:51] So I'm 31 now. Typical life expectancy for me would be sometime in my 80s or so. If I make it to that, we will be in, so that's 50 years from now, the 2070s. So I imagine it will be a pretty different world in the 2070s. I don't know what sorts of medicine or technology or AI-enabled things will exist at that time point, but if we imagine things don't get too crazy or too weird, so I'm still able to speculate.

[00:17:16] Hopefully, things like anti-aging medicine will be a bit better by that time point, but I do think it is a fundamentally very difficult sort of thing to develop. And that's what I go into early on in the book, where a lot of the medicine we've previously developed has been overcoming things that our bodies are naturally already good at dealing with.

[00:17:36] So we've developed things like antibiotics, which are an aid to the immune system's natural mechanisms, or we've developed surgeries that are like relatively crude by the standards of like actual basic biology. Whereas with anti-aging medicine, you've got to deal with all the ways in which a person's body is breaking down and fix many little problems.

[00:17:55] So I'm not super optimistic in the medium term on the basis of that, but anti-aging medicine being very successful. But I'm not an expert on anti-aging medicine per se, so hopefully I'm wrong about that, and it does work really well. But let's say it helps me have another decade or another two decades and I get to a hundred or so, that's the point at which I would want to use brain preservation, and hopefully there'll be even better techniques than aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation by then, but that's the one I would opt for at the moment.

[00:18:23] Beatrice: Yeah. And we met earlier this year at a whole brain emulation conference. So that's another potential approach. What do you think about that? Are we, should, would we be able to perhaps digitally copy our brains? And would that count as having preserved your identity? Yeah. What are your like thoughts of the realisticness on that?

[00:18:41] And yeah, do you, would you like to do that if that was possible?

[00:18:45] Ariel: Yeah. So that's the question of if you've taken someone who has been preserved in what methods do you think you could revive them at some point in the future when that technology has been developed? And typically the two things people talk about, yeah, things like whole brain emulation or uploading is how it's colloquially referred to or more direct biological revival methods, things like nanotechnology, those sorts of things. In terms of uploading and whole brain emulation, yeah, I think that is likely to work at some point in the future. The argument I make in the book is that a person survives so long as their personal identity survives, and their personal identity is defined by these psychological attributes, someone's memories, personalities.

[00:19:23] All those sorts of things. And I don't think it really matters what physical material somebody's brain is made from, so long as that information continues to exist and continue to display itself in the world, in someone expressing their behavior and someone having their internal feelings. Now, there's all sorts of questions on exactly how could you upload someone or how could you run a whole brain emulation such that it actually worked.

[00:19:46] And that gets into some thorny questions around what sorts of things can be conscious and what sorts of things can enable personal identity information to display itself properly. But I do think it's very likely that at least one of the different ideas people have will be able to work at some point in the future, just extrapolating from today's technology forwards.

[00:20:05] Beatrice: Yeah, that's a whole big question, if we were able to do that. And it would open a lot of, I think, doors and shift society very largely. Yeah. So maybe we stick then, I'll take it back to the moral. If we're actually able to biologically extend our lives. One of the main sort of things that people always say against that is in relation to overpopulation, that in my experience at least.

[00:20:30] And you do address this a bit in the book. First of all, then, do you agree that defeating death would lead to overpopulation and yeah, how do you address that in the book?

[00:20:39] Ariel: And maybe I'll give a one general comment first, and then I'll get into the specifics of that. So I think there are legitimately quite a large number of objections or at least concerns people have when they're considering life extension technologies in a real practical sense.

[00:20:52] Things like will there be enough space to house everyone? And then I think there's also emotional objections where it's just, it's really weird and it's really different and it's really unnatural and people get concerned by those ideas and then they may also go looking for objections to these ideas,

[00:21:09] trying to justify what is, for them, a sense of it's just too weird. And I think it's very important to both concretely deal with the specific objections, like overpopulation, and to keep in mind just how odd these sorts of ideas are and how unnatural they are for most people, except, nerds like ourselves discussing them.

[00:21:25] But specifically overpopulation. At the moment, the UN predicts that world population will peak somewhere around 10 to 11 billion people in 2100, and then decline thereafter. And the reason for that is that people are just having fewer and fewer kids these days than they used to. So most developed countries have birth rates that are far below replacement level.

[00:21:46] So replacement level being something like, I forget the exact number, but 2.1 to 2.3 births per female. And I think somewhere like the U.S. has, I'm not going to get these exactly right, but something like 1.6 births per female. And in some countries it's as low as like 0.8 or so. So at the moment, the world looks like it's on track to have a shrinking population rather than a growing one in the medium term.

[00:22:08] Now. Obviously, if you had something like life extension and people lived longer, then that would reduce the rate at which populations are shrinking. I think unless we start to increase the birth rates, we're not going to have massively increasing populations anytime soon. You would eventually have a slowly growing population if truly no one ever died.

[00:22:27] But that's over such a large timescale that we start to bring into play new technologies, which sound really weird nowadays. Things like space colonization or seasteading or foresting and populating deserts and those sorts of things. But I think those are the sorts of timescales we'd be talking about.

[00:22:43] I would just remind people that in the near term, it looks more likely that underpopulation rather than overpopulation is going to be more of the problem.

[00:22:50] Beatrice: Yeah are there any other objections you think are like important to address always when talking about this?

[00:22:56] Ariel: Yeah, I think there's lots of objections.

[00:22:58] So the ones mainly I hear from people, so overpopulation is obviously one. Another one is things like social stagnation or the issues of a lack of social progress. So I think a lot of people have in mind that society overall is becoming a kinder, fairer, more just place over time. The world socially is becoming a nicer place.

[00:23:19] And I think that they look backwards in time to periods when we had more systemic racism, things like slavery, things like higher levels of violence. And they're concerned that if things have been continuing to progress from those times to today, then we wouldn't want to stop that progression going forwards into the future.

[00:23:35] And one of the things they might be concerned about is that maybe the reason why society has been becoming better is because people with old, outdated ideas have been dying off, and younger people take their place as time goes on. And I think this is something to take seriously because we do want to ensure that we continue to make a nicer, happier, safer world for people.

[00:23:55] I would say though that I don't think age-related dying and generation turnover is necessarily the best way to continue having social progress over time. There are plenty of circumstances you can see where social progress has happened even faster than generational turnover. So one example I talk about in the book is in the United States, you can see public opinion on things like gay marriage shifted much faster than generational turnover could account for.

[00:24:19] So that's just one example that actually people can change their minds without necessarily dying off. But I guess the other point I would make is that if you're preserving people, then it's not really going to stop them from dying and at least not dying, but being out of action for a period of time.

[00:24:34] And it doesn't really do anything to block social progress as it's currently occurring, if you think it's enabled by generational turnover, it's more you'd have to worry or be concerned by or at least think about ways to do reintegration and rehabilitation of people who've been preserved into future societies at some point in the future.

[00:24:52] That was a bit maybe rambly and long-winded, but I think that's one of the other objections people often have before getting to the like personal, but maybe this isn't something I would want for myself sorts of objections, but that's the sort of society-wide level objections. Yeah.

[00:25:06] Beatrice: One thing, this maybe doesn't relate so much just to the life or death question, but one thing that I've been wondering about and that I'm curious to talk to you because you're in neuroscience,

[00:25:16] is just, do you think that's something that can help us become more empathetic? Because for example, if you have a technology where you're able to experience something exactly like someone else experiences it or something like, would you be more empathetic to that person's experience or like factory farming?

[00:25:31] Would we, if we actually were able to like better communicate and understand, black on white, how much animals suffer when we factory farm them or something, would we do that less or, yeah.

[00:25:39] Ariel: I hope so. I'm not an expert in the sorts of technologies that would make people more empathetic, that would be useful for expanding people's moral circle.

[00:25:49] Already, I just think things like books and movies and videos and YouTube exist to demonstrate that. Both like the wonderful things that exist in the world so that you can easily see lovely things, videos of people having happy times, music, festivals. But there's also plenty of videos of horrendous things, whether it's war coverage or footage of what happens in factory farms.

[00:26:09] And I think the main issue is people generally don't want to access these things, or they don't want to look at all the horrifying and disturbing things that exist in the world, or when they do look at them, they find it depressing and demoralizing rather than maybe motivating, but I'm certainly not an expert.

[00:26:25] I imagine having more technology to help people empathize better is probably generally going to be a good thing, but I don't have a good idea of how to make use of it in the best ways.

[00:26:33] Beatrice: But that's a really good point though, that we have like movies and books and they already do this. I think one example that is often used is like the Uncle Tom's Cabin that helped build momentum against slavery.

[00:26:45] And because people were just like reading and learning about someone's terrible experience in that and getting empathy. And yeah, that's true that we already have it to some extent. And that makes me feel hopeful that maybe we could have it in even more powerful ways than we don't. I

[00:26:57] Ariel: hope so. One of the things I think about being excited for the future is I, even if I can't pick the specific technologies, I'm excited to see what sorts of things will be produced and what sorts of things that people will come up with.

[00:27:08] And I'd love to see the future generations of those sorts of things.

[00:27:11] Beatrice: Yeah, that, that is also true. I feel like a lot of people when, if they're considering signing up to cryonics, I feel like it's often, oftentimes out of pure curiosity, just even if they're not happy, if they, cause there's a large risk if you were to be woken up in a very strange future that you wouldn't thrive in it, but it would just be such a, such an interesting experience that very curious people can't resist.

[00:27:32] Ariel: That exists even for people who aren't interested in cryonics and life extension technology. So again, I mentioned some survey data before, but if you survey people on how long they say they'd like to live for, not in weird like brain preservation scenarios, just in standard general population general questionnaires, one of the things that like most correlates with people saying they'd like to live longer

[00:27:52] is just that they are optimistic about the future or that they have a positive outlook on life. That's just at baseline. And then one of the other things that gets people to increase their answers is, so a typical person normally says they'd like to live maybe five to 10 years longer than is typical for their demographic.

[00:28:09] So they might say 90 years. But if you say, Oh, but what if you had like good health, like good physical and mental health, then typically they'll switch to saying, Oh, at least 120 years or so. So I do think that, yeah, there's this very strong, both in the general population and in people who are more futurists, there's this very strong correlation between optimism and how the future is going to go and how long they'd like to live for and whether they'd like to live in it, which I guess is obvious once you think about it, but it's nice that the data bears it out.

[00:28:34] Beatrice: Yeah, I didn't know that. And that. Yeah, that's, that makes sense. And I'm happy we have the data for it also. Yeah. I, that's, let's take it back to one thing that we mentioned earlier, which is like this concept of learned helplessness that you mentioned in the book, because you talk about needing to unlearn helplessness.

[00:28:51] So can you just explain what you mean by that?

[00:28:54] Ariel: Yeah. So I guess we, we mentioned how my guess would be that most children feel like they would like to continue living. They have a positive outlook on life and that they're sad to learn about the inevitability of death. But then I think as people get older, they come to understand generally that death is inescapable, that they will get older, they will die.

[00:29:12] They see their grandparents die. They eventually see their parents die, and they become, I would say, to a large degree, fatalistic about it. And they think there's nothing that can be done, and either maybe that's because it happens for a good reason, or just that it's just a sad and inevitable fact about the world.

[00:29:27] And what that really reminds me, and an example I talk about in the book that it reminds me of, is this is a similar outlook that people used to have about pain in surgery prior to the advent of anesthesia. So back before the mid 19th century, if somebody needed to have a surgery done, there was nothing that could be done about the fact that they were going to suffer immense pain during the surgery from being cut open.

[00:29:50] But instead of surgeons and individuals saying, that's terrible, but you need the surgery. Otherwise things will be even worse. You had a number of surgeons saying, actually, the pain is an important part of the surgery. The pain is purifying or in some way, a necessary component. And you had people resisting the fact

[00:30:07] that something could be done about this. Resisting looking into the idea that something could ever be done and that resisting the idea that pain should be removed from surgery. Even though nowadays that idea is completely foreign to us. And I think in both these circumstances, both with death today and with surgical pain back in the 19th century, the reason why people can be resistant or yeah, I guess resistant to these ideas is analogous to a phenomenon called learned helplessness.

[00:30:32] So learned helplessness is a situation where an animal has been struggling to escape some situation, and because it's repeatedly struggled and repeatedly found that it cannot escape the situation, it gives up trying to escape. And critically, it might give up trying to escape even when its environment changes, and there is now a way for it to escape.

[00:30:50] So there were some experiments done with dogs given electric shocks, I think back in the 1960s, where they put them in these harnesses. They shock them, and if they repeatedly shock them without giving them a way to escape, then if a method did become available later, the dog still wouldn't even try. And I think the analogy is strong and the reason why the metaphor is strong is I think it's easy for us to ignore the fact that even as technology continues to advance, it's easy to ignore that maybe situations which previously we couldn't have dealt with, now we can and now there's something that can be done.

[00:31:20] Beatrice: Yeah, it feels like philosophy is a really big part of this book. Like your whole definition is to some extent philosophical, I would say, or it's philosophical just it's that our personal identity, that. It's death or yeah. And then another philosophical topic that you mentioned is that you actually use the story of Harry Potter as an example, which I thought was funny as someone who's read a lot of Harry Potter, I hadn't really thought about that, but yeah, you talk about discarding palliative philosophy.

[00:31:46] So could you just talk a bit. What do you mean by this? What is palliative philosophy?

[00:31:51] Ariel: Yeah. I mentioned how I think people come to normalize the idea of death to try and accept it and to make it seem like the fact that something that is so hard seems so horrible that people stop existing.

[00:32:04] They try and make that seem somehow acceptable to a degree. And I think one of the ways people do that is historically through things like religion, where people had these ideas that actually death is not the end, there's something that continues on afterwards. Or with other philosophical ideas that would say that actually death is good for various different reasons.

[00:32:25] It might be good because it gives our lives meaning. It might be good because the deadline gives us purpose without which we would otherwise not strive to achieve great things. And there's a variety of different ideas that people have for why death is acceptable and necessary and maybe even good for the individual and good for society.

[00:32:42] And I think along with the philosophical ideas that people have been talking about for thousands of years, we've also had that reflected in cultural aspects of society, in our myths, in our legends, in our stories. If you go back to the ancients, it's things like Sisyphus chained, forced to push the boulder up, sorry, he wasn't chained, Sisyphus chained up death, and as punishment, he was then forced to push a boulder up the hill eternally.

[00:33:05] As an ancient version of one of those myths, and I think modern versions of these myths are things like Harry Potter, where Voldemort is this awful creature who's seeking to escape death and doing all of these terrible things because he's so hubristic to think that death is something to be escaped, when it should be accepted as just a normal and necessary part of life.

[00:33:23] You see the same sort of thing in Lord of the Rings, where the One Ring grants an extended life, but with increasing corruption. Similar things in Star Wars. It comes up again and again in lots and lots of different movies and shows and books, and I think it's just pushing back on the idea of hubris, pushing back on the idea that like, humans should know their place and they shouldn't be trying to escape things and do something so unnatural as to end death.

[00:33:45] And I guess the reason why I call that palliative philosophy is because so palliative care is the branch of medicine that's concerned with trying to make a patient more comfortable and improve their welfare and well-being in situations where their disease cannot really be cured any longer. And so it's typically something that's done when somebody, for example, might have terminal cancer, where the cancer has metastasized and can no longer be effectively, there's not much chance of being able to totally remove the cancer from the patient.

[00:34:13] Even in these circumstances, though, we're still very concerned for wanting to make the patient as comfortable as possible. And you might do palliative things like giving them pain medication and giving them surgery or radiotherapy to shrink their tumors, even if they can't be removed. All these sorts of things that make them feel better.

[00:34:29] And I think that's the same with the myths and legends, with the philosophy that talks about why death is natural, why death is good. It's palliative philosophy, it's things to make us feel better even when they're not really addressing the underlying problem.

[00:34:41] Beatrice: Yeah that's a very good point and a good term for it if you came up with it.

[00:34:45] Ariel: Yeah, it's, I coined it while reading through it. It's interesting because I, one of the fun things about writing the book is I got to connect different areas of like medicine and philosophy and neuroscience that aren't normally put together. So I was reading these definitions of death made by ethicists, these ideas of death by palliative care doctors.

[00:35:01] And then I'd go read these philosophy papers on personal identity by people who like were thinking about these things, but not really clinically focused at all. And it's fun, the connections you can come up with when you're reading across the different disciplines. So I certainly hadn't seen the term used anywhere else before.

[00:35:15] Beatrice: No, that's, yeah, that sounds like a very fun research project. Do you have any favorite? Was there any favorite books or texts or things that you came across while doing this research?

[00:35:24] Ariel: There's a few different things that were quite good. I certainly think for those who are interested in palliative care and palliative medicine, the book Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, an American doctor, is very good on that topic.

[00:35:36] But something that's hilariously different in the opposite end. I came across a Lancet commission paper that was talking about palliative care and really making the case for improving access to palliative care, which I strongly agree with. But there were a few funny lines in it. I think there was a line like, "It is healthy to die" or "Without life, every death would be a tragedy," which I think is like palliative philosophy, like really in its essence, poured into the paper.

[00:36:00] Are there any other? That's probably the two I can think of straight off the top of my head.

[00:36:04] Beatrice: Yeah. Yeah. That is, now that you say it, it is very deeply ingrained in our culture, in many ways and in many stories. Yeah. So let's say you've read the book and you're, you've managed to convince someone and they now want to start

[00:36:17] doing something to help abolish death? What would you recommend that they do? Any specific like skills or knowledge that you think they should focus on developing?

[00:36:26] Ariel: The first thing I would say is I think the most helpful thing anyone can do, no matter their background, is just to try and normalize talking about end of life and normalize talking about how long people want to live for and what they want the end of life to look like.

[00:36:40] I think it's so often a topic that's so scary and so disturbing that people put it off longer and they don't consider it and they don't take it seriously and they don't think about what will happen to them. And I think that is very understandable and particularly reasonable if you think that there's nothing that can be done about it.

[00:36:56] But I think if you think something can be done about it, then you have all the more reason to try and talk about it, try and talk about it with other people and try and explore the options that exist. And that's not just for individuals themselves, but also because if we want to have political clout to go to policy makers and say, Hey, these, we want access to these sorts of technologies.

[00:37:15] We want them to be researched. We want them to be implemented. We want them to be regulated. We want them to become generally accessible. Then there needs to be general public pushing for these sorts of things. But if someone wants to get hands-on with these sorts of technologies, definitely there are still aspects of like how to integrate things like brain preservation into the medical system that are very important to do.

[00:37:35] So there's work for healthcare workers in that sort of space, things like consent forms, things like integration of the procedure with other aspects of patient care, those sorts of things. In terms of the research side, I mentioned aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation. It's a very good procedure. It's not necessarily absolutely perfect, as if you put someone in a time machine and pull them out a hundred years in the future.

[00:37:56] We should always be trying to improve preservation techniques, and even if we think we have preservation techniques that are perfect, to improve ways in which we could try and make revival easier at some point in the future. Making whole brain emulation work, or making the nanotechnology revival work aspects that we mentioned previously.

[00:38:12] Yeah, I think those in general are the things I would get people to focus on, and then there's the nitty-gritty details of exactly how to go about doing that, which I mention in the references in the book, and people can look up these places online as well. Things like the Brain Preservation Foundation's website would give people some idea.

[00:38:28] Beatrice: Yeah, the book is probably a great resource to start with. And yeah, they, I guess they could also follow you on Twitter or something like that if you share. Yeah, absolutely. Let's take a bit of a turn because this is the existential hope podcast. So I'd also want to ask you just a few existential hope specific questions.

[00:38:44] The first thing I want to ask is just, would you say that you're optimistic about the future? And if so, what made you and if not, why not?

[00:38:51] Ariel: I would say that I am tentatively optimistic about the future? Certainly not blindly optimistic, but certainly not pessimistic either. I think at baseline, I'm probably a reasonably happy person to begin with, enjoys life and enjoys going about life.

[00:39:05] And I think that gives me a generally optimistic demeanor. And I think with a bit of a historical overview of looking at how the world's been and how the world's becoming, I would say that over the past 200 years, at least, it looks like despite all of the huge problems that exist in the world, that on net, we are developing a better world where people are living longer and wealthier and healthier and safer lives.

[00:39:26] And hopefully that will continue into the future. That being said, I think there's a lot of problems both at the less existential of just like, there's still aging and sickness, but there's still more mundane things like political turmoil and misinformation and those sorts of things. And then there's

[00:39:42] climate change, and the more existential risks of global nuclear war, pandemics, AI developments that lead to dangerous situations. There's plenty of things that make me worried for the future as well. But I think, at least, I don't see reasons to give up hope as of yet. And I hope that these things are surmountable, the way problems of the past have been surmountable.

[00:40:01] And on the basis of that, I'm optimistic about the future. Maybe things will continue to get better into the future.

[00:40:05] Beatrice: Yeah. No, there's definitely challenges, but I think there's also hope still. So one of the questions that we always ask is this one of a eucatastrophe. So a eucatastrophe being the opposite of a catastrophe.

[00:40:17] So it's an event that after it happens, there's more value in the world. And yeah, I'd just love to hear if you had to think of a eucatastrophe, what would be your best eucatastrophe that you can imagine right now?

[00:40:28] Ariel: I'm going to cheat a little bit and basically steal from my book, where like the thing that I most think about and most would like to happen is to see the integration of brain preservation technologies into the medical system, where each individual who is approaching the end of their life

[00:40:44] can make a choice that I would like to be preserved when I reach a certain threshold of illness, when I am imminently dying, such that there is some realistic chance that at some point in the future, my preserved body or me can be revived. And that would look like integration of these brain preservation facilities into hospitals, into hospices.

[00:41:05] It would look like having warehouses where preserved individuals' bodies can be stored. It would look like having a shared political will to develop these technologies, to integrate these technologies into our healthcare and medical systems such that any and every individual who elected to take these up would be able to have access to them and would be able to have a good guarantee of ensuring that their brain was well preserved.

[00:41:28] And I, as I say in the book, I don't even think it would be that expensive to do. These aren't particularly complicated or particularly expensive procedures. My guess is if done at a country-wide scale, it costs something like 10,000 per procedure, and a few hundred to a few thousand dollars in storage costs per individual per year.

[00:41:45] I really feel like it is something that would be achievable, and through doing so, would help us abolish death. This horrible thing that's been around since forever, but which I don't think is inevitable and has to continue into the future if we take active steps like this. That would be my eucatastrophe.

[00:42:00] Beatrice: Yeah, I love it. It's very concrete, which I love. Oftentimes, when you ask this question, it can be like, yeah, very just a positive future in general, but this is very concrete, which I appreciate. I think we can really make a cool art piece, trying to visualize this. Yeah, let's try to wrap it up.

[00:42:16] I think I have a few quick questions for you. One would just be like, is there anything you want to recommend to people for reading or listening or watching? And it can be both like a piece of fiction or nonfiction that you want to recommend people.

[00:42:30] Ariel: Maybe I'll give one of each. So in terms of nonfiction, I really liked reading the book recently called Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie, which I feel is a good example of taking the issues that we have today seriously, but not being so pessimistic about them.

[00:42:45] So she outlines all of many of the great environmental issues that we are facing today. But it also outlines why there's reason for hope that we will be able to solve these issues and continue to develop a healthier world for both humans and for the general environment going forwards into the future.

[00:43:00] That was Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie. Then in terms of a piece of fiction, I also really enjoyed reading recently the Terra Ignota Tetralogy by Ada Palmer, which is set in the medium-term future. I think it's like the 2200s. And it shows a vision of a human society which is flourishing, but also is very different from the world today.

[00:43:20] And it has its own problems, which are on net, not as bad as the problems we have today, but still very serious problems that are worth investigating and that make for a fun story overall in a world that's like doing better than we are today. And I think it's a great exploration of, it's very easy to write dystopias where everything is going terribly and there's lots of natural conflict.

[00:43:40] It's very hard to write what read to be somewhat realistic utopian scenarios, where like things are getting better, but there's still interesting challenges and interesting problems that individuals have to face. And I think that those books do a good job of finding the middle ground between those positions of being fun, but also optimistic for the future.

[00:43:57] Beatrice: Yeah, those, that sounds like great recommendations. The Hannah Ritchie one, I also read and I loved it. So I can also highly recommend that one. And the Terra Ignota one I hadn't heard of, but it will definitely go on my list.

[00:44:06] Ariel: Ada Palmer's great, the writer. She's both a historian and a science fiction writer, so she's got a great perspective looking both ways.

[00:44:12] Beatrice: Sounds like we should try to have her on the podcast then, if it's possible. And is there, yeah, you mentioned Ada Palmer now, but is there anyone else you think is inspirational in an existential hope context? Is there anyone you think we should have on the podcast, for example?

[00:44:25] Ariel: If you're going to grab Ada Palmer, why not try for Hannah Ritchie too?

[00:44:27] I think she'd also be good. I think those would be perfect.

[00:44:31] Beatrice: My last question for you is just, what is the best advice that you ever received?

[00:44:35] Ariel: That is a hard one. I think in the context of this, I'm going to have to say, I remember as a child when I would try and do a risky behavior sometimes because I thought it would be fun. [00:44:44] The advice the adults around gave me was, you can't enjoy things if you're dead. And I think that really we've got to be safe. We've got to think about ways of continuing to be safe and healthy so that we can continue to enjoy ourselves going into the future. And I would just say, take care of your health now, eat well, do exercise, but also think about things to come [00:45:01] long term in the future, so you continue to have a healthy and flourishing life for as long as possible.

[00:45:06] Beatrice: Sounds very wise and true. Thank you so much, Ariel, for joining us.

Ariel: No, thank you. Been a pleasure.

[00:45:11] Beatrice: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Existential Hope podcast. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast for more episodes like this one. You can also stay connected with us by subscribing to our substack and visit existentialhope.com. If you want to learn more about our upcoming projects, events and explore additional resources on the existential opportunities and the risks of the world's most impactful technologies, I would recommend going to our Existential Hope library. [00:45:34] Thank you again for listening and we'll see you next time on the Existential Hope podcast.

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