3min chapter

The Michael Shermer Show cover image

What if Death Isn’t the End? The Science of Forever

The Michael Shermer Show

CHAPTER

Exploring Life Extension: From Incremental Changes to Brain Preservation

This chapter examines the potential of life extension technologies, focusing on brain component replacement and neuroscience advancements. It addresses both the aspirations for anti-aging solutions and the skepticism surrounding the challenges of achieving these breakthroughs.

00:00
Speaker 2
Oh, for sure. I mean, let's just start with just extending life through small changes here and there. I mean, you've already mentioned a few with the brain chips that help, you know, cochlear implants and things like that. So why not just keep going? And, you know, you know the thought experiment of it from it to bit, where you just replace each neuron while you're asleep or whatever, and you would never even know it. There would just be a continuation. Well, that's pure science fiction. But in principle, I mean, maybe 500 years from now, 500 years of neuroscience development and more Elons doing their thing, changing the world with Neuralink-type companies, it's conceivable to get there. Surely somebody who's on Death's Door would go, yeah, okay, I'll just put the extra little chip in my memory banks there, whatever, the prefrontal cortex or the hippocampus or something, and restore my memories. Yeah, I would like that. That seems reasonable, just step-by incremental improvements. So
Speaker 1
yeah, that's the idea of gradual replacement of brain materials, of neurons with replacement components. I guess to take a step back, I feel like the ideal life extension technology, right, would be some pill that we take that just stops us from aging. Either it halts it or it reverses it to, I don't know, 25, 30, whatever age you feel like being. And then you just don't get sick. You don't get hurt. Everything's perfect from then onwards. Maybe you can change your body if you want to, but otherwise it's just perfectly healthy for forever. Like that is also the ideal that I wish could exist. I just don't see that happening any soon there there is some effort being put into anti-aging medicine and i very much hope it succeeds but i'm skeptical that for many people alive today it will be fast enough and that's the issue i see that we have uh what is it something like 60 million people dying a year globally uh and that that's just going to continue until such time as as we either develop the technology to solve it or we wipe ourselves out as a species so i'm like what can we do for people in the meantime and again maybe it would be it would be nicer if well if we didn't have an anti-aging pill but maybe we could do gradual replacement of components as they fail, that would be nice. But again, I don't think we can do that either. We don't have the technology at the moment to provide that to people. Our implants and prosthetics are very crude and they only help with small, well-defined injuries at this point in time. So as weird as it sounds, I do think the brain preservation option that I advocate for is the most viable method that has actually some good philosophical and scientific grounding in why it might work for those who are at death's door at present, even if at some point in the future, hopefully we'll have better techniques.

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