Special Episode: Brain Preservation and Abolishing Death

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An interview with Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, author of the book 'The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death'. We begin by discussing how best to define death, focusing on the idea of death as the permanent disruption of psychological identity, and how such identity is constituted by our personality, desires, and memories. We then consider the science of brain preservation, including the recently-developed technique of Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation, and how it could be used to indefinitely preserve the brain structure that encodes or personal identity. Ariel argues that such a preserved brain could potentially be used to construct a digital simulation of our brains,…