The Future Loves You

From ventilators to brain implants, medicine has been blurring what it means to die. In a lucid description of modern neuroscientific thinking, Zeleznikow-Johnston explains that death is not the loss of breath, but of personal identity - that the core of our identities is our minds, and that our minds are encoded in the structure of our brains. On this basis, he explores how recent discoveries now offer us all the chance of preserving our minds for future revival. Whether they discovered cures or fought for justice, we are grateful to those of our ancestors who helped craft a kinder world. Yet while our forebears cannot enjoy the world they helped build, this new preservation technology gives us each a personal stake in the future. Because if we work together to create a better world for our descendants, then just maybe, the future will love us enough to bring us back.

Autorentext

Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston is a neuroscientist at Monash University, Australia, where he investigates methods for characterising the nature of conscious experiences. In 2019, he obtained his PhD from The University of Melbourne, where he researched how genetic and environmental factors affect cognition. His research interests range from the decline, preservation and rescue of cognitive function at different stages of the lifespan, through to comparing different people's conscious experience of colour.

By contributing to research that clarifies the neurobiological, cognitive, and philosophical basis of what it is to be a person, he hopes to accelerate the development of medical infrastructure that will help prevent him and everyone else from dying.

Klappentext

Out of the 120 billion humans who have ever lived, you're lucky to live now. Whether it's a pill, an injection, or a life-saving surgery, today's medicine has a much greater chance of being there for you when you need it most, compared to what our ancestors could access. Even so, it still seems inevitable a day will come for each of us when a doctor is forced to tell our distraught relatives "I'm sorry, there's nothing more we can do..." Yet even here, this book shows how recent advances are empowering doctors to add the much more hopeful "...for now."From ventilators to brain implants, medicine has been blurring what it means to die. In a lucid description of modern neuroscientific thinking, Zeleznikow-Johnston explains that death is not the loss of breath, but of personal identity - that the core of our identities is our minds, and that our minds are encoded in the structure of our brains. On this basis, he explores how recent discoveries now offer us all the chance of preserving our minds for future revival. Whether they discovered cures or fought for justice, we are grateful to those of our ancestors who helped craft a kinder world. Yet while our forebears cannot enjoy the world they helped build, this new preservation technology gives us each a personal stake in the future. Because if we work together to create a better world for our descendants, then just maybe, the future will love us enough to bring us back.

Zusammenfassung

Just as surgeons once believed pain was good for their patients, some argue today that death brings meaning to life. But given humans rarely live beyond a century even while certain whales can thrive for over two hundred years it's hard not to see our biological limits as profoundly unfair. No wonder then that most people nearing death wish they still had more time.

Yet, with ever-advancing science, will the ends of our lives always loom so close? For from ventilators to brain implants, modern medicine has been blurring what it means to die. In a lucid synthesis of current neuroscientific thinking, Zeleznikow-Johnston explains that death is no longer the loss of heartbeat or breath, but of personal identity that the core of our identities is our minds, and that our minds are encoded in the structure of our brains. On this basis, he explores how recently invented brain preservation techniques now offer us all the chance of preserving our minds to enable our future revival.

Whether they fought for justice or cured diseases, we are grateful to those of our ancestors who helped craft a kinder world yet they cannot enjoy the fruits of the civilization they helped build. But if we work together to create a better future for our own descendants, we may even have the chance to live in it. Because, should we succeed, then just maybe, the future will love us enough to bring us back and share their world with us.