Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston (Penguin, 28 November)
Much of medicine today focuses on extending life by no more than several months. Drugs for cancer and Alzheimer鈥檚 disease that are touted for their effectiveness often do little more than give people a bit more time. What if we could send terminally ill people forward to be saved by the medicine of the future, asks Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston.
It is an interesting question, and one that Zeleznikow-Johnston, a neuroscientist, poses in his book, The Future Loves You: How and why we should abolish death. If possible, shouldn鈥檛 we focus efforts on technologies to help us preserve sick people until they can be cured?
Advertisement
The author takes us through a wide literature, ranging from the philosophy of mind and personal identity to sociology and economics, that he uses to justify his belief that brain preservation is viable and an indirect path to curing all disease.
He defends a new notion of death as an irrevocable loss of identity rather than a permanent cessation of a heartbeat. To him, humans are their neurological connections, what neuroscientists call the connectome. To save or copy this is therefore to save the person.
He also backs the philosophical view that consciousness has more to do with how something functions than with mechanisms underlying those functions: if something acts in a way that is indistinguishable from you, it is you. This view, known as functionalism, is popular among people working in technology who want to make claims about the consciousness of machines.
Next, we have an interesting explanation of the neuroscientific advances needed for effective connectome preservation. He says we can use novel techniques relying on a process called vitrification to prevent damage to brain cells when freezing them.
Preserving the brain 鈥� or finding a way to copy its synaptic connections 鈥� would be enough for him, given his philosophical leanings, to say we have preserved the connectome.
Amid all this, he defends the idea that people of the future must love us: they owe us for their existence, he says, just as we owe the people of the past for giving us our world today. People of the future will therefore owe it to us to wake us up from our preserved states and cure whatever diseases we may have.
If these arguments sound too broad to be plausible, it is because they are. The further you read, the more Zeleznikow-Johnston seems to ask for intellectual blank cheques to fund research. Defining death as a loss of personal identity? A functionalist view of consciousness? Ethics, economics, sociological effects of preservation? Blank cheques the lot.
There is, in fact, little the author doesn鈥檛 ask us to take his word for 鈥� before comparing himself to Gottfried Leibniz, the 17th-century polymath who first envisioned, among other things, what a computer might look like.
The worst of this is his dismissal of the sociological implications of life preservation. Billionaires spend huge amounts on life extension, and whether extending some people鈥檚 lives will increase inequality isn鈥檛 an issue he considers for more than a few paragraphs.
In the early pages, Zeleznikow-Johnston lambasts philosophers for saying people should accept death as an inevitability, and says they therefore aren鈥檛 seeing the world as it 鈥渢ruly鈥� is. Yet his dismissing their work to defend a view he has already formed about humanity, death and the future isn鈥檛 an effective refutation.
Modern medicine isn鈥檛 perfect, and Zeleznikow-Johnston poses important questions in his book. But as a defence of a new position, it falls short of world-changing.
Jonathan R. Goodman is a writer and聽researcher at the University of聽Cambridge
快猫短视频 book club
Love reading? Come and join our friendly group of fellow book lovers. Every six weeks, we delve into an exciting new title, with members given free access to extracts from our books, articles from our authors and video interviews.
