The dream of indefinite life.

From Plato and Derrida to anti-aging treatments, cryogenics, cloning, and whole-brain uploads, the dream of indefinite life is technological and, as Adam Rosenthal shows in Prosthetic Immortalities: a matter of prosthesis, the transformation of the original being. There can be no certainty of immortality and yet, the problem of immortality continues to haunt the soul. Rosenthal engages David Wills and Deborah Goldgaber in a conversation that touches on philosophy, transhumanism, biopolitics, Dolly the sheep and the return of the dire wolf, what it means to extend life or, ultimately, to extend death.

Adam R. Rosenthal is associate professor of French and global studies at Texas A&M University. Rosenthal is author of Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life and Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida.

David Wills is professor of French studies at Brown University and author of Prosthesis. 

Deborah Goldgaber is assistant professor of philosophy at Louisiana State University and author of Speculative Grammatology: Deconstruction and the New Materialism.

REFERENCES:

Plato 

Homer

Descartes

Heidegger (the Dasein)

Derrida

Geoffrey Hinton

Hegel

Nick Bostrum

Dolly the sheep

David Chalmers

Aubrey de Grey

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Praise for the book:

“Rigorous, compelling, and beautifully written, Prosthetic Immortalities is at the vanguard of the new wave in Derrida studies.”

—Nicole Anderson, founding editor, Derrida Today Journal

“Adam R. Rosenthal conjures up the ghosts of metaphysics that return today through the promises of indefinite life from medical science and transhumanist speculations, moving brilliantly between science and science fiction.”

—Francesco Vitale, author of Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences

Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life by Adam R. Rosenthal, with foreword by David Wills, is available from University of Minneota Press. Thank you for listening.

Episode Transcript

Adam Rosenthal (00:06):
Probably all of us will admit that it's likely
that we'll die. Is it the casethat that realization changes
who or what we are or what wecall the human? Human.

David Wills (00:17):
Know, we're living in a moment where we see both
sides of everything.

Deborah Goldgaber (00:21):
It's just so crazy about this exposure to
death, and at the same time, thesense that our need to die is
less and less.

Adam Rosenthal (00:32):
Hello, my name is Adam Rosenthal, and I am the
author ofProsthetic Immortalities:
Biology, Transhumanism and theSearch for Indefinite Life,
published the Posthumanitiesseries at University of
Minnesota Press in 2024. I'mextremely excited to be able to
talk today about that projectwith two colleagues whose work

(00:54):
has greatly influenced me overthe last years. David Wills,
professor of French andFrancophone Studies at Brown
University and author, amongother things, of the triplet of
texts known as prosthesis,dorsality and inanimation, and
Deborah Goldgeber, associateprofessor of philosophy and

(01:16):
director of the Ethics Instituteat Louisiana State University,
as well as author ofDeconstruction and the New
Materialism. I'll say a wordabout prosthetic immortalities
and then give the floor to Davidand Deborah to introduce
themselves a little bit more aswell as their work. I should

(01:37):
mention that I hold a PhD incomparative literature from
Emory University, and I'mcurrently associate professor of
French and global studies atTexas A and M.
In many ways, this bookProsthetic Immortalities follows
my own intellectual trajectory,which began in literature,
theory and philosophy, such asis epitomized by a certain study

(01:58):
of deconstruction, but which hasevolved in recent years to
concentrate on issues in scienceand technology studies, and
above all the life sciences. Thequestion to which prosthetic

immortality seeks an answer is: how to understand the (02:09):
undefined
contemporary resurgence of thediscourse of immortality? How,
in what contexts, and throughwhich philosophical, religious
or scientific discourses tocomprehend the possibility of a
flourishing of immortalizationefforts, now in what claims to

(02:30):
be a secular, empiricallyinformed, and even enlightened
milieu namely that oftranshumanism, but also in the
biomedical sciences themselves.What I think I show in the book

I'll summarize in two points: first, what is called (02:44):
undefined
transhumanism, a discourse thatunabashedly endorses radically
extending human life, often interms that are blatantly
eugenicist, if not supremacist,to say nothing of speciesist,
represents a mode of thinkingthat is far more widespread and

(03:05):
far more difficult to weed outthan one commonly gives it
credit for. In a word,transhumanism is but the blossom
of a tree whose roots are to befound in the tenets of the
biosciences themselves.
Tenets, I'll note, that not manywould wish simply to discard.
Second, and as a directconsequence of the deep

(03:26):
entanglements of transhumanism,the deep entanglements in some
of the desire for andtechnoscientific efforts to
extend and even immortalize whatis called human life, well, one
must go back, way back, to thevery roots of Western thought in
order to grasp the specificityof the modern search for
indefinite life. Disentanglingthis web requires a

(03:50):
multidisciplinary labor ofreading, which this book at
least makes a fledgling efforttowards realizing by starting
with Plato, but also Homer,following their inheritance in
Descartes, tracing theirmodification in Heidegger and
Derrida, and then putting all ofthis into conversation, first
with the empirical discourses ofmolecular, micro and organismal

(04:10):
biology, so that second, thelegacy of these sciences can be
traced within the philosophicaland literary fictional
discourses of transhumanism,above all in figures of brain
uploading, biologicalimmortality and cloning, but
also what is closely related tothem de extinction. Let me hand
things over now to Deborah andDavid, maybe starting with

(04:31):
David, who I guess I shouldmention graciously wrote the
foreword to the book, PreferringBeing Condemned Not To, where he
raises many important questionsabout who gets to live and who
must die, who gets to stay andwho must go.

David Wills (04:46):
Well, you, Adam. My name is David Wills. Everything
Adam says needs to be discussedis basically what his book
discusses. It's a monumentaleffort, I've got to say, to try
and take on these discourses,these very different discourses,
philosophical, scientific and soon. And so it makes for a

(05:06):
fascinating read.
It makes for a deep dive intovarious questions, the direction
in which he has taken the ideaof prosthesis, which has been an
idea I've worked on. Thedirections he's taken that
discussion are places where I'venever been. And it was a

(05:26):
challenge for me to think aboutgoing and to think what I might
be able to contribute to theproject by way of a forward. In
any case, I was very happy to doit. I'm very happy to see the
book, happy to hear itresonating in so many different
directions.

Deborah Goldgaber (05:42):
Thank you so much, David. Thank you so much,
Adam, for organizing and forwriting this amazing book. I
really hope that it is widelyread and it deserves to be
widely read. And I think it's ablast by being really timely,
and that's not always true for abook of such philosophical
breadth and depth, but it alsotouches on some of the most
important questions that we'retalking about today. I'm very

(06:05):
excited to talk about cloning,because I think your discussion
about cloning gets to so many ofthe mysteries of some of the
biotechnology that we're seeingtoday.
I'm primarily focused on Frenchphilosophy in the twentieth
century. And so Derrida's reallycentral influence on both my
thinking and my scholarship.It's my first book, Speculative

(06:25):
Grammatology, could have had thesubtitle of The Indefinite Life
of the Trace a little bitqualified because it argues that
life ought to be understood interms of the trace, which has
this structure in definitude. Sowe really share that core
insight about the way thatDrurydian philosophy is really
interested and centered on thisfigure of indefinitude and how

(06:48):
this is somewhat wronglyunderstood in terms of finitude
as the opposite of infinitude orimmortality. And now whether or
not Derrida himself would haveendorsed this ontological read
that I gave in speculativegrammatology, I really sort of
argued for an ontologicalreading of the trace in terms of
the structure of indefinitude, Ithought might help explain some

(07:10):
peculiar phenomena, like thisidea of having orphan text, or
in the case of the recently thestory of the direwolf, which I
hope we talk about right, youhave this orphan DNA, which is
sort of sitting there, and thenyou have this idea that coming
back to life, or this sort ofresurrection.
So this very possibility of thisreturn of these texts can be

(07:31):
understood in terms of the traceand its indefinite structure.
And so I hope to talk more aboutthat and many of the themes that
you've brought up. And also, Ihave a long standing interest in
just how we should think abouttechnology in terms of
prosthesis, and I think thatconnects with both of your work.
So excited to be here inconversation with you today.

Adam Rosenthal (07:49):
Well, I'd love to hear you know, each of you,
your work draws us in differentdirections. But I would love to
touch on, David, your forward alittle bit, because I think in
the book, one of my mainconcerns was excavating the
relationship between a number ofconcepts that are at play, not
only excavating, but alsoanalyzing the relationship

(08:09):
between them. And to the extentthat I was so focused on
differentiating indefinite lifefrom immortality, from substance
immortality, etcetera, etcetera.There is a huge component that
could have been in the bookthat's not there that I think
you bring forward, and that isspecifically concerning these
massive ethical, global,biopolitical questions.

David Wills (08:31):
Sure. Let me say that I was struck thinking about
this event, this discussion,this conversation. I was struck
by the extent to which things Idid think about in relation to
the book, and some of which Iformulated in that foreword,
suddenly seem to have beenexponentially enlarged. And that

(08:55):
at this point, hundred daysafter the beginning of Trump's
second term, We are in a placethat was to us unimaginable a
year ago, two years ago,whenever. I remember the three
of us being together at thesymposium that you put on at
Texas A and M, Adam, which tookplace just a couple of weeks, I

(09:17):
think, after the events of10/07/2003, the attack by Hamas
against Israel and the beginningtherefore of that war, which was
already seeming horrific in waysthat we couldn't imagine.
Here we are this much later,eighteen months after that, and

(09:39):
we read about the imminentstarvation of the population of
Gaza in a way that none of uswanted to think about back then.
But that brought me to considerhow, as you suggest, there are
such massive ethical and ethicoeconomic questions raised by
your discussion that it might beworthwhile reflecting on them a

(10:03):
little in our current moment ofcrisis, if that's what we want
to call it. So two points inthat regard that I would say,
what I was interested inthinking about when you talked
about extending life was howthat was also a question of, if
you like, extending death to theextent that death is understood

(10:27):
as a moment, as a knife edge.One moment we're alive, the next
moment we're dead, and that'sthat's death. Right?
But that by the same token,death overshadows life to a
great extent. And many of theseprosthetic immortalities that
you talk about, these attemptsto prolong life are, of course,
an attempt to stave off deathand to stave off the moment of

(10:49):
death and to control that momentof death. Because if what
defines mortality is the factthat none of us knows exactly
when we are going to die, not inany absolute sense, even if we
choose to die. By the same tokenor conversely, these attempts to
prolong life, to download one'sbrain, to clone oneself and so

(11:13):
on and so forth are very muchabout having that knowledge that
we as mortals don't know. So theknowledge which then allows us
to control as it were our death.
That came back to me as a typeof Promethean hubris whereby we
as human mortals are able to dothese things and act like gods.

(11:35):
And it seemed to me that thoseparticular forms of prosthetic
immortality might not be so muchin the news these days, but what
is very much in the news is asimilar Promethean hubris about
how we react to climate changeby flying to Mars, how we find

(11:55):
the scientific solution to thefact of global warming and the
fact of what humans with theirgeneral technological hubris, if
you like, have brought on interms of the Anthropocene and so
on. It seemed to me that thatput your work into a context
that is very much with us as wesee more and more billionaires

(12:17):
building bunkers, Elon Musk,Jeffrey Bezos and whoever else
heading into space and towardsMars, colonizing Mars and so on.
So I thought that was aninteresting question. And then
that obviously is an economicquestion.
So it comes back to thesequantitative extensions of life

(12:37):
you talk about, for me cannot beseparated from the whole matter
of quality of life. And the factthat we spend so much money or
we're planning to, we alreadyare, and we want to spend so
much money on these prostheticimmortalities while so much of
humanity, for example, not tomention animal existence in

(12:57):
general, is living a bare life,being let die or being killed in
various ways. Extending life, itseems to me, has to be also a
question of extending or dealingwith life expectancy, life
quality and so on. Those thingscame back to me with a
vengeance, as I say, at thispoint in time.

Adam Rosenthal (13:19):
Yeah, it's certainly, David, no coincidence
that, I mean, Elon Musk, whomyou mentioned, is well known as
a donor. I think he gavesomething like $10,000,000 to
the Future of HumanityInstitute. He's given generously
as well to the, I believe,Future of Life Institute, which
are think tanks, basicallygenerally associated with

(13:40):
transhumanist ethos. So there isa direct line of intersection
between the desire for lifeextension, be it on earth or
colonization of Mars, and acertain attitude or even
indifference to, let's say,ecological but also ethical
issues concerning life. Some ofthese polarities or ambivalences

(14:02):
are also very much at work inthe question of cloning that
Deborah brought up a moment ago.
To go to the direwolf, whichrecently was famously de
extinguished or resurrected, wecould even say. So the company
that did that is ColossalBiosciences, which I had never
heard of, but it's one of theendeavors of the Harvard
biologist church. It iscurrently valued at something

(14:25):
like $10,000,000,000 And youmight ask, right, why invest so
much money in de extinguishingand bringing back a species, the
direwolf in this case, or thewoolly mammoth or the dodo, what
have you, when there are so manymassive needs to aid endangered
species that are not yet gone?And one answer, of course,
probably the most obvious andalso most cynical, is that

(14:48):
there's no money in bringingback species that are almost
dead, whereas the possiblefinancial benefits of bringing
back the direwolf, right,cloning, whose names did you see
the names that they gave to thethree four beasts? They're
Romulus and Remus and Chelise.
Those names which are obviouslyright, they pick up on any

(15:08):
number of cultural residences,origin of Rome, but also Game of
Thrones. That is absolutely partof what's at stake in this whole
question of cloning. And one ofthe things that I find so
fascinating about the clone,even to a certain extent more so
than questions of brainuploading, if you will, is that

(15:31):
the clone is so thoroughlyartificial, artifactual. It's a
literary fabrication, but onethat is so deeply enmeshed in
what we think we understandabout the nature of biological
reality that we can't see it forwhat it is. And when names like
Romulus and Remus are given,right, familiar names that
associate these life forms withmythological figures, it is

(15:54):
absolutely playing on that in away that we have to attend to.

Deborah Goldgaber (15:58):
There is a certain way in which it's the
underside, like the biopolitics,when Foucault talks about
biopolitics as unleashing themost virulent and vicious
catastrophes and death andviolences on populations. It's a
really interesting counterparty,

David Wills (16:13):
I don't

Deborah Goldgaber (16:13):
know what the right word for what you're
talking about. Because in manyways, like, for example, in your
discussion of cloning, I feellike I haven't read anything
that good about, like, why isthis colossal story about the
direwolves just so weird whenyou actually read what happens?
Like, at first, you're like, howinteresting. There was some
direwolf teeth that were leftover, and they drill into them

(16:36):
very, very carefully in order tofind this extant DNA, and they
sort of unravel it andreconstitute the text of this
ancient DNA, and you're like,wonderful, we're gonna have this
fabulous resurrection. But infact, what you find is something
just much stranger, weirder,messier, and not at all what was

(16:57):
promised, right?
You end up with a gray wolf thathad some added features that
they believed would typicallyrestore what was so lovable
about the dire wolf in the Gameof Thrones. And what you show in
the chapter that you have oncloning, which is towards the

(17:19):
end, I believe it's the fourthsection of your book, like after
you discuss biologicalimmortality, but like you talk
about just how like there's noreal way to ground our ideas
about cloning, and it's just awhole set of fictions. What's
really interesting about cloningis, A, the fictions and the
desires that you can read off ofthese stories and discourses,

(17:40):
like the belief that we couldrestore these creatures and the
way that they're going to haveno interest in preserving
existing life. They haveinterest in monetizing these
kinds of stunts in order toexpand technologies of

(18:02):
indefinite life that will keepthese billionaires alive as
they're trying to get to Marsand abandon all of us. And so
there's this, the story ofcurrent capital and the way it's
entangled with the dream ofindefinite life and the techno
science associated with it, andhow that is all associated with
the biopolitics of death anddestruction.

(18:25):
Think it would be your bookallows gives us so many
resources to think theseconjectures. But I don't think
that at the end, book touches onit's more about the fictions and
the desires and the projectionsand the sort of philosophical

(18:49):
concepts and sort of less aboutthe way that the dark side
that's haunting it, I think. Orhow did the dark side that David
was just talking about, how didthat show up for you as you're
writing the book and as you werestructuring it? Because the book
has such an amazing structure asyou take us through dream of
immortality from Diatma toBostrom, you know?

Adam Rosenthal (19:11):
This is a really important question, and I think
the reason why I don't focus onthe dark side. So for one,
there's an excellent literatureon the evils of transhumanist
philosophy, if we want to callit philosophy. So that has been
done. It's been done very well.But more fundamentally, what I

(19:33):
think we need to address is evenif the current instantiation of
transhumanism is, let's say,repugnant and vile, and by and
large, it is, The sources ofthat discourse or the
fundamental ground upon which itdraws is not something that's so
easily dismissed as itsproponents, whether we're

(19:55):
talking about Nick Bostrom or, Idon't know, Harris or what have
you.
My interest in writing this bookin part was to show how the real
difficulty that we have inhandling this So on the one
hand, we can obviously say weshould be prioritizing other
things politically. Absolutely.And I support that 100%. But if
I have something to offer, it'sin shifting the level upon which

(20:20):
our negotiation with thisresource is going to take place,
because I don't think we cansimply dismiss it. An example of
that, David, when you startedtalking about the experience of
writing the forward, you saidyou were traumatized.
And in a certain sense, I toowas traumatized in writing this
book in the sense of aconversion experience, which

(20:42):
isn't to say that I found God. Idid not find God. But what I
found, and this specificallyconcerns the problem of the
clone, but also brain uploading,but also indefinite biological
life. In the end, what I foundwas that as much as I wanted to
be skeptical of all of thesefigures, even phantasms, at some

(21:02):
point we all are attached tolife, to some corporeal or
embodied or or some form ofexistence. I think often we miss
that there is that element thatfiction when I call fiction or
phantasm here in the sense ofthis desire for immortal or
indefinite existence on the onehand, in its current political
and economic manifestation, itmust be rejected and fought

(21:25):
against.
On the other hand, it's not asif there is a non fictional, non
fantasmatic foundation that wecan rely on to form a new
ethics. There's no new ethicsthat's coming. And that is,
let's say, why I don't go so farinto declaiming this discourse
or into focusing on the negativeside of this. Because even if
the clone is artificial,nevertheless, we don't exactly

(21:47):
have another concept. And maybewe're all clones to a certain
extent.
Even the notion of species.Right? The notion of species is
a concept that has shifted overthe years. It is an artifact. It
is artifactual.
There is no single notion ofspecies, either in the
biological or the philosophicalliterature, that we can rely on.
And indeed, to your point,David, about how a lot of these

(22:07):
discourses of immortalizationhave more to do about the
resistance to death, the verynotion of species can be seen as
an attempt to save somethingwhen even though I know I will
die, something will live on.Right? So the notion of
humanity, insofar as it relieson a concept of species, itself
is this hope, this dream, thisphantasm that something will go
on. Of course, the negative sideof that is what you sacrifice in

(22:28):
order to preserve, andundoubtedly, that's highly
problematic.
Even if we can point out all ofthe fabrications that go into
forming the notion of species,and the direwolf is the prime
example of this because it isn'ta direwolf. And yet the argument
that, right, the ecologists onstaff at Colossal Biosciences
make is that it's functionally adirewolf. Who's to say where

(22:50):
function and, let's say, geneticidentity, what the relationship
between the two of them is?There's no final word that we
have on where the ultimatesource of ipsaty or selfhood
lies. We must be critical ofwhat's done in the name of
preservation, be it of speciesor of human life.
But at the same time, we can'tjust dismiss the notion of

(23:10):
species as such, because that'sactually an essential concept
for preservationists andecological work that's being
done.

Deborah Goldgaber (23:17):
I want to push back, and I agree with you
on the level of efficacy, butwhy not say the problem that we
are facing is if at one time werecognized, we Western
Christians, that like life wasjust, we were going to die, but
we had hope for life immortal,that our souls would ascend and

(23:38):
we would be with God. And youcould say that that led to a
certain understanding of humanlife and our human place on
Earth. And then now we've givenup on that silly story of
immortality and that silly hopeof immortality, and we've found
something even more sustaining.And that is the hope for an
indefinite life where maybe I'lldie, but maybe I'll be brought

(23:59):
back as a clone of some sort.And that this has the virtue of
being so much morescientifically respectable than
the religious or theologicaldiscourse or belief it replaced.
And then you might say, Well,this actually is disastrous
because it makes us I mean, forall the ways that you might as

(24:23):
need to have taught us to see,this view of another life made
us devalue this one. And so youcould have critiqued that view
for all of its negative effectshere on Earth. But you might say
this one is even worse becausewe don't have to value anything,
because we can imagine that itcan be it's at our fingertips

(24:45):
and our technological ourexpertise will tell us how to
restore everything. We can evenaccelerate it because we'll be
able to bring it back. Andagain, the question about in
what sense this unleashes evenworse biopolitical energy.
So why not say that, no, wereally should. Really, the right
thing to do, even if it'spointless is to insist on

(25:08):
finitude.

David Wills (25:09):
If I can add an element to this, it seems
fascinating to me since we beganon cloning, right? It's
fascinating to me how thequestion of cloning and the
clone operates to make such anabsolute divide between the
human and other species. Thathow long ago was it now when

(25:30):
Dolly was produced, the sheep,which was supposedly the first
cloned animal? I remember thehorrified reaction to that, oh
my God, you know, next somebodywill be wanting to clone a
human. And so we went throughthat whole period of discussion
where we figured out that maybewe could clone certain animals
and so on, but we would have toregulate it necessarily.

(25:50):
But that there seemed to be aconsensus, an international
consensus, universal consensuswe presumed. When it came to the
human, no, that was off limits,that humans could and should not
ever, ever be cloned. And ofcourse, that universalist
acceptance of that dividing linewas never there probably. But
soon enough, we started to hearrumors about, you know, what

(26:13):
might be going on in labs inChina, for example, or what
might be happening in terms ofhuman cloning, irrespective of
that presumed ethical dividingline that we had made. The
question of the clone and thequestion of the direwolf within
that same context, and I'msorry, I have to say that most
of what I don't understand aboutthis whole question, I didn't

(26:35):
even know what a direwolf was,is because I've never watched
Game of Thrones.
So I do need to get myself acertain cultural literacy, I
know, before I can contribute tothis discussion. But it is
interesting that in all thistalk of prosthetic immortality,
the varieties of it, Adam, thatyou delve into so extensively

(26:55):
and fascinatingly, throughoutall that discussion, it seems to
me the presumption is that we'reonly talking about humans. We're
only putting our energy intohuman life. And that's really
what matters. Now, of course,that doesn't maybe there are
some crossover areas wherepeople who are interested in
whether it be from aphilosophical point of view or

(27:16):
an ethical point of view or ascientific point of view, people
who are interested in thesequestions of human immortality
might also in fact be verysensitive to the possibility of
preserving animal species,resurrecting animal species and
so on and so forth.
Don't know. Just the idea thatwe are still struggling with
that limit, After what ageneration of discussion now

(27:38):
about speciesism and humanismand the human treatment of other
species and so on and so forth.When it comes to a limit of life
like death or not and thepossibility of extending that
limit, then suddenly the oldparadigm comes back into
operation. And suddenly we'reback to we humans and all the

(27:59):
rest of other animal species. Itjust strikes me as interesting
that through these biopoliticalformations and configurations,
one of the most important pointsthat Foucault made in all of his
work was that epistemologicallyspeaking and so on and so forth,
it's always a shifting focus.
Right. And it's never justsimply a discovery that
represents a progress and amarch towards enlightenment, but

(28:20):
necessarily there are infoldingsthat come about. And so I think
that all these futuristicsounding possibilities of
extensions of life, we stillhave within us those very
retrogressive impulses that meanthat, for example, we preserve
ourselves at the expense ofother humans to begin with, but

(28:42):
also other other animal speciesand so on.

Adam Rosenthal (28:45):
Yeah. You raise a number of really important
questions. And given thattechnological means of extending
and ending life extend farbeyond the human and have for
millions upon millions of yearsentered into the realm of animal
plant microbial life. What isthe specificity of the human now

(29:07):
within the contemporary form ofthese biotechnologies? I think
you're coming on to somethingthat's pretty important.
Unless I'm mistaken, identicaltwins are clones of one another.
So now with hindsight, right, alot of these questions that
created quite the uproar twenty,thirty years ago seem a little

(29:28):
bit quaint. Perhaps one of thereasons why they seem quaint is
because as radical as ourcapabilities for manipulating
biological and organic life havebecome, we now can't but face
the problems of artificialintelligence. It's everywhere.
And that is so ominous andimpending that great clone of

(29:49):
direwolf, that seems minusculecompared to what's coming on
that other horizon.
Right? And even the experts inthe field of artificial
intelligence, especially theexperts, right, are saying,
well, this thing is out of ourhands. All we can do is try to
mitigate what we've set intoplay. Right? I'm thinking of
Jeffrey Hinton in particularthere.
These are really massivequestions. And Deborah, to your

(30:11):
point, what would the impact beif we opted, right, to insist
again on finitude? In the nameof finitude, what could be done?
In the principal way, right?What I think I ultimately
realized upon finishing writingthis book, because again, as I
mentioned a moment ago, this wassomething of a conversion
experience for me.

(30:31):
I didn't think the same thingsthat I thought when I started
out. What became crystal clearto me, to each of your points,
is that what all of thisdiscourse, all of these
biotechnologies ultimately boildown to, and the reason why
there is so much of afascination, a fixation on the
human rather than the animal orwhy the animal is

(30:52):
instrumentalized in ways thatthe human still not quite is
that ultimately all of thisboils down to a fear of death.
Saying that is not bringing anynews. But once you realize that
a lot of the strategies that areput forward and I'm thinking now
about David Chalmers, NickBostrom, Aubrey DeGray, right?
All of these fancifultechnologies that were

(31:14):
unthinkable fifty years ago,which now seem, if not possible,
at least not impossible.
What it boils down to ismitigating a fear of passing
away and what kinds ofstrategies can be invented to
not only imagine that our soulswill somehow transcendently live

(31:34):
on past our possible knowledgeof that happening, nor even
simply this confidence we havethat our children will carry on
our legacies or our corporationswill carry on our legacies or
our name will be born by decadesand centuries to come, but also
that I might be there to witnessit. There's this incredible
fixation that has been fed bythe promise of these

(31:56):
biotechnologies that not only myname or my memory or my soul,
but me, myself, I, in my presentself feeling fashion, will be
able to experience my futureafter I'm dead, which in sum is
how I would characterize brainuploading, the promise of brain
uploading, or for Star Trek fansout there, right, being beamed

(32:17):
up, undergoing teletransportation. I do think that
finitude is as important asever. It's the fundamental
driving force of so much ofwhat's going on finitude,
fragility, precarity. And yet,if I had a reply to you,
Deborah, it would be that I'mnot sure we've yet discovered
the discourse that can satisfythe fear of death in a way that,

(32:43):
let's say, makes us more open tomultispecies eco justice to take
a figure from Donna Haraway.
Or at least as much as I findthat discourse to be convincing,
it doesn't seem to work on thelikes of our tech moguls, Elon
Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the like.To a certain extent, this book
is written for them. Not that Ithink that they'll read it, but

(33:05):
it's written for this, let'ssay, toxically masculine vision
of life everlasting.

Deborah Goldgaber (33:13):
Yeah. So I think I really appreciate that.
And I said at the beginning thatI thought it would be pointless,
in part for reasons that yourbook discloses, which is we
can't simply say no toimmortality or the desire for
immortality, but we can stillpresent a cultivation of limits
and fragility and finitude andacceptance of death as virtues.

(33:36):
But yeah, we can't simply let goor put down that desire. We
could talk about the things yousay in your book about why that
is so and how that connects withfigures like Haiglend, who often
argue this is exactly what weshould be doing.
But I wanted to say, I rememberreading the first time, it was
the article on resurrecting themastodon or the woolly mammoth.

(33:56):
And this was in Siberia andthere was some Siberian
scientists. And it was beforethe geopolitical cutoff between
The United States and Russiathat this article was written
before the Ukrainian war. Andyes, so they were like, well,
there's a lot of methane that'sgoing to escape due to global
warming. And so these scientistsin Russia, as a father and son,
had this idea of, oh, if wecould get these large herds of
woolly mammoths again, theycould tamp it down.

(34:19):
And that's present in that NewYork article Colossal, which the
direwolf company is also lookingat woolly mammoths for this
reason. So this is like, wow,this is really thinking out of
the box, right? About how todeal with climate change in an
ecological way, you might add.But what was interesting to me
was that these men in Patagonia,like outfits, like for the

(34:40):
company Patagonia, came to visitbillionaires, and they were like
interested in investing in thisproject. That was the first time
I sort of encountered this idea.
I was like, Oh God, yeah, youhave billions of dollars. You
really aren't going to be ableto spend it. There's no Like
your money really, really isgoing to outlive you. And I was
thinking about how that mustfeel. Right?
You might like in the past havelike set up foundations or

(35:03):
whatever, but they're like,okay, well let us like invest in
this Mastodon project or WoollyMammoth project in the hope that
like we can be resurrectedagain. And of course you see
what the direwolf example,you're not going to be
resurrected. Even if they cloneyou, it's not going to be you.
But anyway, it's this dream ofimmortality or this refusal to

(35:23):
die or the injustice of havingto die, especially with all this
money, fuels these economies,this investment, Nearby
technologies that thesecompanies gladly cultivate fuels
this hope for the possibility,even if I have to die, maybe I
can come back. And that this, inturn, will fuel technologies
that we can introduce on a moremassive level to roll back death

(35:46):
or make sure that aging happensmore slowly?
You talk about this in thechapter on age reversal.

Adam Rosenthal (35:53):
Yes. When the first efforts at extinguishing
the woolly mammoth were made,the argument, or one of the
arguments, was that it wouldserve ecological purposes
because they aid, I believe, thegrowth of permafrost in Siberia,
something like that. There'sactually a I address it in the
book, but there is a tradition,I believe, of Russian cosmism,
where the belief articulatedthere is that, yes, entire

(36:16):
populations will be resurrectedat some point in the future. So
you

Deborah Goldgaber (36:19):
find

Adam Rosenthal (36:19):
different manifestations of this. And
there's also the famous case ofLenin's body, which has been
preserved in a totally one offfashion, it's still If you were
able to see it, it's reported tostill be, let's say, supple to
the touch. And so these aredifferent forms, as you say, of

(36:43):
investing capital in forms ofpreservation in various and
sundry contexts. One of theother major ways in which this
takes shape, which I don'treally address in the book for
various reasons, but cryogenics,which has gotten a lot of

(37:03):
publicity, though I believe theactual number of people who have
been frozen number relativelyfew. But there, the idea being
that you freeze yourself or yourbrain so that in the future, at
a certain moment when either thecure for whatever disease or
ailment you suffer from willhave been discovered, or the

(37:26):
cure for aging itself will havebeen revealed, then you will be
resurrected.
There are so many differentforms of this. And in the book,
take some pains to show howthese problems of brain
uploading, indefinite aging,cloning, but cryogenics is part
and parcel, they, while eachemphasizing a different

(37:46):
structure or a different tapas,nevertheless partake of the same
fundamental element. And attheir limits, they touch on each
other in an interesting way. Togo back to the first traces of
the philosophical tradition inthe West, I opened with Plato
because I think Plato, thesymposium, the questions that

(38:07):
are raised there, but also Homerbefore Plato, those issues that
were given articulationthousands of years ago resonate.
They resonate very strongly withthe techniques that are employed
today.
But as you indicated, Deborah,there seems to be vastly greater

(38:36):
deleterious effects today to theimplementation of these
techniques of immortalizationthan there were, let's say, for
example, by having one's nameremembered in a poem or writing
works, or giving birth tochildren in the context of a
Greek polis. Now, we say that,but perhaps, I mean, there were

(38:57):
certainly a number of, let'ssay, homicidal projects that
were also undertaken under thatname in that period. So it's not
as if it was bloodless, butcertainly the biopolitical
implications today are vastlydifferent than they were then.
But I think it's helpful to openthe conversation between these
two moments.

David Wills (39:13):
I was thinking as you were talking and going back
to something Deborah said sometime ago now, that this matter
of immortality, this matter ofthe fact that, as Deborah said,
we've forsaken the idea of anafterlife that begins when we
die, a new life. We haveforsaken that, if you like, in

(39:35):
favor of these otherpossibilities, these
technological prostheticpossibilities. But of course, as
we say that we have just livedthrough this massive media event
of sending off somebody to theafterlife in a way that was
returning to those terms ofhundreds, if not thousands of
years ago, a very simple,simplistic understanding of what

(40:00):
that meant, that it seemed likea billion people in the world
were happy to be reminded of andparticipate in and sign on to.
It comes back to me again as anidea that, you know, we're
living in a moment where we seeboth sides of everything. We see
the Catholic form of immortalitybeing celebrated at the same
time as we see these adventuresand attempts to try and attain

(40:23):
very, very new forms ofimmortality, we see those same
things once again, cloning andso on, preservation of current
forms of human life beyond thenormal term.
And then we see the most basicnineteenth century natalist
project, you know, Americanmothers now have to women now
have to go and make babies,right? And not to mention the

(40:45):
eugenicist ideas that are beingfrankly discussed out in the
open. It's extraordinary how andI don't think this is just a
function of the election ofTrump. I don't think it's just a
function of Elon Musk's adultbrain so he can suddenly convert
from being this do gooder whoproduces produces an electric
vehicle as a one way of helpingto save the planet to being the

(41:07):
person taking the chainsaw toeverything ecological. Somehow
both things, the two sides ofthe coin have a very uncanny
coexistence.
Maybe it's just the fact thatthis moment in time has brought
that into relief. Maybe thatwill always be with us. Maybe we
cannot think one without theother. It seems to me some of
the things that you talk aboutin the book are very resonant

(41:30):
with that idea that we're alwayson two tracks. We were always
have been for a long time sincePlato, if you like, on the track
of a certain notion ofimmortality.
And at the same time, we'vealways been on the track of a
type of presumptivetechnological possibility of
advance. And maybe that's ourhuman condition. Maybe that's

(41:52):
the way we stand astride bothmortality and immortality at the
same time.

Adam Rosenthal (41:57):
Yeah, I mean, there's so much to say. You
know, the funny thing about theCatholic notion of afterlife, of
course, is that it's apharmacological concept. There's
hell, which I don't talk aboutin the book because I, you know,
it was brought to my attentionsometime after by I mean, it's
obvious, but at the same time,it's not so obvious when we're
talking about the immortality ofthe soul. But that was, if you
will, right, a built in ethicalfunction. I don't know if it was

(42:19):
a great one.
It's not for me to say. But it'sworth noting that immortality
was, if you will, as good as itwas bad. And in the wake of the
death of Pope Francis, I mean,we didn't need that to show us,
but there's no simple limitdividing the religious from the
non religious. Nor can we simplysay that we're in a secular age,
if you will. This is only tooobvious.

(42:39):
Indeed, in the book, one of thethings I tried to do was to show
why it's utterly insufficient tosay that, let's say,
transhumanism is itself areligious discourse even if a
cryptoreligious discourse.Because, of course, that answers
nothing. Because then we have tostill ask, well, what is the
essence of religion such that ititself abides And it's not as if
religious discourse isn't onethat we can simply dismiss any

(43:01):
more easily than we can socalled non religious or secular
discourses.

Deborah Goldgaber (43:05):
It was, well, I guess, like the direwolf and
the pope, you know, with thesetwo striking images of
immortality in the same month. Iwas struck when David was
talking about the juxtapositionof images of immortality. The
book by Jean Baptiste Caisseau,which is more and more and more
an all consuming history ofenergy. And the basic argument

(43:26):
is there is we talk abouttransitioning from one of we
have one kind of immortality,let's imagine, to another, but
this idea of transitioning fromfossil fuels to clean energy.
And he's like, No, no, no.
All the history tells us themore energy sources we can find,
we'll find a way to use them.And so it struck me that he
could say the same thing aboutversions of immortality or

(43:46):
images of indefinite orphantasms of indefinite life or
immortality that we don't mind.In some way, they're not
contradictory. We can collectthem all. We can use them all.
And this is one of the thingsthat struck me in the book, the
way that one transformed intothe other. The way you think
about indefinite life as aterrestrial project, and then

(44:07):
all of a sudden you glimpse itstranscendence dimension, a
transcendence or transcendentaldimension to it. There's a
constant floating betweenimmanence and transcendence,
which is present in your diatomastory that begins, which is just
so excellent. I think that's thefirst thing I told you when I
read the book. I was like, wow,it's just so good.
This diatoma in the symposiumshows us that we can't

(44:28):
understand life at all. Weunderstand reproduction. We
wouldn't recognize it as such ifwe didn't have this image of
immortality. That's a necessarysupplement to the
intelligibility of life or lifeor unshamed life at all. If I
could ask you one more question,I was struck by what seemed like
a moment where you werehistoricizing Heidegger.

(44:51):
And it seemed like this momentwhere you were saying something
like, you have this beingtowards death that Heidegger
thinks individuates us as humansand characterizes our whole lies
and self understanding. By theend of the book, you're
suggesting that the way that weare coming to, presently coming
to understand life, via all ofthese techno scientific

(45:14):
prostheses is transformingwhatever existential we would
want to say structures our selfunderstanding. I'm not a
sophisticated Heidegger reader,so I don't know whether you
would say that you're doingthat. Heidegger is saying it's
true for the time that he'ssaying it, and movies were a
vast part of human history, butit's less true now.

Adam Rosenthal (45:39):
It's a really interesting question. There is
quite a bit of Heidegger in thebook. I wanted to demonstrate
conclusively that when someonecoming from, let's say, the tech
or the STEM fields, whether it'sMax Tegmark or Nick Bostrom or

(46:00):
Aubrey de Grey, when any of themspeak about the coming
immortalization of human life,or what I would put more
technically, indefinite life, orlet's say biological
immortality, or amortality even,which one finds, let's say, in
Yuval Harari's work. When theyspeak about these forms of

(46:23):
survival, I thought it wasreally important to establish
that though the language theyuse is one that's not
necessarily recognizable in thefield of contemporary
continental philosophy, I don'tthink that it contradicts it. I
think it's really important wenot just dismiss what's being

(46:45):
written, what's being said underthis aegis of transhumanism,
because it is really tempting todo so.
There's something I say this inthe book. Maybe I changed it.
Don't know. There's somethingcheap about the discourse. It's
not pleasant.
Not simply because of itsassociation with people who are
destroying lives and theenvironment and the planet's

(47:10):
future. It's also unpleasant forthat reason. But because of the
importance of finitude in itsHeideggerian guise for so much
work today, including that thatone finds in contemporary French
philosophy, I thought it wasreally critical to show that
these discourses aren'tincommensurate. They may be

(47:32):
talking about different things,but to talk about indefinite
life does not contradictfinitude or being towards death
in Heidegger's sense. So thatwas the main reason for its
inclusion.
The second question, is it thecase that our finitude or let's
say mean, our I say that inquotation marks is it the case
that our relation to death ischanging? This is a tricky

(47:54):
question. Who is the our? Is itchanging? Yes.
Is it changing in a way that iswe can speak of a new epoch in
humanity or post humanity? Iwould be hesitant to say that in
any simple or straightforwardsense. It seems as though for
many, for some time, we havebelieved that our biological
lives would necessarily come toan end. This seems like

(48:17):
something that we often take forgranted. If it were the case
that one day we were led tobelieve that that was not an
absolute necessity, even if itweren't actually possible, Well,
probably all of us here on theright will admit that it's
likely that we'll die.
Nevertheless, if we had to admitat some level that that weren't
a necessary reality, but rathera contingent one that in all

(48:41):
probability will come to pass,is it the case that that
realization changes who or whatwe are or what we call the
human? That's what I discuss inthe conclusion to the book. Does
that announce a modification inHeideggerian being toward death?
I don't know. In some sense Idon't care.
That's not the primary takeaway.But there's something

(49:02):
interesting that happens in,let's say, what the existential
ontological impact of such arealization would be on the one
hand, versus his absoluteirrelevance, not only for us,
but to what you've all beensaying, the millions upon
millions of lives that arediscarded, that are let or made
to die. On the one hand, we havethis existential knowledge that

(49:24):
seems absolutely life altering.On the other hand, this life
altering knowledge is absolutelyirrelevant. Could not be more
insignificant in the face of theplanet and its history.

Deborah Goldgaber (49:35):
Yeah. And I think this also connects to
David's recollection at thebeginning. Wouldn't it be odd if
you write February, yourconclusion, and this is just
like, I think this is what youwere talking about. We too live
in the uncertainty of the dateof our demise. We too know not
when we shall die or if we shalldie.
Such non knowledge is perhapsthe novelty of our

(49:55):
biotechnological modernity andof the techno scientific
configuration of modern presstheses of immortalization. The
consequence of these forces isto ontically extend the
separation between whatHeidegger calls being toward
death and Derrida thecondemnation to die. The
separation is therefore growingwider and its growth is a
consequence both of radicaltranshumanist fictions and of

(50:18):
basic research in the lifesciences. But like, even if it
were the case that we would allof a sudden, all of us be like,
Oh yeah, do we have to die?Maybe we don't have to die.
Maybe we aren't sure anymore,and that's more contingent than
we thought. At the same time,our exposure to death by the
death machines of modern armies,like US and Israeli bombs that

(50:41):
just exposed people to death.Was just reading about you know,
there were more bombs thrown onGaza than in all of Germany,
like, for the whole second worldwar. I mean, just so crazy about
the sort of exposure to death.And at the same time, the sense

(51:01):
that our need to die is less andless.

David Wills (51:05):
I was struck while you were saying that, Deborah,
and also in terms of what yourquestion was to Adam, the second
question about whether these newformations for configurations
would require a Heidegger to,you know, remodel, the sense of
the being towards death and soon. And then what came to mind

(51:27):
was, something that, Adam, Ithink you mentioned, briefly,
but that we haven't really goneinto because it's a whole other
discussion, of course. But howin the background of all this,
all of a sudden, in a way thatprobably wasn't clear to you,
Adam, at the time you werewriting the book is, the fact of
artificial intelligence, right?And and how that is in the

(51:51):
process of transformingeverything. Right?
It's probably artificialintelligence that is going to
determine for us whether we canclone our brains and download
our brains and so on and soforth. It's artificial
intelligence that is going tomake scientific decisions and

(52:14):
think scientific thinking, doscientific thinking for us, in,
in an extraordinary unimaginableway at this point, but that
seems to be coming very fast.Artificial intelligence will
probably be a problem for theDasein. It will probably require
that animal to be modified orgenetically modified not too

(52:38):
long in the future.

Adam Rosenthal (52:39):
Yes. I want to respond briefly to what Deborah
said, then David, I'll come backto your question, your
suggestion about the comingimpact of artificial
intelligence for the Daseinindeed. Ironically, as you were
talking, Deborah, what flashedto mind, it's in Being and Time.
When Heidegger is diagnosing ourrelationship to finitude and the

(53:00):
ways in which we evade it. Andprecisely what he says this is
not gonna be precisely what hesays, but it's approximately
what he says, is something like,our certainty in the moment of
our demise is what allows us toevade the fact of our anxiety
towards the uncertainty of ourdemise in general as a certain
uncertainty.
Sorry, that was nonsense. But Ithink you get my point is that
in some sense, fascination withthis question of our ontological

(53:25):
being, our Dasein, is absolutelyso compelling that it allows us
to ignore everything happeningin its wake. The framing of the
question of what if there was ashift in our mortality or of our
being towards death as broughton by these biotechnologies? I
think what we see when, again,we're talking about
transhumanism and where capitalgets invested today, is the

(53:47):
ability to ignore the ravages ofthe world because of this
promise of a shift in ourexistential ontological state. I
don't know how to fight that.
I don't know what exactly we do,but there's something absolutely
essential at stake in that, howthe one seems to be elided
almost because of the other. Tocome to the question of

(54:08):
artificial intelligence, in thebook, I make use frequently of
this figure of translation,which is I like to talk of these
prostheses of immortality astranslations, which is to say as
transformations that, let's say,produce a form of continuity
between something that precededand something that follows. So

(54:29):
in other words, how are we tothink theoretically about
cloning or brain uploading? Ithink translation, as Walter
Benjamin, but also JacquesDerrida, right, have formulated
it, is a really helpful way ofgetting at what's actually at
stake in these forms of livingon, in these forms of
immortalization. Why do I saythis now in light of artificial

(54:50):
intelligence?
I say this because a figurethat's really very closely
connected to translation for me,and something I've started to
think about maybe more since Ifinished writing the book, is
inheritance. And inheritance haslong been tied to forms of
living on when one is faced withone's own mortality. So again,
we have children, and this goesback to Aristotle and Plato. We

(55:10):
have children, and thosechildren are a form of
immortality for the non godsthat we are. But they partake of
this immortality, even if it hasto be in an impoverished sense.
So inheritance is absolutelyvital. And I think if we think

(55:34):
about what is proposed throughthese biotechnologies or these
artificial intelligences, thesewhich are absolutely let me let
me be clear. Right? What we cando today or what we'll be able
to do over the next fifty or onehundred years is was absolutely
unthinkable one hundred yearsago. Unthinkable.
We can't dismiss these noveltiesand reduce them to the things

(55:56):
that Plato or Descartes weretheorizing. That would be a real
disservice to do that. However,the, let's say, symbolic
operations through which theyfunction remain, as far as I'm
concerned, the same as thosethat were already at work for a
Plato or a Descartes. And oncewe see that, and that's what the
figure of translation, but alsoinheritance, gets at for me. And

(56:17):
why is this important when wethink about artificial
intelligence?
Okay, let me put it this way.The people who whether we're
talking about David Chalmers or,again, Nick Bostrom, who are in
favor of brain uploading. Right?So I have my brain, which
apparently has some relationshipto myself, right, apparently has
some relationship to my mind andtherefore myself. And if I could

(56:40):
duplicate that brain, I wouldsomehow duplicate myself.
Now there are a millionphilosophical problems that
result from that, not the thesmallest of which is not the
simple fact that if I were toduplicate my brain, that would
be my brain elsewhere and not mybrain as it is where I am.
Right? It's it's the other me,not me me, And that gap between

(57:04):
the one and the other, I think,absolutely it's a it's a it's a
chasm. That aside, that aside,the people who are in favor of
brain uploading and thetechnologies brought about by
artificial intelligence thatwill allegedly make more and
more fine grained scans of thebrain possible, thereby allowing

(57:26):
for better and betterreproductions of said brain,
would like us to think thatwe're a perfect reproduction of
the brain, like a perfectreproduction of the DNA of the
direwolf conceivable, then theresult would be me. Now, is it

(57:50):
the case that a perfectreproduction of my brain again,
ignoring the milliondifficulties that underlie even
that thought.
Is it the case that a perfectreproduction of my brain bears
some kind of resemblance to mequa experiencing, thinking,
being that is, let's say, adifferent kind of resemblance
than the one that inheresbetween me qua thinking, feeling

(58:13):
being, and the books that Iwrite that bear my name?
Absolutely. That is a completelydifferent prosthetic possibility
that begets a differentrelationship between the product
and the subject, if you will. Wehave to admit that. Absolutely.
But ultimately, what's at stakein any of these translations,

(58:35):
and again, that's why the figureof translation is so important,
is getting selling us, if youwill, the fiction that what is
produced will not just be likeme, but will be me. So we have
to, in some sense, right, wehave to buy into this promise of
an identity when I mean, I it'sso ludicrous to me because we

(59:00):
can't even we don't even know inwhat our identity consists at
present. So how am I are we thento verify what the relationship
between me one and me two wouldbe were there some kind of a
technical reproductive operationpossible. Nevertheless, and
again, why this comes down toprocesses of translation and

(59:21):
inheritance where there's neverany identity, but rather
negotiations of difference, isthat what all of these different
fictions serve, these differenttechnologies qua fiction serve,
is staving off my fear of death.Right?
That's because it's always medeciding. Right? So ultimately,
if I'm able to believe that I'llbe there, right? Much as I don't

(59:43):
know if Pope Francis believedthat he would pass into I need
to bring Pope Francis into this.But much as for someone who
believes in an afterlife and asoul.
Right. Again, the criticalprosthetic element of that is
that that belief gives mecomfort. It allows me to

(01:00:07):
believe, and this is a questionof belief, of credibility, that
I won't die. And it lets me havethat belief, that confidence
now. It's always a question ofthe confidence that I have now.
So, again, it's entirely thesame kinds of symbolic
operations that are at workhere, even if the technical

(01:00:30):
means through which thesefacsimiles are now being
proposed is completelydifferent. And why artificial
intelligence is more scary, ifyou will, than some of these
previous technologies, even moreso than cloning, is This is
maybe a silly example, but Ithink it's not unrealistic.
Again, in the past, onebequeathed one's wealth, one's

(01:00:57):
possessions, to one's children,or at least to someone who was
not oneself. Right? You wouldnot bequeath your possessions to
yourself after your death.
You form an institution, or yougive it to the firstborn son, or
what have you. Okay. I thinkit's now not only possible, but

(01:01:19):
likely that something likeagain, to take some of the names
that are in the air, whetherit's Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk one
can well imagine a Jeff Bezos oran Elon Musk building a Jeff
Bezos or Elon Musk AI that isfunctionally able to make
decisions within a certainmargin of error that resemble
the kinds of decisions thateither will have make during

(01:01:40):
their embodied living time. Andagain, we have to ignore like,
it's not a question of whetherit is or is not either of them.
The question is, does itfunctionally perform in a near
behavioralist fashion kinds ofactions such as they were
capable of to the extent thatthey believe in its ability to

(01:02:03):
carry on their lives.
And we we, or our legislation,allows those AIs to inherit
their properties and theirorganizations and their wealth.
So the question is, now, dothese technologies not allow for
a certain all too likelyscenario where where Elon Musk,
whether or not it is Elon Muskor not, but he will live
forever? We will give all of therights and obligations that he

(01:02:26):
now has control of to an AI thatwill, for all effective
purposes, be indefinite in itsmodes of survival. Philosophical
questions like whether it is oris not Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos
or David Wills or DeborahGoldeber, these are irrelevant.
What is relevant is what kindsof decisions are we now going to
make about how society isstructured under the true

(01:02:49):
fictions, if you will, of theseartificial, extensions of the
lives of people.
This seems completely, likely tome.

Deborah Goldgaber (01:02:59):
I had never thought about that that
possibility somehow. Like, Iwasn't I wasn't thinking about,
like, the ability to just anindefinite, like, Elon Musk AI.

Adam Rosenthal (01:03:09):
As soon as we get caught up in the high
philosophical questions, is itElon Musk or not, we completely
lose sight of what's actually atstake. And I think that's really
important. And I think that'swhat, again, the proponents of
these technologies, whether theysee it themselves or not as
irrelevant, but what their workserved to do is they attempt to
sell us the continuity of anexistence as if that even

(01:03:30):
matters, which is completelymissing the point about, again,
yes, what kinds of global andplanetary actions we take on the
basis of these beliefs in theextensions of our lives, which
are catastrophic. Does that meanI want to die? No.

David Wills (01:03:43):
I won't let you do it before me.

Deborah Goldgaber (01:03:48):
Well, it's But that one got morbid. That's
a whole different discussionabout whether we could help but
get morbid. I think this is areally great discussion. I think
I would invite Adam to say,like, who's your dream reader or
readers? What thought you wantto leave us with from the book?

Adam Rosenthal (01:04:06):
Thanks, Deborah. I feel like you asked me that
question because maybe the bookdoesn't have an ideal reader. I
guess I hoped this book wouldwould reach some kind of I'm
tempted to say a philosophicallyinformed reader, but I but I
hesitate because I myself am nota philosopher. Though I'm quite
fond of the discipline ofphilosophy, it's not one that I

(01:04:27):
myself belong to. So it'd bestrange to write a book for a
population to which I don'tbelong.
Although maybe that's not sostrange. Part of writing this
book was constituting an archivethat didn't exist in its
assemblage. One of the thingsthat I struggled with towards
the end of its composition wasindeed this fear that there was

(01:04:49):
no ideal writer, because I thinkthe first half of the book,
which engages much more with theWestern philosophical tradition,
and the second half of the book,which deals much more with
discourses of micro andmolecular biology, philosophy of
biology, as well astranshumanist discourse, that
those seem to have differentreaders. They don't often have

(01:05:11):
the same reader. But I think,and this is something that has
become more and more importantto me recently, I think that
putting these things togetheris, well, absolutely vital.
I truly believe in the kind ofcomparative, multidisciplinary
work that I think that this bookenacts. I would hope that the

(01:05:34):
reader it finds is one who maybeisn't necessarily excited for
all the parts of it, but who isconvinced or even converted by
it into thinking that the chasmsbeyond these disciplines is not
so vast as we thought. Andcertainly I'm not a specialist
in each of them, but there is nospecialist in each of them. I

(01:05:56):
don't know, now this is becomingmy pitch for humanities
research. But I do think thatone of the things that, you
know, humanities research can dois indeed read beyond the
humanities.
I'd like to thank you both,Deborah and David, for your
willingness and enthusiasm forthis discussion. It's been eye

(01:06:17):
opening for me to see what yousaw in the book, but also what
you have brought that is not inthe book to it. Truly, I'm
appreciative for yourparticipation.

David Wills (01:06:26):
Very happy to do so. Couldn't have done it
without the book.

Deborah Goldgaber (01:06:29):
Yeah. Thank you for writing the book.

Narrator (01:06:32):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. Thebook Prosthetic Immortalities:
Biology, Transhumanism, and theSearch for Indefinite Life by
Adam Rosenthal with a forewordby David Wills is available from
University of Minnesota Press.Thank you for listening.