'I like being alive, and I’d like to stay that way!'

Ariel, The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death was a thought-provoking read. What do you mean when you talk about 'abolishing death', and how on earth could a terminally ill individual be preserved and brought back to life in the future?

In brief, my book argues for providing the terminally ill access to a preservation procedure that halts the decay of their body – and most importantly their brain – through a combination of chemicals and cold temperatures. By doing so, the aim is to place patients into a kind of stasis from which they can one day be revived, once medical technology advances sufficiently. 

Revival could potentially be achieved via improvements in medicine that allow the reversal of the initial preservation procedure, but also plausibly, by more speculative techniques like 'mind uploading', i.e. scanning and re-creating a person's brain through artificial means. Either way, were access to this preservation procedure to be universally provided – which I argue would only require a modest addition to government healthcare budgets – this could effectively abolish death by ensuring every dying individual would have a realistic prospect of future revival.

My first thought upon reading the synopsis of your book was: 'This would not be a good idea,' but your book identifies some strong social, economic and philosophical arguments against prolonging life and offers logical counterarguments to refute them. How have most of your peers responded to the suggestions of abolishing death?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there has been a very wide range of responses, both on the subject of whether the technology could work and on whether we should use it even if it does. I'm currently in the middle of running formal surveys of my neuroscientist colleagues' opinions, but here's a brief preview of the results: on average they believe the preservation procedure has about a 40 per cent chance of working, though individual opinions vary widely! 

Less formally, talking to doctors and philosophers has also revealed a huge range of opinions in those communities – some are strongly supportive of any reasonable means by which people could be provided more control over their lifespans, while others remain quite concerned by the changes such technology would bring to the status quo.

Allowing people to have control over their lifespan is a fair objective. Where would the line then fall? Do you propose to bring people back to life so that they could enjoy say, a life span of say, up to 80-90 years and then let nature take its course uninterrupted? Or would the goal be to extend life for as long as each individual wants?

I think the goal of all medicine – life extension or otherwise – should be to give individuals more autonomy over their bodies and the ability to control their own health. If someone who was preserved in their fifties, and then later revived, wanted to live only another 30 years, then that should be their choice to make. But in the same way, if someone reached 100 or 150 years, and felt that they still had so much left to live for, then I think medicine should be helping them too.

What inspired you to explore social, philosophical and scientific discussions about prolonging life through future revival?

I want to live a long and healthy life, and I want the same option to be available for those I love. Unfortunately, though, death comes for us all, despite surveys clearly showing that most people on their deathbeds wished they could have lived longer and in better health than they were able to. 

On this basis, I think it is an enormous tragedy and injustice that people are deprived of opportunities to spend more time with their loved ones, pursue their passions, or make a positive impact on the world. As a result, I think that as a society we should be trying to empower people by giving them more control over their lives, rather than having them end due to circumstances beyond their control. The book is my attempt to encourage that attitude and to rigorously and seriously analyse how it could be done.

What do you think happens when we die, and would you say you are afraid of death?

I think we die when we permanently lose our personal identity and capacity for consciousness, by which I mean that death entails our oblivion. In that sense, I am not afraid of being dead per se, as I don't think it would feel like anything at all. But in a much more relevant sense, I am very upset with the prospect of being deprived of the ability to spend time with my partner, relax in the sunshine, eat food with my friends, and otherwise pursue the things that make my life meaningful and enjoyable. It's not so much that I'm afraid of death as that I like being alive and would like to stay that way!

In the book, you provide a very rational rebuttal of the overpopulation argument (against reviving people from the past), but surely with expectations that life expectancy will increase in the future, and the prevalence of terminal illnesses, there would have to be some limit to how many people we can preserve to bring back? How would we decide who will get to be revived in the future? Do you think it would be a case of the rich and powerful members of society being the only ones who get to come back to life and if so, do you see negative implications to this?

The answer to this is incredibly contingent on the economic capacity of future societies and the costs of revival, so it's difficult to answer with any degree of certainty. Even so, though, I think there are good reasons to be optimistic that, in time, revival could be provided universally. The history of medical technology has shown that therapeutics that were initially extremely expensive and niche, such as insulin when it was first developed in 1921, tend to become cheaper and readily available as production efficiencies improve and mass markets develop. As I outline in the book, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that future societies would have the capacity to revive everyone.

Do you not think much of the beauty and purpose of life comes from the finite time we are given to enjoy it?

No, and to be honest, I don't find the argument very compelling. I don't think enjoyment of this year's Christmas holidays is diminished because we already had Christmas last year, I don't think people derive more meaning from spending time their loved ones because they know the time will eventually come to an end, and I don't think people would lose their motivation to improve the world if they lived for 500 years instead of 80. I recognise individual stories might need endings to prevent them from becoming boring, but I think human lives are much more like libraries than novels – they contain multitudes and are only enhanced by adding more stories to them.

Let's move on to the science. Neurologically speaking, what defines a person's identity and what does it mean to be alive?

There are competing philosophical conceptions of personal identity, but the most popular one is that a person is primarily defined by their unique psychological properties; their memories, their personality, their goals and desires. Neurologically, these psychological properties are encoded in the structure of a person's brain, with each person's unique pattern of synaptic connections termed their connectome. I argue that so long as a person's connectome is still intact, a person has not died.

If you had to select one research study that best highlights the potential to preserve minds for future revival, which study would it be?

'Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation' by McIntyre and Fahy (2015) describes the development of the preservation protocol I recommend in the book, capable of preserving the ultrastructural details of brains in a manner compatible with centuries-long storage. This publication, along with its subsequent evaluation by the Brain Preservation Foundation, outlines exactly how the procedure works and how it was verified using high-resolution electron microscopy.

Are there any other books that have had a significant impact on the way you think?

The Mind's I (edited by Hofstadter & Dennett) is a collection of essays and short stories about cognitive science and philosophy of mind that I read when I was finishing high school and it definitely strengthened my interest in the field. The Right Price is a brilliant health economics textbook by Ollendorf, Cohen and Neumann that clearly articulates how trade-offs need to be made and evaluated in health care. Perhaps The Stars, the fourth book in the Terra Ignota tetralogy by Ada Palmer (a historian and science fiction author), provides an exploration of a semi-utopian but still meaningful future for humanity that I find deeply inspiring.

So now the book is out, what's your next project?

Currently, I'm trying to formally survey what the academic world thinks of preservation and the prospects of abolishing death. My suspicion is that as weird and sci-fi as what I'm proposing sounds, there's a lot more support for it out there than the general public might initially expect!  

• The Future Loves You by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston is out now from Penguin.

Review by Dr Dara Mojtahedi

Freezing humans for resurrection in the distant future is a dystopian concept that screams science-fiction rather than scientific, it is perceived as unrealistic by most and even unethical by some.

Yet Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, a neuroscientist at Monash University, provides a captivating lesson in science and philosophy to conceptualise how the future may allow us to preserve the life of incurable patients until scientific and medical advancement can allow us to revive and cure them. His book, titled The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death, provides insightful arguments to explain how modern developments in brain preservation techniques can allow us to preserve the minds of individuals who have been denied the right to a full lifespan.

However, this book is much more than a review of the recent neuroscientific literature. The first two parts of the book – aptly titled Why and What – provides readers with a sociological and philosophical commentary on What it means to be alive, to have an identity and to die; and rationalises Why it is not only feasible for future society to endorse such practises but also Why it is the right thing to do.

Reading this book, I found myself grappling with my pre-existing views not just on whether the preservation and revival of life was realistic, but also whether it was ethical. Ariel brilliantly identifies common social, economic and philosophical arguments against prolonging life and offers logical counterarguments, allowing the reader to make their own judgements about 'abolishing death' in the future.

With recent developments in robotics and talks about the future attempts to colonise Mars, this book is just another reminder of how fast science is evolving us into a world that was once only seen in movies.