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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Probably all of us will admit that it's likely that we'll die. Is it the case that that realization changes who or what we are or what we call the human? Human.
David Wills:Know, we're living in a moment where we see both sides of everything.
Deborah Goldgaber:It's just so crazy about this exposure to death, and at the same time, the sense that our need to die is less and less.
Adam Rosenthal:Hello, my name is Adam Rosenthal, and I am the author of Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism and the Search for Indefinite Life, published the Posthumanities series at University of Minnesota Press in 2024. I'm extremely excited to be able to talk today about that project with two colleagues whose work has greatly influenced me over the last years. David Wills, professor of French and Francophone Studies at Brown University and author, among other things, of the triplet of texts known as prosthesis, dorsality and inanimation, and Deborah Goldgeber, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Ethics Institute at Louisiana State University, as well as author of Deconstruction and the New Materialism. I'll say a word about prosthetic immortalities and then give the floor to David and Deborah to introduce themselves a little bit more as well as their work. I should mention that I hold a PhD in comparative literature from Emory University, and I'm currently associate professor of French and global studies at Texas A and M.
Adam Rosenthal:In many ways, this book Prosthetic Immortalities follows my own intellectual trajectory, which began in literature, theory and philosophy, such as is epitomized by a certain study of deconstruction, but which has evolved in recent years to concentrate on issues in science and technology studies, and above all the life sciences. The question to which prosthetic immortality seeks an answer is: how to understand the contemporary resurgence of the discourse of immortality? How, in what contexts, and through which philosophical, religious or scientific discourses to comprehend the possibility of a flourishing of immortalization efforts, now in what claims to be a secular, empirically informed, and even enlightened milieu namely that of transhumanism, 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 transhumanism, a discourse that unabashedly endorses radically extending human life, often in terms that are blatantly eugenicist, if not supremacist, to say nothing of speciesist, represents a mode of thinking that is far more widespread and far more difficult to weed out than one commonly gives it credit for. In a word, transhumanism is but the blossom of a tree whose roots are to be found in the tenets of the biosciences themselves.
Adam Rosenthal:Tenets, I'll note, that not many would wish simply to discard. Second, and as a direct consequence of the deep entanglements of transhumanism, the deep entanglements in some of the desire for and technoscientific efforts to extend and even immortalize what is called human life, well, one must go back, way back, to the very roots of Western thought in order to grasp the specificity of the modern search for indefinite life. Disentangling this web requires a multidisciplinary labor of reading, which this book at least makes a fledgling effort towards realizing by starting with Plato, but also Homer, following their inheritance in Descartes, tracing their modification in Heidegger and Derrida, and then putting all of this into conversation, first with the empirical discourses of molecular, micro and organismal biology, so that second, the legacy of these sciences can be traced within the philosophical and literary fictional discourses of transhumanism, above all in figures of brain uploading, biological immortality and cloning, but also what is closely related to them de extinction. Let me hand things over now to Deborah and David, maybe starting with David, who I guess I should mention graciously wrote the foreword to the book, Preferring Being Condemned Not To, where he raises many important questions about who gets to live and who must die, who gets to stay and who must go.
David Wills:Well, you, Adam. My name is David Wills. Everything Adam says needs to be discussed is basically what his book discusses. It's a monumental effort, I've got to say, to try and take on these discourses, these very different discourses, philosophical, scientific and so on. And so it makes for a fascinating read.
David Wills:It makes for a deep dive into various questions, the direction in which he has taken the idea of prosthesis, which has been an idea I've worked on. The directions he's taken that discussion are places where I've never been. And it was a challenge for me to think about going and to think what I might be able to contribute to the project by way of a forward. In any case, I was very happy to do it. I'm very happy to see the book, happy to hear it resonating in so many different directions.
Deborah Goldgaber:Thank you so much, David. Thank you so much, Adam, for organizing and for writing this amazing book. I really hope that it is widely read and it deserves to be widely read. And I think it's a blast by being really timely, and that's not always true for a book of such philosophical breadth and depth, but it also touches on some of the most important questions that we're talking about today. I'm very excited to talk about cloning, because I think your discussion about cloning gets to so many of the mysteries of some of the biotechnology that we're seeing today.
Deborah Goldgaber:I'm primarily focused on French philosophy in the twentieth century. And so Derrida's really central influence on both my thinking and my scholarship. It's my first book, Speculative Grammatology, could have had the subtitle of The Indefinite Life of the Trace a little bit qualified because it argues that life ought to be understood in terms of the trace, which has this structure in definitude. So we really share that core insight about the way that Drurydian philosophy is really interested and centered on this figure of indefinitude and how this is somewhat wrongly understood in terms of finitude as the opposite of infinitude or immortality. And now whether or not Derrida himself would have endorsed this ontological read that I gave in speculative grammatology, I really sort of argued for an ontological reading of the trace in terms of the structure of indefinitude, I thought might help explain some peculiar phenomena, like this idea of having orphan text, or in the case of the recently the story of the direwolf, which I hope we talk about right, you have this orphan DNA, which is sort of sitting there, and then you have this idea that coming back to life, or this sort of resurrection.
Deborah Goldgaber:So this very possibility of this return of these texts can be understood in terms of the trace and its indefinite structure. And so I hope to talk more about that and many of the themes that you've brought up. And also, I have a long standing interest in just how we should think about technology in terms of prosthesis, and I think that connects with both of your work. So excited to be here in conversation with you today.
Adam Rosenthal:Well, I'd love to hear you know, each of you, your work draws us in different directions. But I would love to touch on, David, your forward a little bit, because I think in the book, one of my main concerns was excavating the relationship between a number of concepts that are at play, not only excavating, but also analyzing the relationship between them. And to the extent that I was so focused on differentiating indefinite life from immortality, from substance immortality, etcetera, etcetera. There is a huge component that could have been in the book that's not there that I think you bring forward, and that is specifically concerning these massive ethical, global, biopolitical questions.
David Wills: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 I did think about in relation to the book, and some of which I formulated in that foreword, suddenly seem to have been exponentially enlarged. And that at this point, hundred days after the beginning of Trump's second term, We are in a place that was to us unimaginable a year ago, two years ago, whenever. I remember the three of us being together at the symposium that you put on at Texas A and M, Adam, which took place just a couple of weeks, I think, after the events of 10/07/2003, the attack by Hamas against Israel and the beginning therefore of that war, which was already seeming horrific in ways that we couldn't imagine.
David Wills:Here we are this much later, eighteen months after that, and we read about the imminent starvation of the population of Gaza in a way that none of us wanted to think about back then. But that brought me to consider how, as you suggest, there are such massive ethical and ethico economic questions raised by your discussion that it might be worthwhile reflecting on them a little in our current moment of crisis, if that's what we want to call it. So two points in that regard that I would say, what I was interested in thinking about when you talked about extending life was how that was also a question of, if you like, extending death to the extent that death is understood as a moment, as a knife edge. One moment we're alive, the next moment we're dead, and that's that's death. Right?
David Wills:But that by the same token, death overshadows life to a great extent. And many of these prosthetic immortalities that you talk about, these attempts to prolong life are, of course, an attempt to stave off death and to stave off the moment of death and to control that moment of death. Because if what defines mortality is the fact that none of us knows exactly when we are going to die, not in any absolute sense, even if we choose to die. By the same token or conversely, these attempts to prolong life, to download one's brain, to clone oneself and so on and so forth are very much about having that knowledge that we as mortals don't know. So the knowledge which then allows us to control as it were our death.
David Wills:That came back to me as a type of Promethean hubris whereby we as human mortals are able to do these things and act like gods. And it seemed to me that those particular forms of prosthetic immortality might not be so much in the news these days, but what is very much in the news is a similar Promethean hubris about how we react to climate change by flying to Mars, how we find the scientific solution to the fact of global warming and the fact of what humans with their general technological hubris, if you like, have brought on in terms of the Anthropocene and so on. It seemed to me that that put your work into a context that is very much with us as we see more and more billionaires building bunkers, Elon Musk, Jeffrey Bezos and whoever else heading into space and towards Mars, colonizing Mars and so on. So I thought that was an interesting question. And then that obviously is an economic question.
David Wills:So it comes back to these quantitative extensions of life you talk about, for me cannot be separated from the whole matter of quality of life. And the fact that we spend so much money or we're planning to, we already are, and we want to spend so much money on these prosthetic immortalities while so much of humanity, for example, not to mention animal existence in general, is living a bare life, being let die or being killed in various ways. Extending life, it seems to me, has to be also a question of extending or dealing with life expectancy, life quality and so on. Those things came back to me with a vengeance, as I say, at this point in time.
Adam Rosenthal:Yeah, it's certainly, David, no coincidence that, I mean, Elon Musk, whom you mentioned, is well known as a donor. I think he gave something like $10,000,000 to the Future of Humanity Institute. He's given generously as well to the, I believe, Future of Life Institute, which are think tanks, basically generally associated with transhumanist ethos. So there is a direct line of intersection between the desire for life extension, be it on earth or colonization of Mars, and a certain attitude or even indifference to, let's say, ecological but also ethical issues concerning life. Some of these polarities or ambivalences are also very much at work in the question of cloning that Deborah brought up a moment ago.
Adam Rosenthal:To go to the direwolf, which recently was famously de extinguished or resurrected, we could even say. So the company that did that is Colossal Biosciences, which I had never heard of, but it's one of the endeavors of the Harvard biologist church. It is currently valued at something like $10,000,000,000 And you might ask, right, why invest so much money in de extinguishing and bringing back a species, the direwolf in this case, or the woolly mammoth or the dodo, what have you, when there are so many massive needs to aid endangered species that are not yet gone? And one answer, of course, probably the most obvious and also most cynical, is that there's no money in bringing back species that are almost dead, whereas the possible financial benefits of bringing back the direwolf, right, cloning, whose names did you see the names that they gave to the three four beasts? They're Romulus and Remus and Chelise.
Adam Rosenthal:Those names which are obviously right, they pick up on any number of cultural residences, origin of Rome, but also Game of Thrones. That is absolutely part of what's at stake in this whole question of cloning. And one of the things that I find so fascinating about the clone, even to a certain extent more so than questions of brain uploading, if you will, is that the clone is so thoroughly artificial, artifactual. It's a literary fabrication, but one that is so deeply enmeshed in what we think we understand about the nature of biological reality that we can't see it for what it is. And when names like Romulus and Remus are given, right, familiar names that associate these life forms with mythological figures, it is absolutely playing on that in a way that we have to attend to.
Deborah Goldgaber:There is a certain way in which it's the underside, like the biopolitics, when Foucault talks about biopolitics as unleashing the most virulent and vicious catastrophes and death and violences on populations. It's a really interesting counterparty,
David Wills:I don't
Deborah Goldgaber:know what the right word for what you're talking about. Because in many ways, like, for example, in your discussion of cloning, I feel like I haven't read anything that good about, like, why is this colossal story about the direwolves just so weird when you actually read what happens? Like, at first, you're like, how interesting. There was some direwolf teeth that were left over, and they drill into them very, very carefully in order to find this extant DNA, and they sort of unravel it and reconstitute the text of this ancient DNA, and you're like, wonderful, we're gonna have this fabulous resurrection. But in fact, what you find is something just much stranger, weirder, messier, and not at all what was promised, right?
Deborah Goldgaber:You end up with a gray wolf that had some added features that they believed would typically restore what was so lovable about the dire wolf in the Game of Thrones. And what you show in the chapter that you have on cloning, which is towards the end, I believe it's the fourth section of your book, like after you discuss biological immortality, but like you talk about just how like there's no real way to ground our ideas about cloning, and it's just a whole set of fictions. What's really interesting about cloning is, A, the fictions and the desires that you can read off of these stories and discourses, like the belief that we could restore these creatures and the way that they're going to have no interest in preserving existing life. They have interest in monetizing these kinds of stunts in order to expand technologies of indefinite life that will keep these billionaires alive as they're trying to get to Mars and abandon all of us. And so there's this, the story of current capital and the way it's entangled with the dream of indefinite life and the techno science associated with it, and how that is all associated with the biopolitics of death and destruction.
Deborah Goldgaber:Think it would be your book allows gives us so many resources to think these conjectures. But I don't think that at the end, book touches on it's more about the fictions and the desires and the projections and the sort of philosophical concepts and sort of less about the way that the dark side that's haunting it, I think. Or how did the dark side that David was just talking about, how did that show up for you as you're writing the book and as you were structuring it? Because the book has such an amazing structure as you take us through dream of immortality from Diatma to Bostrom, you know?
Adam Rosenthal:This is a really important question, and I think the reason why I don't focus on the dark side. So for one, there's an excellent literature on the evils of transhumanist philosophy, if we want to call it philosophy. So that has been done. It's been done very well. But more fundamentally, what I think we need to address is even if the current instantiation of transhumanism is, let's say, repugnant and vile, and by and large, it is, The sources of that discourse or the fundamental ground upon which it draws is not something that's so easily dismissed as its proponents, whether we're talking about Nick Bostrom or, I don't know, Harris or what have you.
Adam Rosenthal:My interest in writing this book in part was to show how the real difficulty that we have in handling this So on the one hand, we can obviously say we should be prioritizing other things politically. Absolutely. And I support that 100%. But if I have something to offer, it's in shifting the level upon which our negotiation with this resource is going to take place, because I don't think we can simply dismiss it. An example of that, David, when you started talking about the experience of writing the forward, you said you were traumatized.
Adam Rosenthal:And in a certain sense, I too was traumatized in writing this book in the sense of a conversion experience, which isn't to say that I found God. I did not find God. But what I found, and this specifically concerns the problem of the clone, but also brain uploading, but also indefinite biological life. In the end, what I found was that as much as I wanted to be skeptical of all of these figures, even phantasms, at some point we all are attached to life, to some corporeal or embodied or or some form of existence. I think often we miss that there is that element that fiction when I call fiction or phantasm here in the sense of this desire for immortal or indefinite existence on the one hand, in its current political and economic manifestation, it must be rejected and fought against.
Adam Rosenthal:On the other hand, it's not as if there is a non fictional, non fantasmatic foundation that we can rely on to form a new ethics. There's no new ethics that's coming. And that is, let's say, why I don't go so far into declaiming this discourse or into focusing on the negative side of this. Because even if the clone is artificial, nevertheless, we don't exactly have another concept. And maybe we're all clones to a certain extent.
Adam Rosenthal:Even the notion of species. Right? The notion of species is a concept that has shifted over the years. It is an artifact. It is artifactual.
Adam Rosenthal:There is no single notion of species, either in the biological or the philosophical literature, that we can rely on. And indeed, to your point, David, about how a lot of these discourses of immortalization have more to do about the resistance to death, the very notion of species can be seen as an attempt to save something when even though I know I will die, something will live on. Right? So the notion of humanity, insofar as it relies on a concept of species, itself is this hope, this dream, this phantasm that something will go on. Of course, the negative side of that is what you sacrifice in order to preserve, and undoubtedly, that's highly problematic.
Adam Rosenthal:Even if we can point out all of the fabrications that go into forming the notion of species, and the direwolf is the prime example of this because it isn't a direwolf. And yet the argument that, right, the ecologists on staff at Colossal Biosciences make is that it's functionally a direwolf. Who's to say where function and, let's say, genetic identity, what the relationship between the two of them is? There's no final word that we have on where the ultimate source of ipsaty or selfhood lies. We must be critical of what's done in the name of preservation, be it of species or of human life.
Adam Rosenthal:But at the same time, we can't just dismiss the notion of species as such, because that's actually an essential concept for preservationists and ecological work that's being done.
Deborah Goldgaber:I want to push back, and I agree with you on the level of efficacy, but why not say the problem that we are facing is if at one time we recognized, we Western Christians, that like life was just, we were going to die, but we had hope for life immortal, that our souls would ascend and we would be with God. And you could say that that led to a certain understanding of human life and our human place on Earth. And then now we've given up on that silly story of immortality and that silly hope of immortality, and we've found something even more sustaining. And that is the hope for an indefinite life where maybe I'll die, but maybe I'll be brought back as a clone of some sort. And that this has the virtue of being so much more scientifically respectable than the religious or theological discourse or belief it replaced.
Deborah Goldgaber:And then you might say, Well, this actually is disastrous because it makes us I mean, for all the ways that you might as need to have taught us to see, this view of another life made us devalue this one. And so you could have critiqued that view for all of its negative effects here on Earth. But you might say this one is even worse because we don't have to value anything, because we can imagine that it can be it's at our fingertips and our technological our expertise will tell us how to restore everything. We can even accelerate it because we'll be able to bring it back. And again, the question about in what sense this unleashes even worse biopolitical energy.
Deborah Goldgaber:So why not say that, no, we really should. Really, the right thing to do, even if it's pointless is to insist on finitude.
David Wills:If I can add an element to this, it seems fascinating to me since we began on cloning, right? It's fascinating to me how the question of cloning and the clone operates to make such an absolute divide between the human and other species. That how long ago was it now when Dolly was produced, the sheep, which was supposedly the first cloned animal? I remember the horrified reaction to that, oh my God, you know, next somebody will be wanting to clone a human. And so we went through that whole period of discussion where we figured out that maybe we could clone certain animals and so on, but we would have to regulate it necessarily.
David Wills:But that there seemed to be a consensus, an international consensus, universal consensus we presumed. When it came to the human, no, that was off limits, that humans could and should not ever, ever be cloned. And of course, that universalist acceptance of that dividing line was never there probably. But soon enough, we started to hear rumors about, you know, what might be going on in labs in China, for example, or what might be happening in terms of human cloning, irrespective of that presumed ethical dividing line that we had made. The question of the clone and the question of the direwolf within that same context, and I'm sorry, I have to say that most of what I don't understand about this whole question, I didn't even know what a direwolf was, is because I've never watched Game of Thrones.
David Wills:So I do need to get myself a certain cultural literacy, I know, before I can contribute to this discussion. But it is interesting that in all this talk of prosthetic immortality, the varieties of it, Adam, that you delve into so extensively and fascinatingly, throughout all that discussion, it seems to me the presumption is that we're only talking about humans. We're only putting our energy into human life. And that's really what matters. Now, of course, that doesn't maybe there are some crossover areas where people who are interested in whether it be from a philosophical point of view or an ethical point of view or a scientific point of view, people who are interested in these questions of human immortality might also in fact be very sensitive to the possibility of preserving animal species, resurrecting animal species and so on and so forth.
David Wills:Don't know. Just the idea that we are still struggling with that limit, After what a generation of discussion now about speciesism and humanism and 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 the possibility of extending that limit, then suddenly the old paradigm comes back into operation. And suddenly we're back to we humans and all the rest of other animal species. It just strikes me as interesting that through these biopolitical formations and configurations, one of the most important points that Foucault made in all of his work was that epistemologically speaking and so on and so forth, it's always a shifting focus.
David Wills:Right. And it's never just simply a discovery that represents a progress and a march towards enlightenment, but necessarily there are infoldings that come about. And so I think that all these futuristic sounding possibilities of extensions of life, we still have within us those very retrogressive impulses that mean that, for example, we preserve ourselves at the expense of other humans to begin with, but also other other animal species and so on.
Adam Rosenthal:Yeah. You raise a number of really important questions. And given that technological means of extending and ending life extend far beyond the human and have for millions upon millions of years entered into the realm of animal plant microbial life. What is the specificity of the human now within the contemporary form of these biotechnologies? I think you're coming on to something that's pretty important.
Adam Rosenthal:Unless I'm mistaken, identical twins are clones of one another. So now with hindsight, right, a lot of these questions that created quite the uproar twenty, thirty years ago seem a little bit quaint. Perhaps one of the reasons why they seem quaint is because as radical as our capabilities for manipulating biological and organic life have become, we now can't but face the problems of artificial intelligence. It's everywhere. And that is so ominous and impending that great clone of direwolf, that seems minuscule compared to what's coming on that other horizon.
Adam Rosenthal:Right? And even the experts in the field of artificial intelligence, especially the experts, right, are saying, well, this thing is out of our hands. All we can do is try to mitigate what we've set into play. Right? I'm thinking of Jeffrey Hinton in particular there.
Adam Rosenthal:These are really massive questions. And Deborah, to your point, what would the impact be if we opted, right, to insist again on finitude? In the name of finitude, what could be done? In the principal way, right? What I think I ultimately realized upon finishing writing this book, because again, as I mentioned a moment ago, this was something of a conversion experience for me.
Adam Rosenthal:I didn't think the same things that I thought when I started out. What became crystal clear to me, to each of your points, is that what all of this discourse, all of these biotechnologies ultimately boil down to, and the reason why there is so much of a fascination, a fixation on the human rather than the animal or why the animal is instrumentalized in ways that the human still not quite is that ultimately all of this boils down to a fear of death. Saying that is not bringing any news. But once you realize that a lot of the strategies that are put forward and I'm thinking now about David Chalmers, Nick Bostrom, Aubrey DeGray, right? All of these fanciful technologies that were unthinkable fifty years ago, which now seem, if not possible, at least not impossible.
Adam Rosenthal:What it boils down to is mitigating a fear of passing away and what kinds of strategies can be invented to not only imagine that our souls will somehow transcendently live on past our possible knowledge of that happening, nor even simply this confidence we have that our children will carry on our legacies or our corporations will carry on our legacies or our name will be born by decades and centuries to come, but also that I might be there to witness it. There's this incredible fixation that has been fed by the promise of these biotechnologies that not only my name or my memory or my soul, but me, myself, I, in my present self feeling fashion, will be able to experience my future after I'm dead, which in sum is how I would characterize brain uploading, the promise of brain uploading, or for Star Trek fans out there, right, being beamed up, undergoing tele transportation. I do think that finitude is as important as ever. It's the fundamental driving force of so much of what's going on finitude, fragility, precarity. And yet, if I had a reply to you, Deborah, it would be that I'm not sure we've yet discovered the discourse that can satisfy the fear of death in a way that, let's say, makes us more open to multispecies eco justice to take a figure from Donna Haraway.
Adam Rosenthal:Or at least as much as I find that discourse to be convincing, it doesn't seem to work on the likes of our tech moguls, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the like. To a certain extent, this book is written for them. Not that I think that they'll read it, but it's written for this, let's say, toxically masculine vision of life everlasting.
Deborah Goldgaber:Yeah. So I think I really appreciate that. And I said at the beginning that I thought it would be pointless, in part for reasons that your book discloses, which is we can't simply say no to immortality or the desire for immortality, but we can still present a cultivation of limits and fragility and finitude and acceptance of death as virtues. But yeah, we can't simply let go or put down that desire. We could talk about the things you say in your book about why that is so and how that connects with figures like Haiglend, who often argue this is exactly what we should be doing.
Deborah Goldgaber:But I wanted to say, I remember reading the first time, it was the article on resurrecting the mastodon or the woolly mammoth. And this was in Siberia and there was some Siberian scientists. And it was before the geopolitical cutoff between The United States and Russia that this article was written before the Ukrainian war. And yes, so they were like, well, there's a lot of methane that's going to escape due to global warming. And so these scientists in Russia, as a father and son, had this idea of, oh, if we could get these large herds of woolly mammoths again, they could tamp it down.
Deborah Goldgaber:And that's present in that New York article Colossal, which the direwolf company is also looking at woolly mammoths for this reason. So this is like, wow, this is really thinking out of the box, right? About how to deal 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 company Patagonia, came to visit billionaires, and they were like interested in investing in this project. That was the first time I sort of encountered this idea.
Deborah Goldgaber:I was like, Oh God, yeah, you have billions of dollars. You really aren't going to be able to spend it. There's no Like your money really, really is going to outlive you. And I was thinking about how that must feel. Right?
Deborah Goldgaber:You might like in the past have like set up foundations or whatever, but they're like, okay, well let us like invest in this Mastodon project or Woolly Mammoth project in the hope that like we can be resurrected again. And of course you see what the direwolf example, you're not going to be resurrected. Even if they clone you, it's not going to be you. But anyway, it's this dream of immortality or this refusal to die or the injustice of having to die, especially with all this money, fuels these economies, this investment, Nearby technologies that these companies gladly cultivate fuels this hope for the possibility, even if I have to die, maybe I can come back. And that this, in turn, will fuel technologies that we can introduce on a more massive level to roll back death or make sure that aging happens more slowly?
Deborah Goldgaber:You talk about this in the chapter on age reversal.
Adam Rosenthal:Yes. When the first efforts at extinguishing the woolly mammoth were made, the argument, or one of the arguments, was that it would serve ecological purposes because they aid, I believe, the growth of permafrost in Siberia, something like that. There's actually a I address it in the book, but there is a tradition, I believe, of Russian cosmism, where the belief articulated there is that, yes, entire populations will be resurrected at some point in the future. So you
Deborah Goldgaber:find
Adam Rosenthal:different manifestations of this. And there's also the famous case of Lenin's body, which has been preserved in a totally one off fashion, it's still If you were able to see it, it's reported to still be, let's say, supple to the touch. And so these are different forms, as you say, of investing capital in forms of preservation in various and sundry contexts. One of the other major ways in which this takes shape, which I don't really address in the book for various reasons, but cryogenics, which has gotten a lot of publicity, though I believe the actual number of people who have been frozen number relatively few. But there, the idea being that you freeze yourself or your brain so that in the future, at a certain moment when either the cure for whatever disease or ailment you suffer from will have been discovered, or the cure for aging itself will have been revealed, then you will be resurrected.
Adam Rosenthal:There are so many different forms of this. And in the book, take some pains to show how these problems of brain uploading, indefinite aging, cloning, but cryogenics is part and parcel, they, while each emphasizing a different structure or a different tapas, nevertheless partake of the same fundamental element. And at their limits, they touch on each other in an interesting way. To go back to the first traces of the philosophical tradition in the West, I opened with Plato because I think Plato, the symposium, the questions that are raised there, but also Homer before Plato, those issues that were given articulation thousands of years ago resonate. They resonate very strongly with the techniques that are employed today.
Adam Rosenthal:But as you indicated, Deborah, there seems to be vastly greater deleterious effects today to the implementation of these techniques of immortalization than there were, let's say, for example, by having one's name remembered in a poem or writing works, or giving birth to children in the context of a Greek polis. Now, we say that, but perhaps, I mean, there were certainly a number of, let's say, homicidal projects that were also undertaken under that name in that period. So it's not as if it was bloodless, but certainly the biopolitical implications today are vastly different than they were then. But I think it's helpful to open the conversation between these two moments.
David Wills:I was thinking as you were talking and going back to something Deborah said some time ago now, that this matter of immortality, this matter of the fact that, as Deborah said, we've forsaken the idea of an afterlife that begins when we die, a new life. We have forsaken that, if you like, in favor of these other possibilities, these technological prosthetic possibilities. But of course, as we say that we have just lived through this massive media event of sending off somebody to the afterlife in a way that was returning to those terms of hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, a very simple, simplistic understanding of what that meant, that it seemed like a billion people in the world were happy to be reminded of and participate in and sign on to. It comes back to me again as an idea that, you know, we're living in a moment where we see both sides of everything. We see the Catholic form of immortality being celebrated at the same time as we see these adventures and attempts to try and attain very, very new forms of immortality, we see those same things once again, cloning and so on, preservation of current forms of human life beyond the normal term.
David Wills:And then we see the most basic nineteenth century natalist project, you know, American mothers now have to women now have to go and make babies, right? And not to mention the eugenicist ideas that are being frankly discussed out in the open. It's extraordinary how and I don't think this is just a function of the election of Trump. I don't think it's just a function of Elon Musk's adult brain so he can suddenly convert from being this do gooder who produces produces an electric vehicle as a one way of helping to save the planet to being the person taking the chainsaw to everything ecological. Somehow both things, the two sides of the coin have a very uncanny coexistence.
David Wills:Maybe it's just the fact that this moment in time has brought that into relief. Maybe that will always be with us. Maybe we cannot think one without the other. It seems to me some of the things that you talk about in the book are very resonant with that idea that we're always on two tracks. We were always have been for a long time since Plato, if you like, on the track of a certain notion of immortality.
David Wills:And at the same time, we've always been on the track of a type of presumptive technological possibility of advance. And maybe that's our human condition. Maybe that's the way we stand astride both mortality and immortality at the same time.
Adam Rosenthal:Yeah, I mean, there's so much to say. You know, the funny thing about the Catholic notion of afterlife, of course, is that it's a pharmacological concept. There's hell, which I don't talk about in the book because I, you know, it was brought to my attention sometime after by I mean, it's obvious, but at the same time, it's not so obvious when we're talking about the immortality of the soul. But that was, if you will, right, a built in ethical function. I don't know if it was a great one.
Adam Rosenthal:It's not for me to say. But it's worth noting that immortality was, if you will, as good as it was 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 limit dividing the religious from the non religious. Nor can we simply say that we're in a secular age, if you will. This is only too obvious.
Adam Rosenthal:Indeed, in the book, one of the things I tried to do was to show why it's utterly insufficient to say that, let's say, transhumanism is itself a religious discourse even if a cryptoreligious discourse. Because, of course, that answers nothing. Because then we have to still ask, well, what is the essence of religion such that it itself abides And it's not as if religious discourse isn't one that we can simply dismiss any more easily than we can so called non religious or secular discourses.
Deborah Goldgaber:It was, well, I guess, like the direwolf and the pope, you know, with these two striking images of immortality in the same month. I was struck when David was talking about the juxtaposition of images of immortality. The book by Jean Baptiste Caisseau, which is more and more and more an all consuming history of energy. And the basic argument is there is we talk about transitioning from one of we have one kind of immortality, let's imagine, to another, but this idea of transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy. And he's like, No, no, no.
Deborah Goldgaber:All the history tells us the more 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 about versions of immortality or images of indefinite or phantasms of indefinite life or immortality that we don't mind. In some way, they're not contradictory. We can collect them all. We can use them all.
Deborah Goldgaber:And this is one of the things that struck me in the book, the way that one transformed into the other. The way you think about indefinite life as a terrestrial project, and then all of a sudden you glimpse its transcendence dimension, a transcendence or transcendental dimension to it. There's a constant floating between immanence and transcendence, which is present in your diatoma story that begins, which is just so excellent. I think that's the first thing I told you when I read the book. I was like, wow, it's just so good.
Deborah Goldgaber:This diatoma in the symposium shows us that we can't understand life at all. We understand reproduction. We wouldn't recognize it as such if we didn't have this image of immortality. That's a necessary supplement to the intelligibility of life or life or unshamed life at all. If I could ask you one more question, I was struck by what seemed like a moment where you were historicizing Heidegger.
Deborah Goldgaber:And it seemed like this moment where you were saying something like, you have this being towards death that Heidegger thinks individuates us as humans and characterizes our whole lies and self understanding. By the end of the book, you're suggesting that the way that we are coming to, presently coming to understand life, via all of these techno scientific prostheses is transforming whatever existential we would want to say structures our self understanding. I'm not a sophisticated Heidegger reader, so I don't know whether you would say that you're doing that. Heidegger is saying it's true for the time that he's saying it, and movies were a vast part of human history, but it's less true now.
Adam Rosenthal:It's a really interesting question. There is quite a bit of Heidegger in the book. I wanted to demonstrate conclusively that when someone coming from, let's say, the tech or the STEM fields, whether it's Max Tegmark or Nick Bostrom or Aubrey de Grey, when any of them speak about the coming immortalization of human life, or what I would put more technically, indefinite life, or let's say biological immortality, or amortality even, which one finds, let's say, in Yuval Harari's work. When they speak about these forms of survival, I thought it was really important to establish that though the language they use is one that's not necessarily recognizable in the field of contemporary continental philosophy, I don't think that it contradicts it. I think it's really important we not just dismiss what's being written, what's being said under this aegis of transhumanism, because it is really tempting to do so.
Adam Rosenthal:There's something I say this in the book. Maybe I changed it. Don't know. There's something cheap about the discourse. It's not pleasant.
Adam Rosenthal:Not simply because of its association with people who are destroying lives and the environment and the planet's future. It's also unpleasant for that reason. But because of the importance of finitude in its Heideggerian guise for so much work today, including that that one finds in contemporary French philosophy, I thought it was really critical to show that these discourses aren't incommensurate. They may be talking about different things, but to talk about indefinite life does not contradict finitude or being towards death in Heidegger's sense. So that was the main reason for its inclusion.
Adam Rosenthal:The second question, is it the case that our finitude or let's say mean, our I say that in quotation marks is it the case that our relation to death is changing? This is a tricky question. Who is the our? Is it changing? Yes.
Adam Rosenthal:Is it changing in a way that is we can speak of a new epoch in humanity or post humanity? I would be hesitant to say that in any simple or straightforward sense. It seems as though for many, for some time, we have believed that our biological lives would necessarily come to an end. This seems like something that we often take for granted. If it were the case that one day we were led to believe that that was not an absolute necessity, even if it weren't actually possible, Well, probably all of us here on the right will admit that it's likely that we'll die.
Adam Rosenthal:Nevertheless, if we had to admit at some level that that weren't a necessary reality, but rather a contingent one that in all probability will come to pass, is it the case that that realization changes who or what we are or what we call the human? That's what I discuss in the conclusion to the book. Does that announce a modification in Heideggerian being toward death? I don't know. In some sense I don't care.
Adam Rosenthal:That's not the primary takeaway. But there's something interesting that happens in, let's say, what the existential ontological impact of such a realization would be on the one hand, versus his absolute irrelevance, not only for us, but to what you've all been saying, the millions upon millions of lives that are discarded, that are let or made to die. On the one hand, we have this existential knowledge that seems absolutely life altering. On the other hand, this life altering knowledge is absolutely irrelevant. Could not be more insignificant in the face of the planet and its history.
Deborah Goldgaber:Yeah. And I think this also connects to David's recollection at the beginning. Wouldn't it be odd if you write February, your conclusion, and this is just like, I think this is what you were talking about. We too live in the uncertainty of the date of our demise. We too know not when we shall die or if we shall die.
Deborah Goldgaber:Such non knowledge is perhaps the novelty of our biotechnological modernity and of the techno scientific configuration of modern press theses of immortalization. The consequence of these forces is to ontically extend the separation between what Heidegger calls being toward death and Derrida the condemnation to die. The separation is therefore growing wider and its growth is a consequence both of radical transhumanist fictions and of basic research in the life sciences. But like, even if it were the case that we would all of a sudden, all of us be like, Oh yeah, do we have to die? Maybe we don't have to die.
Deborah Goldgaber: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 just exposed people to death. Was just reading about you know, there were more bombs thrown on Gaza than in all of Germany, like, for the whole second world war. I mean, just so crazy about the sort of exposure to death. And at the same time, the sense that our need to die is less and less.
David Wills:I was struck while you were saying that, Deborah, and also in terms of what your question was to Adam, the second question about whether these new formations for configurations would require a Heidegger to, you know, remodel, the sense of the being towards death and so on. And then what came to mind was, something that, Adam, I think you mentioned, briefly, but that we haven't really gone into because it's a whole other discussion, of course. But how in the background of all this, all of a sudden, in a way that probably wasn't clear to you, Adam, at the time you were writing the book is, the fact of artificial intelligence, right? And and how that is in the process of transforming everything. Right?
David Wills:It's probably artificial intelligence that is going to determine for us whether we can clone our brains and download our brains and so on and so forth. It's artificial intelligence that is going to make scientific decisions and think scientific thinking, do scientific thinking for us, in, in an extraordinary unimaginable way at this point, but that seems to be coming very fast. Artificial intelligence will probably be a problem for the Dasein. It will probably require that animal to be modified or genetically modified not too long in the future.
Adam Rosenthal:Yes. I want to respond briefly to what Deborah said, then David, I'll come back to your question, your suggestion about the coming impact of artificial intelligence for the Dasein indeed. Ironically, as you were talking, Deborah, what flashed to mind, it's in Being and Time. When Heidegger is diagnosing our relationship to finitude and the ways in which we evade it. And precisely what he says this is not gonna be precisely what he says, but it's approximately what he says, is something like, our certainty in the moment of our demise is what allows us to evade the fact of our anxiety towards the uncertainty of our demise in general as a certain uncertainty.
Adam Rosenthal:Sorry, that was nonsense. But I think you get my point is that in some sense, fascination with this question of our ontological being, our Dasein, is absolutely so compelling that it allows us to ignore everything happening in its wake. The framing of the question of what if there was a shift in our mortality or of our being towards death as brought on by these biotechnologies? I think what we see when, again, we're talking about transhumanism and where capital gets invested today, is the ability to ignore the ravages of the world because of this promise of a shift in our existential ontological state. I don't know how to fight that.
Adam Rosenthal:I don't know what exactly we do, but there's something absolutely essential at stake in that, how the one seems to be elided almost because of the other. To come to the question of artificial intelligence, in the book, I make use frequently of this figure of translation, which is I like to talk of these prostheses of immortality as translations, which is to say as transformations that, let's say, produce a form of continuity between something that preceded and something that follows. So in other words, how are we to think theoretically about cloning or brain uploading? I think translation, as Walter Benjamin, but also Jacques Derrida, right, have formulated it, is a really helpful way of getting at what's actually at stake in these forms of living on, in these forms of immortalization. Why do I say this now in light of artificial intelligence?
Adam Rosenthal:I say this because a figure that's really very closely connected to translation for me, and something I've started to think about maybe more since I finished writing the book, is inheritance. And inheritance has long been tied to forms of living on when one is faced with one's own mortality. So again, we have children, and this goes back to Aristotle and Plato. We have children, and those children are a form of immortality for the non gods that we are. But they partake of this immortality, even if it has to be in an impoverished sense.
Adam Rosenthal:So inheritance is absolutely vital. And I think if we think about what is proposed through these biotechnologies or these artificial intelligences, these which are absolutely let me let me be clear. Right? What we can do today or what we'll be able to do over the next fifty or one hundred years is was absolutely unthinkable one hundred years ago. Unthinkable.
Adam Rosenthal:We can't dismiss these novelties and reduce them to the things that Plato or Descartes were theorizing. That would be a real disservice to do that. However, the, let's say, symbolic operations through which they function remain, as far as I'm concerned, the same as those that were already at work for a Plato or a Descartes. And once we see that, and that's what the figure of translation, but also inheritance, gets at for me. And why is this important when we think about artificial intelligence?
Adam Rosenthal: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 relationship to myself, right, apparently has some relationship to my mind and therefore myself. And if I could duplicate that brain, I would somehow duplicate myself.
Adam Rosenthal:Now there are a million philosophical problems that result from that, not the the smallest of which is not the simple fact that if I were to duplicate my brain, that would be my brain elsewhere and not my brain as it is where I am. Right? It's it's the other me, not me me, And that gap between 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 the technologies brought about by artificial intelligence that will allegedly make more and more fine grained scans of the brain possible, thereby allowing for better and better reproductions of said brain, would like us to think that we're a perfect reproduction of the brain, like a perfect reproduction of the DNA of the direwolf conceivable, then the result would be me. Now, is it the case that a perfect reproduction of my brain again, ignoring the million difficulties that underlie even that thought.
Adam Rosenthal:Is it the case that a perfect reproduction of my brain bears some kind of resemblance to me qua experiencing, thinking, being that is, let's say, a different kind of resemblance than the one that inheres between me qua thinking, feeling being, and the books that I write that bear my name? Absolutely. That is a completely different prosthetic possibility that begets a different relationship between the product and the subject, if you will. We have to admit that. Absolutely.
Adam Rosenthal:But ultimately, what's at stake in any of these translations, and again, that's why the figure of translation is so important, is getting selling us, if you will, the fiction that what is produced will not just be like me, but will be me. So we have to, in some sense, right, we have to buy into this promise of an identity when I mean, I it's so ludicrous to me because we can't even we don't even know in what our identity consists at present. So how am I are we then to verify what the relationship between me one and me two would be were there some kind of a technical reproductive operation possible. Nevertheless, and again, why this comes down to processes of translation and inheritance where there's never any identity, but rather negotiations of difference, is that what all of these different fictions serve, these different technologies qua fiction serve, is staving off my fear of death. Right?
Adam Rosenthal:That's because it's always me deciding. Right? So ultimately, if I'm able to believe that I'll be there, right? Much as I don't know if Pope Francis believed that he would pass into I need to bring Pope Francis into this. But much as for someone who believes in an afterlife and a soul.
Adam Rosenthal:Right. Again, the critical prosthetic element of that is that that belief gives me comfort. It allows me to believe, and this is a question of belief, of credibility, that I won't die. And it lets me have that belief, that confidence now. It's always a question of the confidence that I have now.
Adam Rosenthal:So, again, it's entirely the same kinds of symbolic operations that are at work here, even if the technical means through which these facsimiles are now being proposed is completely different. And why artificial intelligence is more scary, if you will, than some of these previous technologies, even more so than cloning, is This is maybe a silly example, but I think it's not unrealistic. Again, in the past, one bequeathed one's wealth, one's possessions, to one's children, or at least to someone who was not oneself. Right? You would not bequeath your possessions to yourself after your death.
Adam Rosenthal:You form an institution, or you give it to the firstborn son, or what have you. Okay. I think it's now not only possible, but likely that something like again, to take some of the names that are in the air, whether it's Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk one can well imagine a Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk building a Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk AI that is functionally able to make decisions within a certain margin of error that resemble the kinds of decisions that either will have make during their embodied living time. And again, we have to ignore like, it's not a question of whether it is or is not either of them. The question is, does it functionally perform in a near behavioralist fashion kinds of actions such as they were capable of to the extent that they believe in its ability to carry on their lives.
Adam Rosenthal:And we we, or our legislation, allows those AIs to inherit their properties and their organizations and their wealth. So the question is, now, do these technologies not allow for a certain all too likely scenario where where Elon Musk, whether or not it is Elon Musk or not, but he will live forever? We will give all of the rights and obligations that he now has control of to an AI that will, for all effective purposes, be indefinite in its modes of survival. Philosophical questions like whether it is or is not Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or David Wills or Deborah Goldeber, these are irrelevant. What is relevant is what kinds of decisions are we now going to make about how society is structured under the true fictions, if you will, of these artificial, extensions of the lives of people.
Adam Rosenthal:This seems completely, likely to me.
Deborah Goldgaber:I had never thought about that that possibility somehow. Like, I wasn't I wasn't thinking about, like, the ability to just an indefinite, like, Elon Musk AI.
Adam Rosenthal:As soon as we get caught up in the high philosophical questions, is it Elon Musk or not, we completely lose sight of what's actually at stake. And I think that's really important. And I think that's what, again, the proponents of these technologies, whether they see it themselves or not as irrelevant, but what their work served to do is they attempt to sell us the continuity of an existence as if that even matters, which is completely missing the point about, again, yes, what kinds of global and planetary actions we take on the basis of these beliefs in the extensions of our lives, which are catastrophic. Does that mean I want to die? No.
David Wills:I won't let you do it before me.
Deborah Goldgaber:Well, it's But that one got morbid. That's a whole different discussion about whether we could help but get morbid. I think this is a really great discussion. I think I would invite Adam to say, like, who's your dream reader or readers? What thought you want to leave us with from the book?
Adam Rosenthal:Thanks, Deborah. I feel like you asked me that question because maybe the book doesn't have an ideal reader. I guess I hoped this book would would reach some kind of I'm tempted to say a philosophically informed reader, but I but I hesitate because I myself am not a philosopher. Though I'm quite fond of the discipline of philosophy, it's not one that I myself belong to. So it'd be strange to write a book for a population to which I don't belong.
Adam Rosenthal:Although maybe that's not so strange. Part of writing this book was constituting an archive that didn't exist in its assemblage. One of the things that I struggled with towards the end of its composition was indeed this fear that there was no ideal writer, because I think the first half of the book, which engages much more with the Western philosophical tradition, and the second half of the book, which deals much more with discourses of micro and molecular biology, philosophy of biology, as well as transhumanist discourse, that those seem to have different readers. They don't often have the same reader. But I think, and this is something that has become more and more important to me recently, I think that putting these things together is, well, absolutely vital.
Adam Rosenthal:I truly believe in the kind of comparative, multidisciplinary work that I think that this book enacts. I would hope that the reader it finds is one who maybe isn't necessarily excited for all the parts of it, but who is convinced or even converted by it into thinking that the chasms beyond these disciplines is not so vast as we thought. And certainly I'm not a specialist in each of them, but there is no specialist in each of them. I don't know, now this is becoming my pitch for humanities research. But I do think that one of the things that, you know, humanities research can do is indeed read beyond the humanities.
Adam Rosenthal:I'd like to thank you both, Deborah and David, for your willingness and enthusiasm for this discussion. It's been eye opening for me to see what you saw in the book, but also what you have brought that is not in the book to it. Truly, I'm appreciative for your participation.
David Wills:Very happy to do so. Couldn't have done it without the book.
Deborah Goldgaber:Yeah. Thank you for writing the book.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life by Adam Rosenthal with a foreword by David Wills is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.