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This podcast explores death and law from a rich variety of disciplinary perspectives, including law, anthropology and philosophy. The podcast explores such issues as buried goods, data protection, dignity and memory. It forms part of a broader project in the University of Aberdeen's School of Law entitled, 'Death and Law – Interdisciplinary Explorations' and is generally sponsored by the Aberdeen Humanities Fund Staff Research Award 2024.
Hey, everyone, and welcome to the podcast series on Death and Law: Interdisciplinary Explorations. This podcast series investigates the evolving relationship between death, law, and society. My name is Patricia Živković, and today we are diving into something that sounds like science fiction, but is quickly becoming reality: the digital afterlife. In this episode, we are unpacking the idea of living on after death, not in the traditional spiritual sense, but in the digital world. We'll explore how people are using technology to preserve memories and personalities, and even create digital versions of themselves that can keep interacting with the living.
We'll also look at real-world examples of digital afterlives, break down the key terms and talk through the ethical questions. Like, who owns your digital self when you're gone? What are the risks and potential harms? And why are some people actually excited about the idea of living forever online? We'll get into how this tech is already showing up in pop culture and what it says about our hopes, fears, and the way we think about identity and legacy in the digital age.
I will not be doing this alone. I'm joined today by two brilliant guests. I would like to ask them now if you can just briefly introduce yourselves.
Hi, everyone. My name is Dr Leah Henriksen. I'm a lecturer in digital media and cultures at the University of Queensland in Australia. I've written books on reading computer-generated texts and digital storytelling, and my research tends to focus on how we engage with computer-generated texts and digital media ecosystems.
Hi, I'm Dr Anna Puzio. I'm a researcher at the University of Twente and UC Berkeley in California, and my work focuses on the intersection of ethics, emerging technologies, and the human-nonhuman relationship, including religion and AI. I'm part of the Dutch research programme Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies.
And finally, as I said, my name is Patricia Živković. I'm a senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, UK. My work focuses on biometrics, neurotechnology, emotion detection, and AI. I'm also one of the co-leads of the Death and Law project, and this podcast is part of that wider conversation about the entanglement of death, law, and society.
To start us off, across different disciplines, cultures, and belief systems, the concept of life after death has taken many forms. In your view, Leah and Anna, how are these traditional ideas being reshaped by emerging technologies? And what does this tell us about our desire to live on, whether through legacy, memory, or something more digital and continuous?
I can start us off. I come from media studies. And in media studies, we're really attuned to the communicative remnants that people leave behind. So things like text messages, videos, pictures, that kind of thing. But these remnants might also include things that we don't always recognise as communicative, so things like credit card statements, metadata, browsing history, all that stuff. And cultures throughout history have always had ways of using these kinds of communicative remnants after death. We re-read letters, for example, or we display photographs of our dead loved ones. But new technology, especially AI technology, allows us to do a lot of different things with these remnants. So we can make the dead appear really animated in ways that we've never been able to or at least, easily been able to. And people seem really keen to do this. We can't seem to bear the thought of our loved ones dying and of dying ourselves.
Yeah, and death technology is deeply intertwined with ethics, so it concerns the rights of the deceased, consent, the well-being, and the grief process of those left behind. And even after death, this domain needs regulation. In the past, death marked a radical and final break, so communication with the deceased was no longer possible. And compared to those earlier forms, that Leah's already mentioned, such as letters, audio recordings left by the deceased, entirely new forms of relationship are now possibly becoming possible. And these are raising new questions about identity, relationships, consent. And after all, the avatar we are communicating with is not the same person. Death and mourning have long been central concerns of religion. So I'm also a theologian, and religions have developed ideas about the afterlife. They created rituals, ceremonies to cope with death. And now, however, this domain is increasingly being taken over by companies.
And death, from a legal point of view, is an interesting phenomenon. It affects the legal treatment of the human body and our person. In the moment of death, our standing under the law changes. For example, while we live, our body is not treated as a thing, except for certain disposable tissues and organs that we can donate. And even then, in most jurisdictions, they will not be subject to free market rules. However, once we die, our body becomes a thing, but a thing of a specific sacred nature. Our person under law, on the other hand, or our legal personality, stops existing once we die. And in the eyes of the law, roughly speaking, once we die, we are no longer its subject as a person. That sounds scary, doesn't it? I always struggle as a lawyer with the fact that law is excellent in dealing with tangible, marketable things, but often falls short in regulating intangible values. And what is particularly important for our discussion today, and we will talk about it a bit more in-depth later, is that once we die, we stop being a person under the law, which means that there is no personal data, and we are outside the data protection framework.
Okay, so, moving toward the heart of today's conversation. We've been hearing a growing list of terms like digital afterlife, grief bots, death bots, digital avatars, post-mortem replicas, digital twins, digital doppelgangers, digital versions. And at their core, many of these refer to the replication of a person's personality and or even appearance after they die. And these digital versions require large amounts of personal data, like emails, photos, videos, messages, social media posts, and even voicemails to be created, to become functional, and they're usually based on machine learning techniques.
So what I would like to hear from each of you, what does the concept of digital afterlife mean to you within your own discipline? How do you approach this whole idea ethically, culturally, technologically, or otherwise?
In media studies, we have this idea that's often accredited to Marshall McLuhan. The idea that media are extensions of ourselves or we extend ourselves through media. So we can be in different places at different times. We can, we can reach further than we have ever reached before. And I think digital afterlives, the concept of digital afterlife sort of speaks to this idea. But with digital afterlife, it doesn't seem like it's so much about living as it is appearing like we're living. We often talk about digital likenesses, and likeness does not equal living.
So just like a digital version of myself looks like it's engaging with the world or sounds like it's engaging with the world, that doesn't mean that I myself am engaging with the world. My phenomenological experience is still a key part of who I am, and I don't think that a version of myself or a version of anyone else can really replicate that experience.
Great. My focus is on ethics. So for me, what matters most in assessing and better developing the Death Tech is gaining a deeper understanding of the grieving process after the loss of a loved one. So grief and mourning, they are highly individual, and everyone grieves differently. And I want to truly understand if and for whom these technologies can be helpful. So these technologies, for me, only make sense if they truly offer support. And in addition, I focus on diversity and power dynamics within these technologies.
So, we also need to ask which voices in societies are not being heard. For example, there are also vastly different intercultural approaches to death and mourning. And who gets to be reproduced in these avatars? Whose image, whose story, is not being preserved?
I'm so glad to hear, Leah, what you mentioned, about the extension of ourselves in a digital version, basically appearing to continue living because that's exactly what I'm trying to do through my research. I'm trying to prove that our personal information that we leave after we die is basically the extension of us. And remember when I mentioned the human body and the person distinction under the law? What I would like to prove is that even though we are no longer here, we still deserve the same respect and protection under the law.
Anna, you mentioned grief bots, which are based on a digital footprint, and they're a digital version of a deceased person aimed at helping their closest ones during the grieving process. We know that they can be a text format, voice format, or even with a live face, all based on the personal information fed into the application by the deceased's family.
I wanted to ask if either of you has any other real-world examples of these digital versions that continue to exist after people die.
In addition to the interactive avatar kind of style of digital afterlife or digital death bot, I think, it's worth also mentioning, those kinds of those kinds of digital afterlives that aren't necessarily interactive kind of chatbot styles. So, when you go online, you leave this digital footprint. You have all of your behaviours tracked, and, you're classified in particular ways through various algorithms on different websites or in different programmes. And so even after you die, you know, banks, governments, all of these different organizations are still using a record of you to forecast the future, to make predictions, to still benefit from your data in somehow.
So digital afterlife and digital versions aren't necessarily always, interactive. They're not always in this kind of chatbot, like, resurrection form. They can also take the forms of algorithmic classifications and, kind of clumps of data that are then used for future things.
Yeah. I can mention some living bots or living holograms or death bots. So for example, a good idea for memory and educational purposes are the Holocaust holograms. So, Holocaust survivors are dying, and we want to preserve their memory because it's very important for our society. So, it's a way of interacting and for education, for remembrance, that I found very helpful. There are many different death bots, death avatars that people use, for their personal purposes, for coping with the grieving process. There are also living and death bots or avatars of film stars.
They're also the ABBA holograms or avatars (in the background: Mamma Mia, here we go again.) Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah.
Continue. Please continue. No. I love it. And what I also find very exciting, they are not death bots, rather death avatars or a living, living influence.
So, social media influencers that are developed solely based on AI. So there are very famous social media influencers like Aitana Lopez or Shudu. They have millions of followers. People are very interested in their lives, but they're not existing. They are just made of AI, and people still follow them. Yeah I find that particularly exciting.
Anna, if I can just, tap on that too because I like that you are, drawing our attention to the fact that this technology doesn't just exist for the dead. It also exists for the living.
And I've written a little about Snapchat influencer Karen Marjorie, who made a chatbot kind of a version of herself using very similar technology to the technology that's being used to create versions of the deceased. And I guess the thing that what you were just saying really made me think of, the fact that we create these digital versions while we're living and then our physical bodies might die, but these versions that were living while we were alive or, quote, unquote, living as we were alive, they continue to live on, so they almost outlive us. So if we go back to what Patricia was saying about how there's this really stark marker at the time of our death where our personhood changes under the law, so we're protected beforehand; we die, we are no longer protected. We are no longer a person. We are a thing. That distinction doesn't seem as clear in these scenarios because this technology seems to extend our life in a way that we've never really had the opportunity to do so before.
What I observed while listening to both of you talking, and thank you so much for all the examples and discussion about this, I see that we are going into more complex matters, of our discussion today. I have to note that, or I have to notice that, we don't actually have the language to address these matters. As, for our listeners who cannot see Leah, when she said living, she used air quotation marks, because we do not know how to discuss this, because it never existed before. So we are talking about life, about death, about existence. We are using the words that we would use for human beings, but, actually, does it really mean what we are saying at the same time?
Yeah I think it’s because the boundary between life and death is somehow disrupted. Also what’s living and what’s non-living. This is for a Western context this is very surprising. In a non-Western context, the boundaries are already blurring.
All of this is reminding me of a really good edited collection. It's quite old now, but I think the concepts really continue to be relevant. There's a book called Continuing Bonds by Dennis Klass, who's the editor, and it's a series of essays about, how we continue our relationships, again, quote, unquote relationships with people once they die. And, it is primarily from a Western perspective, but there are some really interesting essays in that book about, for example, the Japanese approach to death and the concept of ancestor worship, for example, which is common in many other cultures around the world. So I just think a lot of what we're talking about today, people have had conversations about in the academic space at least for, you know, quite some time. But this technology is really giving us an opportunity to bring together that literature in a kind of fresh and maybe terrifying way.
Yeah and what’s also connected with that is, so I’m rather sceptical of this new technology so I’m questioning whether we actually need them or whether they serve rather business or commercial purposes. But maybe one opportunity would also be a more vivid culture of remembrance. You know in Western societies we often have these cold impersonal gravestones, cemeteries and other cultures like you’re mentioning have a more vivid culture of remembrance, also more connected to joy, to positive attitudes. And maybe these death technologies could somehow contribute to our way of remembering and commemoration. What do you think of it?
I mean, I for me, the question that comes up is, do we need to remember everything? I'm not saying that, you know, I'm not saying that we shouldn't, strive towards remembrance, but one of the things that I find myself asking a lot when I think about these digital human versions, created from the dead is, like, who are they for? Why are they being created?
And does every single individual need to have a seemingly never-ending life? Like, especially, and I suppose this gets into questions about ethics. One of the things that becomes really obvious if you start looking into the ways people are using this technology right now is that a lot of people are creating digital versions of their, you know, dead parents or their dead partners, and those versions are not intended for widespread use. Those versions are intended for personal private use. And so we start having to ask ourselves the question, like, what does that do to our sense of who that person was and their agency and autonomy?
Because of the commercial logic of all of these chatbot technologies, those chatbots are not going to offend me. They're not going to disagree with me. And so we have essentially created this version of a person that exists just to be nice to us and to respond to us when we want to talk. And a real person doesn't respond right away, and they might disagree with you. And so my relationship, my continued bond with that person whom I've enslaved essentially is not, in my view, it can't be an honest representation of who that person was. So I don't know. I'm not entirely sure. I, like you, Anna, am very sceptical of the technology. I'm not sure that digital immortality really benefits society at all, especially when it means that we essentially enslave the dead to their own likenesses. Let the dead die. Let the dead die.
Thanks, Leah, for that. That's really an interesting view. So let's talk about that a bit more. Let's talk about our drive for digital immortality. Why do we want to continue our existence, or why do some people want to continue the existence of other people after they're already long gone? Anna, what's your thought on that?
Yeah, so I believe the intention is twofold. So first, we all have people we love, and we don't want them to die. We don't want to lose them. We want to keep them with us for as long as possible. And second, we don't want to die ourselves. So we want to survive.
We want to be remembered. We don't want to simply fade into oblivion. We want to mean something to someone. And writing, for example, has long been one way to resist forgetting. So there's a German saying, the idea that those who write remain, who writes will be remembered after their death.
Yes, but there’s also a problematic side to this. So who is being duplicated through technology? As you can tell, I’m very sceptical of the growing trend to constantly replicate ourselves through technology, and I think it’s a small group of powerful white men whose identities and narratives are preserved and reproduced, so looking also on societal inequalities on Global South it could be also a form of new colonialism to only duplicate a certain group of people.
I really like what you said, Anna, and, how you mentioned that we don't want to die ourselves. And recently, I came across an article in the American Journal of Bioethics, which is titled Digital Doppelgangers and Lifespan Extension: What Matters? And that article outlined three key motivations behind why we, as a species, work on expanding our lives beyond death even in a digital form. And I found their work really insightful and would agree with their approach.
I want to share what are the three aims that they basically categorised as the main reasons that we want to accomplish as human beings through our extended lifespan or person span as they like to refer it to. The first one is about subjective experience, and this aim is all about basically continuing our consciousness, something that unfortunately is not yet possible, but it would be an interesting discussion to have whether we would like to do that. We can even have a little vote on that. And basically, in a sense, this is about wanting to preserve the essence of our experiences, our consciousness, and the enjoyment or meaning we derive from life. The second reason, which is quite possible, and you mentioned writing, Anna, which is quite interesting because the second reason that they pointed out is legacy or impact.
And here, the motivation is less about personal experience and more about leaving that mark on the road. And it's about making a contribution ensuring that our life and its impact are recognised by others and influencing the future in some way. We're all academics here, so I'm pretty sure we can understand this motivation because it basically motivates our lives in essence. And then the last one is a relational aim, which is more personal. So it's not about the society and community or a larger group of people that we want to basically leave an impact on after we die.
But this one is focused on close relationships, and it's about ensuring the specific people, usually loved ones, continue to benefit from our presence in their lives even after death. So this is less about legacy for the society and more about maintaining connections with those that we care about most. So we often think of digital versions of ourselves as something that's done to us, created by companies or our family, AI tools, or even others after we are gone. But I like to think, what if we flip that idea? And it was already mentioned by Leah that this technology is not here only for the deceased, but also for the living.
What if we actually think about creating these digital selves, then shape them how we want to be remembered, which is also aligned with what you, Anna, question. Who is here to stay? Who is here to be remembered? What if we, while we are still living, can actually impact that and decide for ourselves?
The thing is, so going back to media studies, the problem with that is that if I'm an author, so I talk about authorship a lot in my research. And, if I'm an author and I write something, if I create something, sure, that thing might exist in my image, and I might spend, you know, all this time perfecting it, making it exactly what I want. But as soon as it's published, readers will do what they want with it. And I cannot necessarily anticipate every way in which my readers are going to interpret my work and how they're going to use it. And so I think the issue I have with people who are carefully crafting versions of themselves to, quote, unquote, outlive them; the issue with that is you don't know the full extent of who's going to interact with that version. If that version of yourself exists fifty years down the line, a hundred years down the line, you also don't know what context in which that version is being used.
So, sure, you've carefully crafted this version of yourself. You've, like, preserved aspects of yourself at this moment in time, but those aspects of yourself could be deeply offensive to somebody a hundred years from now. Or, yeah, I don't know. And, also, like, if you preserve yourself and then it's that same self that people are interacting with a hundred years from now, you've not grown. You've enslaved yourself to this moment in time.
And that just seems bizarre to me. Like, why would you want to capture yourself at this particular moment? And, like, I don't know. So even if you do update it, does that still reflect who you are? Like, if that version is updating, is that still you? But then if you're staying the same, is that actually a good thing? Like, I don't know.
I totally get what you mean and I totally agree with you. Just one unsceptical thought: because aren’t we actually doing this in academia and research? We’re for example taking old philosophers from a different century and applying them to new technologies. Because I’m always sceptical of doing this because I think they lived in a very different time. Different technologies. Different diversity situation. And we’re just assuming that they would say this or that in our present time. But they never met us. Or never met this society we’re living in.
Now we're just putting words into the mouth of Michel Foucault. Yeah. I think that's a good point, Anna. Like, we do often say, you know, if Michel Foucault were here, he would think this, and we're like, we don't know. Like, we don't know what he's been through. We don't know his inner thoughts.
But I do think that with academia, there is a practice at least of building on other people's kind of thoughts. And when you publish something, there's an expectation that somebody will refute that or will build on it or will challenge it somehow. So, I think with the genre of academic writing in particular, like, that version I created myself, the version I encapsulate in my papers, I hope that other scholars don't do this. Like, I certainly, I expect other people to disagree with me.
I expect myself, my future self, to disagree with me. And I think that's what kind of distinguishes that citation model from the version model, at least in my mind.
Yes, and also looking at the fact that this is an image. You know?
Also, when you scroll through social media and you know that this is just an AI tool, you don't realise it or it's so influential because it's an image. It moves. It interacts with you. And even if you know it, it has such an impact on you. Right?
So, Anna, as a researcher in ethics, what I would like to hear from you is what are the ethical complexities surrounding this digital afterlife?
Yes, many different ethical challenges arise in this context. So one ethical challenge is consent. Do we agree, do we give our consent? It raises questions connected to identity, embodiment relationships. So also relationships in the broader sense. So the community that is also so important for grieving should also not be lost. Also from a religious perspective we are always embedded in a community. There are ethical challenges connected to manipulation, deception. In this example where a grandmother reads to their grandchildren a story, that’s a challenge connected to vulnerability, deception, manipulation, because maybe children don’t understand what’s happening, that the grandmother is not alive anymore. It’s connected to truth. It could support the grieving process. So this is also in interdisciplinary endeavours. So we have to collaborate with psychology, for example, to see the psychological insights whether it supports our grieving process. Another very different aspect for me is it’s also connected to environmental issues. So all these technologies, they have such an environmental impact so their use must be carefully justified and designed with meaningful purpose. So from the perspective of environmental damage alone, one should seriously question whether we need such technologies at all. And yet I believe that the sector will continue to grow. Unfortunately, it is likely that this expansion will occur without adequate ethical reflection, especially since companies often fail to take responsibility in this regard. Yes that’s we urgently need ongoing ethical engagement with these kinds of technologies.
I think you're right, Anna. And despite the three of us being quite sceptical about this technology, it seems that the technology is being developed nevertheless. And digital immortality might be part of our very near future. So let me ask you both. Is there any particular social, cultural, or even ethical implication that we haven't mentioned that you think that this technology will create?
I think it concerns me, just circling back to what Anna was saying, that this technology is getting developed whether or not we are having these conversations about ethics. I think we absolutely do need to be having these conversations.
We need to be asking ourselves the hard questions, like, why do we want this technology? What does it do for us? What does our wanting the technology say about us? And we need to do the hard thinking and reflection. It concerns me ethically.
It concerns me greatly that this technology is really starting to boom. We're seeing a lot of different examples from around the world. China, for example, has really been investing in this space. It concerns me that we are capitalising on people when they're at their most vulnerable. If a loved one has just died, we're not necessarily thinking about, you know, what does this say about me?
You know? What's going on? We are just we're hurting. And if you're selling some technology to kind of alleviate that hurt, however, temporarily, that's really gross. That's really gross that that is how you've chosen to make a buck, is by capitalising on people who are hurting and who are at their most vulnerable.
I know this is nothing unusual in this kind of neoliberal society, but we should we should be thinking about responsible ways to develop technologies that aren't rooted in pain.
What I'm particularly interested in in my research is this entanglement between a human and technology. The combination of preserving our mind, but also preserving our body. And, talking about law and what I mentioned at the beginning, how law treats differently, basically, humans before and after death in terms of whether they're a thing or not, what happens when one day we will have these synthetic bodies that will basically allow us to, continue existing, maybe in the same shape, but definitely in a different material. So I'm really interested to see, hopefully, during my lifetime, where this will get us.
But since we are running out of time for this particular podcast and knowing you two, we could continue talking about this for another hour. So I want to wrap up on a slightly lighter note and ask you, in addition to all the applications we mentioned throughout the podcast, what are some of your most iconic pop culture examples of this technology, maybe even the ones that you knew about before the technology existed?
So I've been paying attention to this technology for a long time in my research. So I kind of knew it existed before I saw this example, but my favourite pop culture representation of digital afterlife technology is the show Upload. Upload was an Amazon Prime show that premiered in 2020, I believe.
And there are a couple of seasons of it, and it's all about how these people are dying, but they're uploading themselves into this digital afterlife. And I like the show not only because it's funny, it's easy watching. You know, you're doing the dishes or you're just kind of pottering around the house, and you can have it on in the background. But it also does raise a lot of the questions we've talked about today.
So it raises questions of, you know, access. Who, financially has access to the best digital afterlife and who is stuck in these kinds of horrible, gross little cells for the rest of their, quote, unquote, life? It raises questions of why we want to upload. Like, who benefits from this? Is it the dead? Is it the living? There's so many interesting questions this show raises, while at the same time, just being easy, fun, nice watching.
For me, Klara and the Sun. So, honestly, I don't like the book, and I wouldn't recommend it for reading. Instead, I would recommend you Ian McEwen's 'Machines Like Me' or other books. But Klara and the Sun does spark important questions for me.
So about how far these developments might go in the future, how many toxic structures could emerge around Death Tech, and whether, like in Klara and the Sun, we might not only see death bots, but even death robots, even though death robots would be much harder to implement.
I have to say that my favourite example is not really a post-mortem digital version, which is sort of off topic. But because it's also not a digital copy of a person, but it still had a really huge impact on me. And it's the film Her. I don't know if you watched it.
I think it came out around 2014, and we weren't anywhere near this kind of technology. I mean, it was it was basically a sci-fi movie, but the film captured something so emotionally real for me. And what I love about that movie is how it shows the deep emotional connection someone can form with just a voice, basically, with something that isn't even human in a traditional sense, if we think, of course, about our body. But it felt so real, and it challenged this whole idea of what makes a person.
Is it the body or the personality, the presence, the emotional connection? And I rewatch it every year, and I take notes over and over again, and it continues to inspire me and make me think, especially in the context of digital identity and relationships.
I think, as we come to the end of our conversation, maybe we can talk about key takeaways that we are walking away with after today's discussion. I know we are going to continue working together in this project, but I would like to hear what are your thoughts after having this one-hour-long brainstorming. And then I might have a fun vote for all of us to end with.
I think for me, whenever I talk to both of you and the three of us have had a few conversations now about this kind of stuff. Every time I leave these conversations, I am filled with this kind of I want to say... I don't want to say. This is not the right term. I'm filled with just existential dread. It's not dread. It's like, I think, I think these questions that we're raising and these things that we're talking about are so deeply existential. They raise questions about what it means to be alive, what it means to die, what happens after we die, why we might be uncomfortable with not knowing for certain what happens after we die. None of these are new questions.
Right? Humans have always been asking these questions. But I feel like every time we talk and certainly after this conversation, I'm filled with all of these existential questions that I just am going to stew on, being like, what's not, not what's the point, but, like, what happens after we die, and am I okay with not knowing? And I think, you know, you have to be okay with not knowing because that's just how it is. But I don't know.
I hope this makes sense. I it is existential dread is how, I'm going to answer that question, but it's not dread. It's like existential excitement, confusion. I'm an academic really to my core so I'm like, oh, great - a problem or, like, a grey area to explore.
But, yeah. Yeah. Please, Anna, save me. What do you think?
I think that after this podcast, I would love to delve deeper into, the connection between death and justice, so to explore also the connection between death and politics, to look on neocolonialism and diversity. So how this is eventually so much connected to issues of justice in our society.
Bringing this conversation to an end for today, but definitely, I know we will talk much more about this offline, between ourselves. I do have a question, a very interesting question that I like to actually pose to my students, but also my colleagues, my core researchers, and so on. And because I'm such a huge sci-fi fan, because I think this research kind of combines those two parts of me, the academic part and my sci-fi love, I have a question: If we imagine that in terms of transhumanism and, you know, our own existence, there is one day technology that can basically prolong our subjective experience, meaning that we would truly, in the sense of consciousness, stay alive, whatever that means, with or without synthetic body, we can leave that out. Would you volunteer for such a life?
If you're talking about such a trial, I wouldn't want to be the first one to try it.
I have to say you don’t need to worry.
I would be the first one in line. I have no problem after I, of course, my physical life ends to subject myself to continuance of my existence. And I don't know why, but I don't I think I'm a minority. I don't know, Leah, if you think similarly to me or not, or is it too difficult question?
So my immediate reaction is, like, one of the things I'm quite I'm quite into stoicism and the ideas around stoicism.
And one of the core tenets of stoicism is, like, memento mori, remember death. Death often knowing we're going to die, death gives us life. You know? Like, that kind of, like, seize the day, live every day like it's your last, that kind of idea. And so I just think, like, if you knew that you could extend your life indefinitely, what would that do to your quotidian experience?
Like, what would that do to your everyday experience? And so I think, like, knowing I'm going to die gives my life a real sense of urgency and purpose and meaning. And maybe that's a deficit mentality, but, like, I just think that's a beautiful thing in a lot of ways. That said right; so, kind of hypothetically, I'm like, oh, absolutely not.
I would not take up this opportunity. But then I think if it were actually presented to me, maybe. You know? Maybe. I guess there's so many things that are at play with that, though.
Like, if I'm 90 years old and my body is deteriorating and I'm just, like, barely holding it together, and they're like, hey, do you want to preserve your life in this way for the rest of eternity? I'd be like, not really. Like, my joints hurt. You know?
Like, I don't know. There's a lot there's a lot to think about here. So I think, hypothetically, or, like, theoretically, no way. But practically, I'm open. You know?
Imagine all the articles we could write if we lived forever.
The world would be so annoyed. They'd be so annoyed. They'd be like, please shut these women up. They've been talking about this for eight hundred years.
It would be awesome, I think. We would never exhaust our ideas, I'm pretty sure. Thank you so much both for this, conversation today. As always, it is a pleasure to speak to both of you. You are both my inspiration for my research in this particular area.
And I'm very much looking forward to work with you further on our upcoming chapters.
Thank you so much for hosting, Patricia. It's been a blast. Thank you.
Thank you.
You did really great. Thank you.