This researcher wants to replace your brain, little by little. The US government just hired a researcher who thinks we can beat aging with fresh cloned bodies and brain updates.

Brain of Theseus.
- The Island

This is the correct way IMO. "Uploading" your mind to a computer is making a clone/copy, but the original dies the same.
- Maintaining continuity of consciousness is the only thing that would make me feel comfortable with converting myself to a machine intelligence.
  
  I hate to break it to you, but our meat brains don't even have continuity of consciousness. We become unconscious all the time. The only real constant is the "hardware" our consciousness emerges from, but even that is always changing.
  
  What does maintaining continuity of consciousness look like to you? As in you are able to talk to your copy? And continue to live your normal life outside while your digital self lives their digital life?
  Or are you saying you want the transition to digital to be seamless, where your digital self remembers laying in a chair, a quick pin-prick, and then they're in the digital realm?
  Keep in mind, we have zero understanding of how you'd get the meat consciousness to transition into the digital consciousness - it's likely not even possible. The two options for copying are keep both alive or terminate the original somewhere before bringing the digital one online. There's many ways to do both, but those are the two.
- I think the only way we know it is us for sure is if we are conscious in both the original and clone at the same time. Like... okay... I know this is me in the new brain, I'll shut down the other one.
  
  Like… okay… I know this is me in the new brain, I’ll shut down the other one.
  the other one: i'm pretty sure you've got it backwards, pal
  
  Read Old Man's War.
- I agree.
  But here is an interesting thing to think about:
  What is the perceived difference between falling asleep and waking up the next day, vs going to sleep and copying your consciousness to a machine/new body.
  
  Your brain is still functioning while you're asleep. If it turned off all the way then you'd become brain-dead.
  
  Some sleep is conscious (dreaming) but they're easily forgotten. Perhaps being unconscious still always has a grain of consciousness (but is just forgotten).
  It seems there is a grain of reduced experience while sleeping. Copying seems to imply it's always a clone (a different ego, a different person).
  
  The body. It's feeding you vast amounts of information every moment, it's the one making decisions, you're the AI assistant providing analysis and advice
  If you clone a tree, you get a similar tree. The branches aren't in the same place. If you clone a human, why would the nerves be laid out the same way? Even if it's wired up correctly, without a lifetime of cooperation why would your body take your advice?
  Imagine you wake up. Red looks blue. Everything feels numb. The doctor says "everything looks good, why don't you try to stand up?". You want to cooperate with the doctor, but you don't stand up. You could move, but you don't. Rationalizing your choices, you tell the doctor you don't feel like it. You feel your toes, you shift to get away from the prodding of your doctor, but you just can't muster the will to stand
  Imagine you wake up. Your sight is crystal clear, you feel your body like never before. The doctor says "don't move yet". With the self control of a child, you rip out the itchy IV to get the tape off of you. The doctor says something in a stem tone, and you're filled with rage. You pummel the doctor, then are filled with regret and start to cry
  Emerging science suggests this kind of situation could lead to brand new forms of existential horror
- reading this comment suddenly reminded me of the "Pantheon" show.
  
  Man I can't get that brain laser out of my memory. So brutal

As long as it's made mandatory to cover with insurance so it's available to everyone. The last thing we need is an immortal ruling class.
- Hoping real hard that Alternate Carbon is not becoming reality.
  
  I see that you too have heard the prophecy.
- Don't worry, going by past history this will be available to any and....uhh, [checks notes] oh, uh-oh.
  
  Oh at this point it seems like we're treating dystopian science fiction as a guidebook instead of a warning.
- Let the death of Saburo Arasaka be a lesson to us all: even 150+ year old bastards can get choked the fuck out
- On the plus side an immortal ruling class might actually start caring about climate change.
  
  Sure, in the most dystopian way possible.
  
  ... and reduce emissions by wasting the rest. But due to negative selection leading into that upper class they won't be able to manage the planet further despite thinking that they can and will die of hunger eventually.
- Is a forever expanding population of old people much better?
  
  If they're functional, and we get serious about space or birth control, then no it's not a problem. But that is another path we can take to really juice the dystopia.
- this might finally be a way to eliminate insurance companies
  
  So we get Universal healthcare then, right?
  right?

We don't need immortal billionaires sucking up everyone's oxygen.
- If you haven't, you should watch and/or read Altered Carbon.
  If you choose to watch, it is my opinion that it's primarily the first season that's worth watching.
- Yeah it's not like the rest of the population ever benefits from advances in technology... Oh wait...
  
  Found the immortal billionaire. Your username fools no one, highlander.
- Well the "not having extreme longevity" doesn't seem to function, they are here anyways.

The final boss of subscriptions

Good lord, just let people DIE. Imagine what a rotten place this would be if people with outdated mindsets continued to control the world decades or even centuries after their expiration dates. People were already angry about 80 year old presidential candidates... what happens when they're 120, or 150?
- For $10 a month you can get the brain implant without ads.
  
  You know... I'm just gonna check this DNR box.
- I know it's a scientologist movie but "battlefield earth"...

I’d rather not enact the highest stakes ship of Theseus
- Probably the best description I've seen of this lmao
- You don’t want to save your old brain chunks and put them back together to see if you can make on old version of you?

I want a brain update and a penis upgrade please! Yes 275Tb of ram for my penis and 6" of brain 🧠!
- I don't want my penis remembering that much.
  
  rm -rf penis/
  Oops
  
  That actually made me laugh out loud. 😂
- Cyberpunk, let’s gooo🤣
- The penis upgrade already exists, it's called a "vaginoplasty," sweaty 💅💅💅
- After upgrade, years later in a CT scan. Dr. "That is a weird looking brain it almost looks like a pecker."
  
  Total mindfuck.

There are two reasons he believes the neocortex could be replaced, albeit only slowly. The first is evidence from rare cases of benign brain tumors, like a man described in the medical literature who developed a growth the size of an orange. Yet because it grew very slowly, the man’s brain was able to adjust, shifting memories elsewhere, and his behavior and speech never seemed to change—even when the tumor was removed.
That’s proof, Hébert thinks, that replacing the neocortex little by little could be achieved “without losing the information encoded in it” such as a person’s self-identity.
The second source of hope, he says, is experiments showing that fetal-stage cells can survive, and even function, when transplanted into the brains of adults. For instance, medical tests underway are showing that young neurons can integrate into the brains of people who have epilepsy and stop their seizures.
“It was these two things together—the plastic nature of brains and the ability to add new tissue—that, to me, were like, ‘Ah, now there has got to be a way,’” says Hébert.
Very interesting. I've also seen research suggesting that the application of stem cells to damaged neural tissue within the spinal cord could repair it, so the idea that you could use a similar approach to actual brain health isn't such a big leap. But still, wow. I wonder how long it would take for the immature cells to develop into "adult mode" that's fully integrated into the patients cortex. In order to replace the entire brain, you'd have to do it in like, 8 parts, with years of recovery time in between each surgery. Also there would exist the potential for the new cells to develop into like, a second, smaller brain, if the connections sour or if the new material isn't stimulated the "right" way.
- a man described in the medical literature who developed a growth the size of an orange. Yet because it grew very slowly, the man’s brain was able to adjust, shifting memories elsewhere, and his behavior and speech never seemed to change—even when the tumor was removed.
  Wow, that's wild.

No thanks. We don't need rich people living forever.
- Might be the only way to get them to give a shit about the environment.
  
  I doubt it. They will just dump shit further away. If their solution default is to make things "somebody else's problem" there's no reason to believe they will stop thinking that way.
- Seems your plan doesn't work, they are here anyways.
- Speak for yourself. I think it would be great.
  
  They can live forever but have to trade their fortune for it permanently

I don't want to live longer, fix my fucking knees and back.
- ...fresh cloned bodies...
- If they make it so I can eat cheese and go outside in summer without drying I'll happy
  
  Yes, please focus on the Global Dryness problem first. I must be wet at all times.
- This would do that.
- Ya the SENS repair approach is the way to go IMO.

FROM THE MOMENT I UNDERSTOOD THE WEAKNESS OF MY FLESH IT DISGUSTED ME

Millennials and Gen Z: *bond over their death wish Scientists: *ETERNAL LIFE
- "Millennials are ruining the death industry!"
- Could they have at least waited for the boomers to go first, they’ll never give up power now

The brain renewal concept could have applications such as treating stroke victims
If this can restore functions to stroke victims again, it's absolutely amazing.
If this is vastly successful which remains to be seen, there might be a path format to the longevity part of the idea.
- This could help a lot of veterans and football players too
  
  I can think of a lot of football players who are in need of more brain.

President Joe Biden created ARPA-H in 2022, as an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, to pursue what he called “bold, urgent innovation”
I did not see Biden creating a cloning and immortality medical research arm of the government but I guess it's proof he already knew he was getting old before the debate and no wonder Trump wants back in the white house.

I am not renting my corporeal existence from a megacorporation. There is no way this is ever affordable to the masses without some pretty huge caveats
- Your Brain^tm privacy policy has been updated. Blink once to accept the new privacy policy.
- Caveat 1: Move out of the US
  Caveat 2: ???
  Caveat 3: Extended youth
  
  Caveat 2: ???
  That would be the, become a citizen of a country with free health care, part of the plan. That would be the hard bit.

If you want a bit of a deeper dive, Sean Carroll's Mindscape gets into the science of aging and known workable remedies/treatments.
The good news is that Billionaires will not be living forever any time soon.
The bad news is that we've got a cellularly defined terminal limit and there's nothing we can do to simply reset the clock. "Cloned Bodies" for animals are dysfunctional bordering on nightmarish. The human brain's plasticity isn't something you can renew with a pill or a potion. Blood Boys don't work. There aren't trivially replaceable components in the human body.
- Its wild this research is even being attempted, its borderline unethical to experiment on otherwise healthy people.
  I fully don't expect immune system driven aging to be understood until the Thymus better understood. DNA reproduction and telomere related aging will not be addressable until cell to cell signaling is finally mapped, and methylation activation/deactivation can be targeted.
  Most likely some kind of cloned brain tissue can help reduce age-related cognitive decline and some diseases. Imo we'd get far more out of targeting specific diseases than going after aging.
- I'd be fine with billionaires getting it first. As much as I'm not a fan of late stage capitalism, I refuse to cut off my nose to spite my face; they got A/C, feather beds, cars, baths, and all sorts of other luxuries long before us plebs got them. Let them beta test the stuff, and by the time the economies of scale pick up enough for it to be affordable to the rest of us, the kinks will be worked out.
  Of course there's always the possibility of a cartel withholding it from the masses, but that's what the second amendment and guillotines were invented for.
- "Cloned Bodies" for animals are dysfunctional bordering on nightmarish.
  That's nothing to do with the back that clone is impossible and just that cloning is hard. You are acting as if it is an unsolvable problem.
  
  clone is impossible
  It's possible in the sense that you can get near identical genetic replicas of the parent organism.
  But the side effect of this process is in line with historical experiments of inbreeding. Most notably, you get a high instance of progeria, which is the opposite of what you want when aiming for life extension.
  You are acting as if it is an unsolvable problem.
  It is an unsolved problem. Whether it is solveable (either theoretically or practically) is an unanswered question.
  But there's a real possibility that "anti-aging" is, at its heart, a war against entropy that we can't win.
  The best we can do may be to archive the information of a subject and pass it on to an inheritor. And we've already got a good handle on that, by way of schools and libraries and making babies.
  Or maybe not. Maybe there's a trick to indefinite cellular repair and replacement. It's just not anywhere on the horizon. If it exists, the closest we've come so far is hypothesis. Nothing we've tried has successfully undone aging, even at a single cell level.

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh...
- I stopped using shampoo for unlisted purposes.

Plenty of meat bags walking around now without a fully functioning brain. Can we use those?

Yes, because who wouldn't want to live for centuries amidst floods, fire, raging mad politicians and greedy billionaires...
- Well this really exists for those billionaires and rulers. This isn't for the common person.
  They're so mad that they've removed themselves so far from us and we still share a common experience in death. That's unfair for them to have to be associated with peasants in such a debasing way. So now they'll remind us that death is for the poor or at least not living centuries will be for poor.
  
  I have never understood people who make this argument. In all of history, can you point to a single time when technology wasn't eventually commercialised and made available to the masses at affordable prices? The billionaires don't want to keep it to themselves, they want you buying more stuff from them.

No. Absolutely not. Whenever anyone says, "wouldn't it be great to live forever" remember that means people like trump and Musk are with us forever. Unless people take things into their own hands, but that's another issue.
- means people like trump and Musk are with us forever.
  But that would also mean their polar opposites would also be with us forever, the objectively best of us
  
  They won't be able to afford it.
- Maybe the procedure would fix whatever's wrong with their brains. Like, maybe Trump would slowly regain the ability to form complete sentences. I'm imagining a Flowers for Algernon situation where he wakes up one day, reads his own Wikipedia page, and is briefly ashamed before the non-neural parts of his body crap out.
- people like trump and Musk are with us forever.
  Hey, we only have to get lucky once. They need to keep being lucky every time.

Something something Doctor Who Cybermen.

Brain updates? Now with integrated thought-crime prevention using AI-safety training data.
- Psycho-Pass is an anime based on exactly that.

they tried that a few years back via a quadraplegics brain transplant to a normal body. he died on the table. not likely to change that with cloning
- I've just looked it up and there has never been a full brain transplant, so I don't know what you're on about.
  
  They might have confused it for a head transplant?
  Although neither patient was alive at the time of the transplant.
  I don't know if a full brain transplant would be feasible, or even a good idea. Not only would none of their senses and motor nerves work for weeks while the brain and nerves re-established themselves, but they would be walking around in a dead person's face, body and speaking with their voice. That seems genuinely horrific.
- Why not?
  
  go look at images of old telephone wiring like when POTS was still the main method.multiply those rats nests of wires by a billion and shrink that them down to the molecular size and you might see the issue

Somebody’s been watching Picard.
- I'm a transhumanist, and I've never heard of Picard in the context of something you watch, and what's being spoken of in the article is something that's been part of our wider Philosophy for longer than I have.
  
  Picard swapped his brain into an android body. It wasn't very good writing.

There's a trick most of the population can do to "youth up". Rewind decades of biological age for your entire body. The answer is out there. Start with the jungle people that even in old age have hearts like 20yr olds.
- Cardio