Neuroscientist theorizes brain freezing could cure all diseases

Cancer medications, for example, do little more than give people “a little more time” to live. What if we could preserve terminally ill people to be saved by the medicine of the future?

In the book “The Future Loves You: How and why we should abolish death”, which will be published on the 28th of this month, the neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston proposes a provocative reflection on life extension and modern medicine.

In the first few pages, Zeleznikow-Johnston criticizes philosophers for saying that people must accept death as an inevitability and says that they are therefore not seeing the world as it “truly” is.

Zeleznikow-Johnston challenges conventions and encourages debate about the limits of medicine and the concept of death.

To change the paradigm, the specialist questions whether, instead of accepting modern medicine and its temporary palliative treatments, we should not focus on preserve people until future technologies can definitively cure them.

In the book, Zeleznikow-Johnston explores a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy of mind, sociology, and economics, to support the viability of brain preservation as a means of eventual healing.

“Medicinal functionalism”

In an excerpt published this Wednesday in , the neuroscientist suggests a new definition of deathcentered on the irrevocable loss of personal identity, rather than the cessation of vital functions.

The specialist theorizes that, if what constitutes us is the connectome (set of neural connections), preserving or replicating each person’s neural connections would be equivalent to preserving the person.

Adopting the functionalism – philosophical perspective that values ​​functioning over underlying mechanisms – Zeleznikow-Johnston believes that if something functions in a way that is indistinguishable from a human being, then it is, in essence, a human.

This approach is popular, for example, among technologists interested in assigning consciousness to machines.

Zeleznikow-Johnston addresses the necessary advances in neuroscience for effective connectome preservationincluding techniques such as glazing – known method of transforming a substance into a glass-like state by freezing it rapidly without forming ice crystals – to minimize damage to brain cells during freezing.

Naturally and due to all the ethical dilemmas that this topic has always generated, the neuroscientist did not escape criticism.

The author is accused of neglecting the sociological implications of their theories, especially the potential intensification of social inequalities, which this method would bring.