Superlongevity, Memory and Identity with Transhumanist Pioneer, Dr Natasha Vita-More #6

Welcome to The Future of You. So now and again you meet someone who is rather unique and who has done so much and has so much to say. That, well, you have to give over the whole episode to them. Usually, as you know, I invite two guests along, but for today's discussion, I have invited only one. My guest today is Natasha Vita-More. Now, I could take the 45 minutes just to talk you through her CV because it reads like an historical timeline stretching all the way back to 1983 when she first wrote the Transhumanist Manifesto. And she's done quite a lot since. Natasha holds a PhD from the University of Plymouth School of Media Arts, Design and Architecture, and a master's in future studies from Houston. She was a filmmaker in residence at the University of Colorado and has credentials in the world of paralegal, law, nutrition, and sports. In 2001, Village Voice called her a role model for super longevity, and she will no doubt tell us more about her concept of the whole body prototype or whole body prosthetic. She's the executive director of Humanity Plus. And a professor at the University of Advancing Technology. And she's also the co-editor of the 2012 book, The Transhumanist Reader, and lots more besides. The interesting thing is that after all this work and all this innovation, Natasha doesn't feel like stopping. Indeed, this is one of the central theses of her work, that human life should be less limiting and we should be achieving a much longer lifespan than the one we currently settle for. And so it is in that vein that we have a fascinating discussion about radical life extension, binary thinking that perhaps limits some of our visions and possibilities and potential, the importance of the continuity of the person for identity, and whether it's possible to live over different platforms and inhabit different substrates. We talk about the growth of AI assistant services that might in the future open up the doorways of perception for us, enhancing our sense senses, showing us new realities all around us. And she tells us a little about her scientific work that involved the reviving of earthworms after they'd been cryonically preserved, and how she could demonstrate that there was a continuity of memory in the animal afterwards. And we finish up talking about multiple selves in the cybersphere, and also what it's like to be a pioneering woman in transhumanism. So let's listen in to this episode about longevity, memory, and identity with Natasha Vita-More. So welcome, Natasha. Oh my gosh, it's such a thrill to speak to you. I've wanted to speak to you for quite some time. I followed you and your work for ages and ages, and, um, I'm thrilled that you've been able to join us today.

Thank you, Tracey Follows. I am absolutely delighted to be here.

It's great. Now, let's get straight into it and talk a little bit about transhumanism. I don't necessarily want to start with a definition, but I think you will explain it very well to our listeners. And I wonder if we could start by thinking about the intersection between transhumanism and the notions of identity, personal identity.

All right. Well, transhumanism Started out as a philosophy, a codified philosophy stems from humanism, was arrived at around the time of postmodernism and saw some difficulties with the postmodernist rhetoric and aimed to seek beyond a lot of the fear syndrome of during that time. And it reached back into historically into looking at the advances of humanity and through the use of technology and science and ethics and the wonderful things that humanity has developed over the years and toward a more rational, logical way to assess where we are as futurists in looking at the advances that are taking place and some of the concerns we have about the future, the pros and cons. So it's really a type of rational, sensible, critical thinking and creative visionary thinking philosophy. It became a movement in the 1990s and a worldview that has spread throughout the planet and is still esteemed as a fundamental philosophy about the future and advances in technology and science.

Yes, exactly. And I— often when I'm reading about transhumanism and looking at, you know, the seminal work on this, it feels to me that it's a lot to do with the removal of limits. I don't know if you'd agree, but it could be political or cultural limits or psychological or biological limits. And I know you've done a lot of work around, you know, how we get to a longer life where we perhaps remove some of the limits to our current, you know, time span, our current span on this Earth. Can you tell us a little bit about longevity and the work that you have been doing for, well, some decades now in this area?

Surely. I want to acknowledge that you have a very strong, insightful sensibility about transhumanism and longevity and the desire and the practical applied science and technology of removing limitations. And I think we are seeing this today with getting beyond binary thinking, for example, getting beyond biases, getting beyond prejudices and limitations in all ways put on humanity through social dictums, through political type of hegemony, through corporate structures, through a type of buying for position and social media. I mean, all these things are a reminder of our limits, that we need to use social media so much to have followers, for example. It's one day we'll look back at that and go, what the heck were we thinking? But in regards to longevity, I think that is applicable and looking, you know, theoretically and practice-based longevity. And there's a very strong link between the transhumanist agenda of seeking beyond limits of disease and suffering and, you know, anguish. Why live a life full of anguish and disease? Why not try to be as healthy and focused on possible futures and positive ways to overcome odds and help each other in this way. So I think that's core to transhumanism. You asked about longevity, and I really am so glad you didn't say immortality because the term immortality does have a heck of a lot of baggage over the years. Immortality is a pipe dream. It's improbability and possibility. Nothing in the universe is immortal. So to aim for immortality would be a little bit foolish for a, a focused sensibility. Longevity, on the other hand, offers all sorts of possibilities. I think it's really important to mention here that longevity refers to living healthy lives within the range of human life expectancy, which currently is a maximum of around an approximate 123 years. Alternatively, super longevity, radical longevity, or extreme life extension refers to expanding the current maximum lifespan well beyond that given shelf life of 123 years in good health, not in poor health, but in good health. And I think you wanted to ask me how long life should be.

I was going to ask you that because I know that, well, actually we'll get onto that, that It must be 20 years ago that you were referred to as a role model for super longevity, and I am going to ask you, what have we been doing for the last 20 years? But yes, if we're not immortal, then, you know, what is a long life?

Yeah, yeah, it's— a long life is living as long as possible in good health, as long as the cells are functioning, as long as the body is cooperating with its systems and the brain is functioning. So that is life. You know, that's what the aim is for. And you mentioned, yeah, role model for super longevity. Yes. It's interesting that over 20 years, I can't see that a lot has happened in regards to the expanding of humanities and with the internet of things and artificial intelligence or narrow AI, looking at, you know, general intelligence or AGI, looking at nanotechnology, looking at the, you know, the virtual worlds and computational theories. And it's just the space exploration, all these things have really advanced. However, we still have a maximum lifespan of 123 years. So over the 20 years since that quote about me, my work has taken some shifts and turns and advances. But in the field of longevity, we have really good therapies that are band-aids that are helping to keep us alive and maybe give us good life, but we haven't had major advances in the industry of life extension or longevity. And that's something we're going to get to. I don't know how long life should be, but how I do have a view on how long life could be. And since life is a process of functions, It depends on how well we function. And life lasts actually as long as the capacity of these functions cooperate. And different life forms have different lifespans. I think this is important to consider because, I mean, for example, take a look at the Great Basin bristlecone pine trees has lived up to and maybe longer than 4,845 years. Whoa. I mean, think about that. A tree has life. It has its process. It goes through from a seed to an elder, but 4,000 years, wow. So a tree's lived that long. We don't question it. We accept it. The bowhead whale, and I think it's the giant tortoise, the one I'm thinking of weighs 800 pounds. Well, both of these two beings can live well beyond 200 years and even double that. And if we look at, you know, sea life in their environments, the hydra, simple water, fresh organism never dies. And the sea anemone never dies, and a lobster does not experience metabolic changes that cause aging. So we accept these other life forms living different types of lifespans. So we ought to hopefully remove the biases on life extension that humans are only supposed to live a certain number of years, and that's long enough, we need to die and pass on. Our genes to our offspring. And that type of ingrained societal or cultural meme is slowly fading away. People want to live longer and in good, good health. So lifespan for longevity is based on how long we can live in good health. And in my view, we can live as long as biomedical interventions and technology and its advances provide solutions. To the disease of aging. And so we could live many hundreds of years with biology and far longer within semi-biological environments. Remember, the Hydra, within its environment of water, is immortal or never dies. However, taken out of that environment, the consequences are clearly fundamental to its life and cannot exist outside of water.

So we need to think about the environments we're living in, our exchange, our ecosystems, Yeah, so thinking about our ecosystem and actually the kind of societal environment, if you like, I remember I saw Peter Schwartz talking, I think it was one of the World Future Society conferences, and he was talking about longevity. And he made the point that he was talking about, let's say, you know, if the younger generation who were in the audience lived to 120, and he was talking about obviously future generations living longer than that, but if they were living to 120, you know, they could be married for 100 years. So to, to pick that person wisely, because you could be having to put up with them for a long time. My question to you really is around this societal environment. If there is no aging, or if there is greater longevity and we are living a lot longer, we're not really going to see ourselves as aging, are we? Certainly, let's say, at the age of 200, we wouldn't necessarily see ourselves as being old. So do you think a life where we have such longevity, super longevity, we're also, you know, aging is disappearing, but so is the language around, you know, an old person or an aged person. What do you think the implications are for, you know, for society?

I think the implications are very strong because, you know, consider age is a number that holds significant social prestige. A person conjures up all sorts of views, opinions, beliefs, and prejudice based on age. And, you know, we consider the older person, the senior person, signifies knowledge and wisdom, and the younger person signifies youth and foolishness. But that, again, is binary thinking. Which is not always accurate. In fact, the converse is often true. And I think that the social structures that have created this norm for what age looks like and how we're supposed to respond to age or step away from age is shifting at its core. And I think that Schwartz makes a really good point. It's tongue-in-cheek that if you live 200 and you're married, you're going to be married to the same person. Well, I mean, that's kind of a I think that the whole idea of marriage is shifting. And people used to think you had to be married to one person. If you divorce, then you had a bad or failed marriage. But now we look at it differently. You hear people coming out of a marriage, maybe they married 10, 20, 30, 40 years, and they said they had a good marriage. It lasted as long and ran its course. People leave as friends. And I think that is the, the wise thing to consider it with that. We don't— you know, marriage doesn't mean you're forever with one person for the rest of your life, just like we don't have one career for the rest of our lives. And, and I think I'm a good example of that. But separately, aging is a biological condition brought about by the loss of cellular and metabolic functioning. So if we consider maybe the Hayflick theory, early on in the 1960s it was espoused a lot of cell division means that there's a limit on the capacity, or the many how many times a cell can divide. And so that means we have a shelf life.

And we—

this goes back to the 123 approximate maximum years for lifespan. But this is not a good thing. And the process of aging ought to be slowed down and reversed for the health of society and people. A lot of our angst, perhaps aggression and depression, stems from a limited timeframe on how long we're gonna be alive and/or from the diseases that we have, depression, anxiety, certain psychological influencers of envy and jealousy and greed and all those things that are very reptilian, fight or flight. And as well as the diseases of dementia and Alzheimer's and heart disease and all these different diseases frighten us. And what would it be like if we didn't have to live by that dictum? What would it be like if we didn't have to have the albatross of time and age and, you know, the symbolic rhetoric and archetypes of it constantly elbowing their way into our conscious mind? We would be freed from that. And what would we do? Many people say we'd be bored with longer lives, but I don't think so. I think we haven't even scratched the surface of who we could become as an evolved humanity, perhaps.

It is challenging, though, isn't it, to think about our lives? I mean, I was even going to say the phrase going forward, but even that's linear. Thinking of our lives, you know, chronologically, it's very, very difficult to think of our lives for most people in any way that isn't linear. Because obviously, we think back in history, we think forward to our visions and our dreams and our hopes. And obviously, we're in the present, and those three time horizons are very connected in a certain sequence. I guess when you talk about some of the other aspects of transhumanism, like cognitive intelligence and mind uploading and things like that, we'd be inhabiting a different kind of sphere, perhaps we might call it the cybersphere, that isn't really chronological time. So do you think the more that we consider that and try to bring it about in reality, the more we will get used to sort of a different time construct, and that will take us away from the whole idea of a limited life and a chronological time.

Yes, I do. I think that we're seeing the beginnings of this. It's on the horizon. For example, virtuality and gamification of education, the awareness of space exploration and coming back into the biosphere, the weight of gravity once having been freed from gravity, going back to gravity, It's hard to walk at first. Seeing experience with, again, virtuality, going into that sphere where you move information and synthetic structures and virtual agencies back and forth through time, and then you go back into this physical material world, it's quite different to get a grasp on it again. So I think that we're developing this equilibrium through different modalities, different environments. And I think, again, that's just on the horizon for what we can be doing, where time will not be exclusively linear, it'll be varied, going back and forth in time, across time, leaping through time. There are some movies that kind of exemplify this in a very entertaining way. Limitless is one movie that is quite exponential in its time prognostication. Other movies like Memento, you know, where you have no memory and you have to really rely on what you write on your skin to remember day to day. You ask those who have been in a coma or, you know, suffered from some type of time differentiation what it's like, and it's hard to adjust. But if you scuba dive like I do and you go into the sea and you go down 40 feet, 100 feet, when you resurface, submerge in the water, you have to stop and pause and let your body adjust and go to another 15 feet and stop and pause and let the body adjust. So like with space exploration for astronauts and for scuba divers who do deep sea diving or, you know, night diving, every time we go through these environments, these ecosystems, we have to come back and readapt to get our homeostasis back on target and balance. And I think that those particular physical experiences or exercises help us better understand what it will be like. I think the same is for someone who's a gamer that goes into a game and lives in that environment and then comes back out into this, this world, this biosphere, has an adjustment to make. So we're all making adjustments as we're going through the virtual, the artificial, the synthetic, environments and then adapting. For the transhumanist perspective, this is quite normal. And there's been a lot of work, writing, research on what will the human be like as far as identity in the future when we can coexist in these multiple environments. And how will we keep this continuity of ourselves intact without having, you know, fractured identity. That could cause chaos, you know, mentally. So these are all things that are really important that tie into longevity and aging and looking at the technologies that will give us different environments to exist on, or it's often said substrates or platforms to exist within or on.

So you've done quite a lot of work, haven't you, on what those substrates should be like or could be like? I'm thinking in particular your work on the whole body prosthetic, or— there was a great quote here actually from a piece of work I saw of yours called Body by Design, where you talked about the importance of art and the aesthetics. I think you said, the aesthetic approach and design intensifies perceptions of reality. Bodily adornments and artifacts have become wearable technologies, computerized devices and apps, altering physiology by adding strength to our muscles, speed to our limbs, Intelligence to our cognition and memory to our experience. And I really did wonder about that last bit. And given everything you've just said about memory and identity and the continuity of the person, how can we, using some of these systems and design, add to the memory or add— use memory to add to our experience? What have you got in mind there specifically?

Well, I think memory is a composite of experiences and helps us remember who we were and project who we are today and imagine who we might become tomorrow based on the continuity or the combination of experiences. If thinking about that body by design, it was originally Primo-Posthuman that I innovated in 1996 with a MetaBrain. And I'm going to mention the MetaBrain because I think that's important here. The concept for that future whole body prosthetic or prosthesis was to act as a non-aging engineered body that one could have in this environment, this ecosystem of the biosphere, and also have a connection called the meta-brain to other types of platforms or substrates, computational, cybernetic, synthetic, whole brain emulation type of uploading and downloading to simplify it. And the continuity there would be that it would be continuous, that any gaps in it would be smoothed out through a link to an idea that would represent what occurred during that time. So just like today, I mean, you know, you stop and you daydream for a moment, then you come back to reality, go, oh, what was I thinking? Those things are not problems with cognition. They're just just giving yourself a moment to redigest where you are in life at that, at that time. And those reflective processes go on continually. Sometimes you're totally alert and aware of what you're doing moment to moment, and other times you kind of space out. But as you're spacing out, your body's doing something else and your mind's doing something else that are equally interesting. So the issue there is that the need to have a backup system for the brain is really important. And I think that's what I was aiming for with that project and looking at the future of AI and nanomedicine, for example, and the importance of that as far as why are we in longevity or super longevity in the first place? We want to live longer, healthier lives. 123 years isn't long enough. Okay, that is a given. We want to live healthy lives with longer, maybe 100 years, maybe 200 years, however longer. Do we really want to stay in this biosphere? Maybe, maybe not, but that will probably be an option. Some people may prefer to remain exclusively biological in these bodies. Others may opt for my design, Prima Posthuman, and have a prosthesis to exist within in this biosphere and upload or transfer memory and cognitive properties into other worlds. And that's really frightening to many people. And they don't understand the continuity of who they are in those worlds. But if we consider that, let's just, let's take the onus off of that and say, okay, yes, it could work and it will work. Let's just start there. And if it does work, what would it be like? Well, it wouldn't be too much different than being a deep-sea diver, a scuba diver, or an astronaut. You go into another world, you experience a different environment, you adapt and adjust to it, and then you come back. So if we look at the highway of the future and what that transportation modality could be, it might be a seamless transference of a person identity from our ecosystem in the biosphere to a computational system, into a gamification, into all sorts of different environments, simulated and non-simulated. And that would probably become as seamless as it is for me to be here in Scottsdale talking to you in the UK through a studio that has a microphone and a headset. And I can't see you and you can't see me, but I trust that you're you and you trust that I'm me because we had an agreement prior to this and we know each other's background, we checked each other out, we Googled each other, let's say, and we see that we're good people. We have a solid reputation as scholars or entrepreneurs or innovators. And those elements outperform any type of negativity or bias someone may have said or written about us. But we trust the— that I went to university, I got my doctorate, you went to here and you got your this. So we have this agreement. And it doesn't matter that I can't see you or you can't see me because we're so engaged in what we're sharing from our experiences and our, you know, curiousness about this conversation that that becomes primary. And I think in the future, as far as identity is concerned and memory, that what will be primary is the instantaneous integrity of the discussion or the communication.

That's fascinating. In that scenario though, what happens to our senses because it is so cognitive? What about the physicality for not sort of working out whether you can trust someone or kind of checking them out, or even your intuition, just sensing what's around you and communicating that to the other person? How does the senses influence or communicate back to the mental states when it is a kind of mind uploaded or it's just pure cognition in a different substrate.

It's so interesting that you asked that and we've veered in this direction because just 2 days ago I was watching a YouTube exposé on body language by an expert in body language. And he was reviewing a recent incident at the Academy Awards and taking down every moment-to-moment facial expression, body language with the hands, the shoulders, you know, the stride, the body movements and what was probably or possibly going on. And it's interesting that because we can't see each other, I'm listening to the tonality of your voice, the amplitude, the velocity of the words, and the reflections, your pauses, and it's a visual thing. So even though I can't see you, I'm visualizing because you're speaking with a a tonality and a reference point that affords a visual interpretation. So maybe our senses will increase in ways that we haven't considered. We know that a bat can, can do things we can't do with its hearing, and that a whale can do things with echolocation that we can't do, and a dog can smell things that we can't smell, etc. So other animals have senses that are far more refined and advanced than our capabilities. But that doesn't mean our senses can't be even more enhanced and capable. And, and go back to my whole body prosthetic, Primo Posthuman, that I included this in that particular engineering or theoretical engineering of the prosthesis, that our senses would be enhanced to catch things that we might not catch otherwise, and to be able to increase the volume or reduce the volume to be able to see telescopically or microscopically and reduce and improve that. So I think that our senses, to cut to the chase here, will advance and largely through devices and enhancement and other types of things. But what I think the question becomes, why? Why would we need to do this? And I think the answer is because we want to communicate. And it all kind of boils down to our need and desire to communicate, to find likeness, to expose differences, to try to share love, to experience. And, you know, without love and kindness and sharing, what's the point? Just sit by yourself and masturbate, you know. So it's, you know, so what we want to do is to have engagement. Some people need more engagement than others, but you know, that's okay. The level or degree of engagement is, you know, can be parsed out to individual personality and behaviors. But the whole point is to have that shared sensibility.

Yeah, because I was wondering if the senses would be enhanced rather than diminished because I was listening to Eric Schmidt the other day. I think I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but he was talking about having AI assistants that could obviously feel out around the world and detect things.

Oh, he took my idea!

Oh, well, there you go. Go on, you can tell the original. Well, tell us about that because that's fascinating because it could open more doors to perception rather than shut them, I felt.

Yeah, I wrote about this many years ago. And actually, I worked with Peter Voss, who is the co-creator of of artificial general intelligence. He co-coined the term with Ben Goertzel and a couple of other people. And Peter and I were talking, again, a few decades ago about AGI. And I was working on, at that time, what I thought would be a great cognitive assistant. And this is based on my concern about binary thinking biases, hearsay, judgment, prejudice, and etc. And it was in the 1990s, I remember I got some bad press by people who said, "Oh, she doesn't care about her body. She just wants to live forever. She's an elite, you know, one of those wealthy Silicon Valley people." And I'm going, "I don't live in Silicon Valley. I work 3 jobs working on both my master's degree and my PhD. I work full-time. I waited tables for my undergraduate." You know, I come from a, you know, a good family, but I worked. From, you know, 16 and continue working today. I was never handed anything and I had to work twice as hard as a woman. And I say that very openly. So my reaction to any journalist or, you know, media person saying that, making this false assumption about me, caused me to go, okay, wait a minute, I'm getting angry. I don't like that. Wait, I'm getting resentful. I don't like that. So I thought I would love to have an AI work with my brain, with my personality, my reactions to go, oh, wait a minute, do you really want to do that? Hey, stop a moment. So I saw it as a type of best friend that would kind of be like the angel on your shoulder. Instead of like having knee-jerk reaction to things and getting angry or, you know, defensive and retaliating, maybe to think about it, to be a little bit wiser, to pause for a moment and collect, you know, your thoughts and realize the person saying this may have their own problem. You know, maybe it's not directed towards you. Maybe they're making an assumption based on something that they experience. So I came up with this idea, this AGI assistant, and it would be an augment to the brain, and it would be part of that meta-brain, and it would be working on, you know, 24/7 doing instant replay. So if you said something and you left the room and you thought, oh, did I really say that, or did I really interpret that correctly? This AI assistant would would replay the situation to you. So you go, oh, I see what I did. Or I, you know, you can have a more accurate memory than what most of us have, which is a subjective memory. And that was published as a paper. And it's quite good. It's right on my website, as a matter of fact. It's called Wisdom, Meta-Knowledge Through AGI Neural Macro-Sensing. And yeah, right on my website, I wrote that. Worked on it in 1999, published the paper in 2006. And it says, "Wisdom, meta-knowledge through AGI, neuromacro-sensing." In other words, narrow advanced AI and neuromacro-sensing, which is a whole sensing system and your central nervous system and peripheral nervous system in acquiring wisdom. And so this AGI Assist would give you Feedback and reflection analysis help you better weigh your responses to situations in life through a stronger mindfulness, to better steer us to be clearer thinkers and more agile, and to be more compassionate, I suppose, rather than retreat with a defensive statement or an offensive attack, to weigh the conversation carefully to respond in ways that would advance thinking and emotional input and output. I think that's the main thing for it. But getting to that point, I think it's really— I mean, I wish we had it today because things are so emotional, so heated in the binary landscape that I just wish people would pause for a moment before overreacting to things, myself included. I think all of us are part of this It's almost an amplified emotional state. So how do we reduce that with the social media pressures and the instantaneous internet thumbs up? People not informed maybe thumbs upping someone's bad behavior when you have a slap in the face that's totally inappropriate. But to that person, it was in that moment and it happens. And looking at the Ukraine right now and that hurt all of us feel. And it's just this continuous immediate observation about global information and global tragedies without enough balance for the global good things that are going on and the global kindnesses and successes. So we're— it's the scale is not balanced. It's leading towards a pretty unhealthy emotional state. You know, if you took the temperature, yeah.

It feels like we're being programmed to react continually, immediately, and that, you know, you get the biggest reactions when you show the greatest harms. And that's something that I feel like we're getting into a cycle of. But, you know, maybe the AI Assist can remove us from that or help us stand back. Or it made me wonder if this does come off and we have these sort of sensing devices or AI or extensions, if you like, if they do become more part of the self rather than a, a separate device. I mean, we'll have such a continual exchange of data, and it will be very personal data. It makes me wonder if this becomes quite integrated, and either we're developing these multiple selves because we have these almost monitors, these AI monitors, these friendly monitors helping us, turning inward to help us deal with the world, or perhaps it does become integrated and it becomes part of the self. I don't know if you've got any views on that.

Oh yes, I do, I do, I do. I think that without any question it will become part of ourselves and be seen as a natural aspect of ourselves. And I also think that will help us with our fundamental programming and to take us from the, the brainstem fight-or-flight reaction or reptilian brain more towards a frontal lobe with some finessing along the way. So that our frontal lobe and the aspects of the brain that are more the logical will not be just logical or rational, that they'll have semblance of smart emotions. So when I worked on this years ago, I also wrote about smart emotions and the need to have smart emotions, basically, that the— that we're always on alert. And we had to be for our survival from the savannas to fight or flight. To overcoming all sorts of hardships on a daily basis in our earliest evolution to overcoming the social dictums on us today and the pressure of that. It's a continuous battle. It'd be lovely to get to a point where our skins were not so thin, is what I'm saying. Our membrane could be smarter and absorb more, absorb more positive stuff rather than toxins. That are around us.

I was also wondering whether it could help with dementia or people who are cognitively impaired. I mean, if you know soon enough, then maybe you can turn to some of these enhancements to either help you record memories or store memories or play them back to you or sense out new— because obviously when one's suffering from dementia, some senses recede and other senses strengthen. I've noticed that in people I know. And again, you know, maybe this could be a very valued enhancement for, for people who do end up suffering with these sorts of cognitive impairments?

I think so, on a, you know, a step 2 basis. I think step 3 would be the— I'd like to talk about, not in this right now, in this part of our conversation, but I think the step 3 would be nanorobots repairing neurological damage continuously, biocompatible. But as far as the devices augmenting or enhancing our senses I think definitely could help with dementia. Not so much with, you know, certain other cognitive diseases like Alzheimer's where memory's gone and there's not much that can be done there at this time. But if memories are, you know, they're part of the brains that aren't functioning because of dementia, then certainly there's a hope that those memories can be found and restored.

Yeah. So what other work have you been doing? Because I know you have done a lot of experiments, you've done a lot of scientific research into life extension, or I know you've done work in cryonics. I'm wondering if you can just give our listeners a bit of an insight into the sort of practical scientific advancements that you've either been involved with or, you know, been privy to, and helps to give us more of a picture about where transhumanism is going practically.

Okay, let me think here. Okay, I think to lead into that, setting the pace that The life extension and the longevity industry has been around for a long time. Most people don't realize that. They think it's just recent. It's not. It's been around a long time. But let's just say most of the practical aspects of biomedical interventions for longevity, say, in the 1960s with Roy Walford, Maximum Lifespans, Dick Pearson, and Sandy Shaw. I mean, there's some really key figures there that really established the life extension industry. And movement. Unfortunately, and you mentioned early on that the 20 years that have gone by there, well, there hasn't been much going on other than Band-Aids, you know, therapies, CRISPR, stem cells, vitamins, you know, injections, hormone replacement therapy. All these different therapies are great, but they're, they're not really extending life. So all we have there is number one, which I think is Plan A, which is cryonics. Which you touched on, and then from there go into nanomedicine. And then the, the third, I would say, would be the whole body prosthesis. So with my work, I, I tend to look at the work that's been done prior to me and see what has been accomplished and if there's any gaps. And I filled the gap for the whole body prosthesis in 1996, and that work was really well received. What if we had a whole body prosthesis that could back up the brain and, you know, live and be an alternative body? But I think that as far as what stands out more is something that is not so theoretical, something that is actual. In crossing fields from, let's just say, science to design, and I also have, you know, work as a futurist in future studies and ethics. The aim is always, no matter what field I'm in or what I'm working on, the aim has always been to innovate. And I think that's the earlier artist in me or the designer or the architecture of innovation really, really fascinates me. So I look for gaps and I found a gap in the sciences. I found that the issue of memory and cryonics and soul So understanding this, that there was a gap, in other words, we know that we can cryosuspend animals, humans and simple animals, and we know that simple animals can be revived, brought back to healthy life. The C. elegans, this has been proven in scientific research on numerous occasions. But the part that was missing was that you can revive a simple animal like a C. elegans nematode, But no one had checked to see if that Cielagin's memory was intact or whether its neurological structure, which is based on 302 neurons, were functioning after being revived. If you're going to be revived, you want to have your memory, right? You want to have an identity. You don't want to be a thing. So this really stood out for me. So I developed a laboratory to address the what-if question. And that question is, what if? Will chronic patients remember who they were after they were brought back to life? I mean, very obvious question to ask and one I've been asked many times in doing interviews. And my answer was, well, we hope so, we don't know. And I thought, okay, I'm tired of saying that. I'm going to say definitively yes or no. So I couldn't work on a human, obviously, because we don't have the biomedical interventions to mitigate the damage So that's really a bit far off for me. So I put that theoretical question of will cryonics patients remember to test, and I developed a methodology for testing long-term memory of simple animals who have been placed in cryonics and revived. And I worked with a simple animal— remember, this is simple, not a complex animal— a simple animal. And I chose one that regardless of its simplicity is exceedingly renowned in biomedical medical research. And that simple animal is known as a C. elegans, which is a nematode, or an nematode, which means in plain speech it's earthworm. These elegant creatures, and thus elegans, early name Latin Greek for elegant, have actually been the heroes of 4 Nobel Prizes in scientific research. So it's a highly renowned, respected simple animal, and that's the one I chose And I did— my methodology is based on olfactory imprinting, which means smell association with food. So when they were babies, I associated their food with a particular chemical, benzaldehyde, in their feeding assays and vitrified them in cryonics using a slow, safe speed method, CryoTOP, which is often used with embryo freezing, which is a very commonplace everyday practice. So I wanted a renowned simple animal and I wanted a practice that had already been accepted in society. So I wasn't pushing any, you know, anyone's neck out of joint. And I thought, okay, so those things, then I'll have to teach it something. And I used the Pavlovian protocol of imprinting and with smell. Smell is highly associated with memory. And the long and short of it is that working with hundreds and hundreds of these C. elegans nematodes we proved— my lab and I proved— that long-term memory was intact. That after bringing these simple animals out of cryonics, out of vitrification, and place— warming them up in a very comfortable ecosystem, putting in them in the petri dish with very healthy agar, which is a type of jelly, and watching them under the microscope to see if they went to the food with the chemical association or went to the food without the chemical association, that would prove long-term memory. And in fact, they went to the food with the chemical association in the olfactory or a smell imprinting. And it wasn't just a few, it was all of them. And so that imprinting lasted through cryopreservation. And that was really exciting to me. And I published a paper in Rejuvenation Research and it had over 16,000 downloads within the first couple of months. So it is really a wonderful first. I love that I did it. I love the work. I loved my team and I did what I set out to do. And that's that. But I learned a lot from it. And I think the next step of that research is the secondary findings, which was a happenstance. And that was in the Petri dish while I was, you know, checking out their health and their movement. See how they swim, and that's a sign of health. I saw one of the worms was laying eggs, and I looked and I looked, and I captured on video and in images of the eggs hatching and little babies swimming out of their ovum or their, their eggs and, you know, growing up. And it was really quite wonderful. So the secondary outcome of that research was that the that pregnant simple animals can be put in cryonics while pregnant and give birth when— after being brought out and revived. And so that's quite wonderful. I haven't written about that, but I will be talking about it at an upcoming conference soon.

Wow, that's amazing. Remind me what year that was.

The research started in 2014 and the paper was published in 2015.

And do you feel that that research has had the public acknowledgement that it deserves?

No, no.

So you see, this, this is one of the things I really want to ask you as we draw to the conclusion, I'm afraid, of this conversation, which I, I could have forever. But you see, there's a lot of chat at the moment, and there has been in Silicon Valley obviously over the past few years, and you've got people like Balaji Srinivasan writing that life extension is the most important thing that we can invent, and talking about, you know, how longer lifespans lead to the reduction in the cost of everything, and so it's our purpose of technology to eliminate mortality. You've been talking about this for a long time. You've done the hard yards of doing research into this. You've published an inordinate amount of papers. You've lectured. You know, why hasn't this taken off more than it should have? Or maybe— and I hope you don't mind me saying this— why aren't you— I mean, Because you are very famous in transhumanist circles, but why aren't your blog posts about why life extension is the most important thing we can invent more popular and more circulated than, you know, a VC investor in Silicon Valley?

That's a really good question. And I wonder about that myself and it breaks my heart. You know, I think it has a lot to do with people wanting to get their name out there. And it also has a lot to do with people not doing their due diligence on prior art or prior knowledge or prior companies, prior writings. When I was full-time faculty and chair of the graduate studies department at university, I would tell my students, always cite the work that came before you, give recognition because your work is based on their work. That will not only give them recognition, which is warranted, but will also give you the credence of being a scholar, of being a unique thinker, of of someone with integrity. Unfortunately, in today's environment, largely, um, people just want to get their name out there and they're like, they invented it. You know what's interesting too is I've seen a number of transhumanist manifestos and I'm going, excuse me, that was written in 1983 and my name's on it. It's published in books, many books. And even within the scientific realms, because I'm a transhumanist, I get overlooked. And I think that because I'm not selling a product with my name all the place, I'm the first to do this. People are not paying attention. And I intentionally did not want to do that because I respect the work too much and I respect myself too much. And in the longevity community, I do see this. I see people who say they can solve aging or are solving aging and they're not. And I see people saying, like, pushing their product or their company and being the first to do this, the first to do that. And maybe they are the first in their particular slice of the pie of longevity, and that's great. But the hyperbole around it and the self-promotion around it is, I think, something shameful. So maybe I'm a fool. Maybe I should have, or maybe not. Maybe later on in life, I'll be thankful that I didn't. I don't know. But I do think that there is a big miss here. I think it speaks louder about humanity, our lack of humaneness, and about our lack of respecting others. And I think it speaks largely about people wanting to be famous and wanting to have their name out there.

Do you think it's anything to do with gender or not?

Yes, I answered immediately.

You did. Because I mean, I have spoken before on this podcast series about the lack of very public profiles of women in transhumanism. And I know there are lots of women in transhumanism and working in the various aspects of it, whether through art or design or, as you say, science. But they don't seem to— and I might be wrong— but they don't seem to have the same sort of profile. What's your take on that as the pioneering woman in transhumanism and the one who wrote the original manifesto?

My take on it is that maybe it's based on, on several things. Maybe it's ageism, that I'm older so I don't matter anymore. Maybe because I'm a woman who comes from the humanities and arts, you know, as a performer, a fine artist. I've exhibited in museums. My videos have been exhibited at film festivals. I've performed in many places. So maybe that aspect of it. But artists are highly regarded. I mean, if Sting had gotten into longevity, he would be, you know, well, let's pick a woman, Annie Lennox, or Beyoncé, you know, they're artists, they would be highly revered. And, you know, I don't know, maybe it's my own fault. Maybe I've distanced people, I don't know. But I Not intentionally. I think that because I'm a woman and a transhumanist and don't have a corporation, perhaps, I don't have like a Silicon corporation or, you know, any, that I'm pushing a product that I'm not taken seriously because it's a world of entrepreneurs. I don't want to push a product. And in fact, I intentionally did not because I wanted the science and my own work as a visionary and futurist to speak louder. And I think a lot of it is binary thinking. You wonder why someone is said as the hero of longevity and it's a guy, and then you look, well, what scientific research has that person done and what breakthrough? And you go, well, there isn't anything, he's just good at speaking at conferences. So I don't know.

I think it's because you— I think you go against the stereotype. I think people are quite intimidated and, and quite fearful about seeing a woman who's obviously an intellect and who has these visionary thoughts that can alter humanity. It just goes against stereotypes we have of women. And, and it could come from a misperception of transhumanism, and I think it actually does partly. But I think it's, I think it's that people are quite intimidated, and that's not an excuse for it. And I think, you know, obviously you have a lot of work out there. I don't mean to diminish it in any way. I just, it would be nice to hear more people talking about about, you know, you as the author and pioneer of the Transhumanist Manifesto and for you to have the rightful ownership of it, that's all.

Yeah. And, you know, in thinking, I remember early on when the philosophy was written, even right before the philosophy was written, I wanted to create a movement. Movements were normal in the art world. You know, you have the Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, every movement. And it just seemed like it was a movement. So it was always on my mind. And yes, that was an intention, a forthright intention. In fact, what's interesting is my advisors at the university where I got my doctorate didn't want me to write on transhumanism because they said, "You can't write on something you've already created." Okay. And maybe I should have taken that quote and put it on a billboard. But no hard feelings. It's all good. I think it's all good. I just think that maybe some of these guys that you've interviewed, namely, but some, you know, the people need to take a pause. What's interesting, I remember I was a plenary speaker at a conference at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in Tucson, Arizona. And there was a guy who was working with brain preservation, aplastination, and me having worked with memory with C. elegans. And he would not look at me the whole time. He would not even turn around, look at me. And another guy said to David Shulmer, one of the co-organizers of the conference, well, you should have me up there rather than Natasha. I'm, I'm the expert in whole brain emulation. And David Chalmers was very upset about this and said, this is wrong. It was just, again, it's part of that thing where if you theorize on something and your work is really good, but you're not from a particular community, then your work does not count. So anyway, I don't know what to do about it. You're not the first person who's mentioned this. And I'm referring to my AGI assist right now who's telling me that it's the gracious thing to do is say, that's life. You know, all is good. Um, you know, it's been going on for so many years, I've kind of gotten a little tone deaf to it. But I, I do think it's endemic of a larger issue about where we are and the immaturity of the need for fame and recognition.

I just, I just think, um, you— we need more women in transhumanism is what I think. And so obviously you are a role model, and there are some other but I think the more the better, because I think it will only improve transhumanism, and it will only improve the communication about transhumanism to the wider society. I really believe that.

Thank you. I do too. I really do.

Well, Natasha, we are unfortunately getting to the end of our fantastic conversation. It's been fascinating to talk to you, but I do ask all the guests one final question, which is: what action— and maybe we've just summarized it— what action, uh, would what would you like to see for identity in the future? We're going to come back in one second to hear your answer, but we're just going to take a slight pause for an ad break.

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Okay, and we're back. So Natasha, your action for identity.

My action plan for identity would be a more humane humanity, which is inclusive of allowing people just to be who they are, recognizing others' work, building off of it, and embracing a level of kindness. And I suppose that goes to a type of fairness, not meaning equity for all, that everyone needs to be the same or equal. No one is ever equal. There'll always be someone smarter or faster or kinder, but I think that if we find what we do, each person's own individuality, build on that and allow others the space to build on theirs.

Very good. Well, Natasha Vitamore, you are a fascinating person, pioneer and practitioner, and, um, thank you. It's been a privilege to speak to you today.

Thank you.

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