Hi Rudi,

Thank you for the kind words, and for the positive future vision . You are doing vital work, helping people to recognize that we now have the capability to live on, if we so choose. Getting brain preservation technologies validated to preserve memories (a project of current neuroscience) and making it increasingly inexpensive, accessible, and covered by health care for all who might want it, is surely a great task that deserves much better funding and effort.

As VP of the Brain Preservation Foundation, I expect such futures will slowly emerge. At the same time, I recognize that most people won't make this end-of-life choice, for many reasons. One of the most important and undervalued reason, in my view, is that our digital technology is presently on an accelerating path to capturing ever more aspects of our "higher self", and to keeping it around and improving after we die. Every user of digital tech is being incrementally uploaded today, whether they recognize it or not, and such uploading will get exponentially stronger, and will be astonishingly good at capturing (simulating) our ideas, experiences, and personalities just a few decades hence. So one way or another, whether we want this future or not, our increasingly complex civilization is getting exponentially better at preserving all that is unique and valuable in our individual and social selves.

You may enjoy my Medium post, Contemplating Mortality, on these topics. https://johnsmart.medium.com/contemplating-mortality-personal-ais-mind-melds-and-other-inevitable-paths-to-our-b37f091191c9

Alex Wright's Glut: Mastering Info through the Ages, 2008, is also a brilliant overview of this accelerating information-and uniqueness preservation process.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0801475090?psc=1&smid=A137N5PCRAJMCA

We truly do live in an amazing universe, one that gets exponentially better at preserving unique information, and one that appears to be both evolving and developing. Most of us have yet to recognize how strongly self-improving and self-protecting our civilization has been, when it is viewed from a network and developmental perspective. By far the most amazing and precious process I know of is the process of biological development. In many past cycles, it has learned how to take a single fertilized cell and predictably and robustly, make each of us, setting us up for our evolutionary experiments. The lessons from those are slowly added to our developmental code, making us ever more complex, conscious, and capable (and I would argue, ethically and empathically self-regulated).

I expect our future computer science must borrow deeply from the evo-devo processes, under selection, that made us. I also expect that this path is the *only easily accessible way*, in our universe, ,for us to create General AI. In other words, postbiological life will have to deeply incorporate the central algorithms of biological life, algorithms we are still seeking to understand today.

This is actually a very old vision. The great Vannevar Bush, the father of the NSF, even had this vision. We still discount it today, but I expect the universe will force us to take the same evo-devo path that created us, with AIs that have emotions, empathy, ethics, incompleteness, uncertainties, visions, and arguments, just like us. We shall see.

Thanks for all you do!

johnsmart@gmail.com