A Digital Afterlife—What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Just as if the present weren't bleak enough imagining an even worse future is really kind of how I like to spend my time. [music] Welcome to this episode of Bioethics for the People, an informal look at hot topics, controversies and scholarship, dealing with Bioethics, medicine, technology, and anything else we're interested in. We're your host, Devon Stall, from Waco, Texas. And I'm Tyler Gibb from Kalamazoo, Michigan. And yes, that's a real place. [music] Welcome to this episode of Bioethics for the People. This is a special crossover episode with the podcast Weird Religion. Devon, who are these people and why are we talking to them today? Yeah, so Weird Religion is a super fun podcast. If you've never heard of it, check it out. It's Leah and Brian, and they're both scholars of religion, and they just watch shows, usually TV, sometimes movies, sometimes documentaries, and they just talk about how that kind of media intersects with their understanding of religion. So if there are any religious elements that they'll want to bring up from their expertise, but mostly it's just sort of a fun look at different forms of media that are interesting and have all provoked all sorts of interesting conversations. So Devon, this episode of the podcast, we are going to talk about a TV show. Well, not a TV show, a show online on Amazon Prime called Upload. And this is a show that you watched a couple of months ago, and you recommended that I watched as well. What's the show about? Sure. Well, I love all things sci-fi and dystopian, and this will be in that genre. It's great. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I love thinking about future worlds in which we are all totally in a terrible place. That is just, it's a super fun genre to think about. And I liked it. Yeah. In general, that's a great genre for me, just as if the present weren't bleak enough imagining an even worse future is really kind of how I like to spend my time. This show was particularly fun for that reason, but also because it brought up a lot of bioethics issues. And as soon as I saw it, I thought, "Oh, this is going to be great for teaching or for talking about different bioethics issues," because it's about people who can upload their consciousness into a kind of afterlife, which recalls all sorts of interesting ways in which there are people right now who think that that would be a great idea and are trying to come up with computerized ways to do this. Really, way far in the future, but people are really trying to do this. So, what does it mean? What would that future even look like? And how does it get tied up with industry and the ways in which capitalism is going to try to hone in on that kind of afterlife? So, my question for all of you is, if you could have your consciousness be uploaded to any person living or dead, who would it be and why? You can have their body, their life. Like they're dead, so we're going back in time with them. Well, I'm just saying, usually with academics, they want some sort of obscure philosopher or something from the 19th century. But I'm just saying you have to time travel for that, you know what I mean? Yeah, okay, well, yeah, I mean, sure, why not? Time travel is included. So, but your consciousness is inside of them. So, do you have a double consciousness or are you just like uploading your brain into somebody's body? That's what I was wondering, am I them then or are they them, but I'm also them? Okay, okay. I think we're all clarified this. Okay, this is the most academic version of this. I feel like if we were all like at happy hour, you guys would just answer it. Don't even think. No, I don't think so. So, I think so, my answer would be like the rock, because yeah, like somebody really, really big and strong. And then I'm like, Dwayne, Dwayne the rock. Dwayne the rock, Johnson. Okay, I took me a second. I just didn't know. Yeah, I want that rock and bod. And then he has, but he has like my sensitivity and my consciousness. So, like, that's the best of all worlds, right? Oh, I love that. I love that. What about, what about you, Ty? I don't know that I'm just kidding. My, my, my answer was going to be the rock also. It's so weird. I'm still stuck on the original question of like, am I me in the person's body or am I just like watching like a movie through the other person's eyes what they are? To me, that's not a scholar's thing. That's just like a normal. If we were all doing this in the pub, that would be question number one. If you're uploading your entire consciousness, yeah, it's you, it's you, you're still you, you're still Brian. Because I'd be like, oh, I'll be Jesus. And then I'm sitting here and I'm like, Jesus is body. And I'm like, oh, wait, what am I doing? Like people are expecting these things to me. No, I can't tell if he really thinks he's the son of God, because it's just me thinking like that's point. You just ruined Christianity by that answer. Like you just like, there is no more Christianity because you ruined. I know. Exactly. Now that would be the kind of thing you'd want to ask. So, so I just take over their body and life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, I feel like we're, we're really like hovering around the, the crux of this entire episode, which is about the show upload, which has a premise of being able to upload your consciousness somewhere else that's not your body. The folks at Bioethics for the people had this show on their minds. Why did you all choose this particular show? So I watch this show. I think when it first came out, so it's been a little bit yet, but I loved, I mean, because there's so much like technology, so much futurism. And I think at the time I was writing about transhumanism, which is this group of people who basically like they want to live forever, these transhumanists, and they're trying to figure out all sorts of ways to do that. And so one of the ways you could do that is to upload your consciousness. So there's a guy named Ray Kurzweil, who is what we call like a futurist, and by we, I mean only people who call themselves futurists would know what that term was, because they sort of made it up. So they're sort of like the enlightenment, right? Yes. Made this up. Yeah. Okay. Where I'm a scholar of the future, which is a weird thing to be a scholar of. So there's all these people who are like trying to figure out how to live forever, and they tend to be like super rich, really like just kind of like I have everything in my life, except immortality. And so there's all sorts of interesting ethics questions, especially bioethics questions that go with that, because whether it's like uploading your consciousness to live forever, or it's like tweaks to your physical body to have it kind of go on for a really long time. Like what does that mean for the rest of us? How could you do that ethically? Like for me, that's like an inherently interesting bioethics question. Ty, are you watching this show too? Yeah, so I started watching after Dev and told me to, but I really enjoyed it. Yeah, I finished this set the first season, and I mean, it was tainy and lots of interesting things to talk about. No, it's really good. I'd recommend it to anybody. One of the questions that I had when I was watching it, well, I quite enjoyed it myself too. I thought it was in addition to being a fun intellectual exercise. I just thought it was cute, like the characters and stuff. But one of the questions that I had was, you know, Dr. Stahl, Devon, to your point about transhumanism, which by the way, I don't know if you remember this to all of our listeners, but Dr. Stahl and I, one time, we used to have this contest. Do you remember where we would try and find the weirdest titled paper at a particular conference that we go to? Oh, yes. And academics are known for creating just like totally bizarre paper titles, and then probably bizarre papers too. And one of the first, the first time, like, I think that when I learned about transhumanism was it was some paper that asked a question like, is a human a toaster or something like that? And then it was about transhumanism. And I was like, what is this? So then I learned some things I didn't know. Leave it to the AAR to come up with something like that. Yeah, thank you Academy, American Academy of Religion. But one of the things that I thought of was like before technology, surely there were rich guys, most of their men are men, I assume, who were like trying to live forever. But what did they do before they could think about uploading their brains? Brian, is there like any ancient? Oh, yeah, you just like, you know, yeah, you could like visit like, you know, witches and take potions and stuff probably. Yeah, but it didn't work that well. Well, like the fountain of youth, right? That's a big. Yeah, the, the fountain of youth and the looking for the gold and the stuff, you know, I think, or, you know, well, actually one of the world's oldest epics. The epic of Gilgamesh is actually one of its major themes is immortality through the idea. I guess it comes down to that your story would be written or told and that it could be the physical object of the story could be like buried within the city walls. And all that would outlast you and thus your immortality is tied up into your city and in the telling of epic. I think that's also true for Homer as well, like the alien in the Odyssey. So I think those kinds of things are sort of like proto attempt to set immortality. I mean, that seems right to me, also just like even writing books in general. It's like three people will ever read my book, but that book will be in a library probably for hundreds, hopefully hundreds and hundreds of years. Thousands, thousands of years, millions of years, does it, is it true? Do you think it's true bio-ethics for the people? This is a little off, off bio-ethics, but I think it's a science-y thing. And to me as a non-science, you're the best scientist I know, okay? It's fair, it's fair. Do you think, I mean, do you think that any piece of knowledge that exists now will ever be lost? Like, aside from a complete extinction event of humanity and a complete destruction of the globe, every piece of book and knowledge and things, won't it just keep, won't everything just kind of continue? Like not hundreds of years, like millions of years, or as long as there's an earth or anything like people? Like, where would it go? It's not a good way. Yeah, well, I mean, you think about other cultures that we, that have been lost over time, right? I mean, they clearly had knowledge and information that we don't have access to anymore, right? So, like, Stonehenge, like we know it's there, we kind of know what the point of it was, but I mean, kind of the details and the daily lives of those people that lived at that time, I think it's been lost, so. But they didn't have the internet though, but they didn't have the internet, right? They didn't have books, and they didn't have, I mean, they didn't have that books of Stonehenge, but like, we have this digital thing now, right? So, I guess I'm asking, like, does, does the digital world that we have now just keep transmuting and evolving to the point where everything that's on it now is always going to be there and just keeps like blossoming? Gosh, I hope not, but maybe. Yeah, I've got some pictures I've tried to delete that I don't want anybody to tell us, tell us more about those pictures, Ty, what is that about? It's when you have that goofy curly hair, I think. Remember when you used to have hair. I've seen some of those. Yeah, it turns out I do actually remember having hair, Devon. I have a question for you all about like, so the show, which maybe we should just kind of briefly state the premise, which is, it's set in the very near future, wherein it's possible after you die. If you have enough resources, you can upload your consciousness into this sort of like super computer that may or may not be a pretty nice place, and they have all these clever ideas about like if you're poor, you have kind of a crappy place to live. And if you're rich, you have a really fancy place to live in our main character. This, you find this out in the first two minutes. So it's not a spoiler is uploaded into this, this new world. And the question, of course, well, I have a question, I have two questions for you. The one is like the bioethics question like if you could should you and how do you even evaluate that. And then also like, how did you feel personally like thinking about the, the premise of the show. So maybe the first like how should you do that? How does a bioethicist even evaluate that? Well, super subjectively. And then the answer is obviously no. I mean, this is, it's, it's an older bioethics question. Obviously, we can't do this and we're like not 13 years away from being able to do this as the show presumes, which is like a pretty funny. My guess is some of this is supposed to be funny. Like this is only like 13 years in the future. And there's like flying cars and or self driving, there's a bunch of self driving cars and like you can make food just appear from a 3D digital printer. And stuff that's like conceivable, but surely not within the next, you know, 20 years. That seems a little maybe slightly off. Like, should you do it? You can just imagine people would want to do it. But I mean, I guess the question to like the religionists is, you know, is this, is this just like another version of the afterlife or is this something totally different than what world religions are imagining as they sort of predict or anticipate what an afterlife means. Yeah, I think it's pretty different. Although, you know, this theme, I mean, right away, the first comparison show is obviously the good place, right? Because it's this idea that you're supposed to be in a heavenly place, but then you find out it's actually not great and their problems and so on, but there's a jerk, but there's a journey then that you're taking, you know, so it's a clear instantiation of that theme, but then also black mirror, which has no which has no humor, but there seems to be a genuine. I think with the loss, the general, you know, loss of enchantment, the disenchantment and the very interim of the world, the loss of religion, the loss of religious ideas about an afterlife, the loss of a centrality of an afterlife, even for very religious people who don't really think about it. I think all we have is like this vacuum of horror at the idea of an afterlife, like we could laugh at it, or we could be horrified by it. Black Mirror has a lot of these upload your consciousness horror themes, I think, but it's it's almost like it just can't be taken seriously, like it either has to evolve into jokes or just us imagining you're living in a Taco Bell commercial, essentially, which is a running theme on upload, or that it's just it's like a nightmare, like it's like a horror film, like in black year. Well, one of the things I'd like to I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Devon is that just the fact that like when you think about the whole concept of upload as a bodyless afterlife and a bodyless eternity, and I think that was a part and maybe it's just because I think that bodies are pretty great in a lot of ways, but I was sort of like, is that the part that is giving me like. The really bad feeling about this like there's something that just felt wrong, even though it's quite charming and there's some fun little scenes and seven I was like, is that the fact mean how what do you think about that I know you've written a lot about bodies and the self and. How we ought to think about them like as ethical sites. Yeah, I mean for me for sure and I think that's inherently at least my supposition is this is why this idea is not super attractive to women and people with minority bodies is because. We tend to put a lot of stock in our bodies and to think about them is like inherently part of who we are and maybe there's a kind of a rich white man who doesn't feel that way. I don't know any of these people but there must be some people who feel that way but for me it's like no who I am is really important like my body is really important to how I self conceptualize so even if it were a virtual body that felt real that looked like my body should. You know that it wasn't your body and for me like even if it it just knowing that it was virtual would really like sort of ruin my sense of self. And so for me like that the disembodied part of it and this is why transhumanism gets critiqued so heavily by so many people is like and there's actually a classic philosophy I think it's kind of a bioethics question of like. Or a situation of a head in a jar and if this head in a jar kind of could experience the world could still conceptualize and think would you still be you if you were just a head in a jar. And I would say no some people might say yes they'd say really your consciousness is the only it's the most important thing it's what makes you you and it's not your body so I think that's sort of a debate and bioethics but. Yeah I think the most interesting bioethics piece for me was so when we're making decisions for other people particularly when people are like. You know at the end of life in a coma and we're trying to make decisions like what grandma would want in this particular situation right. We don't have access to grandma and and in the same way that it kind of you know we don't have access to people who have already died. So we're doing a lot of speculation and a lot of kind of inferencing but what was interesting about the show is that it demystified kind of that that severance of somebody's. Continuity and we don't have access and we now have access to people who are dead and you know it's really it was funny how he would like be calling back to his like still living girlfriend and like interrupting her at the spa or like whatever and there's just keeping that connection and so. Yeah that that's really interesting so one thing that I that I study a lot or that I work on a lot is this idea of King decisions on behalf of somebody else like proxy decision making like how do we have access to what somebody's. Emotional state was when they said xyz about what their treatment decisions would be for example and so i mean that would be really interesting to actually have better information upon which to make decisions for for people but another part of the the show that I really loved was that. That his continued existence in this uploaded area was contingent upon him keeping his kind of difficult girlfriend relationship intact right and so yeah that that kind of played out in a lot of fun fun ways. I thought about this in terms of religion as well like you know do you when you say tell death to you part that's like you're out like at least I can die and I don't have to be with my partner forever. But if there's an afterlife you know and I think that there might be some things in the bible about this and i'm not sure about other traditions thinking about are you still married in heaven are you still with your partner and this poor guy Nathan. Like his girlfriend's kind of awful and and and the reason he has to stick with her is because she's paying for it which we should get into to because she is paying for him to have his consciousness remain in this resort hotel yeah yeah. Yeah there's a really funny episode where where his he think he's going to try and escape and it doesn't go super well because he doesn't have the financial resources to make sure that it. Have you know that he ends up in the good place the goodish place I thought that the the okay I know that the girlfriend we're supposed to think that she's kind of awful because she's blackmailing him emotionally in terms of you know his. his status. But I don't know. I kind of liked her weird weird sort of way. I found that there were some parts of it. So if you think about like how it would be to try and maintain a relationship with a dead person, I mean, it's not going to be easy, right? So I found her more sympathetic than I thought I would, you know, as the show goes on. So maybe that's how they want us to think about it. Well, the show labor is very hard to try to like provide little quick expositional details about characters that will help you feel some kind of depth or sympathy. Many of those threads don't really go anywhere, but like they try to do it. Like they'll show, you know, like the customer service agent lady who then becomes the love interest of the guy who's uploaded because like he has a customer service agent, right? Like somebody who's kind of guiding him through this experience. While they show like she used to have a roommate and there's like two beds, but where's the roommate? So it's like you're left like kind of watching. So you have to keep watching. I know, but like, you know, so I think I think it's in their interest as a show just to make everybody like a little bit complicated. Like, you know, the girlfriend is manipulative and whatever, but like she's really, you know, I mean, just the fact that she wants to be with him forever, like right away, and it seems almost kind of crazy. I like, you know, that's like kind of beautiful. Like it's romantic. She wants to be with him forever. You know what I thought the part that gave me the part of the show that sort of gave me chills actually, there's this horrific scene where what I thought was interesting was at the end of the day, all the characters really truly do want to be embodied again, right? Like the goal is to just this is like more of a purgatory type of a situation where you're like, not no, not even purgatory at all. It's a liminal space, right? You're not trying to be like burned away. Limbo? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like it's like this in between space, but really the goal is to someday be embodied again. And there's this awful scene where you see a character they're trying to make that happen. But I thought what was so fascinating was there's like this character who they're going to try and like upload his soul back into or whatever his consciousness or whatever it is back into a body, a redo of his body. And he has like this one tiny moment of like glory knowing that he's like reconnected with his body before, you know, polarity gruesome polarity ensues. But that I thought that was kind of interesting. I was like, oh, you know, I mean, I'm always thinking about what's the message that the writers and the director are they're trying to tell us? They seem to see transhumanism as a danger. Yeah, for sure. And late capitalism, right? So when you combine, and this is really like what is fueling a lot of transhumanism is, is a lot of these guys like work for Google. And like Ray Kurzweil works for Google. And so that sort of connection between huge industry. So and it'll be guys that work for Oracle and guys that work for Amazon who are funding these futurist projects to try to live forever. It's that combination of, you know, how to sell yourself like the capitalism of it and the technology of it forever in like the most dystopian way. I mean, I to me at least it this is it's funny and it's light-hearted but it's also really, really sad. It's definitely a dystopia. Nobody, it doesn't come across as good. Totally. Like, I mean, the show, so the show is on Amazon Prime. Amazon is like the biggest purveyor of this kind of like problem capitalism thing in many people's eyes. No comment for me. I've ordered something while we're doing the podcast already. So, but do you think they're doing product placement in the show for Amazon? They're doing product placement in an Amazon show, for Amazon, ridiculing the capitalism like almost like with a bat over your head. Like, I mean, if I did, there's something I don't like about the show. It's just like shows that are so on the nose like every second they have to remind you that like this is what the show is about. This is what the show is about like you can never forget what the show is about. You know, and maybe there's something comedic about that like in the guys first day in his quote unquote after life. He's getting annoyed like he gets burned out really quickly because he's always trying to sell you things in the digital afterlife and so on. But like, so granted, I understand that there's like a plot point to that never let you forget. But Amazon is like this too, right? They'll never let you forget like what you just looked at or what you must now order and all this kind of stuff. So it's like, I don't know. There's there was something that could feel creepingly gross about it as a show that like the show is making fun of something while they're also doing the thing and you're like, ha, like Jake, I don't know. Is that do you think that's too cynical? I think it's beautifully cynical. No, it's it's totally like this meta experience, right? Where you're where you're like you said you're engaging in the thing that they're tongue in cheek poking poking fun about. But but I think the writing is really good. I mean, there was some like laugh out loud for me sitting in my basement by myself quotes like like there's that one really rich guy who I think is supposed to be some sort of foil of like Rupert Murdoch or somebody and he's he's paying for golf lessons for the for the main character. And he's like, Oh, you know, that's really expensive. Whatever he did. And something along the lines of he says, I spent more on a majestic endangered parrot sandwich than whatever like I'm doing for you. It's beautiful. I laughed a lot when he's with the dog and the dog is like, are you talking the dog and the dog talks back to him? There's like a talking dog, which is part of this world. And the dog's like, he's like something like, Oh, it's weird or something and the dog's like, yeah, it's only weird if you make it weird, which I thought actually it is a great tagline for the show or the transhumanist idea like if you could just like get over it and just accept it, it wouldn't have to be weird or any kind of ethical problem or you wouldn't have to be leaving your body or the material world like everything in some weird philosophical sense isn't everything material like our but like even the digital world relies on these synapses of electrodes and things like that's a material right it's not it's not a nothing it's not the same kind of material as like your meat your meat suit that you're wearing but it's like still material you know so like you could make it unweird you know like you could make you know so I thought oh that's a great tagline for the show you know it's only weird if you make it weird. Okay well I think other may maybe like early modern historians might be better equipped to to handle this but this idea like that you can make a distinction I don't know probably back to Descartes or or maybe maybe somebody else like the idea that you would think that there is some essence that is extractable from your meat suit like that there's a difference between a mind and body I think that that has got to be a distinctly modern idea and I think the way that the show depicts like the monetization or the capitalization of that is like I felt and I want to hear what you guys think like only in America right like this idea that you would be so optimistic about it like and have a wholehearted embrace of of this thing that is like when you sit down and really think about it I you know I guess it is only weird if you make it weird but to me it's just always going to be weird that that you would just be like yeah let's do this I don't know it felt it felt very like of our culture first of all meat suit great term that's that in and a very romantic one I'll have to bring this up with my husband that we'll just call I love that meat suit um it's very gross so there's a there's some actually like inclinical practice or at least in um in some of the things that we do or think about in the hospital settings you do have to sometimes think about like what is the most essential aspect of a person so if you start thinking about transplantation issues like this come up and and this isn't sort of happening right now so this would be true of like any transplant like some people think that they get like the essence of that person with their organs and how how strange it is to sort of absorb another person that way but there's all these scientists are trying to do and they've been trying to do this forever but head transplants and the kind of like deep question of the head transplant is is it a head transplant or is it a body transplant so it's like people it's generally as people who have their full consciousness but who for some reason are dissatisfied with their bodies maybe because of some sort of disability that they experience and so they they prefer to have a different kind of body so could you you know take one person's head and put it on another person's body and then would you be the same person that could you have a totally new body and how disrupting that would be to your sense of self you just made it weird you just made it weird for me yeah it's never not going to be weird but you that makes me think of like um tv shows where or I mean not tv shows shows like studies that they when they talk about like the people who have face transplants how they have a hard that's a whole other yeah yeah I love it um but you know like how they have a hard time looking at themselves at first and I wonder if you can ever get used to it because I don't I don't know that would be a really strange thing to be like not only you know say if you have a terrible your your face I mean you have an injury on your face I can see how you would be like I have to get used to the new me but it would be your features that have been injured in some way, but versus someone else who's no longer living's nose, or are they still living? That's really intense. No, so they wouldn't be living anymore, though, the donor of the face. Oh, I mean, I mean, are they still living because they're connected to your body? Oh, I see. You lost the nuance there. Yeah, so there haven't been that many face transplantations that have been successful enough to kind of study this, but one area of transplant that has that has is hand transplants. And you think about they try to match tone and pigment, but at no point are they going to be closely matched enough that you're going to look at that hand and be like, that's my hand, right? It's always an it's an other ring, right? And because you can see it and you use it every single day, it's different than like a kidney where I mean, it's in there. It's working. You forget about it and it just kind of gets absorbed into who you are, but but hand transplants actually they have the highest rate of people wanting to to self reject or to what that removed after the fact because it's such an othering experience like that. I wonder what's what's what's the state of the science around? So it's one thing to have like a hand that's chopped off or whatever and you just get another hand and it's like Luke Skywalker, you know, you've got the hand. I think, man, I just I wish the science was better where it's like, couldn't we trick our bodies into just growing another hand? Like you grow from a fetus, right? And you grow things out and you grow teeth like, is that a thing? Is anyone working on this to try to just grow a new thing? Yeah, so we do this with pigs. So we will grow human ears on the backs of pigs. And then we'll transplant those people have all sorts of issues with this too, right? It's like the chimera research. So, you know, is it, are you now like part pig? This is probably not true of like ears, but there's some like sort of ways we're starting to have little brains that are growing in other animals. And if you have human brain cells growing in other animals, could that somehow develop consciousness in other animals? And that got totally freaks people out. Yeah. It sounds like in some ways, I mean, these kind of questions, man, it makes it sound as though in order to navigate the next, say, 13 years or 100 years, you know, people are going to have to be part of communities that are very much like religious communities, even if they're not religious or say they're not, in order to make value judgments about what of all this is okay and what's not. I don't see where you would get a template of meaning to know what to do. Yeah, I'm curious about that too, because when you brought up the fetal cells, that reminded me of this current conversation that's going on right now about COVID-19 vaccines and how they're developed and whether or not, you know, like even gelical Christians are going to be okay with fetal cells being used to develop them. And so one question that I have, like at least historically, is those kinds of even public conversations about ethics are typically done, at least, well, actually, Devin, you could probably tell us, but they've been done in conversation, at least, if not exclusively within a religious community, right? I mean, traditionally, that would be true. And bioethics was actually a field started by theologians who were more or less quickly pushed to the sidelines as irrelevant in the conversation, which is a whole interesting other history. But yeah, I mean, I think that so theologians were kind of the public intellectuals that were respected enough to start thinking about how technology after World War II healthcare technology was shaping the way we think about the differences between life and death and how long somebody should live in a state that maybe it's not optimal. So once it's only once you develop those technologies that you have to ask those kinds of questions, today it'll, you know, and Tyler, you can tell me your experience. But when I get with a group of, like, sort of hard scientists, so they're doing hard science. And then they're having to think about the implications of that science. They tend to want to pass the buck to bioethicists or other people to say, hey, I'm just a scientist. You know, I can't, I don't have to think, I don't need to think about the ethics of this, which is a bizarre thing to say because they're already developing it. And so then bioethics is sort of like an afterthought. And then we're like the naysayers if we say that you shouldn't do this, which is pretty unfair. But, but that idea of like they're just going to be hands-off, they're just going to do what they're going to do. And then other people have to evaluate whether it's right or wrong. A lot of them, I'm not saying this is true of all scientists, but a lot of the ones I meet will kind of try to pass that off. And so then they'll maybe sometimes invite ethicists and other stakeholders to public events or public conferences where they want to get their input. But they themselves don't necessarily have the training or even the desire to try to figure out the ethics of the things that they're working on. Yeah, it's, it's almost like they live so much in the can I world, can it be done, can I do it that they just offload all of the really messy, should I questions to, to somebody else, which I think is just kind of a, you know, an abrogation of their, of their responsibilities as scientists and people seeking for truth. But yeah, that's totally been my experience as well. I don't want to be in any way diss the many fine women and men who are like doing excellent scientific work on behalf of all of us, but it reminds me of Dr. Frankenstein. And like it, Mary Shelley's character, right? Like, and I, I just read that book not too long ago. I love creepy stories. Can't give it. But what I thought was so fascinating was how the character of Dr. Frankenstein is depicted with such optimism and naivete about this enterprise and then comes to, to regret it. But I wonder, so then I was thinking like, okay, that's an iconic story of like a certain era. What are the stories that we're going to be telling like a hundred years ago about now? Like, is upload the kind of story that we will tell, do you think? So you want us to be futurists? Yeah, be futurists. Be futurists and try to figure out what the future people will say. Oh gosh, I mean, I do think that there's a lot of things that we're doing that, you know, are very controversial to people like us. I mean, like Xeno transplantation. So what we're doing with animals, that, that, so I mean, the fetal cell lines is always a controversial issue. But just for some people, I think that kind of gets dismissed as, it's actually not that many people, if you survey Americans who actually have an issue with this. It's a surprisingly few amount of people who like won't take a vaccine if it were made from fetal cell lines. That's a, I don't know, what else Tyler? What else do you think are like kind of the hot button things? Definitely like the artificial intelligence and, you know, artificial, you know, cognitive enhancement and device stuff. That's, I think that's really where a lot of the edge technology interfacing with the ethics is, you know, if I put a, some, some little probe or something electrode in my brain and it changes how much empathy I feel or, you know, my solidarity with my community in predictable ways, in predictable and manipulatable ways. What does that say about me as an individual within that community? Oh, yeah, if you guys don't, you're probably not part of this conversation because I feel like it's such an insider bioethics conversation, but like moral enhancement. So there's like, you know, drugs you could take or implants, you could put in your brain, that some people think would make you like a more moral person. According to whose definition of moral? Exactly, right? So you'd have to have a, we'd have to actually agree on that to begin with. But of course, you just like, obviate that, you just push that question aside and say, well, gosh, but there are some things like, there are some, some guys who think that like you could eradicate racism because it's probably just a pathway in your brain. And if we could find it and like block it, then maybe we wouldn't be racist anymore. And then when you're like, I'm not sure that's a good idea. They go, well, what? You want to be racist? Right. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I love racism. I would imagine one of the problems that comes up with this stuff is like until like a thousand years past and we know like everything or something, you don't know like, for instance, blocking some kind of gene that makes you not a racist. It also like cancels like any affinity for your family or you know, something like that. Like if these things are connected in some kind of way that we don't really understand, that will get really confusing. That'll be so confusing. I was thinking though, like when you talk about augmentation, I was thinking about the revolution, the repulsion people had against the Google glasses. You know, everyone's fine with the phone in their hand, but as soon as you put it like, it was like as soon as like people hated the Google glasses, right? Because it always felt like there was this creepy sense that someone was not looking at you or they were looking at this other thing or it just like crossed this barely too much line between holding something like in your hand and and accessing it versus like it almost becomes like a part of your body the way that glasses wears their glasses. Like for me, people just like, you take out your glasses and they're like put your glasses back on. Like that's you, you know, or something glasses are even a technology like that. I guess which become part of your body part of your face. So I was wondering about that. Like who, you know, what is the threshold? What's our what will be our tolerance level? I think from our perspective, I mean, most of us were probably raised with that before the interweb and then now like we're in this whole new world and I sort of wonder like it maybe from our perspective, it seems like there is no threshold, but maybe a hundred years from now people will recognize that there was like that. I remember years ago that Apple made like a laptop or maybe it was a, what are the non-laptops? What was those called? Whatever desk top computer? But the problem with it was that it looked too much like a human head and it freaked people out. So like maybe there are some sort of, there are actually our boundaries, but we can't really imagine it right now. And maybe maybe we're living in a time that's teaching us that. I mean, I know I'm sick to death of Zoom and it probably seemed like five years ago that Zoom would take over the world, but I cannot wait to be face to face with people again. Yeah, I mean I think that's what's so hard about prediction is that it's so things happen usually pretty gradually and so you like learn to accept one thing then you learn to accept the next and then there are these like things that will throw up a roadblock like the Google Glasses and maybe it was just like ahead of its time and maybe if we wait 50 more years an idea like that will come back and will be more accepting of it because we've like moved a little bit each way. But there's a concept I wonder if this applies of the valley of the Uncanny, which is more of an aesthetic concept of if you're making like dolls or anything that looks human, it's like fine to make it look not human at all and like kind of human, but if you make it look too human it like really creeps people out. So you have to like get right up to the edge of not too human. So you get as close as you can but if it just crosses that little threshold and it's impossible to say you know exactly where that threshold is but people know it when they see it and they go oh and it just creeps you out. So there is like some sort of threshold it's just that it's really hard to define. Well like those creepy baby dolls that you sent me a link to once. What's it you? I don't remember they're they're really creepy. They're really creepy. Well I feel like that's a good note to end on creepy baby dolls. Thank you guys so much for talking to both. Oh thank you. Yeah thank you. This is a lot of fun. Super fun. Let's do it again. Thank you for listening to this episode of Bioethics for the people. Special thanks to Chris Wright for writing and performing R&D music. For show notes visit Bioethics for the people.com and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.