When cells become damaged beyond repair, our bodies have a mechanism for eliminating them: a process known as apoptosis, or programmed cell death. Occasionally, however, damaged cells evade apoptosis and instead enter a state called cellular senescence. Senescence is an important tumour-suppressive mechanism that prevents damaged cells that evade apoptosis from continuing to divide and potentially developing into cancer.

Senescent cells stop dividing, but they don't die. Instead, they remain metabolically active and begin secreting signalling molecules that the immune system uses to find the cells and clear them. As we age, our immune system itself deteriorates, becoming worse at clearing senescent cells. They accumulate, and the molecules they release cause chronic inflammation in the surrounding tissue, accellerating aging. This raises an intriguing question: could we slow down aging by selectively eliminating the senescent cells that accumulate later in life?

In this conversation, I speak with Paul Robbins, who was part of the research team involved in identifying the first drugs capable of selectively targeting and eliminating senescent cells. These drugs are known as senolytics. Studies in mice have produced promising results, showing improved health and longevity, with extensions in lifespan of up to 15%. The central question of this conversation is whether these results might transfer to humans.

#PaulRobbins #CellularSenescence #Senolytics #Longevity #Geroscience #Healthspan #AntiAging #YamanakaFactors #DasatinibAndQuercetin

►Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6VEHC1LWLs&list=PLnE3V9mcAvmbGgs15Z0LkfHv0_1Hm5i9Z

►You can find out more about Paul Robbins's work here: https://robbins.umn.edu/

If your brain were simmulated down to the individual neuron, would the simmulation be concious? Would it be you?

Until recently `mind uploading' existed as pure speculative fiction, constrainted by the overwhelming complexity of simulating billions of biological neurons and trillions of synaptic connections. It was not clear whether emulating human consciousness would require molecular-level or even quantum-level physical simulations, making whole-brain emulation, if not physically impossible, then economically impossible.

Three things have happened in recent years that might change the calculus: (i) Recent breakthroughs in expansion microscopy allow brain tissue to be physically enlarged and imaged with standard light microscopes bringing down the cost of brain imaging. (ii) Advances in AI-driven image reconstruction, are turning the near impossible task of manually identifying millions of Neurons and connections from scans into an automated process. In theory these two advances mean that we can develop Neuron level scans of human brains within economically feasible limits. (iii) Simulations of a fly brain at Neuron level appear to capture fly behavior to relatively high fidelity.

In this discussion, Michael Andregg, founder of the public benefit company Eon, outlines how modern neuroscience and computational modeling are accelerating the timeline toward digital human emulations. Andregg details how his team emulated the brain of a fruit fly, placing it in a digital body to navigate a virtual world. Although the model was greatly simplified, it shows that in theory it is possible to recover the behaviors of an organism from the digital reconstruction of its brain. He addresses the valid scientific skepticism surrounding early virtual organisms, proposing a standardized five-level framework for uploading fidelity that spans basic sensory-motor loops to complete, indistinguishable personal emulations capable of passing memory, behavioral, and emotional tests.

Beyond the mechanical execution of brain scanning, Andregg presents a distinct perspective on the role of digital humans in solving the artificial intelligence alignment problem. Rather than attempting to control or slow down synthetic de novo artificial general intelligence, he argues for uploading human minds into digital substrates, enabling humans to operate at electronic processing speeds while retaining human empathy, ethics, and social cohesion. The conversation explores the technical roadmap from fruit flies to mice and humans, the realities of destructive brain scanning and chemical preservation, the software-like philosophy of personal identity, and the profound ethical safeguards required when digitizing biological consciousness.

#MindUploading #BrainEmulation #Neuroscience #ArtificialIntelligence #AIAlignment #Connectomics #Transhumanism #MichaelAndregg #ExpansionMicroscopy

►Watch On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9VzvTwDWgY&list=PLnE3V9mcAvmbGgs15Z0LkfHv0_1Hm5i9Z&index=1 ►You can find out more about Michael's work here: https://eon.systems/ ►Follow Michael on twitter: @michaelandregg

Most people view democracy as the best form of government we have, but also as a moral good. Everyone is given an equal right to vote. Leaders are replaced peacefully, and governments are encouraged to be accountable to the people because of the voting power they hold. That all sounds good compared with monarchies and dictatorships, but what if we can still do better? In this conversation I speak with Political Philosopher and Author of `Against Democracy' Jason Brennan. He argues that because each individual vote counts for so little, democracy has no real incentive for voters to become politically well informed. As a result, the political system is driven by the ignorant, poorly informed voters. Furthermore, a wide range of social science research shows that political participation and democratic deliberation actually tend to make people more irrational, biased, and mean. For this reason, political philosophers have put forward a range of alternatives to our current system of voting. In this discussion we cover one particularly interesting approach to voting, which attempts to count the votes of an election in a more sophisitcated manner, which simulates how a population would have voted if it had been better informed.

►Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pwddex9uCk&list=PLnE3V9mcAvmbGgs15Z0LkfHv0_1Hm5i9Z&index=1 ►You can find out more about Jason's work here: https://gufaculty360.georgetown.edu/s/faculty-publications?id=00336000014RXIUAA4

►Check out Jason's book: https://www.amazon.nl/Against-Democracy-Jason-Brennan/dp/0691162603