The Escaped Sapiens Podcast

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 

What determines who you become: your genes, your environment, or something else entirely?   I originally the answer lay in our environment and DNA, full stop. But it turns out there's a third ingredient. Our DNA doesn't hold enough information to specify all of the the various connections in our brain. In a certain sense the DNA specifies a charicature, and the process of development itself fills in the details. This process starts at conception, such that even two people growing with identical DNA and environment will nevertheless end up with different personality traits, intelligence, etc.   In this conversation I speak with Neurogeneticist Kevin Mitchel (Trinity College Dublin, author of Free Agents and Innate) about how our brains develop. He spells out the implications of the developmental process of the brain for our personalities, medical conditions, and intelligence, consciousness, and free will.   Correction: At 1:57:02, the claim about XYY syndrome and violence was misleading. Some studies have found a modest association with lower average IQ, but the evidence does not support XYY making someone inherently more violent. ►Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EohgJnp6bNQ&list=PLnE3V9mcAvmbGgs15Z0LkfHv0_1Hm5i9Z&index=1  ►Find out more about Kevin's work: www.kjmitchell.com ►Check out Kevin's books: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691173887/innate  https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691226231/free-agents

We can't put a real black hole in a laboratory, but we can recreate some of its most important physics. In this interview I speak with Bill Unruh, one of the pioneers of analog gravity. The idea is fascinating: Usually we model gravity using equations and computer simulations, but there is another way. Rather than a gravitational black hole that can trap light from escaping, you can instead build a black hole using the flow in a fluid to trap sound from escaping. Such models really do mimic many of the properties predicted by the equations that describe black holes. Unruh explains how a waterfall can act as a sonic black hole, creating an analogue of a black hole event horizon where sound waves can become trapped. In the lab, such analog systems have been built using water, but also Bose–Einstein condensates. One hope is to show that analog black holes sponateously emit sound quanta in exactly the same way that Hawking radiation is proposed to be emitted from Black holes. In particular, a key goal is to show that such radiation is `thermal', which would mean that it carries the least amount of information possible just as predicted by Hswking for black holes. One of the key reasons for being interested in analog gravity, is that it can provide intuition about horizons and other aspects of gravitational systems that we can't explore in the lab. In this interview I ask Bill what intuition he has gained for one of the key paradoxes in gravitational physics that researchers are currently arguing over: The Black Hole Information Paradox. In particular, what happens to the information contained in matter that falls into a black hole? Can Hawking radiation carry that information back out? We also discuss what actually happens inside a black hole. Does the singularity represent a genuine physical feature, or does it signal that our current theory of gravity has reached its limits? ►Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzNAGllVWjo&list=PLnE3V9mcAvmYosrFCguPfGnFeI_CChb1j&index=1  ►Find out more about Bill's work: https://quantumgravitysociety.org/science_advisors/william-unruh/ https://news.ubc.ca/expert/william-unruh/   #BlackHoles #HawkingRadiation #QuantumGravity #AnalogGravity #Physics #QuantumMechanics #GeneralRelativity #StephenHawking #BlackHoleInformationParadox #TheoreticalPhysics #cosmology   This publication is based upon work from COST Action RQI CA23115, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). COST is a funding agency for research and innovation networks. Our Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and enable scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. This boosts their research, career and innovation. For more information see: www.cost.eu .