How would we know if we were living in a simulation? What if you were a butterfly having a dream it was a human? What does any of this have to do with John Lennon, or Renee Descartes, or freezing yourself in a vat of liquid nitrogen? How will we eventually solve the problem that human bodies can’t do space travel? Join Eagleman for a wild ride into the strange possibility of making brains immortal.

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More Information:
Eagleman DM (2009). Silicon Immortality: Downloading Consciousness into Computers. In This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future, J. Brockman, Ed. Harper Perennial. [Reprinted at Edge.org]

Jonas E, Kording KP (2017) Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?. PLOS Computational Biology 13(1): e1005268. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268



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"[A] neuroscientist and polymath."
- Wall Street Journal
"What Eagleman seems to be calling for is a new Enlightenment."
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"David Eagleman offers startling lessons.... His method is to ask us to cast off our lazy commonplace assumptions.
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"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
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"David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive."
- Stewart Brand
"David Eagleman is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun."
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"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker