A Brain in Jar? A Bodiless Star!

Wiley posted part of an article about the preservation of brains after death:


I have been read­ing about the Brain Preser­va­tion Foun­da­tion (BPF), which hopes that chem­i­cal and other meth­ods, includ­ing a refined ver­sion of plas­ti­na­tion, will enable brains to be pre­served with such fidelity that mem­o­ries, per­son­al­ity, and even iden­tity can be preserved.

This may well seem rem­i­nis­cent of the older cryo­genic preser­va­tion projects which have not always had a good press over recent years, though they still con­tinue to oper­ate and indeed have refined their processes some­what. But although the BPF also has a vision of bring­ing peo­ple back to life after their nat­ural death, it is in many ways a dif­fer­ent ket­tle of fish. It does not itself offer any kind of ser­vice but merely seeks to pro­mote research, and it does not expect to see a prac­ti­cal sys­tem for many years


Traditionally, attempts to preserve brains have been portrayed as sinister plots to prolong the depredations of evil dictators both terrestrial:





and intergalactic:





Sure, if you put an evil brain in a jar, you have an evil brain in a jar. Not a lot of good guys seem to get the treatment, with a memorable exception, and even then, he was just used as a glorified building superintendent:




Why wouldn't having your brain preserved outside of your body actually be a good thing? If the aliens want to put your brain in a jar and take it around to have interplanetary adventures, why fight it? Sure, it would suck to have your brain stuck in some facility on a remote planet running the sewer system, but it wouldn't be bad to have your brain taken along on jaunts to thirty-seven different celestial bodies—planets, dark stars, and less definable objects—including eight outside our galaxy and two outside the curved cosmos of space and time. Even better, maybe the Brain Preservation Foundation can preserve Taylor Swift's brain, so she can keep breaking up with dudes for millennia and writing songs about said breakups. Even better, Taylor Swift's preserved brain can be placed in a space probe so she could break up with every dude in the universe.