I thought about death the other day and how maybe it's akin to the feeling of going under before a surgery.
When you go under and then wake up some hours later, often you feel like no time has passed at all.
What if death is just that same feeling or lack thereof for Millenia, an infinite amount of time, but at some point from your perspective, you wake up instantly far in the future.
Like a photon travelling for millions of years, you don't perceive time passing at all.
Given an infinite amount of time, there will be a time where all of your atoms will recombine again in just the right away to bring you back to consciousness with all your memories in tact.
To you, it feels like you woke up in an instant. To the universe, it took an infinite amount of time to wake up you again.
I don't get this "infinite amount of time" thing. in a steady state universe, yes, sure, but if the expansion continues and no new incidents like the big bang happens, then it just gets colder and colder, right? and even if atoms were to come together in that way again, the CMB would be lower, so that fragment of timeline would lead to Pensias and Wilson to finish work earlier that day and never get the Nobel prize - so that history would be very different.
Not just surgery, but isn't that how you feel just after going to sleep at night or taking a nap? I guess as long as you don't have memory of your dreams from that time.
I prefer the Buddhist interpretation of self. There isn't really a singular you. We are all interdependent beings. A four plus dimensional tree reaching back to the start of time. The "you" that you're experiencing right now is an illusion created by your brain. When the body you are currently experiencing with dies, there are still all the other bodies producing experience.
After all, are you really the same person that began your life? Do you have the same memories? Can you even remember what being 10 years old was like? Are those memories real? Are you experiencing the same universe as when you were born?
For all you know, you have died a thousand times and just don't remember it because those memories died in some other universe or some other body.
When it comes to cryopreservation the thing I find infeasible is the idea a provider would bother with the preservation, under the incentives of capitalism.
If someone pays millions of dollars to a company that promises to freeze their corpse for 200 years, the company can simply freeze the corpse for a decade or two, take the millions of dollars as dividends and executive bonuses, then declare bankruptcy. The dead can't sue.
The novel When the Sleeper Wakes is based on a situation where a tax loophole meant that one particular suspended-animation quasi-corpse inherited (eventually) over half the property on Earth. His trust becomes a de facto world government, and his body, fully cured of its fatal flaw, lies in state in a sort of mausoleum/temple/seat of government.
> Conclusions and Relevance: US physicians assigned a median 25.5% probability to preservation retaining neural information under ideal conditions in a manner potentially compatible with future patient revival. The majority support for pre-mortem anticoagulation and substantial support for pre-cardiac arrest initiation indicate that many physicians would consider accommodating patient requests for preservation-enhancing interventions. These findings may inform development of clinical guidelines, though the speculative nature of the estimates warrants consideration.
> though the speculative nature of the estimates warrants consideration.
Experts in a related field were asked to guess how successful something no one has ever done would be, if it could be done.
That's like asking a bunch of certified mechanics how fast George Jetson's flying car could go. I mean, there are mechanics in The Jetson's universe, so... same knowledge base, right?
This is optimistic, I see "The cryonics people make a mistake in freezing you (how do we know they don't make lots of mistakes?)"[0] and "The current cryonics process is insufficient to preserve everything"[0] resulting of a product 10% already, seemingly matching the questionnaire as well as possible. They say "under ideal conditions" in the survey, so maybe that rules out cracking of brain tissue or ice growth, but that's not the number practitioners want to know about.
...I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Asking about ideal conditions is a reasonable starting point for establishing a baseline, and high-quality preservation is definitely something that can be achieved under laboratory conditions with animal models (e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001122401...)
Principles of Vitrification (Fahy PDF linked) p. 48 many practitioners think they have vitrified when they have not p. 45 volume changes of vitrifying agents, possibly in a way that avoids detection (very small scale?).
Covers the second term, "freezing" (quibble quibble) speed and delays in the procedure cover the first.
Your team seems not to be trying to maintain either normally solid/fluid tissue maintaining recoverable gradients or vitrification through an entire cycle below the triple point (with just removable or bio-compatible vitrifying mixtures) so your "goal" might be easier. Is the future AI just going to say you didn't do well enough even if you meet your "goal"?
On the other hand if there's never any point in the cycle where any volume is not either recoverable to health or vitrified, all the AI can say is that cryonics doesn't work period.
Mark Twain put it pithily (and perhaps apocryphally): "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
Apparently there's a name for this: the Lucretian symmetry argument. And I recently learned there are philosophers who argue the asymmetry in our attitudes is actually rational, and that fearing death while not fearing pre-natal nonexistence makes sense [1].
I find comfort in treating the two as being equal, and I'd be lying if I said I'm not a little hesitant to read their case.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadWhen you go under and then wake up some hours later, often you feel like no time has passed at all.
What if death is just that same feeling or lack thereof for Millenia, an infinite amount of time, but at some point from your perspective, you wake up instantly far in the future.
Like a photon travelling for millions of years, you don't perceive time passing at all.
Given an infinite amount of time, there will be a time where all of your atoms will recombine again in just the right away to bring you back to consciousness with all your memories in tact.
To you, it feels like you woke up in an instant. To the universe, it took an infinite amount of time to wake up you again.
After all, are you really the same person that began your life? Do you have the same memories? Can you even remember what being 10 years old was like? Are those memories real? Are you experiencing the same universe as when you were born?
For all you know, you have died a thousand times and just don't remember it because those memories died in some other universe or some other body.
If someone pays millions of dollars to a company that promises to freeze their corpse for 200 years, the company can simply freeze the corpse for a decade or two, take the millions of dollars as dividends and executive bonuses, then declare bankruptcy. The dead can't sue.
And one day he just wakes up.
Experts in a related field were asked to guess how successful something no one has ever done would be, if it could be done.
That's like asking a bunch of certified mechanics how fast George Jetson's flying car could go. I mean, there are mechanics in The Jetson's universe, so... same knowledge base, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_T...
[0]: https://www.jefftk.com/p/breaking-down-cryonics-probabilitie... “Principles of Cryopreservation by Vitrification” https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2015-fahy.pdf
Covers the second term, "freezing" (quibble quibble) speed and delays in the procedure cover the first.
Your team seems not to be trying to maintain either normally solid/fluid tissue maintaining recoverable gradients or vitrification through an entire cycle below the triple point (with just removable or bio-compatible vitrifying mixtures) so your "goal" might be easier. Is the future AI just going to say you didn't do well enough even if you meet your "goal"?
On the other hand if there's never any point in the cycle where any volume is not either recoverable to health or vitrified, all the AI can say is that cryonics doesn't work period.
Apparently there's a name for this: the Lucretian symmetry argument. And I recently learned there are philosophers who argue the asymmetry in our attitudes is actually rational, and that fearing death while not fearing pre-natal nonexistence makes sense [1].
I find comfort in treating the two as being equal, and I'd be lying if I said I'm not a little hesitant to read their case.
[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-015-9868-2_...
https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Transmetropolitan/Issue-8?i...
What for? The economy doesn't need humans anymore.