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A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future
- dominotw 11y agoWhy are we so scared of death, to be nothing. Why do we have to cling on to someone's memories,is it because it gives some sense of security? It is just bizarre to reduce the beauty of life to some some little affair of holding on to someone's memories. Death is as beautiful as birth. We should break past the ridiculous taboos surrounding death and discuss it openly as to what it means to die. Edit: Jiddu K on death, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_OzCrmqxRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_OzCrmqxRE
- pekk 11y agoOnce you're dead you'll miss out on all the cool stuff that's happening. It's bad enough we missed out on all the stuff that happened before we died.
- grondilu 11y agoYou don't miss anything because you don't exist anymore. Missing things is considered a bad thing when you can experience the frustration of not being able to do things you would like to do. But if you don't exist, you can not experience this frustration, thus not being able to do stuff does not mean anything to you because nothing does. The only frustration you can feel is the idea that in the future you won't be able to do stuff that you would like to do now while you're alive. So you're suffering from an idea. It's all in your head. Fear of death is a self-inflicted pain. Best attitude towards death is not to think about it. Like in this movie: - A hundred years from now there won't be one sad f.ck to look at any of this. What keeps you going? - You know what it is, Theo? I just don't think about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDEFgX-uFZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDEFgX-uFZc
- melling 11y agoTrying to be clever we are. "miss out" or "miss" has a couple of definitions. You are "missing" the point.
- saint_fiasco 11y agoThere is a difference between missing out on things and feeling sad because you miss out on things. Dying protects you from feeling sad about missing things, but you are still missing out on things. If you think only the feeling matters and not the missing out itself, you might as well spend the rest of your life on pleasure-inducing drugs. Most people care about things other than their own subjective experience.
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- orangecat 11y agoBest attitude towards death is not to think about it. That may have been the best attitude in previous centuries. But now we're getting to the point where we might actually be able to do something about it, and holding on to that attitude may result in the unnecessary annihilation of billions of sentient beings.
- fizixer 11y ago> You don't miss anything because you don't exist anymore. But I can miss things while I do exist. I miss 'doing things as a healthful immortal' already! And I'll miss them more and more as my health declines and I age. Also pekk is correct. You would totally "miss out" on doing things if you're dead. Because you were alive at some point and could make it far into the future to enjoy commercial space travel or something more, but instead you died. Only a universally non-existent human would not miss out. By 'universally' I mean one who never existed in the past and never will in the future (like an imaginary human). But you and I are not imaginary. We've already had 'the taste of existence', and we can never be the same again!
- oneshot908 11y agoNot even remotely accurate if quantum immortality is true, and I'm not saying it is, but we still have no idea WTF consciousness really is therefore no idea what happens to it when its CPU and memory are destroyed. But do come back when you've figured this all out and you know how to create a new consciousness in any way except for the obvious way.
- dghughes 11y agoWhat about medicine if you say death is good why postpone it by eating well, taking medicine and being safe? I don't see why we humans should die I think if all science put their efforts together (as done in world wars) we could extend human life quite a bit. The only concern I have is the difference in culture for example imagine a 20 year old versus a person 200 years old. Even today the generation gap between 20 and 40 is big and causes problems when interacting even just music alone as one example.
- reasonattlm 11y agoAnd yet you take your medicines, go to see the doctor, look both ways before crossing the street. Why flee from the thought of doing more than that, of removing all of the other causes of death?
- farresito 11y agoNot sure about you, but I would rather be able to choose when to stop living than have to suffer the terrible disease of aging and its implications (neurodegenerative diseases, for example).
- Old_Thrashbarg 11y agoYour response is what Aubrey de Grey calls the pro-aging trance. And he offers a lot of possible explanations about the psychology behind why many people pretend death is a good thing.
- staunch 11y ago> "Grey believes that defeating aging is feasible and that the pro-aging trance represents a huge barrier to combating aging." Had not heard that term before. I'm glad someone gave it a name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey#Pro-aging_trance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey#Pro-aging_tranc...
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- staunch 11y agoThe only people not afraid of death are delusional or suicidal.
- tene 11y agoI can't say for sure that I won't ever choose to opt out of the rest of forever, but for now there are things I want to do, places I want to see, people I want to spend time with, or get to know. I'm not universally against death; when anyone chooses to die, that's their choice, modulo some concerns about depression-induced suicide. I'm against involuntary death. I want sufficient medical technology to keep people alive for as long as they choose. Death may be beautiful. I disagree, but I can see how some people might think that. I hear that the view from the top of mount everest is quite something, but does that mean there's no reason you might complain if someone broke into your house, dragged you off, flew you up there, and dumped you at the top against your will? I absolutely agree with you that it would be great if we could learn as a society to discuss death more openly. I think that a big part of what might help that happen would be sufficient medical technology that death mostly only happens voluntarily.
- reasonattlm 11y agoSome reading material for those interesting in the current state of cryonics development and research, starting with an overview and moving on. Modern cryopreservation aims for vitrification, not freezing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics http://alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm http://alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm http://www.brainpreservation.org/competitors/ http://www.brainpreservation.org/competitors/ The evidence assembled to date provides a reasonable expectation that the fine structure of the brain responsible for storing the data of the mind is preserved by vitrification, based on scanning electron microscopy and current best understanding of where that data is encoded. There are a few organizations that span the intersection between organ preservation and cryonics, such as 21st Century Medicine. The focus there is on reversible vitrification, such as the paper linked below in which a rabbit kidney is vitrified, restored, and implanted. http://www.21cm.com/ http://www.21cm.com/ http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/12FahyORG5-3%5b1%5d.pdf http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/12FahyORG5-3%5b1%5d.pdf There is a sizable fraction of the futurist community who approach cryonics with the pattern identity view of being satisfied with a copy of their mind running in emulation at some point in the future, the original vitrified substrate then discarded. Not very satisfying from the continuity identity perspective; a copy of you is not you. I'd be stipulating a restoration of the original tissues; probably a harder problem, but one that can be understood and foreseen. Advanced molecular nanotechnology and complete control over cellular biology would be requirements, for example, but that looks like being feasible later this century, just like the process of scanning and emulation. The madness of it all is that cryonics is very plausible and could be far more cost-effective at volume. Yet no-one cares. Just like the problems encountered in trying to persuade anyone that working on rejuvenation biotechnology for indefinite healthy life spans is a good plan, in the matter of cryonics the population world is content to slow-walk off the cliff of aging and death without doing anything about it. There is no status quo so terrible that it won't be embraced and defended. Billions are lost to oblivion in an age in which the technological capabilities exist to prevent the overwhelming majority of those deaths. And no-one cares. The future will look on us as suicidal, ignorant barbarians, and rightly so.
- AndrewKemendo 11y agoNot very satisfying from the continuity identity perspective; a copy of you is not you. Neither are you, you you from yesterday or the day before - conscious continuity is illusory. How do you know that your body isn't replaced with a new copy each night (thought experiment)? restoration of the original tissues...Advanced molecular nanotechnology and complete control over cellular biology You run into a Ship of Theseus problem with this approach, which gets back to your original qualia problem. The biological body is not made to last - you'll need to be converted to something more durable if you want an unbroken conscious experience longer than ~100 years.
- primitivesuave 11y agoBlack Mirror (on Netflix) has a powerful interpretation on the implications of digital reanimation in Season 2 Episode 1, "Be Right Back", although the digital representation of the deceased human is created by an AI that reads all of the person's digital information (social media, emails, videos, etc) and emulates them.
- ThomasBombadil 11y agoConsider the idea that this is a vector into the idea of machines being possibly equally important, or considered even more important than living humans, based on their capacity to accurately represent the continued presence of deceased humans. That a machine is permitted to occupy and consume resources, that might otherwise be used by actual living people who are also trying to live meaningful lives. Which one wins?
- codecamper 11y agono worries. The human emulator uses just 1% of a 2050 EC2 mini compute instance.
- sbilstein 11y agoThe occasional stuttering is actually due to GC pauses.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoThat takes me back to Max Headroom!
- coldtea 11y agoThis thread takes me back to Reddit.
- Qwertious 11y agoThis is a scary thought: What language will people be written in? Imagine if you were stuck in an emulator written in Java. I'd be a little bit afraid of being in an emulator written in C++ that makes heavy use of Boost, though.
- ThomasBombadil 11y agoSo, if the distributed hardware infrastructure cluster supporting 10,000 EC2 mini compute instances is packed with 1,000,000 emulations of humans, how important are the physical data centers that encompass all their backups, master copies and live instances?
- eloff 11y agoThe implications of your identity being copied into a new, improved body and what that means when the original you is dead, or what happens when you get copied more than once, etc are explored in depth in Jasper Scott's excellent Dark Space series: http://www.jaspertscott.com/p/dark-space-v-avilon.html http://www.jaspertscott.com/p/dark-space-v-avilon.html
- lfam 11y agoSome of Greg Egan's books explore this as well. I recommend Diaspora and Permutation City.
- wfn 11y agoAlso see Greg Egan's short story, "The Extra" (http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Extra http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Extra) and others, e.g. "Closer" (http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer)
- danbmil99 11y agoAlso see every f-in thing Greg Egan wrote. Then for fun try to google his image.
- loup-vaillant 11y agoThe social problems from multiple instances, I can understand. The original being dead however, doesn't make much sense. As far as current science goes, it doesn't even have a physical meaning. All that matters is the result: if there is an instance of you, no one died, period. (Well, not quite "period", actually. If you let one instance run for a while (a second, a minute, a day?), then destroy it, that certainly looks like murder.)
- JesperRavn 11y agoIt's fascinating that this is so close to reality, at least in terms of preserving the information that encodes our memories and identities. Of course there is the issue of reviving the person, either biologically or digitally. As computing power grows, I don't see any barrier to simulating an entire human brain. Sure it will take time: according to this[0] and applying Moore's law, it will take about 60 years before we can simulate a brain in real time with a single machine. This whole field makes me very uncomfortable. I'm not saying it's wrong, but the potential for harm (particularly to those being simulated) is very great. There's a Greg Egan story where reanimated humans live as "AI" characters a game simulation, waiting for when society will wake up and grant them rights. [0] http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-second-of-human-brain-activity-takes-82944-processors http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-secon...
- lfam 11y agoWhich Greg Egan story is that?
- JesperRavn 11y agoI can't remember (possibly not Greg Egan). In case someone else knows, the main plot is that the characters have to act as inhabitants of a primitive village, in a computer game/simulation.
- shabble 11y agoProbably neither of these (depending on your definition of primitive), but they're interesting anyway: The Cookie Monster[1] by Vernor Vinge Glasshouse[2] by Charles Stross [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cookie_Monster_%28novella%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cookie_Monster_%28novella%... (WP link, contains spoilers) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_%28novel%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_%28novel%29
- Udik 11y agoPossibly he refers to Permutation City. Absolutely necessary read.
- amalcon 11y agoCryonics is one of those things that's hard to evaluate. On the face of it, it seems insane. You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain -- and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. Given the near-total lack of progress on the former front (there's been considerable progress in the freezing part, but almost none in finding a useful thing to do with a frozen brain), the odds seem phenomenally bad. On the other hand, it does offer something to those who are still alive: the hope that your exstence could continue indefinitely, and that you might get to be with lost loved ones again. This is a valuable hope, so much so that it's built into most religions in some form or other. It's possible that the benefit of this hope makes the costs worth bearing. For now, I've left cryonics in my "not for me, but I won't try to discourage anyone else" bucket.
- fizixer 11y agoSurprisingly, the financial aspect of it is pretty manageable as explained by Max More (head of Alcor) [0]. Apparently if you have signed up for some kind of life-insurance, you simply pay your regular insurance fee, and direct them to give it to Alcor for your preservation if you die. Or if you wish to pay in total, I've heard it's ~$80K for head only. And ~$200K for whole body. Once I can afford any of the above options, cryonics would be my top "burial preference". (Think about it, in the US, it's a fraction of the amount you get to spend in the final year of your life. You could choose to waste a lot of money during age 79-80 on a losing battle, or you could call it quits at 79, for which right-to-die needs to be legal, and spend a fraction on cryonics. Suffice to say, I'm a big advocate of right-to-die as well). [0] (Warning: loud intro) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0xiX9mPB_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0xiX9mPB_s
- amalcon 11y agoJust because that's what Alcor is asking for does not mean that they can actually deliver the service they promise for that amount. Frankly, I don't think any fixed amount is sufficient for a reasonable chance of a positive outcome. A lot can happen in a few hundred years. If you believe they are honest and competent (which I do), there are factors to consider entirely beyond their control. Even if we assume that there are still humans around to run Alcor, that energy prices haven't skyrocketed, that cryonics haven't been made illegal for some reason, and that some kind of war or natural or man-made disaster hasn't wiped out the facility, there's still a rather high chance that some future management of Alcor will be either dishonest or incompetent and ruin the whole thing. On a 200 year scale, I'd place the odds of that alone above 90%, even if I assume maximally effective present management. Again, this doesn't have any effect on the present benefits (hope, etc).
- runewell 11y agoMore power to her. I hope she awakens to a body and future that brings her happiness.
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- eevilspock 11y agoWith all the suffering, injustice, unequal opportunity and privilege in the world, this to me is the epitome of narcissism and selfishness. Would you donate to this rather than to social services for, for example, thousands of homeless children in New York City alone?
- 13thLetter 11y agoWhy are you spending your time posting on Hacker News when you could be rescuing babies?
- eevilspock 11y agoI've devoted my life to working for a better world for all. I quit my 6-figure job years ago to work on solutions or ways to convince others to work on solutions. I spend time on Hacker News because I'm trying to use my tech skills for these aims, to be a voice in a tech culture that is too prone to callousness (such as yours) and simplisitic notions that the free-market solves all. Why do you have to be mean? My comment wasn't mean, it was a criticism of the direction of our culture. Social progress doesn't happen without critique. I find it ironic that I'm being downvoted for speaking a valid but un-PC thought in a community that normally complains about the ills of political correctness.
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- loup-vaillant 11y agoDid spend.
- anti-shill 11y agoIn order to be a good Christian and receive the eternal life promised in the Bible, you must be a cryonicist. At least that is the case according to this blog: http://churchofthebetterresurrection.blogspot.com/ http://churchofthebetterresurrection.blogspot.com/
- salgernon 11y agoSo, 10,000 years in the future they can revive you. Apparently, we've decided that it has a hard problem to guarantee that we can communicate with the future, even about really bad stuff: http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%... This is about warning the future about nuclear waste, but could be adopted to "vault of frozen heads" (Assuming they haven't failed by then and there was sufficient coolant.) Sort of flip the opening sentences around: "This is a place of honor!"
- ridgeguy 11y agoI view current cryonics as a bit like playing the lottery. If you don't play, you will not win. If you do play, you have a minuscule but nonzero chance of winning. Over 30 years ago, I joined others to sit with a friend while he died way too young. He had arranged for cryonic preservation. AFAIK, he's still chilling. And he has a minuscule but nonzero chance of someday resuming his prematurely interrupted life. While that seems to me extremely unlikely to happen, I wonder if it felt just as unlikely to somebody in the 3rd century that people would someday fly through the air...or talk to a friend who was beyond shouting distance...or live to 90 years of age...etc. We've sequenced DNA from dinosaurs, and 30 years ago I would have bet strongly against that. I've learned to avoid underrating the power of exponential increments in knowledge and capability.
- dennisgorelik 11y agoI think lottery is a good analogy here. 1) Extremely low chances to win (if at all). 2) The change that the winner is going to regret being revived is quite high (dysfunctional body, totally new environment, being a subject of historians' research).
- gboudrias 11y ago> being a subject of historians' research I might be narcissistic but that seems like a good thing to me. Imagine being able to tell future people what the present was really like.
- dennisgorelik 11y agoIt is more likely to look like extracting bits of information from rat's brain in a laboratory setting than as an interview. Would you still like to try?
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- cLeEOGPw 11y ago> If you do play, you have a minuscule but nonzero chance of winning. This is what I don't get it. Why people think this? You have exactly ZERO chance to win. Even if cryonics will be a thing in the future, nobody is going to unfreeze you or put you in some body. I'm not even counting technological aspects, where your brain would be incorrectly frozen/lack of some key chemicals that has to be used that don't exist yet/tissue not preserved well enough. Even if they COULD make you live, future people wouldn't do it. Reason is that your brain has no value of any kind besides cryonics experimentation - means same value as a cow or a pig. Maybe even less, because your brain might bring trouble to ethicists who would be upset. Cryonics for smart people is money spending equivalent of fortune teller for less smart people. Even if you explain to them it is not worth it, it doesn't work like they think it works, etc., they will still be convinced they are right. If this helps you psychologically then good for you, fortune tellers sometimes helps people in certain areas too.
- dennisgorelik 11y agoIf you want to preserve your genes, then much more reliable way to do that is to have kids. If you want to preserve your ideas, then writing books, articles and public comments on Internet is the way to go. The chance of successful recovery of frozen dead brain after 100 years is very close to zero (assuming that the recovery process was never tested). Kim Suozzi's “1 or 2 percent chance” is extremely optimistic forecast.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago> The chance of successful recovery of frozen dead brain after 100 years is very close to zero (assuming that the recovery process was never tested). Kim Suozzi's “1 or 2 percent chance” is extremely optimistic forecast. While it's impossible to predict whether you'll be able to be revived it doesn't sit right with me that you, and many others, are making predictions about how future medical technology will work. Honestly, if we can keep progressing as quickly as we have been, it wouldn't surprise me that we couldn't do it after X years but could do it after X + Y years. Meaning if at some point we have the technology to start reviving people but can't do it reliably then wait another Y amounts of years and there is a significantly better chance. Honestly, unless the brain is just completely ruined or something bad happens to the handling of the brains, it wouldn't surprise me if they're all eventually revivable. At this point we may be talking 200+ years away but they're frozen, who cares?
- dennisgorelik 11y agoMaking predictions is the main way to test out theories. > but they're frozen, who cares? That is another problem with cryonics: why would future civilization care about dead brains frozen 200 years ago? Imagine that we already have technology that can unfreeze and revive people. And we just found 100,000 frozen medieval people to unfreeze. So for the same price we can either unfreeze and revive 100,000 people or we can extend lives of 100,000 modern people who are facing terminal illness today. How many medieval people do you think we would unfreeze&revive given such choice?
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago